Kurt Schmidt

Let the person who'll build the work write the estimate. A founder selling the job tends to guess low, while the designer remembers how long the last round of revisions took.

Check your pipeline every Monday the way a restaurant checks its reservation book. You'll see an empty month six weeks out. Call people then.

I've watched teams hide problems from a founder who snaps. Stay calm the next time bad news lands and it starts reaching you early.

Take your last ten finished projects and sort them by profit after all the hours are added up. Compare the top two with the bottom two. Sell more of what the winners share.

You keep the weak client because replacing them means admitting the pipeline is thin. Fix the pipeline and the decision gets easy.

Hire a project manager before your next designer, or in six months your best designer will be doing the job for free.

Custom work for every client keeps you small and keeps you busy.

Prospects who agree to every line of your proposal haven't read it. Pushback is coming. It'll land in week three, after you've spent the deposit.

Pick one industry and write it on your homepage. You'll lose some leads. The ones who stay already believe you know their business, and they'll pay more to skip the learning curve.

Repeat the plan until you're bored of it. That's roughly when the team starts to remember it, and I've yet to see a founder overdo it.

Run a ten-minute retro when every project ends. Ask what slowed the team down, then fix the top answer before the next kickoff. Skip the fixing and the retro is just a meeting.

Underpricing comes from fear of hearing no. Raise your rate for the next new client and leave the old ones alone. I've watched that one test change how a founder quotes for good.

Quote a small version and a full version of every project. Clients who'd have haggled over one price start choosing between two scopes, and the small one still pays you.

Book your team at 80 percent and leave the rest open. A sick day or a rush request will eat that gap, and a team booked solid has nowhere to put either one.

Put feedback deadlines on the schedule, right beside the launch date. Once a client sees that a three-day delay moves launch by three days, replies get faster.

Three months of payroll in the bank changes who you say yes to. Thin cash has you chasing the client you'd turn down in a good month.

Lead every case study with the client's result and push the list of deliverables to the bottom, since prospects skim for proof that you can get them the same thing.

A prospect who trashes their last agency on the first call is lining you up for the same treatment. Ask what they'd do differently as a client, and listen for the pause.

Approving every deck yourself puts a queue in front of your best people. Pick the two kinds of work only you review and hand the rest to a lead.

Ask each client what your work earned them. If they can't say, they'll cut your retainer first when budgets tighten. Put a number in your quarterly report and make that answer easy.