remix: freelance and succeed

Last week was a busy week and this week is shaping up to be much the same.  With the foundation growing near and new contracts on the horizon it is safe to say we will be planted right here, online, for the forceable future.  While on a 50 mile ride near Mt. Adams yesterday, Kelsey and I met a very nice group of riders out on the road.  One of the guys was from The Dalles and he is moving to Portland in the next couple of weeks to work as a freelance designer.  The world of business is slowly changing and Kelsey and I got to talking about the world of a freelancer.  Here are some tips to success, (at least they have been good for us):

We all have heard the saying, “there is no ‘I’ in team.”  That is true in sports, in life, and in business.  We don’t follow a traditional business model and that’s what our client’s like about us.  We are flexible, progressive, innovative, adaptable, and are able to create marketing plans and creative strategies for a wide array of businesses.  We are a creative agency without the overhead and without politics that have destroyed other agencies.  But our strengths could potentially be our weaknesses and we have learned that without a strong team there is no way we could survive and grow in this industry.

A brave new world

Almost daily I’m reading about how top execs at the nation’s leading ad agencies are leaving their six-figure salaries to explore the marketing world on their own.  I just read today thatSaachi & Saachi just lost one of their execs, Gerry Graf, who left to start his own firm.  Graf is just one more person on the list who has recently quit to pursue their dream of owning their own agency.  So why now?  The fairly obvious answer is the economy.  A poor economy forces companies to evaluate their spending while it also forces creatives to evaluate their worth within a large organization.  “Constraints spur creativity.  Bad economies demand it.  Innovation is easier when the alternative is death” (Read Nivi’s full article on bad economies spurring innovation here).  As our economy recovers there will be a handful of small entrepreneurial agencies that grow and become the Widen & Kennedy’s and the Saachi & Sacchi’s of the future.

Creativity is a team sport

There will never be a shortage of creative talent, especially where we are in Portland, so why does it seem so few people within the creative industry make it?  There are a million answers to that question, but from what I have seen in the past year one of the largest obstacles a solo artist has to overcome is how to balance designing for a client while also running a business.  The day-to-day operations of running your own company are so vast and tedious that it is easy for creatives to get bogged down with day-to-day operations which limits their ability to do what they excel at: creating.  This is why creativity is a team sport.  I would almost always encourage someone to go out on their own and see if they have what it takes to make a living independent from an established company, but I would never recommend that they do it alone.

We are an agency that encourages our design team to explore opportunities on their own while still giving them the support they need to be able to create some of the best work in the country.  Our company, in turn, would not exist if it weren’t for the amazing work of our creative team.   Agencies as we have known them for the last 15 years will cease to exist because clients are demanding more and are learning that just because they are working with a multi-million dollar agencies doesn’t mean that they are getting the best product that reaches their brand.  There is a real opportunity for talented designers in every discipline to win contracts with large clients.  It just takes teamwork and realizing that you can’t do everything on your own.  Creating partnerships with other designers and project managers is a great way to build your business.

If you are a designer, photographer, videographer, or artist of any kind and you are working as a freelancer, we would like to hear from you to learn what has and hasn’t worked well for you.