What you’re about to read isn’t stuff I read in some book or overheard some lawyers talking about in a coffee shop. These are just a few things I’ve picked up on this sometimes winding and bumpy road of owning my own business. Hope you enjoy these points and get something out of them!

Communication is the key

I’ve said this a million times on this site and IgniteLiving.com, but if you don’t communicate, you’re not gonna make it.

It doesn’t have to be artsy, poetic, business-like or even intelligent communication. It just has to be communication.

Your client doesn’t care if you use the words “empowering”, “networking” or “flux capacitor” in your email. He doesn’t care if your sentence structure is a little funky. He doesn’t care if you floss regularly or subscribe to any particular political stance.

He just wants you to exist and act like you’re actually there.

When someone writes you, write them back. When someone says they like your stuff, say thank you. When someone says it’s urgent, don’t go out for a long lunch before you answer. When someone calls, call them back.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t like the phone. I’m with you; I hate the phone. Ultra-hatred bordering on homicidal and/or suicidal psychosis probably. But it’s not about me. It’s about the client and the client wants a phone call. Seeing as how that client’s money will be paying my bills or buying me some groceries, I guess I ought to just shut up and get on with it, eh?

When you do communicate, have fun

If your business is anything like mine, you might have a LOT of clients. That’s not a boast; I’m just saying I don’t charge an arm and a leg for what I do, so have to make up for it in volume.

If I wrote every client the same email, over and over and over, I’d go insane. I try to keep it fresh and interesting and inject my personality into what I do. It makes it way more fun for me, and I’m sure clients enjoy my messages more than some generic bland form letter I could send. Plus, if you act like yourself, your client probably will too. You may even end up making some good friends along the way!

Pay attention

This is a tribute (or anti-tribute maybe) to the old used-car salesman mentality.

You go in looking for a car. You say, “I want one in blue.” The car salesman says, “We don’t have that, but look at this stunner in bright pink. Now that’s you!” And you think to yourself, “Is this guy a moron? I want a blue car and he is showing me one in bright pink? And it’s not even the same model!”

This happens all the time in business, especially via email. Client says, “I have a 50-page ebook I want designed.” Don’t write back and say, “How long is your ebook?” It makes you look stupid. It makes the client think you’re not really paying attention…which you weren’t. You can lose business this way.

It takes much less time to read an email all the way through and get it, than it does to read another email the client has to send because you weren’t on the ball. Wastes their time too.

Don’t take every client

I always run the danger of estranging clients when I speak of “Clients from Hell!” on this site, so please read this disclaimer first lest you think I’m pointing a finger at you:

Clients from Hell don’t care if they’re Clients from Hell. If you have the sensibility to even worry that you may be a Client from Hell, you’re not.

If you have to ask a client four or five times how long their book is, you might be steering into dangerous territory. If you ask the client, “Is it okay if I get this to you on Tuesday,” and they write back, “My favorite color is blue,” you might be in for some trouble.

You bring in what you put out

That probably sounds a bit enigmatic, so I’ll explain. If you want work to come IN, you have to put OUT communication. If you want a new client IN, you have to advertise OUT. If you want someone to know that you sell special wedding napkin rings with ducks on (business IN), you have to tell them (OUT).

Make some noise, tell everyone what you do, post to your blog, pick up that phone, spark up conversation even if you hate talking to people. Your reward will be new business. It never fails.

Take care of those who take care of you

When you find someone with whom you work well, boost that relationship and protect it as much as you can.

There are a few clients for whom I’ve done countless projects, one after the other. They make my business and life so much easier, having their repeat business. I have no illusions about that whatsoever, so I take good care of them. The more I help them the more they help me, and that is a fantastic way of things.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, do your best for them. Well, you should be doing your best anyway, but maybe you could do extra your best. Or something more logical perhaps.

Keep getting better at what you do

This is not only essential for keeping up with your competitors but also is a great trick for keeping interested in what you do.

Case in point, after designing about 8,384,859 ebook covers, I was feeling a bit stagnant and burnt out, and wanted to spend all my time watching Square Dancing DVDs.

So I started learning 3D programs, different Photoshop skills, studied up on classical typography and layouts, figured out what the Golden Mean was and how it could help me in my designs. All of a sudden I was interested again and started having better ideas and more of them.

So, long story short is don’t type-cast yourself. You’re not necessarily going to develop new skills and competencies just working your routine. In fact, just in interest of time and keeping the machine running, you may end up doing the same things over and over. They’ve worked before and they’re easy for you, so you just keep pulling that same trick out of the bag. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s also not the best route to personal development either.

Of course, this not ALL I’ve learned over the past year of working, but these main points will leave one in good shape if they’re remembered and practiced. Plus, I just don’t feel like writing any more.

Next week, we’ll be posting the next installment in our old series: 10 ways to make your website look better. You don’t want to miss that so subscribe now. Oh…and here are the first three posts in the series, case you missed them:

• 10 Ways to make your website look better
• 10 ways to make your website better, Part 1 – Effective eye trails
• How proper line height will improve the look and stickiness of your site

Let me tell you a story…

At the end of 2007 I gave away a free ebook to my customers over at IgniteLiving.com, another site of mine. At the time, the site was only a couple months old and had exactly 17 RSS subscribers.

