During all three years of work practice, I was getting surprised by one thing: there is always a misbalance between your relationships with clients and designers. Either you protect the values of the company and the interests of designers or you stand on the side of the client and protect his or her interests.

Saving balance must have been a key secret to success. However, it’s almost impossible. Protecting the interests of designers and values of the company usually leads to the loss of clients and lack of sales, which results in the lowering of income and disability to pay more to exactly those designers whose interests you were protecting.

Unsplash image by Piret Ilver

Normally when it happens we switch to protecting clients’ values, and that leads to the rounds of fixes, overtime and burning deadlines, which always result in team burnout, where people are sick and tired of projects, work and company as well. So, as you can see misbalance is dangerous. But how not to get trapped here? We’ve just gathered!

Clear Messages

The first and the most important thing you should do is outline what exactly are you going to protect:

• on one side you need to outline messages of the company for designers and employees, like “our goal is a healthy atmosphere”;
• on the other side you need to outline messages for clients like “we appreciate collaboration and co-honour on the project”;

Once all the messages are outlined, you need to compare them: if they argue with each other? Do they translate the same or different things for people? If different, you need to bring them to the same bases and compile them into one document to have one, unified doc with messages and values of the company.

Right Customer Success Policy

Once messages are there, you should work on the choice of clients. Yes, I mean exactly what I said here — you are free to choose clients yourself. When we only were opening a design boutique, one of the key ideas was to choose clients by ourselves, which actually gives freedom to build a healthy community.

So, you need to work on a system of filters and marks that will allow you to choose your people versus not yours and work only with those who share the vision and values your company offers. Build all client-related communication along with values you translate and educate staff to follow it. It will allow for building better client relations.

Motivational System

At the same time your designers should not be forgotten: create a flexible motivational system, that will be customized for every designer in person and will allow them to have exactly KPI and estimations of what is expected from them. Such a system will allow you to have exact deadlines and expectations outlined for the employees.

This approach gives a chance to make the policy of the company crystal clear. And thus, designers also will understand more that they are not forgotten and you are still interested in their success compared to the client’s interests. Having a motivational system also will allow you to have strict bonuses for designers that will let you keep balance.

Balance is ideal. Balance is a fairytale we always try to reach: at work, in our private lives, everywhere. However, being in balance is hard without seeing complete chaos. So make your mistakes and apply the right system that will work exactly for you. Above is the one that worked for us.