Maintaining your current business is essential in attracting new business. If your clients are happy with your work and your customer service, they will be more likely to refer you or write a positive testimonial about working with your company. You’ll need to simultaneously work to maintain your current clients and attract new ones. It costs five times more to attract a new client than to keep an existing one. The majority of your efforts should go toward maintaining your current clients and leveraging your relationships with them through referrals and testimonials.

Now that you’ve decided how much you will charge and how you will structure it, you will want to professionally present those items to your client in a proposal and then a contract. Each proposal and contract will be unique to each client. You will need to formally...

Estimating your costs, also known as your overhead, helps you set up the framework for what you will charge for your services and how you will structure your business. It’s important to understand what kind of income you need to generate each month to cover your overhead. Once you’ve hit this number, the rest will be considered profit. Read on to learn more about calculating your overhead, setting the right rate, and choosing the right pricing strategy to ensure a profit.

Setting up the legal structure of your business is one of the first and most important steps to becoming a functional and profitable business. You will want to put a good deal of thought and consideration into choosing the framework that best fits your business model and desired outcome. In this chapter we break down the pros and cons of the most common legal structures for your business and provide insight into how to make the most of each for various business situations.

If after reading chapter one, you think that you have the right personality and the desire to start your own graphic design business, planning is essential. Poor planning could result in you missing the opportunity to ever start your business or you may start your business just to find that you were unprepared and are unable to continue. In our opening chapter we listed the ABCs of what you will need to get started with your own business. In this chapter we will review how you can be sure you have the right training and experience you need to make it. We will also have advice on how to maintain those skills and improve them as the industry changes and evolves so that you’re not left behind.

In our opening chapter we cover some basic things needed for anyone to start their own graphic design business as well as some necessary personality traits for those looking to be in business for themselves