So it’s been about 6 months since I started Tridea with some colleagues, and things have been going great. Since starting Tridea, in addition to having a full time job, things have been quite challenging, and I’ve learned a ton. I’ve done freelance in the past, but not to this extent of actually running a business. It requires a lot of attention and dedication.
Of course there is much more to learn, but here are a few key lessons that I’ve learned thus far.
Time Management
This has been very important to me. Having to work a full time job during the day leaves a very limited amount of time to run a business, so I’ve had to be very efficient with how I spent my time. Working all day, only to come home for more meetings and design work to do can wear on you pretty quickly. You want personal time to relax as well, so in order to balance that time, weekends become a big factor with managing time.
Every person has their own way of managing time, but what I’ve done for the Tridea would be to crank out a few days of solid hard work, little breaks, and get a good chunk of work done. Then I relax for a couple days. This isn’t a sure-fire plan, but it has worked for me. I can’t work all day, then all night for 5 days straight only to have a short weekend to relax, I like to spread my work out a bit more, because working on the weekends doesn’t bother me.
Focus
I can’t lie, sometimes it is extremely hard to stay focused on my work after coming home from an 8-9 hour work day. Somehow I manage to do it easier than other days. To help me focus, I ignore phone calls, non-business emails, turn on music, and just go at it. Once I start paying attention to non-business stuff while trying to work, that is when I lose focus. I’ve also learned not to force creativity. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t, so in the times that you don’t, just let your mind rest. It works wonders.
Choosing Clients
Since we’re in a position where we don’t exactly need every single project for the money, we’re able to pick and choose our clients. It’s awesome. When we meet with [potential] clients, we make sure that we have a good vibe going. If we don’t have a good feeling about it, we turn it down, no matter what the price tag is. A bad client experience is not worth the money. As Cameron Moll says:
I’ve turned down a fair share of projects based solely on the fact that something didn’t feel right at the outset. Fact of the matter is you’ll inevitably be faced with unknown variables in any decision, no matter how well you do your homework.
Communication
This is easily the most important, and the one thing that seems the most overlooked. Our first client was the hardest simply because of communication issues. There were just too many people involved in the project that didn’t need to be. My advice on communication, establish one point-of-contact. Dealing with that one person will help keep projects within the scope, and things will go much more smoothly. You don’t want to be taking direction from 5 different people. It’s not productive, and very frustrating.
In addition to what I mentioned above, keep the client in the loop throughout the whole project. It’s normally not a good thing if the client has to come find you. They should be apart of the whole design and development process. If you have an idea, let them know. It shows that you care about your client. Don’t just communicate with them at the beginning and end of a project.
Contracts are golden
We made the mistake of not having a contract on our first project, which we thought was going to be a quick and easy project. We were wrong. The timeline dragged further than it was supposed, and the project got out of scope. If we would have had a contract, it would have helped tremendously. From now on, no matter how big or small the project is, a contract is required. Outline everything that is entailed for the project within the contract. If the client wants something not in the contract, charge more and redraft the contract. It will save you lots of time and headaches.
As I said, we still have a whole lot to learn about running a business. We will face many more challenges down the road, but the first 6 months have been great, and I’ve obviously learned some useful lessons thus far. I hope to write more after another 6 months.
