Sherwin - Success by design: the essential business reference for designers

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This book is also for Mary.

This book is not meant to be the last word about running a design business. That would require thousands of pages!

Instead, I hope this book will serve as an entry point to the essential tools and attitudes youll need to work at a design business - or own one yourself. It may serve as a useful refresher on familiar topics or as a primer that will aid you in bootstrapping a new business venture. Depending on what you need help with, you can read it from cover to cover or jump from one topic to another.

In your design career, you may have been like me: Digging through blogs. Trying to keep my projects on the rails and my clients happy. Learning to translate bits of information into useful knowledge for running a design business.

But I always found that the best advice came from group therapy.

When I lived in Seattle, every Wednesday night was dubbed BurgerDrama: An assortment of friends and refugees from various design studios, agencies and in-house design departments around the Puget Sound region blowing off steam in the middle of their work week at a local bar and grill. Every time wed meet, there would be a point in the conversation where the cone of silence would lower over the table. While munching on onion rings and guzzling IPAs, we would share the successes, failures, trials and tribulations of running design businesses. No client secrets. No unverified gossip. Just lessons from the school of hard knocks and the occasional story of a crazy co-worker.

Over the first few months of conversation, it became apparent that the majority of our problems had nothing to do with the design work itself. They had to do with being a good businessperson.

I bet when you first began working as a designer you thought you would have uninterrupted time - full days, if not weeks - to lounge at your desk, leisurely scratching away at your next breakthrough design idea.

Perhaps you work in a magical place, where the halls are filled with game-changing conversations spawning reams of genius, and it all floats effortlessly into layout and graces your perfectly calibrated monitors with award-winning unicorns. Or, if you work in-house at a corporation, youre always in client service mode, ready at a moments notice to turn any flaming arrow that thunks beside your head into creative fire.

But even for designers who fly solo, with the requisite dreamy dreams about me time, no one can deny that both our increased connectivity and our heightened need for interaction with clients are rapidly changing how we construct billable time as part of our paid workday.

If we want to preserve the integrity and quality of great design work, we need to understand how to run our businesses like, well, a business. We need to know how to manage ourselves from the high-level work flow to the nitty-gritty negotiations that sneak their way into seemingly simple client conversations. We need to restrain our hand from reaching back to the mouse for the fifteenth comp that really isnt necessary to prove (to the client, to yourself) that youve explored every microscopic detail.

We can eat, sleep and occasionally dream in measurements other than pixels and picas. We can learn to speak in estimates and business strategies. We can open Excel to update a spreadsheet without bursting into tears or feeling like weve sold out. Not only that, but we can also put aside our chunky black glasses and speak frankly with our clients about our measured, expert opinions informed by our previous project work, innate emotional intelligence and our understanding of how to wield the design process effectively.

When weve brought structure and thoroughness to the business process that supports our ongoing creative work, there is a much cleaner balance between what we imagine we do (design!) and what it really takes to succeed as a designer (business!).

Design is the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes, says Bruce Mau. The producing part? Thats definitely design. And the planning part? Still a good bit of design, but the rest is business.

We can plan and produce better outcomes for ourselves when we act as design businesspeople. On the other hand, when we dont have effective conversations with our business partners or our clients, because we choose to hide behind our own designerspeak and when the way we present our concepts doesnt really describe how weve helped our clients with their needs and when we get sidetracked by the internet, and end up pushing our creative work into the wee hours to distract (or inspire) ourselves out of a rut when we do such things, were actually struggling to reconcile what we feel doesnt fit the designer persona. Designers are supposed to be on top of it all, but the truth is that were usually just trying to avoid being crushed by the eight ball. We just want to get paid to make cool things. All this business stuff is ruining everything!

Well, Im all for putting aside anything that might get in the way of great design. Risk yields reward, when managed with a light touch. Some processes can be put on the shelf.

But the business process - thats what keeps us up and running. For the sanity of both co-workers and clients, it can never be sacrificed. Never. Firms that are unwilling to box their creative inclinations into a stable business process blow through clients, staff and potential profit like Kleenex.

So, where are the resources to aid us in becoming better design businesspeople?

Its my hope that this book becomes one of them.

Over the course of this book, I will use the term design business to describe any business that includes design as one of its core competencies. The term design studio or design firm will describe a design business that bills for time. They are not always one and the same.

You know good client service when you experience it. Think about Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Southwest Airlines, Virgin America, Starbucks Coffee - even low-cost restaurants like Waffle House. What all of these brands have in common is that theyve deliberately