🔴 Shift In Design Thinking and Problem Solving For Creatives

Key Takeaways

up. Welcome to this edition of the future live. Today we're going to not do one episode, we're going to do two episodes and we're going to break it in half. So, if those of you guys that are tuning in either on Zoom or on the internet, watching this on Facebook or YouTube, some of you guys are in here for the Spartan logo design challenge. H, too long #craziness. Uh, we're going to do that in the second bit. All right? And I'll give you a little preview of it, but um we're going to get into that deep, but the first segment is all going to be about business. And I want to tell you guys a little story and then we're going to turn it over to the people who are tuning in live on Zoom and they're going to ask us a few questions. Okay. The first story I want to tell you is it's really centered around a real experience that I've had recently and I think it's going to touch upon a lot of pain points that some of you guys are going through in terms of when you send out a project and you write a proposal and the client ghosts on you. They disappear. They they phantom out. You don't hear from them and it causes your mind to do crazy things. is you start to ask yourself questions about uh did I come in too strong? Was my price too high? Was I legitimate enough? What else was going on? So, you start to question all these things, right? And there's a reason why that's hap that happens. And I'm going to talk about that and I'm going to share an experience. So, here we go. You guys ready for this segment? Uh let's test some sound effects. Yes. Do you guys can hear the sound effects? Excellent. Okay. And Okay. So recently, my wife and I have been talking about remodeling our house. Hey, if you guys on the on Aaron and Mark, can you guys just mute yourself so I don't hear every cough and everything you guys do over there? It's distracting. Just mute it. Mute your mic. All right. Thanks. All right. So, we're we want to remodel our house and we just really want to remodel our bedroom, our bathroom, and the kids bathroom. And we bought a home. It was a spec home, so it wasn't really designed to what we what our needs were and how we live in the house. So, that's a pretty standard thing. So, my wife found an architect and she came over with her general contractor and they walked through the house. They spent hours there asking us questions about what we're going to use it for, what our tastes were like, etc. So, they spent, I think, the appropriate amount of time learning about us and kind of looking at how we use our own home. And they took a lot of measurements. I gave them floor plans and then they left. A week later, they came back with an email saying, "So, based on what you talked about, the budget's going to be $200,000." And my wife told me that. I'm like, "What? $200,000? We don't have that kind of money. That's just way bigger than what we were planning on. That's just too much. What What What are we doing for this?" And she said, "There's a lot of budget in here for for cabinetry." And that's where a lot of the budget comes in. There's a lot of surfaces to cover because we're going to put in some nice stone work, marble or whatever else that we're going to do is tile. It's expensive. And then I asked my wife, "Did you respond to the client yet? Did you or not the client, the architect, did you tell her what's going on?" She goes, "No, I don't know how to respond. I just I'm like shocked. I have sticker shock." All right. So, I want you guys to think about perhaps a situation where you were the architect, you were the designer, and you had a client. Maybe you were afraid to bring up the issue of money. And we've talked about this many times before that there's certain parameters that you have to bring up at the very beginning. Otherwise, you're going to waste all your time. Now, imagine how much work the architect had done with her general contractor. They had to go back. They had to measure all the spaces. They had to look at materials. They had to probably kind of guesstimate uh what the cabinetry work was going to cost and entail. And they did, I assume, a lot of work. And they're earnest and they're good people. and we like them and we want to work with them. They're talented. But the problem is they came in not knowing what the budget was going to be and they left our meeting without a clear picture as to what the budget's going to be. So by the time they submitted the budget, they've already invested 5, seven, 10 hours of work. And that's totally unnecessary. Completely unnecessary. And I'm I'm telling you guys this story mostly from an experience of what I've gone through personally in terms of when I learned to talk about money. It's changed the dynamic, but also now I'm the client and I'm sharing with you guys what's going on. So I'm going to turn it over to the Zoom audience or anybody that's tuning in on Facebook or YouTube live. I think Mark and Aaron are going to be monitoring that. Have you guys felt this kind of pain before? Have you committed these crimes to go ahead and to do all this work unnecessarily only to discover that the client has maybe a tenth of the budget? Maybe you came in thinking they had $3,000 and they had $300. Was it a situation where they only wanted a logo and you had gone through the process of proposing a website and a logo and then also a whole identity system and all they wanted was this very small thing. Was there a time that that has happened to you? Let's talk about that. Now, my phone's buzzing off here, and normally I don't pay attention to the phone, but Mark's talking to me, so I have to pay attention to Mark. That's how it's going. Okay. So, I want to talk to you guys about that. You are you not hearing my audio on the on Zoom, you guys? Can you hear me? Okay. You Okay, thumbs up. Oh, excellent. All right. Yeah, cuz somebody's like, I can't hear audio. All right. Check your audio settings, you guys. We are okay. So, my Zoom people, since I can talk to you, I want to have a conversation about this. So, anybody want to share an experience? Just really quickly, tell me your name and tell me your experience that was similar to this. Anybody? Cindy. Hi, Cindy. No. Okay. All right. Michael, do you want to say something? Who wants to talk on Zoom? Yeah, I sent you I'll I'll say something. I have I sent you I sent you three case studies and um one the guy said you know and it was that um this could cost anywhere between $300 and $10,000. 