How to serve a client?

👋🏼 Hi , this is Aayush with another publication of the Joy Of Creation newsletter, where I write nuggets of practical tips for niche designers. Subscribe to this newsletter to learn how to find your design niche and scale 10x in your career.

In this issue, we cover:

• How to serve a client?

• Job search in a recession market

• When hybrid work request backfires

How to serve a client?

Serving clients is a wild ride, right? I started my agency probably with the idea of making a lot of money. But then, it morphed into this mission to lead a value-driven business, making not just myself proud, but making my team and clients proud to be associated with it as well.

And to a lot of us, proud moments have come when we made someone else happy. 

When I started off, client servicing would be the last of my worries. I’d be busy working on my designs, perfecting my website, often outright ignoring client feedback. And this became evident after some setbacks.

It hit me one day, what am I even doing? If these people decide to take their business elsewhere, I’ll probably have to go back and look for a job. 

So I made the leap. Simultaneously, the business made the leap. How?

I started becoming wide open to minute client feedback. I flooded pages after pages scribbling the changes given during meetings. Elements misalign? I would get them fixed right away. Data wrong? Corrected. Spelling wrong? Corrected and triple checked every other spelling too.

Sometimes the human errors get so overlooked I began to be dubious of things that looked otherwise perfect. Imagine two designers, an editor, a production manager, and a director all so optically illusioned they miss that extra letter. Maybe we were exhausted. Events can be chaotic with phones ringing and a million different conversations going everywhere.

But an error is an error, and we owned it. 

Client servicing can look really unrewarding. Why would I want to fret over things that aren’t even mine? It’s their name and their dollars. But at the end, my success lies in their success so it had to be perfect no matter what.

The entire creative process requires you to be unsuccessful: failed concepts, long hours, repeated attempts, constant revisions, massaging the details, and patience carving your career. 

Appreciate the fact that design is all about failure. Every talented designer I’ve worked with has been a product of failure, and they continue to make a successful career out of failing.

Job Search in a recession market

The shrunk placement records of IITs and IIMs this year have shook the job seeking youth. Read more on this here.

Market downturns can be especially a problem for freshers not taking control over their careers. As designers, the best thing we can do while looking for a job is to stay creatively busy.

If your job search takes a bit too long, and there is a high chance it will, start making something for yourself. For your portfolio. Not just for clients. And without worrying about being paid for it. This has two merits:

• You get to create a piece of work that is not influenced by someone else’s mind.

• You stay creatively busy and do not fall into the frustration that most job seekers fall into.

Build a safety net while improving yourself as a designer. It goes a long way.

When hybrid work request backfires 🤣

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Have a great day!