Every design business owner knows the importance of keeping their clients happy and satisfied, but very few of us analyse the value that a positive experience will have on our bottom line. We do it very well FOR our clients but we don’t do it TO them.

Every design business owner knows the importance of keeping their clients happy and satisfied, but very few of us analyse the value that a positive experience will have on our bottom line. We do it very well FOR our clients but we don’t do it TO them.

Recent talk about the business of design focuses on traditional ways of doing biz dev, costing, pricing and positioning. That’s so last decade; it’s now about the human side of the business of design.

With half the country working remotely and clients wanting to work from home there has to be a new approach to business development and selling the value of design.
The question is how do you develop a new approach?

In design research you are trying to understand the customers beliefs, experiences, attitudes, behaviour and interactions.

We aim to get recognised and paid for the value we create, not the hours we spend on the project. We want to shift from a cost focus to a value focus.

That’s what design-led businesses do. They see design has a part to play in every part of their business and the actively apply it.

Clients don’t understand design value because it is design language, not business language

HCD has served us well but with the recent pandemic there is a shift to humanity centred design

The move to digital files has changed the apparent value of our intellectual property. We need to reclaim it as a revenue stream.

Look at set of core activities found in every business, develop a system to analyse these activities and demonstrate which of them creates value. That’s a design audit.

We spend a lot of time talking about value add pricing but how much thought goes into getting more from our client $ within the studio.