Category: design-blog

Should you really charge a client when they ask for working files? There are a few classic debates in the design industry. I’m sure you know them: Mac vs Windows, hourly billing vs value-based pricing, cold calling vs inbound marketing, pants on vs pants off for zoom meetings. One that comes up from time to…

Selling Careplans should be simple and standard. Website care plans are a really effective and simple way to get recurring revenue for your freelance or design business, but selling customers on them can seem hard. For some of us it can almost seem impossible to actually land one of these as a sale. It might…

The struggle is real I’ve been thinking about this recently, how hard it can be to create our own work. Have you ever noticed this yourself? When you’ve been super excited about a personal project, but then almost paralysed when it comes to creating that vision? Well, I know I have. Let’s be honest, designing…

Don’t starve, take charge. The feast and famine cycle is an all too familiar situation that designers and developers find themselves in. This situation is what happens when we go from having a lot of work to do, to having no work to do. This problem is reflected in our finances, where we can have…

Projects going off track and taking longer than they should is always frustrating. It impacts motivation, it reduces profit margins, it messes with other projects and it causes loads of unwanted stress. Keeping projects running on time doesn’t need to be hard. A really easy way to handle this is the idea of “hibernation mode”.…

Repeat After Me – Edition #1 Have you ever quoted a project only to have the prospect come back and say “I’m sorry, but someone else has quoted less”… More than likely, I know I have. There are many ways that you can handle this conversation, but many of these will find you defending yourself…

Offer support they said. Sell care plans they said. Upsell hosting, domain, email services they said. It’s money for nothing they said… … No one mentioned all the additional work and stress. Let’s face it, retainers are great for cash flow. But offering website support and maintenance can be time-consuming and stressful and after all,…

It’s rare that a client will ask for a guarantee, but if they do, you’ll want to be prepared to answer the question properly. If you don’t, you’ll either say you offer no guarantee (which won’t sit that well with a prospect and is only part of the story) or worse you’ll agree to a…

Who doesn’t want to be booked solid for weeks and months in advance? This is a common goal and an ideal situation to get yourself into. But how do you get clients to agree to wait for long periods of time to work with you without the risk of losing the project? When a new…

No one wants to work with poor-fitting clients, so learning how to spot and avoid prospects that display the classic red flag warning signs is hugely beneficial for your design business. Weeding out poor-fitting clients has very much become a part of my formal process. I have done this by creating deliberate – and I…