Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Alexandra Valdivieso

by Alexandra Valdivieso

I founded Seven Thinkers in 2012. One year after returning to work as an employee, I would like to highlight some of the most useful things that I’ve learned and that may help you in your way if your are thinking of taking the step.

Lesson One: If you want to do it, you have to jump

One of the hardest things about an entrepreneur’s career is finding the right moment to dare to take a plunge. For that, there are several signs that you should pay attention to:

“I don´t know what I want, but I know what I don’t want.” Maybe you have doubts about running your own company but you are completely sure that your current position isn’t your place. In my case, when I made the decision I was working as project manager, saleswoman and designer at once and dedicating too much time and effort to someone’s else company.

“I think that there is a different way of doing things”. This is another key: you can dedicate a lot of time to your job although you are working as an employee but if you don’t believe in the things that you’re doing you will finish completely burned out. If it is your case, I suggest that you pay close attention to customer and market trends. If your current company is not doing things right, you can learn from their mistakes to discover new business opportunities. In my case, meetings with clients and being updated helped me to detect a huge need of good digital products and I was able to take advantage of the beginning of user centered design stream to create my own place in the market and, also, to lead my career towards a space with much more value.

Our dear cmd+z. As designers, we have two things in our favor: the first, we are the most valuable resource in a design company, so the investment that you need at the beginning isn’t so high and, just in case you fail, the damage will be less. The second, is that the design world is living a great moment and, luckily, there are a lot of design open vacancies, so in case your adventure doesn’t go well for whatever you always can go back. Of course, you’ll return with huge experience upon your shoulders and your career revalued. In my case, I would never have grown or learned so much in such a short time in any other company.

In short, if you aren’t growing in your current job and you believe you can contribute much more by doing things in your own way, don’t think more about it and just do it! After all, failing will not be as bad as wasting time.

Lesson Two: You need the right people around you

If you decide to make the decision you have to know that this isn’t an easy way. For that, it’s key that you are hyperconnected with the world around you and with the design community, be close to the right people and manage relationships well. In that sense, there are three kinds of key associations:

Partners. If your ambition is bigger than becoming a freelancer, my advice is to look for strong links with other people or even other small businesses. You can ally with other designers but, from my point of view, it’s much more practical to look for profiles that complement your skills. In my case, I was lucky to meet during a project in my previous company the owner of a development company when he was starting to run his business in Spain. We connected and actually it was one of the keys for me to take the step. Partnering with an engineer was great to have a different perspective when I had to make a proposal, so my suggestion is to try to find people different to you, so you can offer a more holistic approach to your clients. Also, a partnership with a development company allowed us to create end-to-end solutions for customers and deliver turnkey projects, wich was key in most cases to obtain the job. Last, but maybe most importantly, creating a strong link with an existing company gave me direct access to a group of existing customers to offer the new design services. Building a nice client database is very important to run your project fast and make money and gain motivation from the beginning.

Paperwork. As your company grows you will need more and more resources around you but, as you can imagine, from the first moment running your own company means a huge mountain of paperwork that, besides being terribly boring, can literally. leave you with no time for what is really important (like think, create your strategy, deliver projects, etc.). My advice is to outsource all the paperwork as quickly as you can, either by hiring a company that will do it for you (is the best option at first), or by hiring one or more people in your own administration department (the best option when you start to have employees and a high workload).

Yourself. If you take the step, follow my advice and for any reason you partnership with complementary profiles, you will have to deal and manage a very important relationship that made me learn a lot (especially in the beginnings): this is lonely. The scenario could be as follows: you are starting up so you haven’t a big team behind you, your first big project arrives and you want to do something amazing, strategical, disruptor, awesome … you open your notebook and… you are alone. Try to speak with a systems engineer about insights, ethnography, journeys,… and you’ll see the Mac’s spinning pinwheel of death in his bright eyes. Another possible scenario could be the moment you are thinking about the strategy to commercialize your design services: how to tell it, how to do it, how to sell it to different kind of clients,… it’s not easy at the beginning. Over time and luck, you will obviously gain synergy and multidisciplinary knowledge, but the specialization will always be yours and for a while you will feel alone to face the danger. My advice here is never to lose contact with the design community: look for other who are doing the same things, share your doubts and experiences, go to design events and get in touch with different approaches. It doesn’t matter if they are your competitors, in fact, if you are open-minded the easiest thing is that you can make strong alliances and even more interesting projects arise.

Lesson Three: The best clients, sometimes are not so good

The reality is that when you are starting up almost any project is worth it. It’s difficult to control anxiety by starting to make money and it could make you not choose well your first clients. In my case, we gained a first “big” contract almost before formalizing the company. A large group of companies dedicated to hospitality with a lot of brands, ideas and things to do. The one-year contract included a monthly fee enough to pay initial expenses and to be calm. It gave us security and everything seemed perfect until I realized I was burying my personal project (what I wanted for my company) under banners, commercial websites, silly apps and Facebook covers for Halloween day. Almost every task without value, requested for yesterday, based on the customer likes and burning the time that we should be dedicating to take our own company to the place that we had planned. At this point, we could have hired one or more people first in the line of fire to attend this client, but we would sacrificed our ideas with them. Again, try to explain to one of this kind of clients the value of Service Design or User Centered Design, you will see the spinning pinwheel of Mac again, flying out of his eyes and slap your face for being an idiot.

