Brian Sweeting

Along with the A List Apart redesign, comes a terrific article from Jim Coudal about becoming your own client. It’s about creative services firms taking control of their destiny by adding product development to their business.

So there’s this table with three chairs around it. It’s a very old table. These same people have been sitting here forever. The guy who created a product sits in one spot. Across from him is the guy who buys the product. And then there’s that other chair.

We’ve sat there frequently. Basically, the first guy pays us to find the second guy and convince him to buy what the first guy is selling. It’s a pretty important function, maybe the most important. Without it, there’s just one guy sitting at a table and nothing happens.

…

It occurred to us about two and a half years ago that there was only one way to take complete control of our own destiny as creatives. We needed to sit at all the chairs at that old table.

One of the biggest problems in the creative services business is that ultimately your client must be happy. Why is this a problem? Because often what makes clients happy doesn’t always make the vendor happy. If you have clients that “get it” and hire you because you are professional in what you do, then most likely both parties will be happy with the end result of a project. On the other hand, if you have client who doesn’t “get it” and wants to art direct or be the driver on UI design or application development, then that client may get what he wants, but you might not be happy with it.

Why can’t both parties always be happy? Because when you’re small or just starting out, you can’t always be picky about the clients you work with. You’ll work with those who “get it” and many who don’t. In Jim’s article, he talks about how his creative services firm became a products company. By creating their own products, they are their own client. They’ve taken their destiny out of the hands of their clients and put it in their own hands.

I think that every creative services firm should (if they don’t already) develop a product. The business model surrounding a product is far more sustainable than trading time for money, which is basically what the services business is.