Who is running a small business?

craftycurate

@Poppadocrock said:
@craftycurate i might have to pick your brain at some point if that’s ok, been flirting with a startup forever, not exactly graphic design, but I feel like I’m getting closer to being ready to just do it.

Sure, ask away. I'm really no expert, and I don't think I exemplify all the nuggets I shared above, not all the time at least, but happy to be a sounding board. PM if you prefer

Krupa

See> @craftycurate said:

I’ve run a graphic design business for over a decade, and here are a few nuggets I learned the hard way that might save someone a lot of time and heartache. For “clients” also read “customers” or “service users” etc as applies to your situation, and some of this will not apply so readily to other kinds of business, but hope there’s something useful …

• the best way to do great work is to love what you do (Steve Jobs) so find something you love doing that other people want to pay you for. This might mean trying a few things until you find it, or diversifying.

• if it doesn’t pay, chop it. I stopped doing web design on the side because it wasn’t bringing in enough to justify keeping my skills current. it was also too stressful to be required to work out why something was broken. Also, a website is a live organism - you might have delivered a working site today, but an update to the OS/website framework/plugin etc can cause problems and you can be absolutely sure that your client will be on the phone wanting you to fix it for free, even if you don’t have a service contract with them, so be warned.

• Make sure you’re clear with clients on what they’re paying for, and that expectations are mutually clear before you get going.

• Talk about money in the first conversation. This is especially important if working for friends or family, so they are clear if this is something you can’t do for free. It’s difficult to retrofit the money conversation later, after you’ve begun working.

• play nice. There may be a good reason why a client hasn’t been in touch or hasn’t paid, so tread gently at first when pursuing payment or trying to re-establish communications. Only up the ante if you really need to or encounter difficult behaviour. Firm but gentle usually gets me the info I need and also keeps them on side, and goodwill is so important.

• related to this, most of your business will be “repeats” (clients coming back) or “referrals” (recommendations from happy customers), so PLAY NICE! Even if you want to smack them over the head, suck it up and put on your happy face because no one wants to deal with The Grinch.

• related to this, work your contacts. if a regular client hasn’t been in touch for a while, drop them a line, wishing them well, and asking if there are any projects you might assist with. This can sometimes bear fruit.

• learn to spot difficult clients and avoid them (there are great resource on the web about different kinds of nightmare client) e,g, “high demand/low budget” clients … one way to avoid them is to triple your usual estimate and rest assured they won’t darken the door again.

• NEVER work in exchange for “exposure”. If they treat you like this at the start, and you let them, they will keep doing it. As you begin, so things will continue.

• keep your returning clients sweet by throwing in little bonuses every so often, and giving excellent service.

• it’s not easy to raise your prices, so don’t give a too low estimate for the first job. Better to pitch it too high because then you’ll find out what their limit is, and you can “negotiate” it down.

• give a range rather than a fixed price. You NEVER know exactly how much work is involved, and you need to build some contingency into your quote range. Normally it takes 30-40% more work than anticipated. The price you would charge if all went to plan should be somewhere in the middle of the range.

• think how you like businesses to treat you, then offer that to others. if I get great service, I go back. So will your clients. if a business is rude, dishonest, don’t keep their word, or don’t deliver on time, don’t communicate etc i don’t go back. Neither will your clients/customers. Do to others as you would have them do to you. It’s good for business and good for your soul!

• don’t get too excited by buzzy initial conversations where people promise to hire you. Not all that glistens is gold. Sometimes someone is just enjoying the idea of it, or externally processing, and most of those conversations don’t lead to paid work. But some do. it’s not always easy to tell at that moment who really means it and who is just having a rush of blood to the head, which will be forgotten tomorrow.

• follow up promising leads. Sometimes a friendly prompt will lead to paid work and demonstrates keenness and initiative which might convert a lead and win them over. I followed up a conversation with someone, and this led to over 20 design projects, some quite significant.

