Play or Download this Episode (Recorded live on 09/22/2012)

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About the Show

This is BizCraft, the podcast about the business side of web design, recorded live almost every two weeks. Your hosts are Carl Smith (@carlsmith) of nGen Works and Gene Crawford (@genecrawford) of UnmatchedStyle.

Episode Overview

This episode was recorded live in front of real people at WebAfternoon in Charlotte on September 22nd. It was streamed as a live video feed via a new “alpha” conference video streaming service conf.ly. It was awesome!

Discussion Topics

We discussed Andy Rutledge’s post about design specialization and how that impacts running a design business.

With design’s disciplinary evolution, the topic of specialists vs. generalists is getting more and more play in the design community. Our digital industry is maturing and niches are being carved out by skilled designers according to both opportunity and apparent need; but sometimes, perhaps, merely because of professed need. What does this mean for our profession? Does this trend toward categorical specialization follow wisdom or whim?

Questions from the kids:

David Conrad | designcommission.com

1) Do you all have any suggestions about what the right mix of administrative vs. production resources is? (Think “one project manager to ever three designers” or whatever). My struggle with a growing firm is that as we grow, I either have to hire out design and get stuck with admin, or staff with admin and take on that overhead.

I realize this is something that is unique to each studio, but I’d love to hear what your thoughts are.

2) Along those same lines, I know you’ve talked about having a business development resource before, but I’m curious if you’ve come across anyone studios who are doing well with having a person dedicated to business development and/or marketing the studio. It seems like a crazy amount of resource costs but (going back to my question above) balancing out the need to “feed the moster” with doing to work is, well, tricky.

Beers from the end of the show

No beers, we both had coffee, it was 11:00 AM, what kind of people do you think we are?

THANK YOU!

Huge thanks to everyone who came out for the live show in Charlotte. The next show is also a live streamed video conference show at ConvergeFL on October 5th. We’ll start off around 1:00 PM Est.

Don’t miss getting your question sent in for the next show too!