Listen—don’t speak over your client, it’s rude. Let them tell you their wants and needs.
Take good notes—DO NOT take orders like a waiter. Here’s where you need to add value and be creative: from your detailed notes, after listening carefully to your client’s request, come up with a creative way to implement the ordinary and turn it into something extraordinary.
Create a timeline and discuss budgets—Timelines and budgets tend to fall off the face of the Earth in small in-house creative teams lacking project managers. Each high-level project must have a timeline and budget that has been agreed upon with your client. This is a crucial step in the design process that your client can relate to and respect you for.
You as the leader may know and understand all of these best practices. But stop and think for a moment, sis this happening as it should on your team or is there some mentoring that needs to happen?
Plan and run better meetings
Meetings are a necessary evil in our business. Between staff meetings, project planning and review meetings, vendor meetings, and of course client meetings, its any wonder we get real work done at all. But one thing I have learned in almost 25 years in the creative...
