GoKawiilEarlier in the year, I wrote a bit about the design services industry in two blog posts: first, I wrote “The End of Client Services” in July, which outlined my thoughts on why the best interaction design is done outside of the studio/agency model. Then in August I followed up with “In Defense of Client Services,” which expands a little bit on why I believe services is such a difficult way to earn a living as a designer. I had meant to write a third post, but getting Mixel out the door got in the way. Over the past several days I was finally able to find the time to hammer out this follow-up.
Actually, I’ve been making notes for this blog post all year long, because it was ten years ago that I co-founded an interaction studio here in New York City, partnering with some colleagues from a previous employer. I stayed with the studio for four years, and I learned a lot in that time. Building that business significantly changed my outlook on the design industry, but I haven’t written too much on why. A decade later seems like the right opportunity.
What still strikes me the most about that experience was how little my former partners and I understood at the outset about what it takes to build a successful services business. In the years since, I’ve met lots of designers who have either founded or had the ambition to found studios or agencies of their own. Most of them, it seems to me, are laboring under misapprehensions very similar to the ones that hobbled my former partners and myself.
So here are a few of the key lessons that I learned from co-founding my own design studio. The usual caveats apply, of course, in that everything about business is contextual, and so your mileage my vary.
People
Far and away, the biggest lesson I took away from co-founding a design studio was that almost nothing matters more than people. How well a team works together, through good times and bad, day in and day out, is a bigger determining factor in building a successful business than the contracts you win, the work that you do, the press coverage you get or even the money you make.
The way to form a good team is to gather people of complementary talents and temperaments and unite them under a single vision. By contrast, my former partners and I started our studio primarily because we were thrown together by circumstance — in the fall of 2001 and in the aftermath of 9/11, with no one hiring, we had almost no other choice but to form a company of our own. But our disparate attitudes, approaches and visions for the business inevitably led to strife, and before too long I could no longer answer the question “Do you like working with these people?” with a “yes.” If you’re going to undertake the hard work of building a company, the answer to that question should always be a resounding “yes.” Life is too short for it to be otherwise.
Clients
You cannot succeed in design services unless you really believe in your clients and your client’s products. Just as it’s essential to enjoy working with the people you form a company with, working with clients that you like is essential too. I liked some of the clients I worked with, and I flatly disliked many of the others.
I did my best work for the former, and I did a disservice to the latter, most of whom had hired us to help further businesses that I felt no passion for, or was outright skeptical of. For years, I thought that my disinterest was immaterial, that I was such a talented designer that I could do a good job for anyone. But before long it became apparent to me that unless I was fully bought into a client’s vision, my work would always be subpar. If you’re trying to build a design studio based on a reputation for doing phenomenal work, taking on assignments from clients you don’t believe in is a waste of everyone’s time.
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