What It Takes To Run Your Own Design Studio

What are the costs associated with opening a studio?

The extent of your initial outlay depends very much on where you’re based, what you want from your office space in terms of size and location. The big question here is does a design studio require a physical space, or can it exist in the virtual environment? Working solo, you could easily work from a coffee shop or home. But you’ll need to consider meeting spaces when more local clients request a face to face meeting in person rather than over the screen. If, like Khula Design Studio, you have clients all over the world, you could save a lot of money by operating from home. It also means you’re not immediately responsible for bigger overheads like rent. 

The time when you’ll need to consider moving to dedicated office space is when you start onboarding staff. In an office space, you can collaborate a lot more easily, and it’s much better for building relationships in person rather than jumping on and off video calls. And as your business grows, it’s important to have a dedicated meeting room, a collaborative workspace, areas for workshops, and space to welcome clients. Obviously, renting premises is going to add to your costs.

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How does a design studio find new clients?

So you’ve got all the right equipment and software, and you’ve got some savings in the bank. Your business plan, branding and website are good-to-go, there’s just one thing missing. Clients. It’s time to get out there and find some, right? But how? 

One of the key channels for driving new business, and this is how Khula Design Studio got started, is word of mouth. You might have someone in your family or social network who needs help with things like branding or a new website. Just through word of mouth, you can quickly ramp up your client base — so long as you’re or surpassing meeting your clients’ expectations. 

That extends to online platforms like LinkedIn, which offers great opportunities for business to business (B2B) networking. Using platforms like behance and dribbble are a great way to showcase your work, but they’re not best suited for lead generation. However, a good website will serve you well. Once it becomes established with long-form content like blogs and case studies, you’ll start to generate business through people finding you through ‘organic’ search terms. For example, try typing “branding for solopreneurs” into Google, and you’ll find Khula Design Studio pops up. 

Of course, there’s a huge range of marketing strategies you can use to get noticed, from placing paid Ads to auditing a company’s website by creating and sending a video analysing their existing site and discussing how you would improve it. It’s an audacious move, but it enables you to introduce yourself, showcase your expertise, and provide value by giving them free advice on improving their website. They might even approach you for a website revamp.     

One of the strongest tools for winning new clients is through advocacy from existing ones. If you can showcase testimonials and case studies of work that you’ve done. This helps to build authority and credibility, which in turn generates trust in your business. Think about the last time you purchased a product or service. Did you read the reviews first? Would you have gone ahead with a purchase without seeing some testimony from other people?  

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Why do small businesses need to use design studios? 

When you’re starting a design studio, it makes sense to work with businesses who are at a similar stage of their development. And for many of them, especially those who are based offline, getting a professionally designed website and brand identity may not be top of their expenditure list. After all, why would they pay for something they can build for free using any number of apps or software packages? 

In the beginning, most small businesses might start with a do-it-yourself (DIY) brand and website, and that might be good enough. However, as their business grows, they’re going to need a more professional-looking brand image as they start to compete with existing businesses. The danger of not doing this is that over time, as they try to attract business from larger, more established clients, they run the risk of actually diminishing their brand. 

Without a clean, professional-looking, high resolution brand image, small businesses can have trouble attracting new business.

So what they require is something unique, something bold, and something that helps their offering stand out in the market. Your start-up design studio can help small businesses with mood-boarding, research and professional design services which puts them on the same footing as their competitors. They also need a consistent identity across all touchpoints with customers, so their brand is cohesive across all platforms and mediums, from the website to social media channels.

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What are some challenges and opportunities of working with small businesses?

Working with smaller businesses, who aren’t necessarily familiar with digital design and websites, means it can be a hard sell to communicate the potential return on investment (ROI) of employing professional design services. Start-ups typically don’t have as much budget to spend on branding and web design.

So once your design studio is more established, it makes sense to work with equally more established organizations who have larger budgets to spend on their branding and website, and they also have more experience of digital design. However, if the client is too large, you may not have the resources to match their needs, and they may be better aligned with a full-stack agency with a complete team, rather than one or two person start—up design studio.

That’s not to say that high-quality design studios can’t come straight out of the blocks and work with bigger clients, but operationally, there may be a steep learning curve. A more viable approach might be to work with a series of start-ups to really hone your craft and streamline your workflows, going through a process of iteration to continuously improve. With improvement and refinement, you can start to attract medium-sized businesses because the way you’re working is better aligned with their expectations.

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Advice for new design studio owners

One of the most important things to remember as a studio owner is to celebrate those small wins. Finished your latest website? Celebrate. Got great feedback from a client? Celebrate. All those small wins compounded over time — that’s what’s going to keep you on your journey. 

Learn to iterate. Not everything is going to work out perfectly first time. There’s always scope for improvement and potential to make change. Launch early and launch frequently — even if you just have a landing page — you can always build incrementally on what you’re creating.

To ensure your business is able to thrive, you’ll need to look after your finances. It’s the heartbeat of your company. You need to know how to create a proposal, how to cost out a job, how to calculate profit margins, and how to manage your cash flow. Finance should be at your core. It’s the heart of your business, and your business won’t function without it.  Pipeline Management is key. You need to ensure you have sales coming in. Getting those leads and converting them is crucial to maintaining a steady flow of work through your business.

Acquiring the right talent is also key. Resumes or CVs are one thing, but there’s real value in attitude. People can learn and develop skills. But it’s often much more difficult to change their attitude. When you hire, whether subcontractors or employees, make sure their attitude fits with your business. As we say, attitude over aptitude. 

Finding coaches or mentors is also a great way to ramp up your learning and experience. Having great people around you can help you tackle challenges, setbacks and improvements. 

When you’re a solopreneur or a two-person start-up, you need to be able to bounce your ideas off other people. A coach can help you on a personal and a professional level, and a mentor can help you with advice, give you ideas and help you to think outside the box. You don’t have to act on all the advice, but it can give you inspiration for how you can approach a challenge slightly differently.  

On that note, Nate O’Hara from NOKO Solutions is our go-to coach for ideas, challenges and goals. Having him in Khula’s corner really helps our business to pivot and grow.

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Final thoughts on what it takes to run a design studio

If you’ve got grand ambitions for your design studio, that’s great, but it can be tempting to rush through and try to be everything to everyone. And definitely don’t try to do everything all at once. Your business can slowly evolve overtime. Have patience. As you start working with your ideal clients, you’ll start to adapt your positioning to better suit their needs and solve their problems.

As it is today, Khula Design Studio is a progression of everything we’ve done over the last 12 months. It’s like building a wall: lay one brick at a time. Don’t focus on building the wall, focus on adding one brick every day until the wall is built. 

Khula Design Studio is an award-winning, global strategic design studio dedicated to helping businesses transform and thrive.