Catching the Right Fish - How to make the right clients come to you
How do I get someone to pay me for this is a question that by nature has been around as long as the profession. Art is a business, at least it is if you want to survive in it. The most daunting task you'll face is leaping from amateur to professional, by definition to become a professional you'll need to find someone to pay you for your work. But who are these people and how do we find them?
Like fish in a river, there are dozens of types, some big some small, some cheap, some valued, some you enjoy, and some who leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Like fishing, if you go stomping around lunging at anything that moves, you're more than likely going to scare everyone and everything off, or at best catch some very suspect fish that you wouldn’t want the displeasure of having in your net anyways.
The best fishermen know the right places to cast their lines, as well as the right bait to attract the right fish. Or in our case, the right client.
Let’s quickly define “the right client” and “the wrong client”. The right client needs YOUR work, the wrong client needs work DONE. This is the simplest way I can explain things.
If someone just needs work done, they don't care where it’s coming from or who's doing it. They're looking for the largest possible return on investment. They're the bargain shoppers, the coupon cutters, and the ball breakers. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but these are the type of people you want to avoid. There is a clear “I'm the boss, you're the employee” roll that leads to a lack of respect, causes friction, and disrupts the communication necessary to get through a project smoothly. These people are not worth the headache, and half the deposit is going to be spent on aspirin anyways. It's just not worth it, please trust me here. These types of jobs become a bidding war and a race to the bottom, if the work can be done by anyone, then you will have to cut costs dramatically to compete. You just can't contend with a kid in India who can live off 30 dollars a day. At least not in this country.
If someone needs YOUR work, half the job is already done. It means they're more than likely familiar with your work and sought you out because of it. Respect is already built-in. If your skill is in a niche (which we’ll talk more about in a moment) that means not everyone can do the work and you possess a skill limited amounts of people have, supply is low, thus you are in demand. You can charge more and select the kind of projects you want to work on. Setting yourself up to be needed rather than fighting for the scraps of any and all work is what allows us to not only make a living at this but refine our skills over the years, improving our craft and enjoying what we do.
Now if you've been around the design world for any amount of time, you're sure to have heard of a niche. In the design sense, this just means narrowing your focus to a more specific type of work. It might sound limiting, it's not, it allows you to focus deeper on the types of projects that interest you. Using one type of bait doesn't mean you can only catch a single fish, but it will give you a better chance at catching the kind you want.
How do you pick a niche? Simple. What do you like? To create good work, you need to have more than a surface-level knowledge of the subject. To develop that knowledge, you have to find it interesting enough to learn about. No one has ever become an expert in something they found mind-numbingly dull. Ever wonder why so many breweries have a hop as their logo? It's because they hired a designer and said “make a brewery logo” the designer, having next to no interest or knowledge in craft beer, worked off what they knew. Which turned out to be very little, thus you get “well beer has hops in it I think, so I’ll draw a hop” It's such an obvious route in a field that has endless amounts of complexity and story that it's almost insultingly simplistic. A mediocre designer does everything and nothing all at once. Deeper knowledge of a subject leads to meaningful design, choosing a niche allows you the time to learn and explore a field, this makes your work in that field superior, and thus peoples whose projects live in that world will seek you out for your expertise. This is what I mean by someone wanting you for YOUR work.
Good fish don't take chances with suspect bait. Good clients won't hire based on work they aren't familiar with. No one in the history of design has ever said “Hey I like this girl's death metal poster, let's see if she can design my fun organic juice labels” It just doesn't happen. People hire based on what they see and will only take small risk leaps. If you want to design Organic juice labels, then your portfolio should live squarely in that world. Branding for a farmers market, a local grocer, or a farm-to-table restaurant.
How do you get someone to pay you to create these projects, so you can then land the Juice brand? You don’t. You create them on your own time, exactly how you want them to be. You might have some past client work or projects from school in your portfolio right now, if they're not exactly how you want them to be, or relate exactly to the kind of work you want to be doing, rework or scrap them.
You really only need 3 projects to give someone a sense of what you do. The catch is they need to be your best possible work, fully thought through and flushed out. A tackle box full of rusted hooks and bait is not as good as a couple of nice lures. less is more as long as its quality.
A painting sitting alone on a white gallery wall commands a lot more respect than that same painting stacked with a dozen others in the corner of a thrift shop. How you display your work is just as important as its quality.
