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Talking around the issue and discussing what most design studios do, it became clear that there are two basic directions a studio can take. You can either go the normal route and follow your project expertise, or you can follow your client expertise. Most studios follow their project expertise.

For example, you do a corporate profile brochure, an annual report or two, maybe a couple or corporate identities. Next thing, your knocking on people's doors saying, "hey! look at this profile - let us do yours." Horniak & Canny is a great example of a successful studio that has built up an entire business around one type of project. Lewis Kahn is another, being predominantly focussed on mainstream consumer goods packaging. Even the very largest studios, Cato Design and Landor Associates to name but two, owe a lot of their growth to this approach, so clearly it works.

What's the other approach? Funnily enough, I just had lunch with someone today (Sunday) where we were talking about this. Quite simply, instead of leveraging your "technical" expertise, you leverage your understanding of the client. In its most basic form, if you find yourself in a highly successful relationship with a merchant bank, you go out and find more merchant banks. The specific kind of project is not your selling point, the fact that you really understand what they do for a living, who they make their living off, and precisely how they do that, is your main selling point.

There is a problem with "the basic form" however, and that is that you could find yourself stuck with an exclusivity problem. For example, my lunchmate today has built up an enormous amount of expertise with a stockbroking client - problem is that no other major stockbrokers are likley to want to work with that studio for confidentiality reasons. So what to do?

Try getting below the surface. Sure, the understanding may have been built up around a stockbroker, but what does that understanding consist of really? Isn't understanding a company that makes its living from profound analysis, deep and constant relationships with very large institutional clients, trading like hell, and in a particular corporate culture? So if you know how to work with these types of issues and create great communication from them, why not try to find other types of companies that have comparable issues? For example, the investments division of a large insurance company, or perhaps a consultancy of some sort.

For this particular relationship, the studio and client have reached a point in the relationship where the client doesn't have to spend hours explaining every little background detail to the problem. In a business where time really is lot of money, being able to save briefing and project management time is worth quite a bit.

I must admit, behind all of this thinking is the assumption that a studio has at least decided to develop a rational approach to building or refining its client base. Realistically, less than half the studios I have come across do this. Most studios are strictly ad hoc, "Oh, you want this done? Sure, we can do that." If you happen to be among the ten best designers in the country, you can probably get away with that, but most designers are NOT in the top ten, right?

Don't sell your experience short. Spend some time thinking about what you have really learnt from each project and client, work out what is "transferrable," and then get out there and beat up the competition (someone should!)

Cheers!

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andrew@lam-po-tangcom