An Exercise in Terror: Narrowing My Firm's Focus
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The document discusses the author's experience narrowing the focus of his firm to specialize in industrial design and architecture. It describes some of the challenges he faced, including defining his expertise, learning when to turn down work, and finding an audience for his specialized services. The author suggests that specializing helped open doors for his business by reducing competition and positioning his firm for specific opportunities within industrial design and the built environment field.
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An Exercise in Terror: Narrowing My Firm's Focus
- 1. An Exercise in Terror What I’ve Learned from Narrowing the Focus of My Firm
- 2. What’s a Canadian doing drinking in Austin?
- 3. My shit or get off the pot moment.
- 4. Obligatory demo reel video.
- 5. What do I know about industrial design?
- 6. Why specialize? Why not specialize!
- 7. What are we really talking about?
- 9. AEC and the built environment.
- 10. Learning to say no. (Still working on it).
- 11. Phase 0 comes before Phase 1.
- 13. We found an audience. (Within reach).
- 14. 10,000 hours? For real? (At least).
- 15. Specialization opens doors. (The proof).
- 16. So where’s the terror?
- 17. Thank you. Mark Busse mark@industrialbrand.com @markbusse
Notas do Editor
- So why specialize? Designers have talked about it for years, but the very word seems to strike terror into the hearts of industry leadership. Many tell me they avoid specialization because a well trained designer’s process will lead to the best solutions, not their past experience with a product, sector or technology. Hogwash. Others argue that too narrow a focus will introduce gaps in studio workload, exposing the business to cash-flow issues, and impede growth—especially if demand for that particular product or service suddenly declines. Fair points, but all can be tackled through a smart strategy and commitment. The arguments in favour of being a “jack of all trades” generalist, including the broader audience and flexibility that comes with being able to offer diverse services to suit any sort of challenge actually seems counter-intuitive to me. Those sound like expensive and confusing things to juggle in a highly competitive marketplace where everyone is offering “full-service” design at increasingly lower rates. The one aspect of generalization I appreciate most is that it leads to a better foundation for specialization. As we considered a focussed approach in our practice, the advantage of specializing seemed to lie in our ability to see what was really going on with our clients, identify the real issues, and guide them toward an authentic expression of who they really are. We found our clients frequently lacked the ability to recognize patterns, anticipate issues or see opportunities related to marketing or branding issues. We’re able to do this with the objectivity of an outsider, but with the added efficiency and perspective of being experienced in their business type. Ultimately repositioning ourselves as specialists became a sales advantage. If you are getting indications that you are losing sales to competition that seems similar to you, want to avoid, derail, or get the inside track on RFPs, it might be time to take a closer look. We found we were able to demand higher fees again, and charge for the important front end work instead of focussing on tracking hours or tactical deliverables.
- What are we really talking about? We’re definitely NOT talking about branding. I have grown to sort of hate the word branding if I’m honest. People who talk endlessly about branding sound stupid. I’d even say that many designers I speak with don’t seem to understand the difference between branding and marketing. As much as all of us here may love design and the creative process, we attend conferences like this one because we want our businesses to thrive. BUSINESSES. We need to get better at selling our services! And I doubt anyone here would disagree that selling design has gotten harder than ever in recent years. For us, the most effective way we increased control of our business was by positioning our firm through a focussed offering—a specialization. I’ve heard arguments like; specialization will evaporate inspiration and hinder creativity and innovation; staff will get bored and leave if they do the same thing too often; talented young designers won’t join for worry of limited career growth; building a firm on a specific speciality will be risky due to market volatility. This is fear mongering based on a lot of what-ifs, maybes, and conjectures. What we’re really talking about is marketing, which ultimately provides control in your business. And the best marketing is through clear positioning based on a REAL NEED in the world, not just cool ideas or stuff we like making.
- Positioning reduces competition. For a few years we starting incrementally tightening our messaging around our expertise in brand research, strategy development and brand identity design. But in time everyone was calling themselves a brand designer. And isn’t a design firm claiming branding as its specialization sort of like a fish saying it’s an expert swimmer? Big deal. As we looked at our own branding, we realized that we were demonstrating some of the same bad habits that many of our clients so often do. Sharing who we are, what we stand for, our vision, our personality, our process, and our passion—these are important aspects of brand building, but they are also ubiquitous and often meaningless rhetoric in the barrage of marketing noise out there. Everyone talks about that stuff. Furthermore, we realized that branding is NOT the same as positioning. We did have a provably superior offering in terms of our naming process, brand essence and application framework, and unlike most competitors, we deliver brands as comprehensive living ecosystems by way of a cloud-based digital asset management system that clients deploy and manage internally. We had a solid horizontal, but this wasn’t enough. We needed a bolder position. Something we could own. Something that would reduce our competition and open up other markets. We needed to stake a claim in deep expertise that would position us as the confident and respected strategy and design consultants we knew we were.
- AEC and the built environment. We knew what our horizontal was, so how did we choose the AEC sector as our vertical? For years we’d worked for professional service firms of various kinds—from product firms like yours to lawyers and accountants—but it was when we took a hard look and evaluated the state of the those sectors that we discovered an opportunity. The architecture, engineering and construction industries were undergoing increasing business challenges—many of the same issues we face in the design sector actually. We looked at the work we were doing, what motivated us, what we knew, what few others in our industry & market were focusing on, and what we were good at. With significant changes happening in AEC—especially relating to identity and marketing to increasingly younger audiences with different needs—we discovered was a real need for our naming and brand design skills within AEC. And in terms of profitability and sustainability, private and public development was a recovering economic sector. We found a real need in the world, so we made a choice and aimed our focus at AEC.