300 would be great, 10,000 would be too much. So I just decided I would go in like between $600 and $2500. Okay. Um but it turned out that he was really just like just fishing for information. Okay. So, when somebody says to you they have between 300 and 10,000, that's a big big difference. Okay. Uh, I'm gonna ask one more time. Please, guys, guys that are on before I go angry on you, please mute your mic right now. All right, Michael. What we're going to do, I'm going to mute everybody and then I'm going to unmute and then unmute yourself, okay? Because people are not paying attention. I'm gonna mute all. Okay. All right. There we go. Michael, go ahead and unmute yourself. Now it's just you and me. Done. Yeah. Okay. Beautiful. Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Okay. So, Michael, when somebody says to you, "I have between $300 to $10,000." What do you hear them saying? Like, how do you read that? Before I ask you how why you responded that way. Well, now I think I know what you're going to say is that's too big of a range. I mean, that he's just starting the conversation. So really it should be you mean more like $500 to $2,000. Sure. Something like that. Sure. Sure. Now when that's what I'm thinking. All right. Everybody that's paying attention or following along with the story, uh when you hear that, you have a reaction inside your mind, your heart, and often times we just don't say it right. So my the way I would respond to that, Michael, is I would say, "Wow, that is a really big range." I mean, if you said 3 to $10,000, that's a big range, too. That's a a 3x multiplier, right? Now, this is a 30x multiplier. So, let's just be really honest and real about this thing. If I came back to you and said, "The project's going to be $8,000." How does that feel for you? What What would he have said? What do you think? That's a good thing. I should have asked that. All right. So, that's one thing. So, you know, you guys I think he would have said that's too high. He said, "Okay, you know what I can do is I can role play with you, Michael, and you can just be him. Okay? You know these types of clients better than I do." Okay? So, the first rule is to say what you think. Okay? Everybody, I want you to write that down. Say what you think. I'm I'm going to write it down here, too. Say what you think. And that's a rule from Blair Ens. You must say what you think. So, a lot of us are afraid to say what we think. We're afraid that the clients are going to get spooked, that they're going to think we're arrogant or we don't know what we're talking about. or some punk or whatever it is you whatever the fear is I want you to put that aside now when I say I want to say what I think I want to start with the emotion part I want to articulate articulate to the client what I'm feeling in here and what how I would say that is wow that's a really big range that's really my honest true reaction first right before I tell them a price or anything that's a really big range can we narrow the range down a little bit are you more on the below 5,000 or above 5,000 So that's a game of 21 questions, right? Is it below 5,000? And he's like, yes. Can it be above? And he's like, probably not. So let's just reduce the amount of exploration in terms of budget. And then I also want to just check his temperature. I want to ask him, does this feel right to you? Are you comfortable spending this amount of money? Because I don't want to go away and put together a proposal for you only to discover this is too much money for you. I'm going to waste your time and I'm going to waste my time. You guys with the sound effects, go easy on it. Let me finish my thought first. Little aggressive on the sound effects, boys. All right. Okay. You guys can't hear it on Zoom, but the internets can hear it. They're playing sound effects in my ear. Okay. So, that's what we're going to do. Okay. So, now I'm going to say to you, and you're the client, uh, does $7,000 feel about how much you want to spend for this endeavor? What would you say back to me? I I think 7,000's uh high for this. I was thinking probably um 700 to uh Yeah, just say 700. Wow. So, what I'm just curious why you said between 300 to 10,000 before. Yeah. I guess um I was just worried that the the some people were going to come in really high and um so I just brought that high range in there. But if it's just kind of identify with that. Okay. I just want to say something. Whether or not you hire me or not, I I know you have a lot of options to consider. I would just give you one piece of advice. Just tell people what you have to spend because there's no point. I I I think uh maybe from a client's point of view, you don't want to scare off any designers thinking that the budget's too low, but really you have a very specific problem to solve with a budget, and there's lots of people who can do it for that budget. Now, unfortunately for me, $700 is way too low for what you asked for. I'm typically in the range of $2 to $4,000. If that's where you can be comfortable spending the money, then I'm the right guy for you. Otherwise, I'm not the right person for you. What do you think, Mr. Client? Well, I thank you for being honest. Um, I would actually now I'm curious to know, okay, what can you do in that range because there's maybe things I'm missing. Okay. Okay. And then I can talk about it, right? I can say like the reason why I'm different is because of X, Y, and Z, and this is what I've been able to do for my clients. And if you like the work that I've done, this is the amount of money that they pay. Okay. What about this allocart thing? Because I sent you three proposals and um I was trying to get around that um where I um gave him three packages. the information architecture, the branding, and then the SEO. And then I broke that down into its component pieces because, and again, it's the same problem I did. I didn't ask the