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Mar 17, 2021

Podcast 23: The Greatest Mistake You Should Avoid To Grow A Design Business

Podcast 01 on what you can learn from the design startup show

Episode Transcript:

Hey design starters. Today, I have a quick lesson on the biggest mistake I’ve made as a freelance designer and a business owner of a design agency since 2005 those years. I only think of making an income and just taking all the revenue as income for myself. So I thought if I were to hire people, I have to spend it’s an overhead.

Why not just do everything myself? Right. I know, I know so much of Adobe, Adobe software, how to use them, the technical knowledge and I love design. Right. I love to design. So I was basically the, the owner, the technical person, the illustrator, the designer, the artist, the accountant. And everything in between.

And that was my greatest mistake in a way. But what do you mean by the greatest mistake? So just in this past five years, I’ve realized that I should have built my business to sell. If you have read the book built to sell by John Warrillow. That is what I mean. If you have not read the book or read the book, but in short, I can tell you now how the book is trying to help you grow your business and it’s to be done in a way where you don’t rely just on yourself to run the business, to do everything only on your own.

And if somebody comes in to take over that person, can. Can handle that and don’t know what other processes that is the biggest mistake you can ever make in graphic design business, or any design business or any service design service business. For, for that matter in a service business, if you’re going to rely on yourself to be the one, delivering something, you are the bottleneck and.

And to end the thing is if you are going to rely on yourself and become the bottleneck, then your deliverable is something that is pretty customized, pretty bespoke, or you may not have a bespoke product or service, but your, you have no processes to pass down the system to someone else to take over when you aren’t able to run the business.

So that has been. My greatest mistake so far, just want to share with you are to what you have to do. Now, if let’s say you, you feel that you are the sole delivery deliver, deliver, uh, how shepherd is delivery person, right. I would say to everything in your business, This is, uh, this will be a mistake. If you still want to grow it, if you want to stay as a sole sole freelancer or solo freelancer or freelancer with maybe help getting help somewhere and all that, that is totally fine because that’s what you want.

So if you already know what you want, and this is for people for designers want to grow their business. If you’re a grower, then you have to build your business such that it’s, it’s going to be ready to be sold. So build it up such debt and you can sell it like a product, like a, like a package, like as in your business, not, not the, not the service, not selling the service, but selling the whole business as a product to someone else to run it for you.

You are not actually going to sell it. You may not. You may or may not. You, what I’m trying to say is if you don’t want to sell it, it’s fine, but you still need to build, build it to, in order to sell so that it’s easy to grow. All right. So this is one take today and I will elaborate more on this in other episodes.

See you later. Bye.