Designers thrive on creativity. Whether you’re a web designer, animator, hairstylist, or in some other service-based creative role, there’s no greater thrill than showing a finished design to a satisfied client.
Of course, there are two sides to being a designer. Alongside the creative side, there is the business aspect. Tasks such as client management, ensuring financial stability, and creating scalable systems are all essential for scalability and success.
For designers to prosper, both creativity and business acumen must work in tandem. Unfortunately, this is where many designers struggle.
Luckily, this guide is here to help. We’ll provide a practical guide to running design like a business—not just a skill.
Why Great Design Isn’t Enough
There’s no denying that having strong design skills is useful. After all, you’ll struggle to attract work without a portfolio that wins clients.
But while these skills might get you started, they’re not enough to sustain a long-term enterprise. Without honing your business skills, you’ll likely encounter the following common pitfalls
- Underpricing – There’s an art to pricing your services effectively. Price too low and you’re undervaluing your work, price too high and you might send clients away. Many designers struggle with finding the sweet spot between these points.
- Inconsistent workflow – Work isn’t always forthcoming for freelancers and solopreneurs. Designers often find it difficult to manage cash flow and account for drier periods.
- Poor client boundaries – Effective design requires a strong, professional relationship with clients. Too often, however, designers feel pressured to take on too much work or handle tasks outside the scope of a contract. This damages the overall quality of your output and leads to undue stress.
Ultimately, success requires a mindset shift from designer to creative business owner.
Managing Clients Without Burning Out
To avoid burnout, designers should create a client management strategy. This should set clear expectations from day one.
Before taking on any projects, be sure to understand the full scope of the work. Make sure that, rather than a vague description, clients provide a full outline. By understanding expectations, you can build stronger professional relationships.
Part of this process should also involve outlining clear timescales for a project. Without a pre-agreed timeline, there’s a higher chance of clients demanding sudden deadlines out of the blue. This adds unnecessary pressure and can leave you scrambling to meet deadlines.
Lastly, in your contract, be sure to set revision limits. This ensures clients have the opportunity to request amendments as needed, without the risk of scope creep.
It’s worth investing in tools that help make client management easier. Project management tools can help with important processes, such as handling contracts, managing tasks, and collaborating with clients.
Better client management means more transparency, fewer disputes, and the ability to foster improved long-term relationships. In time, this leads to more regular work.
Pricing Your Work for Profit
As we’ve discussed, pricing is a tricky task for all designers. Too often, freelancers under-value their work, afraid of putting off clients. This is a common challenge across creative service industries, from freelance designers to photographers, consultants, and salon professionals. But it limits your ability to scale your business. It also attracts the wrong sorts of clients – those who want to pay the lowest price for your efforts.
Avoiding this situation requires a new approach that moves beyond hourly pricing to a value or project-based approach. When pricing your work, try to consider the following factors:
- Time – This doesn’t just include the hours spent on the task at hand. Think about the time required to keep your business afloat, including admin tasks such as overseeing finances, issuing invoices, and marketing.
- Expertise – Years of knowledge shouldn’t go overlooked when setting your prices. Clients will pay extra for ‘a safe pair of hands.’
- Client value – It’s worth considering the value a project will bring to a client upon completion. While a brief might take you an hour to complete, it could be a vital element of a client’s strategy. Be sure to factor this into your pricing.
Building Predictable Income Streams
Like any freelancer, designers face periods of unpredictability where work is less regular. Sadly, avoiding dry spells entirely isn’t possible. There are steps you can take, however, that can stabilize your income.
The most obvious route is by boosting retention rates through building a better business reputation. If you constantly deliver high-quality projects and meet expectations, clients are more likely to come to you for regular work. Greater retention also helps to save money, as you won’t need to spend as much on advertising your services to new clients.
Another option is to offer templates and digital products that customers can download. For instance, a designer could sell business card templates to entrepreneurs online. These require minimal effort and provide passive income over time.
Predictable income streams provide an element of financial security. They simplify planning, as you’ll always have an idea of upcoming projects. Most importantly, they reduce stress by easing work-related worries.
Financial Management for Creatives
It’s no surprise that many creatives prefer to focus on honing their craft, rather than maintaining spreadsheets. Unfortunately, handling finances is a key skill for designers.
Without sound accounts, your business can encounter many issues. Most crucially, it’s harder to sustain growth without proper financial planning. It can also lead to stress and uncertainty in your personal life, with feast and famine cycles as you move between periods of high and low demand.
For sound finances, designers should stick to the following best practices
- Tracking income and expenses – Good bookkeeping is essential for staying on top of taxes and financial health. Try to be as detailed as possible when logging income and expenses, and leave records in an easily accessible, centralized space.
- Setting aside tax – Save throughout the year to avoid the impact of a large tax bill. Put a small fraction of your monthly income into a dedicated tax account.
- Managing cash flow – To make monitoring easier, create separate bank accounts for business and personal income. Alongside saving for tax, set aside monthly funds to ensure stability during slower periods.
Financial management is much simpler with the right financial tools. Many service-based professionals—from designers to those in industries like hair and beauty—face similar challenges when it comes to managing bookings, payments, and cash flow.
From bookkeeping apps and scheduling platforms to financial tools for hairdressers and accounting software for designers, the right systems can reduce admin time and improve financial stability.
Creating Systems That Scale
As work ramps up, it’s important that designers can keep pace without feeling overloaded. The easiest way to do so is to build scalable systems to assist with repetitive processes.
Create templates to speed up the creation of contracts and project proposals. This way, you only have to fill out the necessary fields at the start of a project, rather than making a new document from scratch.
Workflow automation can also be a valuable asset. Automated software can perform day-to-day tasks such as filling out spreadsheets, sending reminder emails, and scheduling meetings. Marketing automation tools can also help with the process of finding new clients, thanks to features such as lead scoring.
With the right approach to scalability, you can save time while maintaining consistent quality within your work.
Growing Beyond Freelance
There comes a point where designers may want to move beyond a freelance approach. If you’re in consistent demand and have an overbooked schedule, it may be a good idea to consider expansion.
You could, for instance, hire subcontractors to handle certain tasks, relieving some of the pressure during busy periods. You could even expand to a small studio, taking on a limited number of employees to work with you.
Of course, expansion also brings some risks. It becomes harder to control quality when you’re no longer responsible for the entirety of your output. If you’re not used to managing employees, there’s also a higher chance of poor delegation, leading to reduced performance.
To ensure consistency as your enterprise reaches the next stage, try to work with professionals with the same ethos and attention to detail. If you’re unfamiliar with managing teams, think about enrolling in an employee management course.
Balancing Creativity and Business
Make sure to find the balance between admin and design work. As we’ve explored, by neglecting admin, your business operations suffer. Equally, though, remember why you began design work in the first place. For most designers, this is due to a passion for creating things.
Always allocate enough time to tasks that bring you the most enjoyment. Otherwise, your business risks becoming like ‘any other job.’ A sense of passion is important, not just for your own satisfaction, but for demonstrating your commitment to clients. It leads to better results and happier customers.
Creativity and business go hand-in-hand
There’s a reason that so many talented designers fail to get their enterprises off the ground. By spending too little time on the business aspect, it’s much harder to achieve longevity and growth.
Instead, use your creativity for both aspects. Think outside the box when attracting new clients, and focus on what makes your business unique. Equally, craft a new approach to handling finances and cash flow for less stress and greater stability.
By mastering design and business, you’ll get one step ahead of the competition. You’ll operate more efficiently, satisfy more clients, and ultimately, pull in more work.