guy what his budget was, right? Okay. So, information architecture, what else? SEO, marketing. Yeah. Okay. Site maintenance. All right. So again, I'm going to quote from Blair Ens. You guys can see behind me, I think. Where is it? Oh, you can't see me. Somewhere over there. Oh, it's barely in the frame. You guys can see that right there. The win without pitching manifesto. Something that Blair says, you know, we're not in the proposal building business. We're in the design, the creative business. So, if you guys go away and you're not sure about what the budget is, you're just building proposals because you like to build proposals for some reason, things that people pay you no money to do. You spend a lot of time thinking about the project. You break it into milestones and then you create smaller milestones. You do the whole schedule, the budget, all the parts and pieces only to discover you're in a different ballpark. So that's another term I can I want to share with you guys. It's like what ballpark will we playing? How big is the sandbox? These are terms that you can use. These are uh analogies that people can understand, right? Like I don't want to be in the wrong ballpark. These are really important concepts to talk about. Okay. So, I'm gonna spend the next few minutes here. And those of you guys that are on Zoom, Michael, is there another question that you wanted to follow up on before I I do my little talk here? Oh, yeah. Go ahead. Yesterday, we had a um a back and forth about the company revenue and how to figure out what their company revenue is. And it was a math question. And to me, I thought, can you think of three top math formulas or strategies we should have in our head so that we can make sure our prices are right appropriate to this client? And I wrote the examples below it. One was the company revenue in dollars you would talked about in that video I looked at yesterday. Yeah. Then maybe two or more were company gold per month in dollars, company gold per product units, like quantity, right? think of anything or talk about that. Okay. So, the question that you're asking me really is about how to assess what the company is worth so that you can charge the client appropriately for the work that you're doing. Basically, that's what you're asking, right? Oh, you were really good with the math and I was just thinking there's there must be some repertoire of math that we can carry around that's portable. Now, despite me being Asian, I'm not that good at math. Even though I've taken advanced calculus before, I've forgotten every single thing about this theoretical math stuff, right? So, I just want to keep it really basic and simple. Those of you guys, do me a favor and just mute yourself for right now while I'm doing this part because I'm hearing some background noise. Beautiful. Okay, that's much better for me. All right. So, those of you guys that don't really understand business, that want a quick formula, I I'm going to tell you, you're going to try the formula and you're going to fail because you don't understand the meaning behind it. So, I'm going to try to give you a different way of understanding the math parts. Okay? And what Michael is asking me about is how do you figure out what your work is going to be worth? And so, this is how I'm going to ask you guys to talk to the client. I want you to think about it in these terms. What is it that we're trying to do, okay? And so, typically, let's just say the client wants you to design a website because the websites are easy to talk about for me because websites besides u looking good, it has a it has a real function, right? it has real value to the company. So for a website, let me get this up here in the frame. You guys can see that. Okay, for website, what are they trying to do? What what kind of marketing or business objectives are they trying to accomplish? Okay, are they trying to convert more? Are they trying to get somebody to download a PDF? Are they trying to sell more widgets? whatever it is, or get people to sign up for a campaign, whatever it is they want to do, and it has some kind of dollar value to them. You need to understand that design in the 21st century should serve a business or marketing purpose. It's not about just looking good because it's hard to quantify or to a client how much a good-looking design costs or is worth. What's the value of a good-looking design? and we can sit around the room and debate. Even amongst designers, we're going to debate this kind of stuff, right? And so I tend to steer away from anything that's super subjective. I want to move from subjective to objective. Okay. So now we need to do a new website. So the question I'm going to ask is why? What are we trying to do? Okay. So, Michael, if you were playing along with me, you might say, "Well, what would the client say?" You can be the client. I want you to be the client role. So, we're going to role play, Michael. So, why? Okay. Um, can you repeat that question again? Why are we building a new website? And I'm the client. You're the client. Is that what you're saying? Yes, that's what I'm saying. All right. Um, well, we want to increase revenue. Okay. How um I guess we want to create these. I've heard of these things. I don't know what they are, but like clickth through funnels or something like that. Okay. Yeah, that's all I know. Okay. So, I'm looking to you to give me some strategies on that. All right. Excellent. And I'm not going to go too deep on this. I just want to say this. Uh see so this is why we need to understand some more business terminology and business dynamics before we can talk about all the math stuff because we need to understand that. So when you start to talk to more clients in the web space or not in the web space I'm sorry that need digital work done they'll tell you why there's a very specific reason why they want it done. Maybe they're going to say, "We don't feel like the website reflects the value of our brand today, and we're about to go public, or we we have shareholders that look at the site, and it really matters to us that we look like a million or or billion dollar brand." Okay, so I hear that. So, what you're hearing then is it's not living up to