Small Design Business Survival Kits

It’s not easy to outshine bigger design competitors on a much tighter budget.

Despite demanding challenges and unexpected setbacks along the way, there are practical ways to increase your chances of success. 

1. Dream Big, Move Smart

Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither is your business. Begin with a clear overall vision and goals, before breaking them down into attainable steps. Maintain a razor-sharp focus, while treating each day as a building block of success and a new opportunity for progress. 

2. Perfect Your Professional Craft

An accomplished entrepreneur's craft isn’t just what they’re specialised in but also how their speciality makes the clients’ lives better. Offering exceptional solutions with life-changing results enables you to stand out, harness word of mouth, and keep customers loyal with limited resources.

3. Embrace the Right Business Tools

Avoid spreading yourself too thin and invest in IT operations management tools that excel in major aspects of your business. Apart from minimising burnout from repetitive tasks, these tools also increase productivity, prevent important details from falling through the cracks, and give you more time for revenue-generating activities.

4. Market with Personalisation

Over 70% of modern customers expect a tailored creative experience. Thus, adopting personalised marketing and user journeys is essential. The custom strategies allow your agency to cultivate meaningful relationships with high-value clients, secure their retention, and make the best use of existing customer data to identify new opportunities or scale up.

5. Control Overhead Costs 

Constantly do a deep dive on unreasonable overhead costs that have no direct benefit to profit generation. Try considering hybrid working, outsourcing specific duties, eliminating redundancies, or removing some underutilised creative software. These alternatives will help keep your design agency afloat and debt free.