• always do your best work. Do it for your own sake firstly, because as humans we thrive by seeking to be the best version of ourselves, and seeking to grow and develop and there is something invigorating about seeking to go beyond the basic requirements and add that little something that speaks quality. Your clients will notice it (well some will anyway). This links to the “love what you do” thing above - if you don’t love it, and feel a some passion for your work, you may be missing your calling elsewhere.

• invest in ongoing professional development. This might be necessary e.g. to keep up with regulations or new technologies, or it might be about keeping abreast of current trends and market direction. I’m currently taking another book design course, because publishing work this is the kind of work I’m mostly getting now and it’s turning out to be what I love the most, so invest in what you want to do, and keep levelling up and practicing.

• don’t let clients dictate terms to you. One client said to me recently before I’d agreed to the work or settled a price “I’ve put a little ‘gift’ in your bank account” to which i replied that it would be more than that, and they were a little taken aback, but paid up.

I might post more if I think of it, but that’ll do for now. I don’t always put the above into practice, but I’m trying to improve all the time.

Hope that’s of some help. Please ask about any of it …

This is all great advice, all lessons I’ve learned through experience, well written and surmised 👍👍

knewspeak

@matthewfox said:
Not a business actually. I am trying to start a non profit now. It's meant to provide all children regardless of race, income and ability, a way to express themselves through art journaling and drawing and painting. Will keep you updated on how it works

Best wishes with your wonderful endeavours.

LinearLineman

I ran an illustrator representation business with my first wife for twenty years. Our office was a couple of hundred square feet on Fifth Avenue and 42 st in NYC. (I used to call it ground zero until 9/11).
We represented 30+ artists from around the world including super realists from Japan, medical illustrators, the first generation of computer artists, stipple artists (can you believe that? A guy was making $250k a year with a pen, ink and a bunch of dots working for the likes of McDonald’s and BK.
In the end he was selling real estate because photos could be converted to stipple with a keystroke).

Working with artist types was the perfect fit for me. I related to their artistry constrained by deadlines and client demands.

The most important element of our success was how much we pushed the artists to advertise (we shared in the expense, of course). Even tho we had a tiny office we looked like a major company. In fact, we were one of the top three agencies in the US when it came to quality and service. A client might have been spending $10,000 for an illustration, but that image would possibly be used in a million dollars of print ad space. To miss a deadline was incredibly costly for a client. Our artists always came through and it was our job, as agents, to keep everybody happy and the process moving.

Our large ad expenditures always kept us in front of illustration directories like The Black Book ($12,000 a spread ad in 1980!) and American Showcase. But with the advent of the internet there was no longer a front or back to what illustrators art directors saw first. It was egalitarian and we lost the edge. When the internet allowed searches of millions of stock illustration the market for custom images dried up. Within a year we went from selling $250,000 of artwork a month to a fraction of that.
We didn’t feel like becoming a stock agency, making $100 a sale instead of thousands so we closed up shop in 2000. Illustrations went from unique artistic creations to a commodity you bought off the shelf and customized to your needs.

My tip: Do your very best to keep everybody happy. Reputation, at least in the illustration biz, was everything.

Poppadocrock

@karrygordon said:
One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was not focusing enough on marketing and customer acquisition. I also underestimated the importance of building a strong brand and establishing a clear value proposition.

Very Well said. A lot of small businesses fail to do this, or to see the true value of doing these things. That’s why they can be so crucial. Im not saying it’s easy but it can be done on a relatively low budget.

Those things are not just about generating leads, and business, which they will do, they are just as much about establishing your brand, your company in the market, becoming known in the area, building a positive reputation, improving credibility, improving industry status, ultimately building value and trust. one of the first things people do is look you up online. I think they recommend you budget like 5%-10% for these areas, but it’s hard to start a business and be proficient in every aspect that is necessary. You got the actual product or service, research and development, customer relations, Marketing, advertising, sales, finances, budgeting, pricing, HR, PR, and on and on… it’s a lot for anyone to be good at all these things.

