Being good at your craft doesn’t make you good at the business of creative work.
You need a system for getting the right people to notice you, a clear way to communicate your value, and a reason for them to choose you over someone else.
In this Creative Pulse fireside conversation, Chris Do and I explored some of the challenges that come with building a business as a commercial creative
— from finding clients and choosing a specialization, to figuring out what your work is worth.
Here are three ideas worth applying to your own creative business right away.
Together, they form a simple progression:
get seen, get known, and get hired.
Who is Chris Do?
Before we dive in, let me introduce you to Chris. He is the founder of The Futur and an Emmy Award-winning designer and educator known for teaching creative professionals about sales, pricing, positioning, and business.
Before launching The Futur, he founded and ran the design studio Blind for more than two decades, working with major brands including Microsoft, Nike, and Sony.
1. Why creatives can be the worst judges of their own work
We don’t always recognize what other people will find valuable in our work.
As creatives, we tend to judge our work according to what we were trying to accomplish:
Is the design good enough?
Is this original?
Is this one of my best pieces?
But your potential clients see it differently.
They might see a skill they need. An aesthetic that fits an upcoming project. Evidence of how you think. Or an application for your abilities that you’ve never considered.
Some of the early work Chris was reluctant to show ended up getting him two clients and helping launch his career.
You can’t predict all the ways someone might respond to your work. But you can give them the chance to see it.
Take action
Don’t treat sharing your work like a portfolio review
Look at the work you’ve created over the last year that you haven’t shared.
Instead of asking:
Is this good enough to show?
ask:
Who might find this useful, interesting, or valuable?
Choose a few pieces that demonstrate something useful about your skills, taste, or thinking—and put them where your prospects can discover them.
2. Should creatives specialize — or offer more services?
Versatility feels safer to the person selling it. Specificity feels safer to the person buying it.
When work slows down, the instinct is often to expand what we offer.
I do branding…but I can also build websites.
And social.
And video.
The logic makes sense:
The more things I can do, the more opportunities I can pursue.
But your buyers are trying to figure out if they can trust you to solve their problem.
Specialization makes that question easier to answer.
The idea boils down to depth before breadth: become known for doing something well before expanding into everything else you can do.
That doesn’t mean you need to abandon all the other things you’re good at.
It means separating two questions:
What am I capable of doing?
and
What do I want to become known for?
The answers don’t have to be the same.
Take action
Pressure-test what you’re known for.
Ask someone who knows your work:
If someone asked what they should hire me for, what would you say?
Don’t worry about whether their answer captures everything you’re capable of doing.
Listen for whether they can give you one clear reason to hire or refer you.
If the answer is a long list of services—or they struggle to answer at all—you have a positioning problem worth solving.
3. How do you find clients as a creative?
Find work by working backward.
When creatives want more business, they often jump straight to marketing tactics:
Should I post more on Instagram? LinkedIn?
Go to networking events?
Start a newsletter?
Do outbound?
These are channel questions.
Before worrying about any of them, you need to answer something more fundamental:
Who needs to notice you—and why should they care when they do?
A real example: finding the actual buyer
During the fireside, an audience member asked how to find clients for his large-scale visualization work in hospitality.
At first, he was thinking broadly about “hospitality clients.” But I pointed out that a more specific buyer might sit further upstream—for example, a developer trying to raise investment or communicate a project concept before it’s built.
Chris pushed the idea further by examining what those buyers want and need, what they fear, and what problems they’re trying to solve.
Once you understand who the buyer is and what matters to them, you can build a much clearer value proposition—and make better decisions about where and how to market.
That’s what it means to find work by working backward.
Instead of starting with:
Where should I promote my services?
start with:
- Who buys this kind of work?
- What are they trying to accomplish?
- What makes my work valuable to them?
- Where do those people already go for information, ideas, and expertise?
Only then should you worry about channels.
Because if the buyer and value proposition aren’t clear, more marketing puts a confusing message in front of more people.
Take action
Run the exercise on your last five clients.
For each one, identify:
- Who decided to hire you?
- What were they actually trying to accomplish?
- Why did they choose you?
Look for patterns. Pay particular attention to whether the person who benefits from your work is also the person with the problem, budget, and authority to buy it.
Then ask:
Where could I consistently get in front of more people like them?
Now you have a much better basis for deciding whether you should be on LinkedIn, attending events, building partnerships, doing outbound—or doing something else.
How to build a stronger creative business
These three ideas address different problems:
- Show your work.
- Build depth before breadth.
- Find work by working backward.
But they share a common thread.
As creatives, we see our businesses from the creator’s perspective.
We think about what we want to make, what services we can provide, what belongs in our portfolio, and where we should market ourselves.
The buyer approaches your business with a much simpler question:
Can this person help me?
Learning to see your work from that side of the table can change how you position yourself, market your services, and grow your business.
Taken together, these ideas suggest a useful way to audit your own creative business:
- Who gets the most value from the work I do?
- What are they trying to accomplish when they hire someone like me?
- What evidence would make them trust me?
- What do I want to become known for?
- Am I making it easy for the right people to discover me?
You don’t always need another service, another social platform, or another piece in your portfolio.
You may need to make it easier for the right person to understand why they should choose you.
Want to go deeper?
And if you’re new to Creative Pulse: we bring together experienced people from across marketing, design, and tech—and turn those conversations into practical ideas you can apply to your craft, career, and business.
Building a team?
Ami Sanyal has helped over 430 business owners connect with millions of prospects online. As a marketing consultant for client-based business owners, Ami specializes in helping experts attract ideal clients — predictably.
Formerly a freelance photographer, Ami has photographed celebrities like Jay-Z, Coldplay, and Olympic athletes. He’s the proud co-founder of Creative Pulse and has led its volunteer team since 2014.
As the founder of The Accelerator, Ami helps creative freelancers and studio principals attract high-paying clients consistently.
Click here to see if The Accelerator coaching program for creatives is right for you
