5 areas where small tweaks have big results.

When things get tough, it’s common for business owners to feel overwhelmed and lacking control. Reality is, we do have the ability to make change. Even small tweaks to areas like pricing, productivity, positioning, sales and services will have impact.

This article discusses why and how to make those changes.

Pricing

Pricing is what you bill your client.

Pricing = your cost rate + contingency margin + value pricing.

Understand what you need to survive, and what you need to thrive (see this YouTube video on costing, pricing and profits) gives you control.

It means you’ll never lose money when quote by hour – you’ll hit a profit ceiling but as long as you estimate the number of hours accurately, you’ll never lose money.

It also means you’ve got a base line to tweak pricing when you need to. Tweaking your hourly rate even by a little makes a huge impact to your bottom line – more detail in this article.

The next stage is to value price – value pricing leads to higher fee-paying clients and better profits and that directly impacts your bottom line and your business. Similarly, giving clients options within an esimate (rather than the one price) often results in a higher-fee project.

If you’re unsure about value pricing, this free Lunchtime Learning recording is a good start.

Productivity

Productivity isn’t about time sheets, not is it about working harder/smarter.

Good productivity happens when the team get more (profits, wages) from less (effort, work hours, resources). It’s about efficiency, innovation and technological advancement.

Everyone is more productive when they are happier. Small changes can make a huge impact. As business owners, we can make changes (improve processes, resources and communication) to help ourselves (and our team) perform to our potential.

There’s a free Lunchtime Learning recording about productivity here.

Positioning

Positioning isn’t the work you do, it’s making your agency visible to clients and projects you want to actively pursue.

Growth by referral works, but it is a loss of control. A successful referral relies on a client understanding the type of work you want, your rate, and the sector your skills and interests are most suited. If not, it’s possible the agency is filled with work not quite suitable and not quite profitable.

Taking control of your positioning by proactively marketing to your target client sector will change your business. It’s gives you knowledge and confidence in business direction and that change can lead to increased productivity and profit.

There’s a free Lunchtime Learning recording about positioning here.

Sales

This is all about clients vs jobs.

Volume isn’t always profitable, sometimes it’s just busy-ness.

Most design firms have the information available to analyse busy-ness by mapping jobs, profits, clients, and industry sectors. Taking the time to understanding where the studio is busy and where the studio is profitable will impact productivity and profitability.

Services

Traditionally designers are ‘taught’ skills that evolve into tasks that evolve to services.
Design agencies ‘sell’ services like website or packaging or publication design.

Problem is, selling design services is an increasingly crowded and fraught marketplace.
Crowded because our design tools are becoming more democratic – Canva and Adobe are promoting directly to non-designers.
Fraught because the AI built into the products make acceptable design skills accessible.

A service-agnostic creative business is focused on outcomes not outputs.

Making that change to focusing on outcome builds a unique, sustainable creative business.

It’s a shift from delivering services reactively-on-request to proactively delivering services to produce outcomes. That stops the client vortex of push-and-pull and that impacts your business because it adds to employee satisfaction, efficiency and profitability.

Moral

The moral is fear can be paralysing but small tweaks in specific areas can make huge impacts.

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Want to discuss any of the above? Email Carol.

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Want more?

Links to our free material:

1. 1. 1. An article about increasing prices
      2. Here’s the link to the February 2024 Ask Me Anything
      3. What will happen if you increase your hourly rate?

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