The Happy Studio – Commit Only to What You Can Control.

So here it is. The most important advice we can give you. It’s the thing that changed our work lives fundamentally from the ground up and that made us more profitable, and happy in one fell swoop. We quit committing to things we had no control over.

Client work is a nefariously tricky to tame. People change their mind, push dates, and generally demand the irrational. We were stuck in the same boat for the first few years of our business. Projects ran terribly over time, and over budget through seemingly no fault of our own. We were doing great work, but making more enemies than friends. It was borderline unbearable.

Actually that it was unbearable ultimately led to us trying something that had seemed impossible only a few months earlier. We quit promising things. Not all things, -but most of them.

The Happy Studio – Handling Revisions

Revisions are part of our business. If you try to fight human nature, you’ll fail, -and have less clients because of it. People change their minds, committees have to be pleased, legal has to have their say. If you’re prepared for it, and understand it’s part of the job, you’ll get through it easier.

• First, have a strong filter for what’s a “revision.” If it’s your fault, or something that should be part of your job to start with, -treat it as such. Accept blame, Assure the client. Act fast. Put yourself in their shoes, – what are the things you would want to hear? Sorry is probably at the top of the list, followed closely by a promise to fix it promptly.

The Happy Studio – Do Great Work at All Costs.

You can stop reading this series of articles after this one if you like. It’s the single biggest item that can make your studio happier, and it outweighs all the others by tons. It’s also however despite being deceptively obvious, -the toughest thing to do. Do great work at all cost.

The important thing about graphic design is that it’s work made for hire. If we don’t please clients, we don’t get paid. This is how sayings like “the customer is always right” got started. It’s also how phrases like “can you make the logo bigger” got spray painted on the walls of the collective consciousness of our industry. We’re going to go out on a limb and tell you, -our clients are frequently wrong. If they knew everything about marketing and design, – they wouldn’t need us. We say “no” to them (carefully) quite often.

The Happy Studio – Handling Quote Requests

Quote requests, and RFP’s are the best and worst thing for your business. Without them you probably would have nothing to do, -but every one you get is a potential waste of time and energy. We get lots of requests through our website and through phone calls every week. Still more of them come via formal RFP’s in the mail. The only way we’ve learned to deal with them, and maintain a light staff is to be selective.

Qualifying Leads
Like most studios, we don’t publish our prices online. Lots of people call us asking “how much” for this, or that. If we made a formal proposal for every call that came in, we would go broke. A lot of times the people are just feeling around without any real money to spend. The goal of whoever fields the phone call is to qualify the lead. We give out rough cost ranges for the bottom end of our services pretty freely. Since we do flat pricing on logos, that’s an easy question to field. If the prospect is still on the phone after giving them basic costs, the next step is to determine a range, and or set up a meeting. We never agree to a meeting, or a proposal without first making sure the potential client understands the range of prices that our services can be purchased for.

The Happy Studio – Quit Working So Hard.

We work very hard at our job. We try daily to improve, and to be the absolute best studio we can imagine with our hands and our brains. But we go home after 8 hours of it…

After doing the alternative more often than we care to say, – we stick pretty religiously to 8 hours or less a day now. The strange thing is that we’re just as productive now, if not more. We have made some very careful decisions to do less along the way. Even in a limited non-workaholic schedule, we’ve paired things back even further to make sure we have time to blog, relax, think, and chat. We’re trying to build two things here. The first is an amazing studio that does beautiful smart work for clients who become friends. The second is to build a sustainable business that provides for us like we provide for it. If either one is burning too fast, it’s not sustainable.