1. When did you realise you wanted to be a designer?
I always had an element of creativity within me growing up. I loved exploration through music and expression and naturally excelled at subjects like art. There was a point that I realised traditional art, at least at the time, didn’t offer many career opportunities. To me, it felt like a choice between becoming a famous artist, where your chances are very slim, or falling into the world of teaching.
I made a conscious decision to transition my creative skills to something that felt more practical, and started my journey into the world of design.
There was a second stage in my life, where I was teaching myself design and continually pursuing music at the same time. Both of which started showing promise that led to a fork in the road, ultimately with another choice to make. Do I fully commit to music, where I had two albums released already in the US and Japan, or pursue design, where I was starting to get paid freelance gigs?
By the fact that I’m here you can guess what I picked. Design was inherently closer to my heart, and I thought, if there was one thing I could do for the rest of my life this would be it!
2. How did you get started and what was the biggest hurdle you overcame?
I got started by throwing myself in at the deep end. Getting my hands on software I had no idea how to use, creating album covers for music friends, combining my traditional art skills with digital art working, and simply trying to figure it all out. It was that ‘rinse and repeat’ process that allowed me to sharpen myself over time during the early days.
My biggest hurdle however, was re-educating myself from a large agency employee to a small agency founder and owner. Having not gone to university, you could say I’ve taken an unconventional path, learning industry knowledge through creating my own luck with freelance gigs, and eventually large agency hands-on experience. Starting my own, smaller scale agency meant I almost had to forget all I knew from that background, requiring significant levels of focus and re-learning.
In particular, mitigating the common expectation that your business should be a full-service agency wasn’t easy. That was my background, and all I knew at the time. I had to educate myself around taking ownership of a niche space. Through trial and error, we’ve learnt to restructure and change the way we do things, operate, and position ourselves into owning a niche, taking accountability and placing ourselves around design and impact.
3. What’s been your most successful way of getting clients?
For Driftime® it’s never about the project itself, but the relationship we build with our clients and partners. To us, it’s about having the conversations rather than blindly pitching, understanding the challenges and objectives before saying yes to a prospect, and working collectively rather than competitively towards long-term change and impact.
We ultimately see our role as supportive, empowering and value driven. Our client would be the protagonist, and we’d be the fairy godmother guiding them towards their truest potential. At least, that’s how we see it.
In a nutshell, we get clients by providing value with no strings attached and deeply understanding our field, articulating it without the jargon to help our clients through their journey and educating where needed. It’s never us versus them – it’s always us together and we must work collectively to achieve real impact.
4. How do you get clients to stay with you and use you for more work?
The simple answer is to do good work, show results and don’t be an asshole. Aside from that, it’s the art of communication. We have to have open and transparent conversations, even when it’s sometimes difficult. Things don’t always go to plan, and it can sometimes lead to frustration, bitterness, regret, or a loss in time and profit.
However, practising love, kindness and empathy can go a long way. Particularly if our role is to empower. If things get a little hairy, as they surely will, we have open conversations and iron things out, explain the situation, maintain professionalism and collectively work together for a solution that favours all. We find this earns more respect and that we are valued for our composure. As I have said before, it is not us vs them, it’s us working together.
5. Do you ever have issues with clients paying late? How do you manage that?
We don’t have this problem anymore as clients we work with tend to pay us on time. However, we’ve certainly had our moments in the past and have learned a huge amount in mitigating the scenario. There have been numerous occasions where invoices were either not paid, held ransom, or simply delayed.
Some scenarios are reasonable, and payments can be delayed depending on who you’re working with and the nature of the business. We look to understand what those external dependencies might be, and suggest a billing cycle that works for both sides and removes the element of risk.
On the odd occasion we have come up against a challenge we have learnt from it and moved forward with a positive take out.
For example, we once found ourselves in a situation where a client refused to pay us for work undertaken until we had fixed some bugs on their site, caused by changes made on their side. We decided to terminate the relationship and take the loss as after some back and forth, it wasn’t getting us anywhere.
Experiences like this have helped sharpen our own process and documentation. Our contract became more specific and carefully worded, we put additional insurance aside to cover such a scenario through legalities, and luckily haven’t had to use it since.
And we have even taken it one positive step further. We have put our learnings, process and documentation into a kit, making it available to other designers and agencies alike in our Sh*t Hot Client Onboarding Kit, in hopes others can avoid such an experience.
6. What does your typical workday look like?
I’m a “zero inbox” type of person, so typically my day starts with responding to emails, as boring as that might sound. I’ll crack on with the rest of my day with input on the multiple moving parts of the business where as needed.
It’s all about engaging with the team after that. How are they? Anything they need? Any specific input needed from me on project work? Etc.
Meetings usually follow with prospects, the team, and with clients. My ‘typical’ day is split between hands-on work with the team, to mostly the vision side of the business. What this means is, rather than being in the deep end of client work, my focus tends to be top level on projects goals and impact, and on internal and external relationship building.
7. Any piece of advice/wisdom that you’d like to give the readers at This Design Life?
Put the work in, persevere, and allow the secret ingredient of time to take place. It’s all too easy to get impatient, but if you stay consistent, keep your values in check, let passion and focus be your primary drivers and allow time to happen, you’ll find yourself in a place worth relishing. Time itself is a finite currency, and you want to invest as much as possible rather than spend.
There is a beautiful quote by champion of individualism and prescient critic Ralph Waldo Emerson…
“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of the intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the beauty in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.”
If these values can be applied through your craft of design, it’s work to be proud of in my book.
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