As art directors and designers we are constantly giving feedback on the design, the overall idea, and just how successful new business ventures might be. However, when is the last time you critiqued your business and its structure? Lets face it, every day you encounter several frustrating processes or to-do list items that you dread completing. Streamlining these necessary evils can help take your business to the next level. Now is the time to pay attention to those details and how you can innovate. Below are a couple ideas to get started.
Paper Audit - How much paper passes through your office each day? Have you taken a look at how much you throw away versus how much you recycle? What creates the most paper in your company? Maybe it’s time to convert those fax invoices to a .pdf email solution.
Software Audit - Take time once a month to check out newly released software. Is there a new online meeting system you can be using? Or a great FTP software that works much better and saves passwords? Even though it’s hard to keep up with software innovation, make time to assess your process and how software can help. Don’t forget your design/creative software either!
MOJO Meetings™ - As often as possible, get your team together and meet about how to innovate your processes. One of the easiest ways to innovate is encouraging ideas. A group talk about new ways to do those annoying tasks and ways to be more efficient will lead to a leaner and meaner business.
Failure - The best way to learn is by failing, right? If you are consistently trying new ideas, some are bound to fail. Learning and innovating from these failures propels your business into greater efficiency over time.
If you spend time auditing, assessing, challenging, and asking questions about your business, ideas will emerge. Whether business is booming or is rather slow, this always seems to take the back seat. You have to schedule time to meet about innovating and generating ideas for your and your clients. Empowering yourself and your team to generate ideas is crucial. And remember, it is okay to fail.
Reading is an essential part of staying sober as a designer. However, it is extremely important to read books that are outside of the design genre. We often gravitate toward our favorite magazine or fiction book to escape, but it is equally important to read about business. Hitting up the business section for books on leadership, management, and the marketing section to learn about consumer insights and selling tips can really help you manage your team, sell in the boardroom and your thought process right at your own desk.
Don’t forget to read to remember: take notes, use a highlighter, and most importantly take your time. After each chapter think about how the information in the book can help your business and how can things be tweaked for the better.
That’s what we did, and this is how it helped:
The 4 Hour Work Week - This book by @tferriss has been a bestseller for nearly two years now. Sure, it may seem like another get rich quick scheme, but it isn’t. It challenged us with new ideas around process, email, and design management, leading us to implement Highrise by @37signals. Highrise streamlined our selling process and keeps us all on the same page whether we’re in or out of the office. This new addition has saved us hours of management time which helps us be far more productive.
GroundSwell - Having been out for just over a year now, this book has become a daily reference for how we talk about social technologies and new ways to market them. Since reading this book, we have gained an understanding and subsequently landed new business in creating social communities & blogs around our clients’ products. Now we have an additional product offering and understanding that all started with simply reading one book.
As you can see, just these two books alone helped us grow our business and we are consistently looking for new titles to learn and grow more. Explore these sections of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble and give it a shot!
June 2009 will mark the one-year anniversary I first gave “The Designer Sobriety” talk. Above is the opening video for the talk which highlights some of the spirit of this initiative. As a business owner and/or decision maker, a lot of things fly at you during the day. What do you do to manage it? How do you still try to enjoy it and just flat-out have a life outside of this crazy business that we’re in? The idea for this blog was born from wanting to share the various tips and advice we’ve learned, observed, or read about. Our posts are intended to be useful and inspirational. We’ll also share design-minded products we discover that you can implement and utilize to keep you going.
We hope you read, enjoy, share and comment. This community is only as good as its content and participation - so please be a part of it.
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