Create a team and structure

The first step in creating a successful design agency (assuming you already have a brand established and a portfolio site) is to team up! Find people to team with who can help share the workload, these people do not necessarily have to do the same thing, but can be split via departments. For example, Darshan takes care of the sales & finance and day to day management of the company while Danny takes care of running the overall business and taking care of the design projects.

Once you have a team which agree on the vision of the company and the roles have clearly been defined, you then need to make sure each member has enough work to do making sure one person is not doing all the work while the other is dwindling around.

Now you’ve got this far, you’ve created the basis of your agency. After this point doing all the design work yourself is not necessary as an agency, it’s not a bad thing to be able to share the work. Some people prefer going at it alone and keeping all the work in house, which is not always a bad thing. Having an internal team and external one means you can bounce ideas of each other and motivate each other to bring in more work and to produce quality work. Obviously the price will vary for client depending on what service you’re offering and at what level of work you’re producing.

Finding good suppliers

Your clients will only appreciate the final end product you produce; everything else is additional but not important to them. So unless you want to be designing everything yourself, having a good set of suppliers is essential to produce the quality your clients deserve.

As your agency grows, so to will your suppliers and supplier list. As a result building and nurturing good relationships with them is essential, as they will become an extension of your agency, and the work will be a reflection of your company image. By building this relationship your suppliers will give you a better service and agree better terms as you continue to supply work to them. It will help when work goes wrong (in this industry you will occasionally go wrong somewhere) but a good supplier will help you resolving the issue and getting the job done.

Have fun and go forth! 

Having a number of useful suppliers will allow you to bring in a fresh perspective and share creative ideas with each other. Creative suppliers such as – web designers, programmer, photographer and graphic designer etc who are from different creative disciplines will bring in new ideas and collaborate with you to produce a successful project, by having these various suppliers will allow you take on bigger projects.

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