November 15, 2023
Our Story
#100 Raw Kris: Welcome to the Design and Prosper podcast.
We cannot quite believe it, but this is episode 100.
#100 Raw Don: That is so exciting. We are so excited to be here. And we thought, what better time than to reflect on our journey from how we started our careers, right up until now.
#100 Raw Kris: So grab a cuppa, get cozy, or pop on your running shoes because we know a lot of you like to do that When you’re spending time with us, however, you like to spend time with us and let’s chat
#100 Raw Don: Let’s do it.
#100 Raw Kris: Hey everybody
#100 Raw Don: Hello. Hello.
#100 Raw Kris: Wow we are so grateful to our community a hundred episodes Like without you there would be no podcast
#100 Raw Don: And we certainly wouldn’t be releasing episodes if we only had three people listening, like, thanks mums.
#100 Raw Kris: I think they’ve even stopped listening.
#100 Raw Don: Kris’s mum and dad. Ha ha ha ha. Thanks guys.
#100 Raw Kris: So? Let’s see how this conversation goes. We’re just winging it.
#100 Raw Don: We have no notes, people. We just thought, let’s just have a chat. Let’s get to know Kris and Don. If you are new to Design and Prosper and new to this podcast, then this is perfect timing to get to know us a little bit and to, yeah, just have a chat about where we’ve been.
#100 Raw Kris: So we do have just a very short list of points to cover just to prompt us.
So the first thing, like I’m going to ask Don, let us know, tell us about your journey into the graphic design world. How did it happen? Tell us about your journey into the graphic design
#100 Raw Don: It wasn’t planned, to be completely honest.
I was on an arts pathway and then a brand new course at the University of Newcastle became available and it was a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design. And I knew that I’d always do something along those lines, something to do with being arty and crafty, as my brother would say.
He’d say, “You’ve always got your coloring in pencils and your scissors. What are you going to create today?” So it was in the blood. But I really didn’t understand or know what graphic design was when I embarked on this journey. It just sounded really, really exciting and From my mum’s perspective, she felt that that was a nicer pathway in terms of financial reward.
She was like, Hmm, being an artist. It’s a little bit unknown, but go and be a graphic designer that feels like there’s a job in it. That’s a whole other conversation because being an artist is a real job. But back in the day, my mum didn’t think that being an artist was a good option. But she could get her head around a graphic designer. So she encouraged me a lot to take the pathway and honestly, I’m glad she did. For a lot of reasons, it was phenomenal. I did my degree. Then I went to Sydney and I was in the advertising industry. Straight out of university down into one of the top four, uh, direct mail agencies in Sydney and, had a ball there and then moved over to another advertising agency before realizing my calling was more design, less advertising, more design, but still highly conceptual.
I think that’s where. I’m a really conceptual designer and I think that’s where it was born because I was in the ad world. And, and that’s, you had to be conceptual in the ad world. And so going into my own design business in around about 1999 and I’ve had my own design business since then, really.
And parallel to that, dipping into the education world as well as a lecturer at University of Newcastle and also Avondale University. So yeah, Kris and I worked together there. Well Kris and I met many years ago when I was teaching Kris at the University of Newcastle. That was awesome. We met, she was a student, I was lecturing, and I was brought in to the University of Newcastle as a bit of a, a dose of reality.
I think it was referred to at one point, where I was in the industry and I’d come in and, and I was working with the final year students. So Kris was doing an honours year, and is that right Kris? You were doing an honours degree?
#100 Raw Kris: yeah it was.
#100 Raw Don: And I came in, met Kris and had an instant mutual like and respect. It was just instant. It was like, okay, you’re a cool human. I love what you do. Her and her really close friend, Suzanna. I’ll let Kris tell her story, what’s your journey into this beautiful field that we’re in?
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah, it’s similar actually, because I was good at art and good at the, good at the creative stuff. And I was really lost and confused actually at the end of my high schooling.
I was like, what am I going to do? I thought I might do communications, but I didn’t really want to be a journalist. And I, I didn’t really want to get into say marketing because that was another stream. And then there was this graphic design thing and I was like, well, what’s that? I don’t know. What is this thing? It wasn’t really clear in the literature. It wasn’t clear.
#100 Raw Don: It wasn’t clear. to us anyway, way back then.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah. So that’s a bit sad, obviously it wasn’t a graphic designer working on the promotional literature for the graphic design degree. I went to an open thing and I was still really fuzzy on what it was.
What is this thing? And I’ve got to say, even my whole first year, I was still confused about what it was because it was so conceptual. Like it was just all these assignments that weren’t really client projects. It was just all about. Working on your conceptual brain, your conceptual thinking, and they were really left to feel kind of things.
And I was like, what is this thing? I was enjoying it, but I just didn’t really know what it was.
#100 Raw Don: and I going to have a career out of this fun and games? Yeah, yeah.
#100 Raw Kris: There was lots of typography play and that sort of thing, but it wasn’t like for logos, for example, it was just like expressing different emotions that I’m trying to think of some of the first year assignments, but it was very, very full on.
