What Design School Don’t Teach You About Business
Felippe and I went to the same Design School and what we learned there about business was close to nothing. I got curious about the subject and started to ask friends of different universities. The result was clear: We all had same — bad — experiences. That’s why I decided to turn it into an article.
This article is based on Brazilian, Canadian, and some European schools. Nothing is 100%, so if you had a good experience that’s awesome. Let us know where in the comments below
Design School is great, a magical place where form and function debate, where colors gain meaning and where your drawing skills aren’t so important as you thought they would be.
Jokes apart, what you usually don’t learn in college is how to handle clients and your own business. It’s really bad and that’s why most Designers who try to become freelancer fail. There’s a whole new way of handling things that you need to understand to succeed in this other field.
Let’s talk about business then.
What Business means to me
Business always sounded boring to me. I never wanted to be a guy with a suit and tie discussing boring things in a boring meeting. This feeling leads me to a creative field and later to work in a mobile agency dealing with digital products.
Only after years of making that choice I discovered that Business could be actual fun and that I was wasting my time there. I quit, became a freelancer for a couple of months and started MOWE. Creating a brand and guiding it to achieve your goals is incredible and a unique journey, that’s why I’m planning to never go back.
Why and how did I learn about Business?
I started to learn about business when I quit my old job and started my freelance career.
I felt totally lost when doing that and if I didn’t have a mentor to help me I would probably face many harsh situations and make many mistakes in my career.
I’m a logical person and I always try to analyze things before going deeper into them. With business and career, it definitely wouldn’t be different. My first mentor is my actual partner and co-founder of MOWE, Felippe Silveira. He was the first guy who I asked for help and guidance. He was already doing it for a while before I started and he was able to give me some critiques and tips on the basic things that I should do to start my new career in a good way.
Later, we united our strengths and created MOWE. If only we knew how difficult — and interesting — things would start to get…
Now I can talk for both of us. I presented Seanwes Podcast to Felippe and both Sean and Ben started to be our mentors. Their tips about Business, Professionalism, Overlapping, and Freelancing have helped us so much that maybe we won’t be able to ever thank them enough. After this, we started to follow Sean and Matt with their crazy and awesome Lambo Goal, which was even more related to business, and later we even discovered the f#&!@#$ insane Jets fan GaryVee who taught us a lot about Social Media and modern marketing.
I myself learned a lot from other people like Seth Godin, Jason Fried, James Victore and many others. I liked this business thing so much that I even started to watch Shark Tank and learned from it.
What this new skill has brought to my life
I know you must be asking yourself what the heck did I see in it and how did it help my life.
That’s really easy to answer. Adding Business to my set of skills has granted me a lot of happiness as it allowed me to do work that matter, with the quality-control I searched for years and with the passion I always tried to give to any project I worked so far.
Knowing how to talk with prospects and turning them into happy clients was a key for our business to become profitable and succeed.
Making clients happy is not about doing anything they want, but about providing good work with a unique experience of care, friendship, attention, security, and honesty.
What we learned in our first year of Business — 2015
We are ending this year with many successful projects, happy clients, money in our pockets and many plans and goals for next year.
We wouldn’t be close to that if we didn’t care so much for how we handled our business and that’s why I wrote this whole story.
Everything we have been doing during this last year was planned and studied to elevate our brand and to achieve great results. We wouldn’t be able to make it without good clients and without good friends.
We want you to feel as our friend and that’s why we want to share with you how you can make 2016 one of the best years of your life.
Our tips for you to find success in your next project/business.
- Find your business/brand/personal soul
Find what is unique in your work and make the best you can to improve it and showcase this to your client. - You’re a Business, not matter the size of it.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a team of two, five or a lone-wolf, consider yourself or your team as a true and respectable business. - Plan Ahead
Thinking ahead is the key to reduce the possibility of failures. Make goals for 3 months, 6 months, 1 year and 3 years. After that, plan how you’ll achieve those goals. I usually make a list until 1 year and review it each 3 months because changes in life are inevitable - Your Client is vital for your business
If your client or user is essential for your success, why wouldn’t you care about them? Clients love to be respected, to feel secure about their money and about their business direction. Our job is to guarantee it and create a good connection that can last forever and bring both, good results and future experiences/partnerships. - You are the machine
You are the machine of your business and every machine needs repair. Keeping both mind and body in shape for good work is hard, but extremely important. Take your time to exercise and to relax, because no human can survive only with work. - Upgrade the machine
The best way to improve your business is to invest in better machines. Take part of your profit and invest back in yourself. - You’re a business and so must be your income
Freelancing is related to the lack of a fixed income in a fixed job agreement and not with a lower rate. Your business has bills to pay and needs a profit to grow. Trust me, you don’t want to burnout by doing things that won’t help you and your business in the future. Every project MUST have a good outcome, otherwise, you are doing something wrong — you took the wrong type of client or you did the wrong decisions. - Investing is better than spending
Many people take their whole money and just spend month after month. Some even try to put it into savings but eventually come back to it later. One of the greatest tips we can give is to keep your money inside your business. Take a small percentage of your revenue or even better, a fixed rate, as we do, and use the rest to invest back into you as a professional or into your business. - Guarantee your future
One of the biggest mistakes freelancers do is to live with money they won in the past month of work. It’s important to you to have a financial security, otherwise, you’ll start accepting bad clients and projects and your whole business will be in danger. Guaranteeing your payment for the next 3 to 6 months is the minimum you should focus, so you can have a decent life without stress.
We learned a lot this year and we want you to learn from us and apply it into your future actions. If you want your next year to be unique, follow these tips as a starting line and feel free to talk to us if you have any related question.
Originally published at mowestudio.com on December 30, 2015.
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