When
starting
a new
business,
you don’t
need to
be the
proverbial
deer in the
headlights

Logos
This is the art that identifies your business. It should be done right, which means it won’t be cheap.

Now is the time to be cold and calculating, impervious to the panic that surrounds you.

A great logo will cost you thousands of dollars. So do you need one when you are first starting up?

Not as a rule. A worthwhile substitution would be the company name or initials in a stylized, decorative font.

You can always address the permanent logo later on when you are making enough money to hire a good graphic designer to design it for you.

Don’t make the mistake of hiring a designer from a bidding web site like elance.com or designquote.com.

As I’ve stated numerous times before, you’ll get exactly what you pay for — a designer that can’t get a job except by underbidding everybody else. It’s a race to the bottom for quality.


Brochures and Web Sites
I’ll cover these together because, in a lot of cases, a company’s web site is like an electronic brochure.

This is where to put the emphasis for your advertising overhead budget.

This is where your future customers and/or clients will see you and your service and/or product.

And again, this is not where you go find a designer that will do the job cheap. There’s nothing wrong with getting bids for the job, but contact business people that you know and get recommendations.

Contact those designers, and only those designers, and have them bid the project

The bids should be relatively similar if the designers are any good and have quoted many jobs. My suggestion is to treat it like figure skating: throw out the high and low bids automatically and then choose one of the remaining designers based on how you felt when you talked with them.


Make It A Team Effort
The design of your advertising materials and company art is a collaboration process. A good designer will listen to you and design something that fits your vision and your budget. Never give them free rein on either.

If each interaction with the designer is a gut–wrenching experience or the designer keeps insisting on doing things his/her way — fire them! It doesn’t matter how good they are — fire them.

If you did things the way I just told you, you’ll still have a nice list of designers to contact for future work.

Also, don’t ever be afraid to change designers for new projects. Sometimes a fresh perspective and a different creative process is all that’s needed to breathe new life into an advertising campaign.


Summing Up
Practice the benefit of discipline. When starting a new business, you don’t need to be the proverbial deer in the headlights.

Put your fears aside and take the correct action. Take a step back from your fear and let logic dictate your next move. And if you’re still not sure, you can always contact me.