the brand, right? They have a bigger idea, bigger vision for what their company is, and for whatever reason, it's falling short. We get that. So that's one thing that you can solve. Okay. Maybe what they want to do is to have more people sign up for a demo. Okay. So sign up for a demo. That's what you're talking about right now. Okay. I'm going to mute you again. Okay. Because you have a lot of background noise there and it's super distracting for me. There we go. Okay. Hopefully it's just you, not somebody else. Okay. Excellent. They want to sign up for a demo. Oops. I'm sorry. Sign up for a demo. Okay. And the demo is basically something that they can download or maybe they need to call uh call a rep or something like that. Okay. So when you make a sale, Mr. Client, and when they sign up for that demo, how much is that worth to you on customer lifetime value? And what would you say then? How much is it worth me for customer lifetime value? Yeah. What's the lifetime value of the one sale or onboarding? I would say just a couple just a couple thousand dollar, you know, is is what I'm seeing. Okay. So, would you say that's maybe like $2,500 the lifetime value of a customer? Yes. Okay. All businesses in the space know. Okay. They know. They have to know otherwise they're not a real business. They know what a life the lifetime value of a customer is. Okay. You guys need to understand that people that have online businesses know lifetime value. So, $2,500. Okay. So, what is the uh percentage of people who are going to sign up for this currently? And so, now I'm going to ask the percentage question, right? What's the percentage of people who go to your site? You can talk about in terms of bounce rate or click-through rate. And then you would tell me what per month I'm seeing like one or two people. I don't know what the percentage rate is that you know in other content. Okay. Let's say it's like 3%. You know anywhere between 1 to 3% seems about right. Okay. Let's say 1 to 3%. Okay. And that equals let's just say for simple math sake uh I'm going to do this a little different. Let's say that's 10 customers. So 10 customers are going to click through and then three of them are going to sign up and and buy. So then they become a customer. Okay. So we have a 10 customers click through. Three will sign up. Okay. So three times $2,500 equals uh is that 7500? I believe it is 7500. Okay. That's per month. That's what the value is to them. So if we do our job and I think after looking at the information architecture some inconsistencies in your branding we can solve that and let's say we increase it or like by 2% or whatever the number is. So this is the difference between what you're converting on now and what you convert on after we we do all this work with you. Okay. So the lifetime value of what we do is worth what? And this is where you have to sit down and do some of the math. Okay. So currently they convert on three customers per month at $7,500. Now that's a very low number. People are converting much higher percentage-wise or numbers. So maybe there's a a campaign you need to run to drive traffic here, right? So this is going to be some kind of marketing campaign. So I'm right here campaign. Maybe they need to spend some money on the funnel to see how much the cost of acquisition, cost per acquisition, right? Or cost per action. how much are they going to spend to acquire more customers and they need to do a little bit of that. So there might be a um an AdWord campaign. Okay, they can run a Facebook campaign and then you're going to help to design that. Okay, so we're going to fix the site the experience. It's going to be worth something to them and then we're going to run a campaign to drive more traffic through. That is in it in a nutshell. Okay, that's one way to talk about that. I know you have a question, but let me let me finish this one thought and then I'm gonna go to you. Okay, let's talk about brand. Like, wow, you know, the brand, the the website, the design just doesn't really reflect well on us. And we have shareholders. So, it's like, okay, if you have shareholders that are looking at this or or potential investors, how much money are you trying to raise and they might say, we need to raise, you know, series B $10 million. Let's say that. Okay. I like big numbers. They're easier for me to do the math. Big round numbers. $10 million. So, how much money do you want to spend so that you'll raise $10 million? Well, I think maybe 20K sounds about right. Okay, let's spend 20K. Okay. Or 40K or whatever. So, in my experience, when somebody has that kind of investor mentality and they're trying to to make them the company seem more valuable, design is a great solution for that. designers are the best kinds of people to make something look a lot more expensive than it is to look a lot more valuable than it is. It's in the packaging of the site. And this is where I think if I'm listening carefully, I hear that maybe they have a presentation they have to do like an investor deck and I hear that the website needs to be retoled and possibly to redesign the logo. So now now there's three deliverables if I'm paying attention to what they're saying. So the scope for me has just grown. So maybe I'm going to ballpark now. I'm gonna do 10K for the keynote the the pitch deck. I would do the site for say 35K. Let's just say that. And they need a logo. And I'm gonna charge them 8K to do the logo. So that total is 13 53K. It's all getting really messy on this p piece of paper. Now, can you guys see that on the internet? $53,000 right there. And that's how I talk about design. I want to talk design about design within the context of context of business and marketing. That's critical. Okay, let's finish up. What's your last question? And I'm going to go I'm going to talk a little bit about this architect experience again. Go ahead, Michael. My question is just really more just a comment. Go ahead. And it sounds like because I bought the core, so you're talking about getting these sheets, awareness goals, revenue goals, and efficiency goals in in front of them and just filling that out so we know what their goals are, what category it is, awareness, revenue or