The Secret to Amazing Client Creative: Bring Your Own Process.
What Clients Buy when they Buy Design
I went to speak at a class recently when, exhausted from a long string of intense projects, I went rogue. Instead of launching into the standard mix of entrepreneurial autobiography / encouraging advice, I went straight to the Q&A, AMA style: “I run a creative studio, what do you want to know?”
Something weird happened: from basic creative disagreement to managing profitability, the answer to every single question was process.
- “What do you do when a client doesn’t like your work?” Process
- “Where do your clients come from?” Process
- “How do you know how much to bill / how long to schedule a project?” You guessed it.
Now, I’m far from a process queen. I like to think of myself as process convert; a chaos muppet-type sharpened to an edge. The answers to some of the questions students asked were not always top of mind (refer back to “exhausted”). Some stuff I had to dig out, dust off, and I found myself wondering why I hadn’t been doing that one thing anymore.
The big takeaway: if you want to be a pro, run a business, have good and productive relationships, make great work you need to stop thinking that clients just hire you to design.
The difference between a burnt-out-every-client-sucks rookie and a seasoned and successful creative is that the seasoned creative knows to bring process. BYOP if you will. Otherwise you show up ready to become a human point-and-click, client hovering over your shoulder giving you design instructions. Clients don’t do this to torture rookies. They do it because without a clear, consistent, structured process you look hapless, lost, and unprofessional.
On the other hand, if you come in with a structure and a process and timeline and I do this you do that and we’ll measure this thing and know it’s working by checking this other thing: you drive the process. Ask the right questions at the right time, have the right conversations at the right moments, present the design within the framework of goals…. you’re a dream to work with. Even if the client doesn’t “like” your work, if you’re true to the goal and can show the facts, they will learn to love it (after it, y’know, works and makes them a ton of money or whatever.)
As I drove home that night, half mindlessly dreaming of sleep, half wondering about how much rambling took place, something clicked. The buried process pieces I rescued to answer the most basic questions about running a creative business connected to my exhaustion. My exhaustion connected to various delays or re-dos or misunderstandings or some other small thing that took energy to fix, energy to get back on track.
All of those things could have been avoided had I just followed our own process. What’s more, I knew that those little issues were why we’d included certain steps or safeguards to our process in the first place.
What happened is that things started to go really well. Projects were all running smoothly, invoicing, payments, taxes, presentations, approvals… clockwork. What happened is that I got cocky and stopped being so adamant about every single step in the process. The team was a bit tired? I’ll just let them skip the client meeting and they’ll ask if they have questions. The client really preferred to call and talk through detailed comments than send written feedback in the requested format? Let’s not be inflexible.
A few days later, after I had a chance to identify what parts of our process we lost and needed back, the team got together to discuss (through the audible groans, obviously.) We all know that adding or changing process is kind of the worst. New process is painfully tedious, at least until it becomes habit.
That’s the promise of process: that once you do it enough times, it becomes second nature. You stop needing to look down to refer to what’s next. It’s the little mantra I tell myself to read through notes from the last three meetings before building the next deck. “Soon this will be automatic, not tedious and you’ll just get to think about the awesome creative stuff” is actually what I tell myself. Y’know, in case you were wondering. The thing is: it’s total bogus.
Pilots and surgeons have checklists for this very reason. Incidentally this is another thing I tell myself when I’m sulking about needing a checklist. Turns out cutting out steps is a terrible idea in any industry.
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The Process Paradox
In the week before I went rogue in class, a client told me our process was too rigid. I was stunned: this was among the more flexible projects I’d run in a while. It was supposed to be straightforward, but early on there was just a tiny new thing they thought about and wanted to see before making a scheduled decision and I relented. “It doesn’t really make sense within the scope of the problem, but I’ll do it this once” were my exact words. I figured I’d show them more work, we’d be back on track.
It doesn’t really work that way. Once there was a taste of seeing more design options it oscillated between setting limits, a voracious desire to see everything we possibly came up with, and analysis paralysis. All that plus adding 3–4 more meetings just because it was the preferred way to react.
The perception of rigidity came from coming upon sharp limits in attempts to contain the project. In other words: by being flexible, we became rigid.
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