IDSA 2013 - Design Driven Businesses Development

COPYRIGHT 2013 TINITT | DO NOT DISTRIBUTEAPRIL 20TH 2013
DESIGN DRIVEN BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
DESIGN DRIVEN BUSINESS
DEVELOPMENT
KEVIN LEHTINIITTY | FOUNDER & CEO
1Sunday, April 21, 13
• Hello everyone
•Talking about design driven business development

1994 2000 2007 2009 2011 2012 2013
BorninFranceMovestoIndianaCreatesﬁrstventure
FoundsCSIndy
CSIndyrebranded
to
TINITT
Rejectsacquisition
offer
Namedin20under20
Namedin20
under20again
2010
FoundsJummba
Jummbafails
Kevin Lehtiniitty
TINITT|Ventures
•A little bit about me.
•[Go through the timeline].
•going to share with you a few of the less obvious lessons we’ve learned along the way.
•We lost a lot of time and money making these mistakes so hopefully, if you can avoid one or two of these, this talk will have done its job.

http://www.seriouswheels.com/pics-mno/Mercedes-Benz-SLR-McLaren-Cutaway-1920x1440.jpg
•Whether we’re talking about a high performance sports car,

http://www.cruisescope.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/cruise1.jpg
•a big cruise ship

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/flyingwithfish/files/2009/04/ba_concorde.jpg
•a sleek high speed jet

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/images/jpgs/england/mclaren_technology_centre_fp270509_ny_1.jpg
•or growing a business...they all need the same two things

Power & Direction
•power to move and a direction to get where we want to go.

http://www.coolfunpics.com/slides/Crazy_Stuck_Car.jpg
•no matter the potential, if you have no power your not getting anywhere

Client acquisition drives business
•client acquisition powers business development

Two less obvious lessons
we learned the hard way

1. Learn to say no
•Learn to say no to perspective clients.

Myth:
•very common trap that we fell in for a few years

=
=
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/assets_c/2010/11/stack-of-money-3153.html
http://s396.photobucket.com/user/eln1/media/marketing%20pictures/money.jpg.html
•myth is the more clients you have the bigger your business gets
•If one client equals money, the 10 clients must equal 10x money
•We were in this for a a little over a year
•year of very slow growth that we could have used to develop our business much faster had we been smarter about our clients.

Number of Clients
BusinessSize Focusing on landing as many clients as possible
•this is what we saw.
•We focused on landing every client we saw no matter the size of the account or the industry they were in.
•We had low proﬁts from our clients and no pieces to put on our portfolio to bring us to the next level.

Reality:
•We were barely able to pay for our ofﬁce and our other expenses
•we made the scariest decision we’ve ever faced.
•started saying no to clients who would bring in the money we so desperately needed.

Quality
Quantity
•We picked a few markets that weren’t too saturated with design, educational institutions for example
•focused all our efforts on landing bigger clients in those few spaces
•turned down all clients that didn’t ﬁt our proﬁle.
•focused on quality over quantity.
•one of the best decisions we ever made.

Number of Clients
BusinessSize Focusing on landing quality clients
•used every client as a portfolio piece to land even more profitable clients the next time around.
•able to climb up the ladder of design projects getting to more interesting and more profitable projects.
•by focusing all of our clients into a few niche areas, the effects were amplified.
•we were able to say look at this great project w did in your industry.
•That was the competitive advantage that pushed us over the top when competing for bids.

http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/3942365/50+shades+of/4#4
•Turning down clients doesn’t seem intuitive to growing a business but there’s only so far you can go by grabbing every client you see.

2. The client isn’t always right
•The second big and costly mistake was letting clients drive our ﬁnal product.

http://www.ready2spark.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/customer-service.jpg
•signs like this posted in too many ofﬁces to remember including my dad’s.
•ﬁrst “take your son to work” day, my dad’s shining cubicle and a big “the customer is always right” sign on the wall.
•That’s the customer service environment I grew up with so that’s exactly the attitude we took.

Image courtesy of McCann Erickson
•clients aren’t always right.
•We’ve all had the experience of creating a truly great product and seeing it get ruined by client change requests.

