3 simple strategies to grow your design business!

If you are a designer or run a design business your concern is always where the next project or client is coming from. We live in a world where accessing designs has become so easy that clients want more for less. In such a scenario design has become a commodity which gets sold on how cheap your design services are. But there is a better way, or shall I say, ways.

But first, my story!

I jumped into graphic design by accident after I had quit my last job and because I knew a little bit of Illustrator and Photoshop and I could sketch. I didn’t have any formal training in design so obviously this career wasn’t obvious but nevertheless I jumped in.

Like most starters I got on 99designs.com, which was great to begin with and infact I had made Rs. 50,000 a month, which may not be too great for many but it was awesome for me at the time, I was out of work for around 6months then so this was a fortune!

Realization!

Soon however I realized that this route wasn’t sustainable. Because no matter how much these sites try to protect your interest, it is sort of a gamble to win the contests. So I made a decision that would change my life, I decided to focus only on local clients.

Ignorance was bliss!

As I didn’t have schooling on design I did things which normally people in the field don’t. Like I wrote an eguide on how to design a logo for entrepreneurs and posted it on therodinhoods, you can check the presentation here. That single eguide got me around 3-4 paying clients which lead to more than 20 clients and I don’t even know how many projects over the years. All this through referrals with no extra effort, with no money spent on marketing.

If you could only take one idea from this post…

…it is this. I did NOT write for the design community, I’m not so brilliant to teach other designers anything new, but I could teach the people who want their logos to be designed something about how to go about it. If you only focus on creating something of value that can help people like your clients using video, slideshare, blog or anything, you will reap huge benefits. In the coming future I shall share more ideas on this.

The 3 ways to grow your business!

These strategies may seem obvious, but don’t take it lightly this can change the way you look at you business. I will do some simple math to show you how powerful these concepts are if applied simultaneously, but let’s look at it one by one first.

3 STRATEGIES FOR GROWTH

Growth strategy #1: MORE CLIENTS

This one’s a no brainer, I guess everyone does this, and so do you. But getting more clients means you need to market yourself. There are a lot of ways you can market yourself, one way is to create content that is beneficial for your prospective client. Anything that will help them in their goal, like the eguide I did. This is area is a world of its own, so I’ll help you on it in subsequent posts.

But there is one route which is perhaps the most powerful way of getting clients, referrals. You need to be so good and useful to the client, that he must become your raving fan and recommend you to others.

Disclaimer: if you are working for a client whose only interest is how cheap you are, then forget about doing it. This business itself will make you go broke. We’ll cover price in the third growth strategy.

Growth strategy #2: MORE PROJECTS

This strategy basically means that you get more projects from your existing clients. Now I’m sure you are doing this as well. However, it is important to do this consciously. You cannot hard sell clients into doing more work with you. But here are some things that you can do:

• Most clients forget you, when the project is over, so keep in touch with them by sending something of value(something that would be valuable for them, not for you), latest graphic design styles will not help the client, but how to make their brand more powerful perhaps would. You need to understand what your client is looking for and give them that. If you become interested in their growth, they will surely be interested in yours.
• Keep asking – what can I do to help my client?

Growth strategy #3: MORE MONEY

This is the most difficult strategy to wrap your head around but it is the most rewarding. Here’s a secret: ‘Price is elastic.’

Yes, price is elastic. I’m sure you know people who charge a lot more than you, but in your heart you know that your work is far superior than theirs, yet they make more money.

Price is tricky but let me share a simple example, would you pay more for an iPhone or for a Micromax phone.

iPhone, of course. But why is that?

Because the real and perceived value of an iPhone is far higher than Micromax, that’s why.

If your only strategy to get clients is to charge less than others, you will end up broke.

Here’s a simple equation, to help you something obvious:

Would you a) work hard for 100 clients who pay you Rs. 2,000 to earn Rs. 20,00,000, or b) work for 10 clients who pay you Rs. 20,000 and earn the same amount of money. I would highly recommend option b. But…

…you might say that you can’t charge that kind of money, but let me tell you from personal experience, that it is possible, I have done it over an over again and so can you!

Two things happen when you increase price:

1. You filter out clients who are only with you for the cheap price you offer, when they do take heart, I can assure you they will not miss you for a minute, they will move on to someone else who is cheap. Let them, the true fans of your work will stay at a higher price (in fact they would probably think it was about time), keep these guys happy!
2. Your perceived value will increase in the eyes of future clients, they will no longer view you as commodity but as someone who has more to offer because you are not cheap. In fact the higher the price a client pays to get your service, the more he would be willing to listen to you and not interfere in what you do. Be an iphone not a Micromax!

Warning: Increasing your price and reducing your quality of work is a recipe for disaster you don’t have to bend over backwards but make sure you give them worth the price.

 What if you apply these strategies SIMULTANEOUSLY?

Below is the table which shows how the strategies applied simultaneously can have an exponential effect on your overall earnings. Don’t get scared by the table, right now just focus on the white patch, which shows how much of a growth happens over the actual number(the first row figures).

TABLE: GROWTH STRATEGIES APPLIED SIMULTANEOUSLY

So as you can see above, a 10% increase in the all the three strategies can lead to 33% growth over the actual total(i.e. Rs. 2,00,000) but what’s interesting is that a 30% increase leads to 119.7% growth over the actual total. Which is super wow!

Now I know you may be a little skeptical about this, but think about it this way – you don’t need 10 more clients to grow your business only 1 more will do, with 1 more project and a Rs. 200 increase in your fees can make an impact to your business.

Apply this to your actual situation and see what happens.

With some tweaking in your mindset and these three strategies you can earn more than you could ever imagine.

Going forth I shall be adding more posts as well as videos that will help you in different ways to grow your design business. I do need a small favor here.

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THE SMALLEST FAVOR IN THE UNIVERSE!

Ok that was a bit too much, but to make this site useful for you is to give you to address YOUR real concerns and not what I think is real. So I’m doing this TINY survey. It would be awesome if you could take a 60sec to do this survey, maybe 30sec if you are fast.

Here’s the link to the survey: The shortest survey in the universe!! (here I go again!)

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Please share your comments, I would love to answer them personally.

(Originally posted on designforprofit.wordpress.com)