My plan was to offer a great ebook that would attract some visitors and possibly some business. So, I wrote the book and designed the hell out of it. I gave it a slick cover, nice fonts and typography, a cool color scheme and made it available for free download.

When the post went live, a whole lot of nothing happened. Which is sort of what you’d expect of a site with 17 subscribers. But within a few days the ebook had been download dozens and dozens of times and my RSS subscriber count was going out the roof.

Even better, and far more important, were the comments and emails that started coming in. Relationships were blossoming all over the place, and before I knew it I’d made fast friends with quite a lot of people. And as will happen anywhere real relationships are born, a few of those connections were very valuable and are providing income to this very day.

All of that from one 30-page ebook that I published almost two years ago to a handful of people.

Of course, I designed it myself so it didn’t cost me a dime, but even if I’d paid $500 for it, it would have been well worth the price. (Oh, and don’t worry…$500 is NOT what I charge to design a 30-page book

Now, let’s ask the obvious question. Would all that profit have happened, would all those relationships have been made if my ebook had been some hideous beast? No way in the furthest reaches of the icy plains of Hell.

So, read this and remember it well:

Every single thing you produce right now, whether it’s an ebook or something else, free or not, IS a pre-launch to any future project you have.

The quality of what you do and produce right now is a barometer and compelling factor (good or bad) for anything you sell down the road.

So, yes, be productive and be proactive. Get your stuff out there, but make it good, because people DO judge books by their covers.

And if you need help making it good, contact me and I’ll certainly help you out. You will probably get famous and end up on TV.

I run a design business for money, but that’s a different thing. The money has always come as an incidental, as an effect and not the cause. I design and often people want to give me money for it. That’s a healthy relationship and a good way to stay alive.

But I design because I love it. I design because when I don’t, odd things happen inside me and the world takes on a certain pallor.

I’m a designer because when I walk around in the city I can’t keep my eyes off storefront signs, sandwich boards, even newspapers in their stands. Everywhere I look is typography for me to study and I often wonder if I’d have made the same choices.

I’m a designer because I see bumper stickers with type so small it can’t be read unless you physically run into the other vehicle. I wonder about the thought process behind that choice and why the designer didn’t care more for his audience.

When I go to the movies, I often pay more attention to the opening credits than the rest of the movie because they’re fountains of inspiration to me. Pacing, typography, layering, composition, mood and how music and images go together…every movie is a semester of schooling for me.

While I hate watching the news on TV I love watching their opening sequences for the same reason. A lot of info has to go into very tight time and space constraints. They’ve got pictures of news anchors, the station logo, stock quotes superimposed over the Loch Ness monster, pictures of Seattle and random shiny bits in motion all over the place and somehow it works. It’s fascinating and I can’t tear my eyes from it. That’s another semester.

Then there’s the internet. I started designing websites because I wasn’t happy with what I saw. Many people were trying to make their businesses thrive on the internet, and I knew they were failing just by looking at their sites. Would you give your money to someone who actually thinks green with pink polka dots is a pleasing color scheme? Or that a flashing star background behind a horse running through a meadow somehow makes sense? Sites like these always left me with a haunting residue. Like what happens when you eat asparagus.

Then there are the great sites. The one-in-a-million site that has 96 awards listed in the footer, and which is so good I feel a pang of jealousy. I see those and wonder why I’m a designer at all, or if I’m even capable of such magic. Those are the times when I spend 48 straight hours reading books on design and doing tutorials, just to keep up with the talent around me if I’m to stand any chance at all.

I’m a designer because I’m probably not slick enough to be a politician, but I’m unwilling to let things slide as I see them. Design is how an artist changes the world, even if it’s just a page at a time.

That’s what it means to me to be a designer. You look around and you wonder.

1. Doing crappy work
2. Starting before you know what the client really wants, leading to crappy work

We all know what doing crappy work is so no need to elucidate here. It goes in the trash.

As to starting a project before you clarify milestones with the client, same things applies. While you may make them the most incredible logo or website ever, if it’s not what they wanted it’s still crap to them. It goes in the trash too.

Now, I know that freelancers in many fields have a tendency to blame the client when things go wrong. And yes, we all know there are tough personalities and clients who don’t pay and such. I’m not saying there aren’t law-breakers and thieves out there, but clients like that are a miniscule minority. The majority of your clients are good people simply looking for a professional product from a professional who knows more about it than they do. Give them what they, they’ll be happy and you’ll get paid.

Be responsible for yourself and your work.That’s my attitude on it at least. Sure I can blame clients for this and that. I can moan about the rare time when a client skips town with a check. But you know, even in those cases, had I trusted my instincts I wouldn’t have even taken the job.

And the few really unbelievably tough clients I had, were tough because I wasn’t getting the job done. And the reason I wasn’t? Because I was new and excited to stun and never tried to find what they really wanted! Once I finally listened, the job was finished in no time.

I guess the moral of the story is to be responsible. Be responsible for yourself and your work. And hey, while you’re at it, why not be responsible for the client too.

This post was inspired in part by a post by David Airey, a fellow graphic designer. It seems unrelated but in his post David mentions ethics and shows how taking a little responsibility can turn the tables in your favor. Even against the inertia of Google.