Author: Julie Campbell / Source: 99U by Behance
Getting started in your creative career is tough, so we’re introducing a new column that will allow you to get the benefit of hindsight before you’ve actually gone through the experience. Welcome to “The First Five Years” where Mitch Goldstein, a professor of design at Rochester Institute of Technology, answers reader questions related to the unchartered waters of beginning a career.
Getting started in your creative career is tough. You’ve got boatloads of ambition and energy, but you lack experience, the kind of knowledge that feels like you can see into the future because you’ve been there before. So we’re introducing a new column that will allow you to get the benefit of hindsight before you’ve actually gone through the experience. Welcome to “The First Five Years” where Mitch Goldstein, a professor of design at Rochester Institute of Technology, will answer reader questions related to the unchartered waters of beginning a career. To kick things off, Mitch takes on a personal question.
“What mistakes did you make starting out in your career? And how can I avoid them?”
My design partner (and now wife) Anne Jordan and I started our design studio in June of 2007. I had graduated with my BFA the year before, and Anne had just finished school that month. We had no business plan, no income or growth projections, no marketing strategy, and no experience. What we did each have were several freelance clients, so clearly the smart move was to start a business together even though we had no idea what we were doing. We actually said to ourselves “How hard could it be? We’ll learn along the way.”
And learn along the way we did. We had some success, and many failures. One of our first mistakes was not finding the right people to help us run the business side of the studio. We immediately hired an accountant, and the first thing he did was make us spend money we did not have to incorporate the business, so we would be able to grow rapidly (even though we did not plan on hiring anyone else — but just in case, we were ready!). We spent lots of extra money on incorporation fees and business taxes, and spent lots of time on paperwork and filling out forms that we did not need.
Had we done more…
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