What clients want:

Image courtesy of Clients From Hell
•log onto clients from hell and the horror stories start pouring out.
•we lived in fear of the inevitable email that contained client feedback
•we realized that none of our portfolio pieces actually showcased our work and our abilities.
•All the projects we had to show had been subjected to the whims of our clients, most of which knew nothing about design.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lnF2ymkb5KI/Tw1YS7X9IAI/AAAAAAABQHc/FlFmE0VBKo8/s640/172458_10150137277585751_634670750_8380962_3247352_o.jpg
•We got tired of taking all sorts of bullshit from our clients.
•This is our ﬁeld and we weren’t going to let clients ruin our hard work.
•We decided to push back
•Instead of losing clients they started to respect our opinions.
•most clients are actually looking to you for guidance, big company politics has just trained them to keep to themselves and not ask for help.
•In our experience, dictating the project - within reason of course -
•gained us a lot of respect,
•helped grow our business to the next level,
•decreased stress

Power without direction
•second component to growing any business is having a direction. If you don’t...

http://i674.photobucket.com/albums/vv101/Konradius5/Gary%20Larson%20Comics/GoingInCircles.jpg
•You’ll end up going around in circles.
•No matter how much power you have driving growth, you need somewhere to get to.

Steering with long term strategy
•This is where a long term strategy comes into play.
•Starting out long term can mean 6 months, a year, two years, it doesn’t matter.
•The point is to set a direction a go after it.

Two less obvious lessons
we learned the hard way

1. Create a design process early on
•Creating a design process sounds really boring but it’s one of those business structures you have to put in place to grow a company.
•started with the process our freelancers had before they came to TINITT.

Image courtesy of Toothpaste For Dinner
•looked a little like this.
•This leads to a few problems when you’re trying grow a business:
•becomes extremely hard to track your workload
•building a business is so much more than just completing client projects
•when you spend 80% of your time fucking off you spend all of your actual work time designing.
•seems great, spend all our time doing what we love.
•But that doesn’t really grow business.
•have to spend a little time everyday deciding where you want to take your business.
•This give you a lot more time to adapt and you’re constantly keeping your end goals in mind which keeps you focused on moving towards
them.

Image courtesy of Lifehack
•This was one of the hardest things for me creating a business.
•I’m a huge procrastinator and it took a lot of missed business opportunities and a couple hard conversations with some of our key employees
to get me to start doing things right away.
•Once we put in some concrete plans for how we develop our products, I began to see how much business we had lost because of my
procrastination.
•I wish we would have created our work ﬂow and processes much earlier in our companies history, we would have been able to grow
signiﬁcantly faster.

2. Think three moves ahead
•you always have to think at least three moves ahead if not more.
•The great part of big companies is if you or I make a mistake and they lose some money we might get yelled at, demoted, or even ﬁred...but
the company will go on as if almost nothing happened.
•When your creating and growing a business mistakes can bring down the company.
•avoid mistakes by creating plans.
•When we were landing every client we could ﬁnd we didn’t have any idea where the company was going to go so we went nowhere
•Eventually decided that we wanted to make the web beautiful and functional.

http://www.commonplaces.com/sites/commonplaces.com/ﬁles/ugly%20baby.jpg
•The web still looks extremely ugly and most websites are “ugly babies”.
•So now we had an end goal, something to work towards.
•But we’re not just going to wake up one day and see the web has completely changed.
•have to take small steps one at a time to reach our goal.

http://www.squidoo.com/chess-three-move-checkmate
•we started creating a plan.
•The chess analogy is really overused but it’s true.
•We started creating a plan to eventually get to our goal.
•didn’t work.
•you need a lot of plans.

http://alltheragefaces.com/img/faces/svg/misc-all-the-things.svg
•We were dead in the water with no idea what to do.
•cost us a lot of money.
•A few months later we hit the same scenario but this time, we had a plan B.
•burned through that one unsuccessfully too.
•plan a and a plan b aren’t enough...we almost went bankrupt making that mistake.
•Now, we have at least four plans to move the company forwards towards our goals.

1. Learn to say no
2. The client isn’t always right
3. Create a design process early on
4. Think three moves ahead
Here’s a quick recap of the 4 big mistakes we made developing our business. Hopefully some of you can avoid them.

Post panel questions
Twitter: @infinitekevin
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/infinitekevin/
Email: kevin@tinitt.com
Web: http://infinitekevin.com
We’ll be taking a lot of questions after presentations but if you come up with questions afterwords you’re all welcome to contact me. Twitter
and email usually work best.

IDSA 2013 - Design Driven Businesses Development

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