30fg Business Podcast For Designers

Employee empowerment can be defined in a number of ways but generally refers to the process of allowing employees to have input and control over their work, and the ability to openly share suggestions and ideas about their work and the organization as a whole. Empowered employees are committed, loyal and conscientious. They are eager to share ideas and can serve as strong ambassadors for their organizations. Greg Grabasch is the principal of UDLA, a group of landscape architects and urban designers who work with communities to help them realize a better environment for living. Despite his amazing growth and success, Greg is an incredibly humble but at the same time totally inspiring guy, who’s journey as a landscape architect offers all of us a lot to think about, no matter what creative field you find yourself in. Greg turns almost every traditional approach not only to design but to doing business aswell, completely on its head. He speaks with a sense of wisdom that is startlingly simple, yet so deeply rele

Nic Brunsdon is a practicing architect and co-founder of a firm called Post, he lectures in architecture at Curtin university, both of these offer him the stability he needs to roll the dice on his entrepreneurial experiments, Spacemarket being the biggest one, a not-for-profit organization of which he is the Director.  In this interview you’ll discover the challenges our guest has given himself in architecture, business and policy making and the entrepreneurial mindset he’s adopted to take them on. While it hasn’t necessarily been a smooth road, Nic has always known it was going to be tough, and that certainly doesn’t stop him. Here is a guy that is not only defining solutions for bigger picture problems but having a real go at taking action on the issues that are important to him and creating opportunities to feed into his business.

  Kristy Haines, our fantastic guest who has been sharing as much as she can to help you get things right for your business right from the startjust kept coming at me with more and more brilliant information to the point that I had to divide her interview into two. This is the second part of that interview and is equally loaded with helpful information and great ideas for helping you get set for success.

If you’re thinking about starting your own freelance practice, or even if you’re already a couple of years in, I highly recommend you tune in to this one. Kristy Haines is a Digital Designer based in Perth. During her time as an employee, Kristy had surrounded herself with successful freelancers and business owners and their influence on her is absolutely tangible. Having just signed up for a mortgage and only four months into full-time freelancing, Kristy was motivated to get things absolutely right and in place before putting so much as a toe in the water of full time self employment. Getting things right from the start is an understatement - Here is a girl who knows what she wants and where she’s going and I look forward with great interest to seeing her grow and continue to expand her network. There was so much great information in this interview, I actually had to divide it into two!   

An introduction to this new podcast series that tackles the business side of running a small creative practice. This includes any of the creative design fields like architecture, graphic design, furniture and lighting design, fashion design and styling, landscape architecture and garden design, photography and projection art and just about everything in between.  The people who I think are going to get the most out of this podcast are those among you who are either just getting started or thinking about getting started, or those that are already up and running and are keen to learn some new tricks along with some really valuable strategies and techniques that can be applied almost immediately to improve the business approach of their practice.    

Chris Nixon is a Perth-based Illustrator and Creative Director. In this interview you’ll learn Chris’s philosophical and practical perspectives on what it is that makes a creative business viable and what separates a business from a hobby. Chris reveals the way he has designed the structure of his business in order to allow him to engage in the different types of creative activities he is passionate about and given him the freedom to move between them as he chooses.

Anya Brock is a successful Sydney-based full-time artist. In this interview we talk about finding that point of convergence between who it is you are as a creative, the value of your skills and capabilities and the market that will part with money to participate in what you're offering. You'll learn how  separating yourself emotionally from your work can actually be really good for business. We also dive into the importance of knowing exactly where you position yourself in the market so you don’t cut yourself off from opportunities to grow and succeed.  

Rikki owns an interdisciplinary practice with a base team of interior and graphic designers that expands and contracts through collaboration with external consultants and suppliers depending on the project. In this interview you’ll find out how you could keep your options open as far as project work goes, by adopting a collaborative approach to doing business. Also how keeping a little bit of distance between you and the details of your work can help to empower your team and give you the opportunity to keep the work coming in. Rikki shares her experience of shifting from being an employee to actually becoming the owner of the business she worked for and walks us step by step through the process she uses in determining, negotiating and clarifying roles in collaborative circumstances.  

Dan is a Melbourne based freelancer with a multidisciplinary approach to design. In this interview,  you’ll have to chance to share in the very real life experiences of our guest, as we explore his recollections of taking the leap from employee to free agent. Dan talks us through, step by step, the two years preceding his move, including the decisions he had to make along the way, his changing mindset, and all the practical things he had in place before he jumped into the abyss of self employment. If you’re sitting on the fence about what to do in your career right now, or have already made up your mind to take control of the reigns of your lifestyle and career, I’m sure you’ll find this peek into someone else’s life, very interesting indeed.

Kerri’s story is a reasonably familiar one, but one that I was really keen to catch because she is right at the beginning of her journey to greatness, its been just two weeks since she left her job. For that very reason, Kerri has barely experienced the ups and downs that many of the rest of you may already have. So far, hers is a tale of bravery through  a number of events in her life and of building the confidence to take on her profession as a full time business. In this interview Kerri talks us through her career changes and how ended up becoming a creative professional, how she managed to negotiate working as a sub-contractor to her employer while still doing small jobs on the side and the events that finally caused her say "enough is enough" and shift all her focus towards Project Artichoke

Emma Williamson and Kieran Wong are a couple, a bold duo who have built a successful architecture and urban design practice from their humble beginnings of just the two of them fresh out of university, through to the team they have alongside them today that has been anywhere from 15 – 20 strong. In this interview Emma explains how building a team is very much a two way street and talks openly about her and Kieran’s ongoing role not only as overseers of the operational aspects of the business but importantly as the cultural custodians of the life of the practice.  

Kat and Jasper are visual projection artists and video jockeys, or "VJs". In this interview you’ll discover some of the real benefits of working with people from outside your business, both for the creative capacity of whatever it is you do in your practice, and also for the long term health, and success of your business, particularly if you’re interested in keeping your business structure compact. Kat and Jasper also share their experiences of working collaboratively with friends and how they get around the ever awkward issue of money and take you step by step through one of their own successful projects to show some of the amazing things that can happen when you put yourself out there and make the effort to reach out to others and build positive genuine relationships and supportive network of others around you.