To be perfectly honest – there are times where I get home from work and wonder why on earth I run a web design company. On those days when everything seems to go wrong, customers are being awkward, your mail server has been down all afternoon and everybody seems want everything all at once – and yet, there are days when I love my job – I am working on an exciting project, clients are grateful for your hard work and you get the feeling you might be actually making a difference to the world. The key is to make sure you have more of these days than the former. A
So how can I keep the blood pressure low and making sure I enjoy my work? Well I have identified three key aspects that over time I have increasingly found to be vital to the health and well being of both my self and my business. I wish I had learn’t some of this stuff years ago!
These aren’t just exclusive to web design companies, but I think that any business owners or self employed person would find these tips useful.
1) Cashflow
Cash flow is the life blood of any business whether you are small or multi national. With long term projects managing cash-flow has proven to be challenging. To some degree we have managed it by taking payments at different stages of projects, but it hasn’t completely solved the issue and different stages of the project can still be held up waiting on content from clients or other issues. Managing schedules and milestones with you clients before hand can be beneficial so long as both parties actually stick with them!
2) Choose your clients and work
In the early days I would have pretty much taken on any job so long as we got paid for it but I soon realised that this was a recipe for disaster. There are such things as bad clients and bad jobs. Some clients will just want far too much for what they are willing to pay and some jobs are destined to be full of problems from the start. My advice is to trust your instinct and don’t fall into the trap of thinking “well its money and it’s better than nothing”.
Its a good idea decide on the kind of work you would like to do. Are you looking at doing local work, or further afield? Are you primarily serving start ups or larger companies? We primarily are a web design company serving medium/larger companies and because we are a Bedford web design company we are always looking at serving companies locally in and around Bedfordshire. This is where our focus is.
3) Be proud of what you do
Being proud of what you do is essential for enjoying any job, whether you work for yourself or someone else. For me, being proud of what I do is also linked to choosing clients and what work we do. I want to work on good projects, projects that allow me to be creative, to provide solid solutions to genuine problems and to give the client a great product. In my early years of running the business I would have probably followed the mantra that the customer was always right, but these days I am beginning to realise that is not true. A client is hiring us as professionals as we know (or at least should do) what is best for the job. The trouble with the creative industry is that everyone seems to have an opinion. You wouldn’t tell a plumber the best way to install a new boiler, but lots of people seem to think they know the best way to lay out a home page correctly.
The key thing I have learnt from this is to push back on some of these comments/requests with reasons why we believe it should be different. Explaining the reason can often help the client to understand that designers lay things out the way they do for a reason – its not random! In the past, I have worked on too many projects where the client has made changes to the original design that have broken the visual harmony of the site and I am no longer as proud of the job as I once was!
Pushing back on design decisions doesn’t mean I don’t like feedback, sometimes clients make very valid points and we can improve on what we have done because of them, but deciding that we should add two more fonts and use a new colour, (because that colour is their favourite) might need pushing back on from time to time.