efficiency, and then prioritizing it. Correct. Then to to se to solve that, I felt I needed a list in front of me of options to solve that. And um so I bought the um boot camp sales and marketing thing. And then look I looked at your whole thing, you know, social contest, online brokers, cold calling, organic, you know, all that stuff kind of have a list of options in front of you and I got to know what they talk about them short and sweet. Right. Right. Right. So when you are when you're working as a facilitator, Michael, and and thank you very much for purchasing those two products. Um when you're working as a facilitator, I want you to elicit the responses from the client. I don't want you to be the person filling in the blanks for them. So if we have this goal of increasing traffic to the site, that's a goal, right? Increase traffic. We want to convert at a higher percentage. That's another goal. I want you to just write all these things down. And what will we need to be able to do that? Well, we need a new website. That's a deliverable. We need a new logo. we need to do some information architecture, we need to do some UX design. And you just go down and list everything. And then what you do is then you rank it based on desiraability and and if it's, you know, if you can do it or not, feasibility. Okay, we desire it a lot, but is it feasible? Well, these are long-term projects and it's expensive to do. So even though we desired a lot, we just don't have the funds right now. So you prioritize and that's important. You know, I asked this question to my Facebook community on um on the on the issue of should we develop an app to help make it easier for people to consume our content. And everybody's like, "Yeah, do everything. Or should we do uh should we make a new course on topography or should we design the topography manual or to launch our magazine newsletter that we've been talking about for some time?" And it's odd to me that the internet just keeps saying, "Do it all. Do it all." And that's a problem. And that's like what a client would say. let's do it all. But reality is there are three full-time staff here, one part-timer and a team off-site and a couple of volunteers, right? And there's just one of me. So, that's a problem. So, what we're going to help the client do is to prioritize what's the most um like the best return on investment of time and money. If we do a little bit of effort and we spend a little bit of money and we get a huge result, we should definitely prioritize those ahead of the other things that are not going to matter as much. Right? So that's what you're going to do, Michael. Okay? You're going to prioritize. Now, I want to ask you this question. Are you in the core tribe, by the way? No, not yet. Okay. So, everybody uh that has purchased Core, Jose's created a separate group. It's totally free. It's just for people who own Core who want to learn from each other. You're definitely going to need to be add added to that group. So, if you guys just hit me up on Facebook and send me a message saying, "I purchased core. Please add me to the core tribe, I will add you over there. I think there are hundred some uh people in there, okay? And you're going to find people like if you get stuck on an exercise or maybe somebody's modified a worksheet, I think you're going to gain a lot of value there." Okay? So, Michael, I appreciate your time. Huge. Thank you. All right. Thank you for supporting us. I do appreciate you. Okay. So, I'm going to go back and I'm going to talk a little bit, guys, and then we're going to turn over to the next person. All right. People want to talk about topography, huh? Make a poll. All right, let's go on a new sheet. So, that's the first sheet. Let's go to the new sheet. Okay, here's what I want to talk to you guys about. And I hope this is a big mindset shift for you. Okay. Uh, all right. People are sending me messages now. I can't deal with that. All right. This is what I call um it's not me, but we refer to this as the double funnel system. It looks something like this. Okay. I'm sorry. Let me do this. at the at the beginning of every project. This is where you start. Okay? And if we draw a line through here, goes look something like this. This is where you finish and you're done. And you invoice the client and you submit the work to win all sorts of awards and you're really happy about yourself. Okay? And something else happens here and we go down to here. Okay? Now, this is typically how a project starts here and it finishes here. What happens in between? Believe it or not, we can control a little bit better. Now, we imagine in our mind it's a straight line that we show the client one or two solutions. They make one or two little comments on it and then we finalize and it's done. And you guys know the project goes bananas. It goes all over the place. Okay? And this is where frustration sets in that when the budget isn't high enough and the more variations that you have to do, the more revisions that you have to make, the more frustrating you get, more more frustrated you get. Okay, I have a friend who's working on the 16th revision for a client when the scope was three. His only saving grace now is he's getting paid over just for each phase of exploration now. And so now they're happy. It's like we can work on this till 2020 if you want as long as you continue to pay as long as the deadline doesn't become a problem. Okay. So, let's map this back to the architect. Okay. Now, the architect asked a bunch of questions. So, they they ask questions here, here, here, here. But the only question that they didn't ask was money. And that's a problem. So, if they go out and start here, let's assuming that we had the the budget to afford them. Okay. So this is an issue of time and money. This is being burned right now. So they're going to explore lots of things. So this is typically how it happens, right? They're going to explore all in here. And then they come to us and say, "Hey, what do you guys think? Here's the first check-in point." And it turns out they're totally off. And so then they have to do another scope or of exploration. and they're just going to keep searching and they're going to keep