Business: Consulting

Ever since I was little, I’ve avoided uncomfortable moments in movies. I would always fast forward through the parts where the characters I liked put themselves in uncomfortable or embarrassing positions. I still do that today. In general, most people avoid uncomfortable situations in real life, but we all have our strategies for dealing with them.

Just this morning, I had an uncomfortable encounter with a shoeshine guy at the airport. After exchanging the usual pleasantries, he proceeded to talk to me about his religious beliefs in excruciating detail. At this juncture, I had several options. I could have asked him to stop. However, that would have immediately changed the interaction between the two of us from a friendly service encounter to one of frosty silence. I could have faked interest and engaged with him on this topic—something I’d have a hard time doing in my personal life. I could have chosen to let this annoy me. However, getting my shoes shined is one of my personal pleasures, and the context was all wrong for going down this path. Read More

All good designers share one thing in common: a strong balance between hard and soft skills. Hard skills constitute your knowledge of design fundamentals, while soft skills are the traits that don’t consciously impact your design process, but nevertheless play an important role. One of the most important processes in which soft skills come into play is in maintaining a healthy relationship with your client. Your ability to do this, or the lack thereof, can have a massive bearing on both your design process and the final product.

In many cases, relationships between designers and their clients are overly formal—and not without good reason. Of course, professionalism should be the cornerstone of your interactions with your clients. However, maintaining a lighter, friendlier relationship can be the best course of action at times, bringing many benefits during and after the delivery of your designs. In this article, I’ll describe a few of the benefits I’ve experienced through maintaining a friendly relationship with my clients, which would not have been possible with greater formality. Read More

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced my idea for a scoping and estimating tool that emphasizes transparency, puts the customer in control, and focuses on the work outcomes for piecework rather than hourly rates. Now, in Part 2, I’ll present a tutorial for creating this tool, while providing some theory on crafting a service business.

To build an estimation tool that meets your own needs, follow these steps:

1. Identify the services you’ll provide.
2. Perform a time-and-motion study for delivering each of these services.
3. Quantize and assign a price to each of your deliverables. (I use the term quantize to refer to the process of converting the value of a deliverable from an hourly rate to a discrete unit of work.)
4. Build a spreadsheet that includes each quantized element.
5. Refine the spreadsheet as necessary. Read More