Our eye was caught today by an excellent post over at logoblog on the warning signs that a client isn’t going to pay for a logo. While the piece is obviously useful to designers, there’s a lesson in there for business owners, too: don’t do these things.
1) Don’t take days to return phone-calls
You know this already, but in case you don’t: it’s unprofessional to leave anyone hanging for days at a time. We know that running a business is hectic: you’re wearing a lot of hats and (if you’re doing it right) you’re spreading yourself thin sometimes. That said, your logo design is important (so is your reputation as a legitimate business, for that matter). Find enough time to make sure the designer you’re working with knows that you’re still alive and ready to work with them.
2) Don’t continuously mock the designer’s work
Criticism is good–it’s how you help the designer make something you want. But you should never just outright mock the designers’ work. Mocking:
- Makes you look like a jerk. You never know who else that designer knows, and establishing a reputation as a jerk won’t help you get your business off the ground.
- Dampens the designers’ enthusiasm for your project and reduces your chance of getting a good design. Yes, you pay them to be professional even if you’re mean to them. No, they’re not robots. Making fun of your designer is a great way to offend them and make them hate doing work for you.
- Accomplishes absolutely nothing positive for your business. Your singular focus as a small business needs to be making your business succeed. It can’t be about you, your ego, your feelings or anything else (if it is, you will fail). It doesn’t matter if you’re frustrated by the designers’ output. Mocking doesn’t solve that problem, so hold it in (and don’t do it to get laughs either–those laughs won’t add one penny to your bottom line).
Instead of mocking, stick to constructive criticism. If that doesn’t work, move on. Be professional and tell your designer outright that things aren’t working out. Don’t waste her time (and yours!) by passive-aggressively mocking work that you’re not satisfied with.
3) Don’t Try to Stiff Your Designer
As a small business, you live and die by your reputation. We doubt that we need to tell this to anyone reading our site, but just for the sake of completion: don’t try to weasel out of paying somebody whom you agreed to pay. There are obviously situations that complicate this rule (and how you handle those “shades of gray” is another matter for another day). But the basic principle is sound: don’t try to worm out of paying your designer for work that you agreed to pay for.
Don’t be that business that takes a designers’ work, “alters” it slightly, and then refuses to pay the designer because you “went in a different direction.” It might seem like a clever way to save a couple hundred bucks, but the risk you take greatly outweighs the reward. We’re not talking about your conscience (although we hope that would be enough to keep you from stealing) we’re talking about your businesses’ reputation.
Remember: a major corporation can afford to launch a PR blitz when they get caught doing something slimy; your business can’t. So be the good guy–it’s the better long-term investment.