doing this over and over until they get to the finished product. And this is typically how we all work. Now, I wanted to talk about a different way of working. Okay. Now, whether you're the client or the vendor, it helps to do it like this. So, here we're going to start over. This is the beginning. And you guys that are tuning in, Mark, are you uh monitoring questions? Are we getting any questions yet? People are confused about this stream. They think we're going to announce the winner of the Spartan race logo. Okay. because they tuned in late, right? Okay, let me let me address that first. You guys that are tuning in, we're going to break this segment into two parts. I mentioned this at the top of the show, you guys. In the second segment, we're going to talk about the winner, the Spartan logo challenge. So, you guys, if you're not interested in talking about the business of design, and you only want to talk about the Spartan thing, come back. We're going to take a break, and then we're going to go back live again. So, we're going to spend another uh 15- 20 minutes talking about the business stuff and then we will close out the show and then we'll start the show again and talk about the Spartan race. Is there anything else, Mark? That's it for now. Okay. All right. Here's what I want you guys to do. So, instead of doing all this wild exploration where you're bouncing from here to here, what I want you to do is to try to narrow things down. And this is how we're going to work now. So, the client has an idea in their mind. So, I'm going to do this. So the client, they have this idea. I'm going to draw a little light bulb here. Okay? And the clients do not have the words necessary to describe precisely to you what they want. So it's a feeling. It's like I I like these kinds of things, but I don't spend all my life thinking about these things. Luckily, you do. So we're going to ask them are some questions. And what we want to translate this idea into words. Okay, these are words here. I'm g just write W. So, we're taking this abstract thing and we're going to channel it into words. And the words sometimes they're conflicting. They don't work with each other. Okay? And we need to resolve that down to fewer words. So, we're going to prioritize down to three. Okay? So, we're narrowing the funnel in. So, now these words sound like we can work with them. They're visual. They're clear. They're not too abstract, but they're still words. Okay. So, the next thing that we need to do is we need to translate these words into images. So, this is going to be my um attempt at drawing some kind of picture. Okay. Now, these are images. Okay. So, we're going to check back with the client. We're going to look at those words and we're going to check back with images. And this is a first check-in point. Hey, you said this. We prioritized these words and now these words look like this. Are we okay to proceed? They're like, you know what? Yes. We like these two things. So, here's a checkpoint. And now it's going to get reduced down to one where we combine this drawing and this drawing. Okay, now we know where to start. And now we can begin the process of designing. So this is where we understand visually what the client is expecting. So now there's no more surprise. So in this space now we can get to this final point pretty quickly. And this is what I'm talking about in terms of exploring work in a very different way than the way you were taught in school. In school, you were taught to explore lots of things and you do lots of drawings, ideiation, sketches, but you're not actually working with any kind of client and you're not working towards a clear objective. And it's very important for us to be able to go back and forth with the client and work this stuff out. Now, in the situation with my client, okay, in the situation with I'm sorry, with my architect and my wife, my wife should have, I think, helped out the the architect. What she should have done was put together what we refer to as a stylescape. Now, I'm just drawing some kind of rough grid here. It doesn't need to look like this at all, but these are images. Okay? Maybe this is some textures or pallet uh like a color palette or something. So, this is what we call stylescapes. She should have organized them by theme. Okay? She could have said, "These are the bathroom things that I like. And she should be very specific. So, let's just say this is an image and um let's say I'm doing this wrong. Like say this is a countertop and there's a faucet here and there's a back wall. Let's say she just likes the faucet. First thing she should do is crop it in and then put an arrow to it and say I just like the faucet or I like the way um let me see if I can draw this. Hopefully I can do this guys. She's like, I saw this herring bone pattern and I like that and I like the contrasty nature of this tile work, let's say. Okay. And she would would build as many of these things as needed. So, I'm going to draw, sorry guys, it's early in the morning for me, relatively speaking, multiple styles scapes. And she would just organize them. So she's doing the process of curation. Okay. By curating what she likes and doesn't like, she's then able to then empower the architect and saying, "Wow, I really like all these things, but I know things beyond this that you really love." And so she can expand it out. So if we look at the funnel system, if my wife does the work of doing the stylescapes, she'll have reduced the number of options down to here. And this is where the architect starts instead of over here. And then the architect can expand out the funnel again and drive it home. This is where my wife is going to be really happy because the architect gets what she wants and is able to expand on it and add a lot of value and say, "Wow, you know, so in my travels, I saw this. you might like this faucet or this tile is actually very close to the one that you love, but it's actually a lot more affordable. And this is the finish. Okay, I'm going to open up to some questions. I want to talk to my group here on Zoom. Whether you want to talk about this or if you have another question, I'm happy to talk to you about that. Now, people on Zoom, unless