When the one-year contract finished, we didn’t renew it. Obviously, we had doubts and uncertainty for lose a safe income but, looking back, it was the best thing that could have happened. We recovered time to design a better approach about the services that we were going to offer and we were not going to offer (anything related to social media disappeared from our brochure) and we moved to close projects that we really liked. Luckily, everything went well. So my advice here is to choose well your company’s mission before selecting your clients; you must be clear what you want and don’t want and how you want to do it and use this criteria to filter the projects before setting a price or seeing how much they are willing to pay for it. Maybe this isn’t the best tip to make money quickly, but it is to make Design as big as it should be. It depends on what your goal is.

Lesson Four: You are not a NGO

If the last sentence sounded too naive, here’s the counterpoint. Loving this profession or putting the project type before the price doesn’t mean being stupid (most of the time). In this case, we face the opposite situation to the previous lesson: customers with very attractive projects with a very low budget (for whatever). Two cases can occur here:

The big stingy company. Big brands with projects with more or less scope ready to give you the opportunity for a low price. Usually, the bigger the brand, the more your budget will tighten. You will hear them saying “it’s a win-win” or “you win in prestige what you don’t win in money”.

The little company with a big heart. The flip side of the coin: small companies, startups or NGOs with exciting projects. For me, these are the most dangerous projects because, if you fall in love with the project, you can make mistakes that will cost you a great deal, investing much more time and resources than you should and it can end up not compensating you. You will recognize these kind of clients because they ask you “almost a favor” or a collaboration that, usually, starts with something small and, normally, it’s becoming something more and more ambitious. Sometimes, this is the fault of both sides, both client and yourself if you take the project as your own and you obsess about making it “really” bigger.

Having sinned in both cases, my tip if you are facing one of this kind of situations is, first, don´t be taken for a fool: set limits, make agreements and impose some conditions. Something like setting a base price plus a small percentage of sales for a while, a commitment to more work after the project or public recognition of your participation are good choices. You may lose the project but, if so, probably it was not worth it. Second, make the value tangible: open Excel (that tool that you love) and calculate how much that project will cost you in resources and how much it will save you, for example, in advertising or brand positioning. Value all the options to obtain the final number and accept the project only in case it really compensates you.

Be water, my friend. There is a third case: a friend who asks you for “something”. I will not go deeper into this matter… in this case I always recommend you to say no: chances of gaining something (even if it’s personal fulfillment) against the possibility that you end up having a problem with your friend are few so, if you can, avoid it subtly.

Lesson Five: You can do things that you never believed possible

This is quite implicit in the rest of the lessons, but actually for me it’s one of the biggest challenges in this process: Dealing with projects and bigger or smaller clients has made me grow exponentially in a way that I couldn’t imagine:

The One Woman Band. Taking a clean sheet of paper and starting a project with few resources gave me the opportunity to acquire skills in every phase of the Design process. I don’t know a better way to obtain a complete profile than having to solve a problem, not knowing how and having to deliver the proposal tomorrow. Hours and hours of research, reading and coffee are the way I’ve learned everything I know about journeys, blueprints, business models, usability matrix and almost anything that I thought could contribute to a better proposal.

The trickster. After the paperwork, surely the worst labour is becoming a saleswoman. Most of us like that our work will sell itself but you will need a good dose of smiles, patience, empathy and talent to get the yes. It’s not the best, but it’s a extremely valuable learning experience.

The human work. Most of the time, working as a team is easy. But things changes when the salary of these people depends on you. Whether you want it or not, the relationship is different and understanding the line between being their colleague and being their boss sometimes is complicated. Get it right, you will gain empathy again, a deft touch in team management and, what is more important and key to success, a team of motivated people working with you and not for you.

As I said, if the first lesson didn’t convince you to take the step, think about the Designer you will become after having had an experience like that.

Last lesson: You have to know when to say goodbye

Maybe you will never have to use this lesson but, despite renouncing to one project when it has been created by yourself it’s never easy and for me it was hard to understand it, sometimes it’s the best way to keep growing.

In my case, Design calling has always been ahead of many things, including the idea of being an entrepreneur, so want to face new challenges or feel fear of “being able” again seemed like good reasons to make the decision and to finish the adventure.

As in the first lesson, you must know how to find the right moment. If you are in a moment like this, fighting against your own ego, I will tell you that retirement doesn’t mean surrender. Retirement means leaving a place when you have nothing else to do there, so you stop wasting time or using it on more valuable things.

Hey! Before you go, please let me know what you think below. If you find this post useful, please share or 🖤 so it can reach others as well.

The six lessons I learned while running my own design consultancy was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The six lessons I learned while running my own design consultancy

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