How can I make my clients take me seriously?

Creative Career Conundrums is a weekly advice column from If You Could Jobs. Each week their selected panel of professionals from the creative industry answers your burning career questions to help you navigate the creative journey.

This week’s question:

“After five years, I’ve found a good standing in the cultural and institutional field. I have steady work, but I’m still only given the ‘small stuff’. I know clients trust my work, but I fear that being a woman and looking young makes them think I’m still not the one to be called for bigger projects and see me as the young do-all as I was when I first started. I feel that I’m at that point that if I start refusing work or impose myself too hard, they’ll quickly switch from finding me ‘young’ to considering me ‘difficult’...

How do I make this transition? And how do I make my clients understand I’m no longer the ‘young designer’ but someone with experience who they can call for big projects?”

Katie Cadwell, co-founder of branding studio Lucky Dip and The NDA Podcast:

You’re at a brilliant crossroads. Five years of experience, reputation and steady work. It’s a compliment that they keep coming back to you. You’ve been so reliable at the small stuff, they’ve mentally filed you as the do-er. So it’s up to you to reframe yourself in their eyes.

The industry I grew up in had a mantra – always overdeliver.

This served a few purposes. Most importantly, to keep clients happy and coming back. Secondly, to widen the client’s horizon to the possibilities in every brief. Expanding the deliverables without being asked often unlocks more work. Thirdly, to demonstrate your creativity. We saw every brief as an opportunity to turn it into something bigger. Something you’d want to share.

This was a time when budgets were bigger, relationships lasted longer, so investing that extra time into pushing the boundaries of the project was worthwhile.

However, in your instance, I think it could be a brilliant way to show clients you’re ready for more. If a brief is focussed on creating a report, show them exciting print techniques to elevate it. Activation ideas to launch the report at an event. Giveaways or merch to launch it. Social posts pulling out key statistics or quotes to drive people to read it. This is just an example, but every brief has the potential to be bigger.

This will take extra work on your part, but it will help change your capabilities in your clients’ eyes. It’s much easier to convince them of your skillset with real examples. Like the old adage, asking for forgiveness rather than permission. You don’t need to wait for them to trust you with bigger projects. You just need to educate them on what you can offer.

In answering your creative career conundrums we realise that some issues need expert support, so we’ve collated a list of additional resources that can support you across things that might arise at work.

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