you were tuning on Facebook, you wouldn't you weren't able to see this drawing. So, it probably didn't help you at all. So, there it is. All right. Okay. So, Zoom people, who wants to ask me a question about the business of creativity? And Punit says, "Am I the only one who can't hear a thing?" Maybe. So, any any people any people on Zoom want to say anything or maybe on Facebook or YouTube? Mark, do we have anything? Yeah, we have a question from YouTube. Okay, hold on. Should I read it or did uh you want to read it? I'll read it. All right, read it. This one's from Mon'nique Kennedy and she's asking a general question about showcasing strategy. A lot of clients to her don't pay much attention to the research or strategy. How do we showcase the value of that? Okay, so this is who? Monique. Monnique Kennedy. Hey Monnique, what's up? Um, you want to know how to showcase strategy? Well, the way that you showcase strategy is that what is the the result of the strategy yield? When you did this research, what did you learn about customer behavior, consumer insights or anything? Did you find a pattern? Did you see a flaw in the way that they were going to the site? Did you did you uncover something? Was there some kind of actionable insight that you discovered? Then what I would do then is to talk about that process and only that process and not just show you a strategy document or research document because they're really boring to read. You know, I don't want to read a 200page document only to ask you, "So, what did you learn?" So, maybe that's the filter you use. What did you learn? And talk about that. Okay. All right. So, that's a Facebook question. YouTube. YouTube. Okay. YouTube. All right. What else? Who else wants to talk to me? All right. People on Zoom, you guys want to say something? Zach. Well, no. Who said that? I can't see you. Um, sorry. So, uh, camera is not working. Can I come in? Am I audible? I I I'm getting too much background noise. Is that you guys, Mark, or is that, uh, the internet? Is the internet mute yourself. It's on the Zoom. All right, you guys on Zoom. Uh, we're going to be doing these kind of calls more often. You guys need to get yourself into a quiet room, please. Please. And get yourself a high quality mic. It's very important. And I'll tell you why. Okay, somebody said, Chris, mute that guy, please. Okay, so he muted himself. I just want to say this, okay? This is very important. More and more so in the 21st century, most of the client interaction that you're going to have is going to happen via teleconferencing, video conferencing like what we're doing right now or on the telephone. You know, this is how we're going to talk. So, it's very important that you have a nice quiet place so that you can connect with your client. I don't care where you are in the world, what your resources are, there is a spot that you can find somewhere in your house, your home office or your office where it's quiet and you have a high quality mic because my ability to understand you and to communicate with you is really dependent on the acoustical quality of the call. And that really is important. So, if you don't have a lot of money, go into your closet where there's lots of clothes hanging in there. It absorbs the sound. And believe it or not, in lots of cars, the sound quality is much better in the car as long as you can park in a nice quiet place where no sirens are going off. Okay, find yourself a nice quiet room. All right, because I it's driving me bananas, the the background noise. Now Zoom people, who wants to ask me a question? Okay, question. Roberto Ramirez, once you finish with a project with a client, how do you keep a good relationship with the same client? How do you keep milking the same cow? My god, the cow milking question. Okay, if you finish the project with a client, you have to ask yourself, did you provide great customer service? Was it a really wonderful experience that the client really enjoyed? Were you a great listener? Did you go um did you exceed expectations? And that's really important. And if you did so, most of the the work in terms of getting them to give you more work has been done already. Did you call in and check in on them along the way to see if they enjoy the process or if they're they're liking the work? And if they did, that's a great way. And once you deliver, I would call them once again, maybe a few days after, a week after you deliver the project and ask them, um, I just want to follow up with you. I'm always looking to improve. Is there is there anything that you can suggest that I can do better? Uh, and if they say, no, I really love the experience. Then what I would do is ask them right then and there. Would you remind would you mind referring me to another client? I'm always looking to do more work. I have the abilities. Um I have the capabilities and and I have people who are a or designers that are on my staff that could could do more work. I would just ask them. All right. And I don't like the analogy of milking the same cow. It just it sends the wrong visual to me. It's about building a long-lasting relationship um with your client. And milking the cow seems a little bit strange to me. You have to provide value to your client. You have to make the experience enjoyable. And if you do so, most likely they're going to come back to you. All right. Um, now you guys that are on Zoom, why are you texting me? Because that's the same as YouTube. Do you not want to ask your question on air? No, go ahead, man. Hi, Chris. Okay, hold on. Hold on one second. Aaron's gonna say something and I'm going to go to you. Okay. No, just I think a lot of people would like to be on the Zoom conference, but they don't have the link. Well, I'm not going to get angry. Hold on. Let me just meditate here. Okay. If you if you're following us on YouTube or on Facebook, you guys go to the Facebook community because we can post links to these calls for you. And if you join our email list, I'm sounding like a broken record here. If you just join our email list, Mr. Ben Burns will send you the link. We make these announcements. And we're not trying to be a secret. I swear to you, we're not trying to be a secret