How to Start a Logo Designing Business | Part-1
If you are interested in starting your own logo designing business you are at the right place. We will be discussing key points that will help you start, run and grow your logo designing business.
There are three stages of expertise that you may be in:
1. You may be a professionally trained graphic designer having multi-year experience in creating logos or other artwork.
2. You may have mid-level experience and want to explore some uncharted territories of entrepreneurship.
3. You are a self-learner who discovered the joy of graphic designing recently and want to test the waters.
Does any of the three scenarios sound familiar to you? If not, then comment down your scenario, your story could help others.
Many people have the motivation to do something but they are afraid to execute. Often times you may be brewing this entrepreneurial dream for many months or years. It’s completely fine. You never know as this article could be your wake up call. It’s never too late.
Demand for Logo Designing
Logo designing is the bare minimum that every company needs. They need a logo to create an identity and recall value of their brand in the mind of their customers or prospective customers.
Creating logos will help you break into the professional arena as a graphic designer. Entrepreneurs and risk takers are present in abundance and they would be needing your service on a regular basis whenever they launch their new venture or rebrand their identity.
Impact of your Work
Isn’t it fantastic that you will be designing a logo that will represent the whole organization and its legacy?
With this amount of expectation, you are expected to deliver the best. For amazing creative creation, you will be focussing on delivering great results.
Managing Your Tasks
For your Logo Designing business to turn into a reality, you will need to take care of your own learning and managing the mundane tasks that are required for proper functioning of your business.
It may irritate you but these mundane tasks are sometimes mandatory or sometimes necessary for scaling up your business.
Work will keep piling up and unless you break down this pile into smaller deliverables, prioritize and organize, it will remain a mess. So you have to focus on managing your tasks with the help of pen and paper or spreadsheets or task management tools.
Legal Formalities
Since you will be starting your business you have to take legal opinion. For that, you need to be in constant contact with a lawyer or a law firm. With regular consultations, you will be aware of the next course of action that will be required for the business.
Once you are sorted with legal permits and legal obligations, you can start working on the next set of actions. Never ignore the legal aspect in business as the last thing that you would want is authorities knocking on your door while you are working to meet a delivery deadline.
Selecting Your Workplace
You may want to start your business from your home or a co-working space or lease your own commercial space. This decision will be based on your preference and financial condition. You need to seek the help of a real estate agent who will help you in finding a good place as per your need.
Tools of Trade
Once you are sorted with legal aspect and location, you can move on to procuring the best pieces of equipment as well as software license that will be required to deliver your services. You will not be looking for something mediocre thus the purchase will involve heavy research. Only after proper research, you will be procuring your equipment and buying license for editing software.
Marketing
Now you have tackled the legal, location and equipment procurement issues. You are in the business ready to accept orders. Here comes the tough part.
You need clients.
For that, you need to market yourself. Marketing can be tough and you should be monitoring your marketing effort. No matter how much you outsource, you need to keep a tab on the progress. You have to focus on digital marketing and that may involve stakeholders from around the world. Someone from northern hemisphere may be taking care of PPC ads, someone from southern hemisphere may be taking care of SEM. You need to manage your globally distributed marketing team as well.
Sales Management
Now that your marketing effort is paying a dividend, you will start getting clients. You need to create a standard operating procedure for handling clients. Once you get clients, you should be able to sign a proper contract, fix on service level agreements, take their inputs, manage modification requests as well. Sometimes you will have to tackle difficult clients and you may have to process the refund as well.
The Real Magic Begins
So far I have talked about the boring but necessary aspects of starting your logo designing business.
But once you are done with all these you can focus on doing what you love doing the most.
You can now focus on creating a logo that could become iconic. You can meddle with blank sheets of paper and pen or play with your pen tablet creating stunning pieces of visual art.
This is the first part of the Start Your Logo Designing Business series. Please share this article with your friends who are passionate about graphic designing or planning to venture into entrepreneurship. This article will give you a rough overview of Logo designing business. We will be going through the business aspect in more detail in the next article. If you have any specific question, feel free to comment below as it will help everyone else. I will tackle your questions in greater detail in the upcoming posts of the series.
Originally published at www.crrux.com.