Poppadocrock

@knewspeak said:

@matthewfox said:
Not a business actually. I am trying to start a non profit now. It's meant to provide all children regardless of race, income and ability, a way to express themselves through art journaling and drawing and painting. Will keep you updated on how it works

Best wishes with your wonderful endeavours.

That’s an awesome idea. I’ve been exploring non profit ideas as well. Best of luck.

ArturoRios

Hey, great to hear from someone who understands the importance of marketing and branding for small businesses! It's true, these things can make a huge difference in establishing your reputation and building trust with customers. Have you ever heard of a Financial Feasibility Study?

Svetlovska

I was a company director of a two person magazine publishing business in the early 1990s. And editor, and chief writer. And designer. And tech support. And anything else that needed doing. My business partner did the ad sales. We ran it from a room in my house, and employed one extra sales person. We had been ‘given the opportunity’ by our employers, who said it was either take the mag for free and run it, or be laid off along with a dozen other titles they were shutting down at the time. The big publisher would handle our distribution, ‘all’ we had to do was produce the mag, and fund it with ad sales.

So for six months, I produced a monthly business to business title which existed to sell high end computer aided design equipment to architects, graphic designers, product designers and such like, at the start of the computer design revolution.

The independent launch of the mag coincided with the property crash, which took out a large swathe of architects. Oh dear.

Still, I worked, literally, twenty hour days, seven days a week, producing the thing.

It was a kind of madness. The mag had to be an exemplar of what we were promoting, so I was pushing our two Mac IIse s to the limit of what they could do - I remember we had an interview with a guy in America who had produced the first ever graphic novel using 3D models for the artwork. He sent his files to us digitally, which took hours in itself on our crappy acoustic modem (!) and then laying out the pages in this newfangled thing called Quark Xpress took even more hours…

The stakes were very high. We were pulling in over a hundred grand an issue, but the distribution deal, paying ourselves and our employee, and our suppliers, came to about, oh… a hundred grand per issue. We had no financial reserves at all. I wrote a spreadsheet which calculated to the penny how much wiggle room my partner and his assistant had to haggle over ad sales and still have us break even.

Back then, commercial presses would fine you for every hour you were late delivering the physical films they used to print the magazine. Five grand an hour. We didn’t have five quid to spare, never mind five grand.

On my final press day, my business partner didn’t show up for work. As the ad manager, it was his job to assemble all the ad copy film so I could comp it into the mag. Print deadline was noon. At ten a.m. he phoned from his new office to tell me he’d seen the writing on the wall, and got himself a new job. He wished me luck.

Somehow, I got the thing together in an hour, and got the films couriered to the press. They arrived with minutes to spare.

Then, I had a complete physical and mental breakdown which took me a year to recover from.

I gave up journalism, and joined the police.

I was desperately naive. I later realised that the company which ‘gave’ us the mag just wanted the optics of closing so many titles in a single business year to look better for them. By letting us take it on a licensing deal, we limped into the next financial year, along with a few other suckers from the publishing group who fell for the same schtick, and spread the pain for our previous employers.

I also realised, courtesy of that back stabbing bastard of a business partner that you can never, ever, trust anyone, something which my new career in law enforcement subsequently reinforced to me in spades.

The only positive I can take now from the experience was that I met all my obligations to my suppliers, single handedly produced every page in six copies of a pretty good magazine, and quit the business having paid my employee and everyone I owed money to on time and in full.

Lessons learned from running my own business?

Don’t do it.

And people are NEVER to be trusted.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

[Deleted User]

Yeah, had my own web/graphic design/development/hosting business for just over 20 years. Less money than I earned as an employee, but no-one would employ an old fart like me now so I’m stuck with it.

Tarekith

Thanks Ethanbot, good to know!

wahnfrieden

I quit my job last year to focus on independently developed iOS/macOS apps. I'm also learning about how to grow worker cooperatives and am trying to start one without taking on investors, because my mistake before quitting was focusing my career on learning about VC-backed startups and products built by wage labor, which are bad vibes all around even if I was good at it.

Tarekith

Thanks DamonPeterson bot, good to know!