Business of design

To grow a design practice, it’s obvious that you need a constant supply of work either from existing clients or new clients. We know that 80% of your growth will come from existing clients. And we know that many agencies have clients scattered across a range of industry sectors

In a crowded marketplace, designers need to explore different ways to find new business. Our design value chain, evolved from Michael Porter’s value chain, works brilliantly to identify where an organisation uses design, how effective it is, and the benefits of using more design.

Of all the line items in an estimate of costs, clients seem to question design management the most. They seem to think that paying for design management is like paying for bottled water…

Our industry is rife with prejudices. We are a long way from gender equity when it comes to ownership of large agencies, in spite of equity at graduation. We slavishly follow the bright and shiny new designers and we are ageist.