Many people work in the hospital but not everyone’s a doctor or a nurse — some are administrative staff, and some even sell snacks in the hallways. After seventeen years working in advertising — where I’ve been paid to work closely with clients and design various things, the worst piece of advice I hear from the people in admin and in the hallways that I find particularly misguided is…
“Sometimes your best feedback comes from your clients, when you actually put the thing out there.”
Why Testing Ideas is Essential
Testing an idea is fundamental in business. Failing to test (not analysis paralysis) leads to no traction. Ideas need to be hypothesized and tested before building a business around them.
Before building my business around The One-Page Project, I spent 6 months testing a theory on local small service business owners’ behavior towards websites. Although the theory hasn’t changed, my understanding of why their behavior exists has. My expertise results from my own successes, mistakes, failures, and working closely with clients — I know why I’m providing my services the way I am: I understand the results it takes to support specific outcomes a local client turns to visual design for and how long that project takes!
So who are these people saying “Just put it out there”?
“Put the video out there, put the messaging out there, send that email, start the podcast, start that YouTube channel”.
…With no evidence of ever successfully providing that service to a paying client? What will you say? What will you discuss?
Where Expertise Comes From
No aspect of expertise (and I know the people in admin and the hallways claim otherwise) in a small service business comes outside of achieving something specific for yourself first and then for others. In other words, even if you have a business already but have this new idea you wish to put into the world, you still have to test it to see if there’s a market for that service. You can’t just assume clients of the other business will buy it. More importantly, you can’t claim expertise before establishing and developing the brand for that service with real evidence supporting its value.
Expertise also involves the act of developing your thoughts and ideas. That’s the non-sexy part. It’s painstaking work, but you can’t avoid it; it’s through client work that you learn your talking points, and how to articulate them. This is where the long-term development of expertise begins.
Many locals shirk off this responsibility to ChatGPT. It’s evident when someone has merely copied something from AI instead of articulating it out of their brain. A lack of perspective as a brand will get you there. A lack of conviction as a brand will make you “listen to the client”.
What Feedback From A Client Sound Like
I had one client in the middle of The One-Page Project tell me she wasn’t able to commit to my process because she “had more important things to do.”
If I didn’t have a few clients under my belt already all praising the smoothness of that process (which wasn’t created based on their input), I would have been vulnerable to her feelings of being fine if the project took a gazillion years before it was completed. I would have revamped my process but by extension, the project would have become very unprofitable moving forward.
My genuine questions: Why do you think the feedback you received from clients in that coaching session, for example, was “not so great”? Do you know? Why do you think you needed to revamp it four times before you — “the expert” — were satisfied with it?
If we’re judging from a place of “this is what I do, this is what I specialize in,” then no weekend course qualifies a client to advise on anything we do or implement. We’re the ones with the experience and the extremely deep and complex insights that collectively, inform us on how to deal with the range of projects we typically take on.
Read: Visual Designer vs Graphic Designer — What Web Design Customers In Trinidad & Tobago Should Know
What message do you — the one claiming to have the plan that takes someone from point A to B, think you’re sending when you allow the client to lead instead? This is what makes the idea that “sometimes your best feedback comes from your clients” misguided.
In Conclusion
I believe there is a spectrum when it comes to business in Trinidad and Tobago. On one end, businesses either ignore branding and try to function without it or use a superficial version of it to a fault.
On the other end, service providers look for the most mushroom-selling way to claim expertise and branding which never works because who they really are always betrays them.
But real branding and expertise exist, and when you have it, the things you do and say have deep meaning, aren’t borrowed or copied from someone else, and affect the actual outcome the client is looking for. At least, this has been my revelation and experience coming to this point in my career as a designer and, for some time now, a 1–2 man show.
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