Now, none of this work does you any good if no one sees it, you'll need a place to display your portfolio. A simple Squarespace site will cost you 100 bucks a year, invest in yourself. It will pay for itself plenty of times over in the first few months. The site should provide you with a custom professional-looking email. Preferably, somthing@yourname.com nothing sets off the “is this person legitimate?” signal in the mind of a client faster than a Gmail address, especially if you don't have an established body of work yet. It's like a nice lure attached to a shoestring, the fish is going to notice somethings up. Half the battle is presenting yourself like a professional. If we cant present ourselves in a good light, why in God's name would someone hire us to present them?
All of this is laying the groundwork, we've essentially got all our fishing gear ready to go but we're still standing on dry land. You've got to go to where the fish are to catch them. Luckily Social media serves as our river. Most fish tend to swim in schools, they group together with similar like-minded fish. People tend to follow and interact with people who have similar interests and who are in similar fields. If you type “organic juice” into Instagram right now, you'll find thousands of accounts and pages all revolving around the subject.
You can start interacting with folks right away if you like, but blank profiles tend to not instill confidence. If the above steps were centered around presenting yourself as a professional, pictures of you slamming a beer bong in Cabo are not going to read well. Archive anything that doesn't fit the new and professional you. Hell, you can create a brand new profile if you like, but why not just reshape what you already have. Those couple hundred friends and family are much more likely to be supportive of this new professional you than you think (especially if you actually were the beer bong girl from before). Having the eyes of people you know will also subliminally keep you accountable to this new venture.
Start posting, if you've just created three fresh projects, you'll be able to break those down into dozens of small pieces of content that already fit the vibe you're creating. You’ll need to keep going though, aim to create something every day, big or small, finished pieces, or just process shots that you can slap up on your stories. The point here is not to have a perfectly groomed profile, you can worry about that later. The point is to push quality work out the door and into the faces of prospective clients. Fish don't bite at hooks they cant see. Social media is a schizophrenic madhouse of mirrors and revolving doors, things get lost quickly. To stay afloat and at the top of people's minds, you need to be seen on occasion. The more frequently the better. This does not mean make a clown of yourself dancing around and pointing at shit on TikTok, throwing a bag of trash in the river will do nothing but attract garbage fish and likely cause your peers to smile and wave as they back away slowly from any and every future interaction with you. Showing up consistently with good content beats one great piece a month, I wish it weren't true but it is. More lines in the water will always yield a greater catch, it’s just the nature of things right now.
Now, this is where the analogy starts to come to an end. People are not fish, they're people and should be treated as such. The goal is not to manipulate someone into giving you money or trick them into doing something they don't need. The goal from this point is to build a small genuine relationship with a person who may at some point be interested in what you do. No one likes a used car salesman, we all like our buddy who knows about cars and is there to help when something smells like it's burning and we need advice fast.
if you want to work with them someday, the quickest way to ruin that relationship is to come in and go “DO YOU NEED A LOGO??” even if they do, they're not getting it from you. You’ve just shown this relationship starts and stops with you selling them something. This is the equivalent of stomping out into the river and yelling “HERE FISH”. It's not going to work. And again if it does, that's a very suspect fish.
The proper way to build a relationship is to only interact with those who you genuinely like or are interested in. People can see BS coming a mile away. If you just talk to someone like a regular person or compliment something about their business a few times, eventually they'll look at your profile and see you're a designer, if they like you and your work, they'll reach out if they ever need anything. It’s as simple as that.
Being kind and genuine is scalable. You can take a wide net approach here and over a few months build small relationships with dozens of people and businesses. They will reach out. Good fishermen are patient, you can’t make a fish bite, all you can do is put yourself in a good position and wait for them to come to you.
If you’ve built that relationship on a sturdy foundation not only are you more likely to get the job than some random person scattering DMs across the internet, when you do, the project will run smoothly and you'll be better compensated for it.
If they already see you as a respectable, genuine, and knowledgeable person. They will in all likely hood trust your talent and judgment. This eliminates radical changes and crackpot ideas being thrown out halfway through. Good relationships begat good projects.
I don’t think anything I've laid out here is that dramatic or world-shifting. When you break it down, it essentially comes out to, People seek out work based on what they can see and from people they know and trust. That's it.
A word for the first-timers and newcomers. When the fish is in the river it can’t tell if the fisherman has been out on the water every day for the past 30 years or if it’s their first time in a boat, all it knows is it likes what it sees, so it bites. If nothing bites after a while, they don't give up, they try new bait. They might snap a few lines along the way trying to land fish that are too big, or maybe even just out of lack of skill. Before long they'll get the hang of it though. Good fisherman don't lose sleep over lost fish, they know tomorrow will be a new day, and the river will always continue to run.