here. So, all of you guys are um on YouTube and Facebook right now. Uh, can you guys drop in the the link for for the Spartan call? Especially if you guys are tuning in and you've got work in the Spartan thing and you want to join the Zoom call. I can only have 100 participants at a time and right now there are 24. So, there's plenty of room for you guys to jump in. Once we're capped out at 100, I think the room fills up. All right. Thanks, Aaron. So, you guys send him the link. I I can't do social media while I'm doing this. All right. Help me out. Okay. All right. Ask your question, man. What's your name? And I forgot your name already. Go ahead. Yeah, you. Hi, G. I have a little bit nosy here, but uh it's nice. The cafe now I don't have a closet. Okay. What's your name and where you calling from? And then ask me a question. Oh, we lost his internet connection. He froze. He froze. Oh, there we go. Okay. What's your name? Where you calling from? And and what's your question? Go ahead. Uh I'm St. I'm calling from Kraov from Poland. Okay. And my question is about uh business of design uh from a point of the designer. And I wanted to ask you about that portfolio and about how it must look you know uh when you are showing portfolio to to your employer uh do you want to show do you want to see mockups maybe some uh photos of logo types printed or you prefer a clean version graphic version vector version? Okay, good question. So, I I didn't catch your name. It's I think it's St or something like that, right? I I Okay. Okay. Excellent. He's out there. He's interviewing. He's showing his portfolio and he wants to have some portfolio tips to get a job. Most often these days, people come in with an iPad and they have a slideshow and it's all interactive and it's beautiful. And I would prefer to see work digitally. And I'll tell you why. Because it looks brilliant. It's like a gazillion colors. It's vibrant. It's back lit. and there's no issues with the print quality. Now, if you still have like a traditional book and it's printed out, that's fine, too. What I would do first is I want to stack your work up front with the best work that you do. And I want you to start to edit out things that you're not 100% proud of and and you're a lot of people add in extra work because they're thinking to themselves, maybe they're they want this from me and they they put that in there and they're not really proud of it. Okay. Now, if you're going to show logo or identity design work, I almost always appreciate work that's in context. If you go the extra mile, instead of just showing me the logo clean, I would like to see the logo as it exists in applications. Um, if it's hang tags for a t-shirt company or an apparel company or a billboard display, something like that. I think that would make it look a lot better and it looks like it's worth a lot more. Okay, if you guys do this, try this. Excuse me. Take the Verizon logo that's been redesigned by Michael Beirut and Pentagram. Take that logo and just put it on a white piece of paper and then go to their store and see it built out from 3D, you know, like it's a 3D sign hanging above the building or it's it exists in a space when it's cut out of plastic and back lit and embedded in a piece of material like wood or or glass. And you ask yourself, which logo is worth more? the logo that's printed out on a piece of paper or the logo that's in an existing environment and it looks wonderful and it looks like thousands of dollars were spent. Of course, the answer is going to be in context. Now, of course, you can afford to do all those things, but you can use Photoshop and there's mockups and you can make your own mockups and you can do this and it's going to look a lot more impressive. Okay? And the same thing goes like when you're walking down the um what is it? the terminal of an airport and you're walking by all these beautiful jets, the airplanes and the logos on the tail and the body and the color palette. Doesn't that look like it's really substantial versus like a little rinky dink thing? And some people are going to argue like look at that Verizon logo that's been redesigned. Isn't that just lowercase Helvetica with a red check? I mean, how much is are they going to pay for that? Right? So, if you guys here's a presentation tip for you. If you have a really, really simple logo and you want to present it to a client and you're charging them quite a bit of money to do this, here's the presentation tip. Present it in context. Show it on a poster. Show it on a uniform. Show it on a truck, a delivery truck. Show it on bags or packaging. When you do that, the clients can visualize. They don't have to use their imagination. They can visualize what it looks like and they're and it feels real. It feels valuable. Okay. We've used this thing, this presentation tip. I want to say it's a trick. It's not a trick. It's just a tip and and the work will look a lot more valuable. Okay. Did I answer your question, S? Okay. Excellent. I'm gonna get one or two more people and then we're going to end this segment. Oh, you have one more. Go ahead. Question me. You talked about the logos that you like you you have done and the logos about you think they're okay or maybe not. Uh talking about that logos. Uh for example, I have a logo designed for I don't know a truck company. Yeah. and I think it's okay but I don't think it's my best work and others people and the track company director tells me that wow that logo is the best that you have designed in in know in all your life. Yeah. So what what should I do? Uh you need the logo most likely. Yes. If somebody is somebody if you respect somebody and you can trust them and they tell you this is your best work, you need to listen to that and you have to start to figure out like why don't I like it and what's wrong with me and you need to fix that part. Okay, I'll tell you something. There's a there's a friend of mine and he does a lot of different kinds of projects, different brands, different industries and I saw something he did that was really simple and beautiful and he said all of your work should be presented like this. This is the work that's going to get you a lot of work. But he he didn't want