How to Find Design Clients (The Practical Side)
Note: This is part 2 of my How to Find Design Clients series and you can find part 1 here.
Last time, we chatted all things creative within your design business. Finding your signature style, creating a killer portfolio and showing off your own brand design. Now we’ve covered the creative, we want to dig into the more practical, business side of design and bringing in clients.
When you run a business, you need to run a tight ship, even if your mind is drawn more to the creative than the organised. This means we need to get our processes in order and make working with us a really appealing prospect to anyone who comes across your work.
You don’t want to be attracting dream clients with your creative side, but then putting them off because you take too long to quote for the job or your process isn’t in order. This is what we will focus on today. The creative brings them in and the practical keeps them with you and gives you referrals.
The approach I’m going to cover in this part is the 3 P’s - packages, pricing and process. These are all key areas of getting clients to work with you and the more you can perfect each one (there's another P), the more you’ll see the results.
Want more tips to help you get design clients?
I’ve written an interactive guide and workbook to take you through all the basics and the not-so-basics for setting your design business up for all those dreamy clients to come flooding in!
Head over to download the guide now and get your design biz in shape…
Pricing
Pricing is definitely a tough subject to cover and also to think about yourself but pricing is crucial for attracting the right clients. There is a sweet spot when it comes to pricing where you want to price high enough to pay your bills but not so high that you put people off. There are several ways to price your services:
Packaged set-pricing
Hourly pricing
Value-based pricing
Whichever way you price what you do, we want to make sure we get the same outcome - you are receiving enough to cover your bills and your value as a designer.
At time of writing, I don’t have the experience to talk about value-based pricing (although it is something I am experimenting with!) so we will focus on the first two - set prices for packages or charging hourly. Let’s look into both:
Set Pricing
With set pricing, you match a price up with each of your services and charge the same amount to anyone who wants to work with you on that package.
Pros:
You can manage and predict your income more accurately
You know you are getting what the package is worth because you have calculated this beforehand
Cons:
Projects which take longer aren’t accounted for in the price
You may feel like you want to get the work done quicker leading to poor quality
Hourly Pricing
With hourly pricing, you track the time you work on any project using a tool like Toggl and then you bill a set amount for every hour you work.
Pros:
You get paid for all the work you do if the project overruns
Clients get a clear guide of what they are paying for
Cons:
You can’t predict your income with hourly pricing
It discourages you getting projects completed at a quicker rate
As I recommend setting up packages for your products, you may guess that I also recommend packaged, flat-rate pricing. Aside from the pros and cons listed, it helps you organise your business and your income and can set you up for booking clients better than having hourly pricing can.
You May Like: How I Made Five Figures in a Month
Process
The final ‘p’ in the trio is your process. Once you get your pricing and packages sorted, it feels like you have everything sorted and ready to go but I would urge you to spend a good amount of time working on your process. This doesn’t just make your own life easier but it will definitely make your clients lives easier and mean they will be more likely to refer more clients to you.
So what is a process?
A business or design process is a step by step action guide which you follow for every client you have. It stays the same to make sure you always know where you are up to and what you need to do next and it keeps you on track and organised with projects.
You May Like: How I Perfected my Design Process
There are a few things you need to include within your design process:
Milestones - Within every project you want milestones to track and match up with different steps in the process. For example, in a branding project, a few milestones would be creating logo concepts, feedback on the logo designs, creating collateral items etc.
Timings - You should have a timescale now for each of your packages, but within this, you want to set yourself and your clients' strict deadlines for when each of the milestones are due to keep the project on track
Start to Finish Plan - We don’t want to just have a process for when we are designing. Our process starts when we get an enquiry and ends when you have followed up with the project launch so you need a plan and steps at every point in between.
Good Business Tools - With any good process comes good tools to support it which help you automate and plan your projects. My personal favourites are Dubsado and Asana for client and project management but there are plenty to choose from, free and paid.
You May Like: What Worked for Me: Business Tools
Once you have your process planned and in place, you will find that when you get clients, they are much easier to manage and fit into your schedule and the organised way you work is a way of attracting more clients. There’s nothing worse than working with someone who misses deadlines or forgets files, you want to be a super professional designer!
I hope these guides have given you some inspiration for how you can tighten your business ship and organise your design packages, pricing and process for success! Let me know which steps you found most helpful and head back and read part one if you missed it.
More Advice for Designers!
Want more tips and tricks specifically for designers and running your design business? Sign up to my designer club below!
