When your way is the best way
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Welcome to Issue 16 of A Good Reputation, a newsletter about a good brand move that helped grow a small business. (Did someone send you? Subscribe here.) Hello Reader, I started my freelance business the way most entrepreneurs do—by winging it. Even though I knew a thing or two about content strategy, I didn’t know much about business strategy. I made sure I had clients and a steady income, but that was it. At the start, I didn’t have a long-term plan, systems to work sustainably, standard practices for delivery, or any kind of process for onboarding and offboarding clients. The problem with that? My business was inefficient, which meant I was overworked and questioning whether I made the right decision going independent in the first place. Not only that, I put my reputation at risk by leaving my client experience to chance. I know I’m not alone. Most new business owners (especially freelancers) make this same mistake. But one freelancer I recently met realized she had an opportunity to take a different approach and the tools to build her ideal business. This approach proved successful. (And she has the results to prove it.) As an independent experience design agency of one, Sarah makes over $200K in annual revenue and has worked with over 100 clients in the eight years she’s been in business. (For reference: that’s a helluva lot for a one-person agency.) What’s even more remarkable is that the vast majority of her new clients have come through word-of-mouth referrals. Her secret? Thinking like a designer. A Good Story As a kid, Sarah knew she wanted to be some sort of artist. In school, she was that student who actually liked making PowerPoint presentations and slides. But, she was also practical. Instead of studying fine arts in college, she went straight into design. She landed her first job at a startup looking for UX support to design its app and mobile ads. That job secured her love of building things for consumers, creating websites, and designing the user experience. What she didn’t love was the startup work environment. (Trust: It's not for everyone.) For the next eight years, Sarah hopped around from startup to startup in search of her Goldilocks fit. She tried all types of startups, small agency work, and even a stint at a big, corporate organization after one startup was acquired by PayPal. But no place ever felt quite right. (Since this is an audience of founders and freelancers, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that most of us can probably relate.) Challenging work environments, hustle culture, and expectations to work after hours—you know, all the “business as usual” practices—weren’t aligning with how Sarah wanted to work. It didn’t help that she was a lifelong migraine sufferer, making it even harder to keep up with the standard pace of work. After a bad bout of mono, Sarah finally entertained the idea of freelancing. What would it be like, she thought, to create a way of working that aligned better with her own user experience? Like a good designer, she decided to mock up a plan and test it. A Good Approach
Sarah landed her first freelance client through a little luck and a lot of networking. A business-owner-turned-startup-venture capitalist who Sarah met while doing the rounds at an SXSW conference had a client in need of a mobile app designer. Sarah came to mind, and she offered her the project. That project led to another, and another. Her new reputation took off from there. For the first two years, Sarah had no trouble staying busy and landing new work, as one client would refer her to another. But as she got her footing, she came back to the thing she credits with taking her business from working with a handful of clients a year to crossing over $200K in annual recurring revenue: Building her business by thinking like a designer. UX design is inherently a human-centric approach to building things. The ultimate goal is to create a more pleasant, easy-to-use, and sticky experience. By borrowing from the basic principle of this approach, Sarah started with a research and discovery period focused on understanding her ideal clients to their core. She asked questions like:
After asking the right research questions, she ideated possible solutions to meet her client's needs and sketched out a handful of scenarios. Then came prototyping and pressure-testing those solutions by experimenting. She experimented with onboarding flows, project lengths, scopes and delivery methods. After experimenting came the most important part: a retrospective learning period after each new project or new process. This review and analysis period was critical to get a clear picture of what worked, what didn’t, and what could work better—a step many business owners often miss or (like me) wait too long to do. This approach not only gave her the confidence to experiment with different ways of working, but it also allowed her to create a sustainable business with a standardized set of systems and processes that she actually enjoys. For instance, Sarah realizes that she stays more creatively engaged when she works on a project basis rather than retainer. So, she shifted her offer and delivery to create a project-based business model. By more intentionally aligning her work with her own priorities, she developed a framework that created a super positive—and therefore highly referable—experience for her clients. Sarah says she’s constantly experimenting and tweaking to improve her business and experiences with clients. This includes experimenting with different tools, scheduling, project lengths, availability, workdays, etc. It’s all, as she puts it, an evolving creative practice. Sarah enjoyed building this creative practice so much that she took to teaching other freelancers. The biggest takeaway of her course? You get to decide how to design your business. So, if it’s not working for you in the way you want to work, go back to the drawing board and start experimenting. A Good Lesson Not waiting so long to seek support and collaboration is something Sarah wishes she had done sooner. (This one keeps coming up.) Like a lot of solos, she initially embraced the independence of running her own business and valued the ability to rely on herself to make things happen. But now, she realizes that building a successful business doesn’t mean doing everything alone. She’s brought on a CPA to help with filing as an S corporation and a bookkeeper to handle reconciliation. She also collaborates with other professionals like researchers, copywriters, and strategists on various projects. Sarah says these relationships have allowed her to focus her time and energy on the areas where she can have the most impact and trusts others to handle the rest. Even if you’re not scaling traditionally with a team, you can still think about where your time is best spent and seek support in other areas of your business. A Good Takeaway Applying design thinking to your business isn’t just about creating visually appealing products or services—it’s about seeing your entire business as a creative practice. From how you structure your client experiences to how you design your days, Sarah opened up my mind to how creativity and experience design can be applied to all aspects of our work. So, how can you bring this mindset into your own business? Start with research and discovery—but turn that lens inward. Be curious about your own goals, what you’re trying to achieve, and how you can best operate. This might mean taking a deep dive into your processes or revisiting your core business model to ensure it aligns with your values. It's okay to learn what's working for others, but—unless their goals are aligned with yours—remember that their approach might not work for you. How you work, what you care about, and what success looks like is different for every single business owner. Next, map our your processes. Document your current workflows—from onboarding clients to project delivery. Look for inefficiencies, pain points, or areas that could be enhanced. Then, brainstorm potential solutions or alternatives and prototype them in small, manageable experiments. Finally, be intentional about your client experience and how it relates to your own. To that end, Sarah suggests you ask yourself these questions:
Most importantly, build in regular retrospectives. Whether it's after every project or every quarter (don't only wait until the end of the year), make time to review and revise. Use the insights you gain from experimenting to make impactful changes. Maybe you need to go back to the drawing board and try something completely different. I'm going through this process right now. I'm prototyping and testing out a completely new offer that’ll allow me to focus on the piece of content marketing I love most: using stories to build your brand. But instead of winging it like I did content strategy consulting, I’m putting in the time to build out scenarios for how this offer can fit into how I work best and deliver the most value to my clients. Ultimately, Sarah’s story reminded me that building a business is more than just delivering client work—it’s intentionally making the business work for you. By seeing your business through the lens of design—and continually experimenting and iterating—you can create a business that not only works but thrives. So, I'll say it one more time in the hopes that it'll stick: You don’t have to play someone else’s game—you get to design your own. A Few Good Resources
Hope you have a good one, |