Tales of a Designer

5 Things Learned Starting a Business

So it’s been about 6 months since I started Tridea with some colleagues, and things have been going great. Since starting Tridea, in addition to having a full time job, things have been quite challenging, and I’ve learned a ton. I’ve done freelance in the past, but not to this extent of actually running a business. It requires a lot of attention and dedication.

Of course there is much more to learn, but here are a few key lessons that I’ve learned thus far.

Time Management

This has been very important to me. Having to work a full time job during the day leaves a very limited amount of time to run a business, so I’ve had to be very efficient with how I spent my time. Working all day, only to come home for more meetings and design work to do can wear on you pretty quickly. You want personal time to relax as well, so in order to balance that time, weekends become a big factor with managing time.

Every person has their own way of managing time, but what I’ve done for the Tridea would be to crank out a few days of solid hard work, little breaks, and get a good chunk of work done. Then I relax for a couple days. This isn’t a sure-fire plan, but it has worked for me. I can’t work all day, then all night for 5 days straight only to have a short weekend to relax, I like to spread my work out a bit more, because working on the weekends doesn’t bother me.

Focus

I can’t lie, sometimes it is extremely hard to stay focused on my work after coming home from an 8-9 hour work day. Somehow I manage to do it easier than other days. To help me focus, I ignore phone calls, non-business emails, turn on music, and just go at it. Once I start paying attention to non-business stuff while trying to work, that is when I lose focus. I’ve also learned not to force creativity. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t, so in the times that you don’t, just let your mind rest. It works wonders.

Choosing Clients

Since we’re in a position where we don’t exactly need every single project for the money, we’re able to pick and choose our clients. It’s awesome. When we meet with [potential] clients, we make sure that we have a good vibe going. If we don’t have a good feeling about it, we turn it down, no matter what the price tag is. A bad client experience is not worth the money. As Cameron Moll says:

I’ve turned down a fair share of projects based solely on the fact that something didn’t feel right at the outset. Fact of the matter is you’ll inevitably be faced with unknown variables in any decision, no matter how well you do your homework.

Communication

This is easily the most important, and the one thing that seems the most overlooked. Our first client was the hardest simply because of communication issues. There were just too many people involved in the project that didn’t need to be. My advice on communication, establish one point-of-contact. Dealing with that one person will help keep projects within the scope, and things will go much more smoothly. You don’t want to be taking direction from 5 different people. It’s not productive, and very frustrating.

In addition to what I mentioned above, keep the client in the loop throughout the whole project. It’s normally not a good thing if the client has to come find you. They should be apart of the whole design and development process. If you have an idea, let them know. It shows that you care about your client. Don’t just communicate with them at the beginning and end of a project.

Contracts are golden

We made the mistake of not having a contract on our first project, which we thought was going to be a quick and easy project. We were wrong. The timeline dragged further than it was supposed, and the project got out of scope. If we would have had a contract, it would have helped tremendously. From now on, no matter how big or small the project is, a contract is required. Outline everything that is entailed for the project within the contract. If the client wants something not in the contract, charge more and redraft the contract. It will save you lots of time and headaches.

As I said, we still have a whole lot to learn about running a business. We will face many more challenges down the road, but the first 6 months have been great, and I’ve obviously learned some useful lessons thus far. I hope to write more after another 6 months.

The Client Is Not Always Right

Every person has heard the term “the customer is always right.” Before becoming a designer I believed this pretty strongly, however, after having clients and working hard to try and perfect my craft, that term seems far from correct now. Sometimes you get clients that are very receptive to new ideas, and actually like learning something about the web. But, others try and come to the table, throwing around buzzwords, like they know the web as well as designers who spend 10+ hours a day on the web.

When meeting new clients, I always like to listen to what the client has to say. I like to hear their perceptions of the web, and how they think having a website wil help their business out. After the listening part, I then chime in on things that I felt that they misunderstand about the web, and help them better understand things about the web, that could prove to be beneficial to their business.

An example of this, was a client that I had a while back who wanted an all flash site (and they actually bought a template for me to customize), yet the core audience for their site would be people ages [roughly] 40 and older. I was non-hesitant to let them know the downsides to having a flash site with that type of audience, and the types of issues that it would pose with accessibility.

The client was very receptive to my recommendations, especially because I sent articles backing up my statements so that they could further learn about why a flash site would not have been ideal for the project.

My overall point is that clients need education sometimes, and just because they approach a designer with a good price tag does not always mean we should bow down and do everything they want when it goes against the standard practices that we are used to. If they’re smart, they will find a designer looking for help to solve a problem, and not just paying to get something done.

The Business Side of Things

When I first started doing freelance work on the side, it was was all fun. I’d get small projects, with a verbal agreement stating how much would be paid, and then I’d have at it. Then only design was the name of the game. A young, naive, thought I had was, I could do this all day, no problem. If only it were that easy.

Now that I’m going through the motions of having my own company, I’ve come to realize that actual design work is a very small percentage in the overall scheme of things. To make it that much harder, I don’t have a business background at all, so all of the aspects of business that I’ve learned up to this point have been through trial and error.

But once things get professional, it’s almost all business, whether it’s chasing down leads for new projects, negotiating project budgets with clients, contracts/proposals, meetings, overall communicating through emails, etc., it never stops. After going through all of the business aspects to get the project rolling, design seems to be the easy, less exhausting part.

Not all of the business stuff is bad. I will always enjoy the designing, but I’ve also come to like some of business stuff and I’ve learned a ton within the last few months. I especially like chasing down leads. That is by far the most interesting aspect, to me, because you find out whether you’re a good fit with a client or not. I also take lots of pride in being able to explain to others what we and how someone would benefit from the services we provide.

Meeting new people is always interesting to me, so I guess that is why I enjoy chasing down leads and learning what other people do. Whether you get along with new client leads or not, you always learn something about them and/or how to do things differently for the next time.

The aspect that I’ve come to like the least is paper……….unless it’s a check! I just don’t deal well with the legal/paper stuff. It gives me a headache, and I always feel like I leave little loopholes for something to go wrong. It’s just a tedious process having to write up proposals and contracts and nothing really excites me about it, however, they are extremely important to every project, and I’d never start a project without one.

Since my company is so new, there is still tons to be learned about the business side of dealing with clients as well as running a small design shop. I am in the process of wrapping up a great book called The Business Side of Creativity, and I would highly recommend checking it out. It packed with useful information on how to get started, and running your own business.

A question for other freelancers/designers……..how do you cope with the business aspect of this industry?