Thinking of Design as a Business

Graphic designers and other creative professionals often face a difficult situation: not being treated with the same deference as other service professionals, such as electricians or mechanics. Designers, photographers, writers, and artists often find themselves haggling with their clients and customers, having to justify the investment in their services in a way other professionals do not. The value of their creativity, technical skills, ability and education is not as clear to the average person as the value of these more accepted and conventional service providers.

The overhead of a creative career is rarely taken into full consideration. In reality, a mechanic’s toolset is a relatively small investment compared to a MacBook Pro and thousands of dollars of software from Adobe. But while $75 per hour is something people tend to live with when getting their car or plumbing fixed, someone charging that to develop a logo or print marketing material or to build a website somehow seems unreasonable.

Competing with the Low-end Market

Part of the issue is inexperienced designers offering their services for free or near free, which creates the impression that it shouldn’t cost that much. This is mostly because younger designers either need to make extra money to supplement their income or are not able to break into the industry directly out of college and want to find ways to build up their portfolio.

Both clients and creators mistakenly believe that the value of graphic design and creativity should be driven by what others are charging in the marketplace. While there is some truth to that in every industry, people are using globalization and crowdsourcing as a standard for determining graphic design rates. Even graphic designers themselves are mistakenly doing this.

For a hobbyist, this is not damaging. However, for industry professionals, as more graphic design work shifts from in-house designers to freelancers and small studios, this becomes more problematic. The level of quality, ability, professionalism, and investment of professional work is not being considered distinct from the services provided by students and hobbyists. They are being put in the same category without any regard for the difference in value they provide for their clients. In every industry someone with a decade or more of experience finds it reasonable to charge a higher rate than someone with only two years of experience. However in the creative services industry this is no longer being taken into consideration.

Operating Like a Business and Setting Your Rates

A good business person knows their rates are not dictated by what people “want” to pay or by what someone else thinks they should be. Their rates are driven by the profits they want to receive. To determine your rates, calculate your total overhead, including production, marketing, and opportunity costs, then add a markup for profit. What your contemporaries are charging has nothing to do with it. What individuals operating in a completely different economy from you are charging has nothing to do with it. None of those factors reduce your cost, your investment, or in any way dictate the quality of your work and the value you can create for your clients. The most successful brands in the world charge more than competing lesser-known brands, and there is a reason for that. Understand your value and learn how to effectively communicate it to your clients.

Overcoming Optics

Some people seem to believe that creative professionals are paid to sit around and play on the computer. In an age where everyone has a camera built into their phone, photographers seem redundant and like overpaid “artists.” There are publications that have gone so far as to fire established staff photographers and simply hand out iPhones to their remaining staff, allowing everyone on payroll to become a “photo journalist.” Somehow people have convinced themselves that is a good idea to pay five dollars to have a logo developed to represent their professional brand. “Good enough” has simply become good enough for the majority of people, even in the professional world.

So what can creative professionals do about this? One lesson can be learned from Apple. Ultimately Apple realized that competing in the mass market for personal computers was not going to be viable. Instead, Apple targeted creators, making themselves a product for a niche market and a status symbol associated with elites. As a creative professional today, there is a difference how clients perceive you if you take a meeting and present on your iPad or MacBook Pro versus any comparable product from a competitor. The perception of your value is augmented by your association with Apple as a brand. This is not to suggest that you can immediately charge more if you’re using Apple products. However, Apple’s strategy is a perfect example of maintaining high margins by becoming so desirable that customers find a way to pay.

Creative professionals need to market and present themselves in such a way that their value is undeniable if they want to avoid competing on price. The key is to focus on the quality of their work and experience. If you don’t want to compete with college students, overseas labor, or someone’s cousin who will do it for free, then don’t! The idea is not to get as many customers as you can but to get the few customers who are willing to pay what you decide you are worth. You simply have to set your value accordingly and put in the work necessary to attract people who will evaluate and can afford it. While this is obviously easier said than done, creative professionals know better than anyone that completely committing to a course of action is often the difference between what is impossible and what is possible.

Some direct courses of action that one can take are simpler than you might imagine. First, you should immediately do an audit of your own branding. Take a hard look at the quality of the materials that you are using to promote and market yourself, like your business cards, your own logo, your website, and anything else that puts you in front of customers. Review your portfolio and take the weakest pieces out, regardless of what personal value they may have to you. Focus on promoting and marketing the work that will attract the type of clients that you want to pursue going forward.

If you don’t feel like your local client market can support the prices that you intend to set, then you need to go beyond the local market. Consider investing time to learn about online marketing and how to attract business by leveraging SEO. This and other inbound marketing strategies will be very beneficial to you because you won’t be restricted by local economics or culture. You will be able to widen your net and attract the type of clients that you really want, without regard for the demographics of your current location.

Remember, at the end of the day as a creative professional, your actual job is to help someone make their own business more successful. There is an irony in the fact that we tend to overlook this with regard to ourselves and our own careers. Apply the same care and the same thought that you would use to help someone else scale their brand to yourself and think of yourself as a business person first and an artist second. If you can alter that perception about yourself, you’re more likely to be able to communicate it effectively to your clients and convince them very easily to pay you what you feel you are worth.

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