I remember it was full on. My parents would joke and say, what are you studying? Are you studying medicine or something? Because I was just like up all night doing the thing but I did I was a bit of a last minute artist always have been all throughout my high school years and it’s something that I’ve had to work on over the years
And I put a lot of pressure on myself and I really push things to the next level.
So I was doing that all throughout my my first year of uni and it was a four year degree and then I think in the second year and the third year things started to fall Into place a little bit. We were actually doing some things. I was like, oh, oh we did we did some seed packaging And I was like, oh, I understand what that is Yep And then and then I could start to explain it to other people like nobody understood and so my grandparents would visit and I’d be Like my grandparents are called Chickie and Bobby.
That’s their names. I’d say Chickie ’It’s the the cereal box. A graphic designer does that. It’s the cereal box. Somebody has to put those graphics on the box. That’s me. I’m doing that sort of thing. That’s what I’m learning’. So I had to start to learn how to articulate it to other people and talk about branding and logos.
We didn’t use the word branding back then. It was not used
#100 Raw Don: it wasn’t, no.
#100 Raw Kris: only brand would be the ones that they put on animals in a farmyard. Yeah.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah, it was definitely not used. Yeah, yeah. No, not until
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah, it wasn’t until the noughties, around then.
#100 Raw Don: yes the noughties. I think it became a bit of a buzzword.
#100 Raw Kris: Anyway, so, it was a stressful four years of my life. Very full on, very intense. I worked really hard. I believe I came out of it a really good designer. But still,
#100 Raw Don: I was there at the end, and I loved seeing you flourish in that final year, and you were a great designer.
Which is a beautiful segue into, the reason that you had the skill set to start in the industry straight away on your own and you did that. And it’s an incredible, incredible thing that you did. It was so courageous and brave. And , before we go on to our first businesses, because I guess that’s the segue that we were just about to lean into. But before we do that, I want to circle back to what Kris said about our degree being really, really conceptual.
I am forever grateful for that. We had ad men as our lecturers. Literally.
#100 Raw Kris: They were like mad men.
#100 Raw Don: Like mad men, ad
#100 Raw Kris: the TV show we’re talking about.
#100 Raw Don: We not talking about their private lives and things like that, but they were advertising gurus, I guess. And they came from Melbourne and it was a brand new course. It was brand new for our students and it was brand new for the lecturers as well.
We were literally in demountable buildings.
#100 Raw Kris: I was in the fancy building.
#100 Raw Don: yes, I’m a bit ahead of Kris, um, little bit older so, we were in the demountable buildings. In winter, it was so cold it was freezing. I remember I would go and I would get whatever task we had to do that day and I’ll go and sit in my car because it was warmer in my car than in the building.
It was crazy and I’d work, I’d be madly working in my car and then I’d run it in and I’d show my lecturer and I’d get some feedback and then I’d go back to my car, with my gloves on and my beanie and, and it was freezing.
But what I want to say is I’m so grateful for those lecturers because they really taught us about divergent research. They really fostered a love of really high level conceptual thinking. And I think that became one of my superpowers and Kris’s superpowers equally because we were taught in the same institution, we were taught the same respect for high level creative conceptual thinking and, and strategies around how to do that.
So I’m so grateful because I know I’ve seen first hand and I’ve been told by others that a lot of institutions skip that. They just didn’t have access to our great like advertising guru lecturers who, well, that’s their whole career. They bought in the philosophies of their whole career into their teaching.
And for me personally, I can say that was one of the biggest gifts I think that I was given in my academic career because the academic was there. Sure, that was there, but, but it was that really it was a philosophy. Around creative thought that I am so grateful to have received, to be on the receiving end of that. So, so grateful for that.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah, it was a gift, and it’s actually something that you can have access to as well, because we actually share a lot of the creative methodology that is proven to work. Like, honestly, we have used it. Time and time again, and our students do too, we share that in the academy.
So, it’s across two modules. It’s like really big, juicy, meaty, gorgeous, creative, thought and also how to bring it back to the brief. That was something that was always drilled into, you gotta make it make sense,
#100 Raw Don: It’s gotta be objective and, and we literally, that was drilled into us all the time.
Where’s your objectivity? You can’t be subjective in this. There is a brief, you need to meet it and otherwise you don’t get paid and otherwise the client won’t meet their objectives if you are not objective around their, their brief. So. Again, that’s another gift, wasn’t it, Kris? That gift of knowing that. For all the failings, being in Demountable Buildings, and there were a lot of failings around the time I studied, certainly around my alumni year, but there were also some really, really great things that happened and really grateful for, and they are the things that Kris and I have really shone a spotlight on in our own careers and we’ve enhanced and highlighted for all of our students as well because they are the skills that really make sure that you hit the mark every single time.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah. And I think that they are the really important things that they really instilled in me as well was to step out of myself and put myself in somebody else’s shoes. That was always talked about and I think that that’s why I liked graphic design so much. Because I was thinking about maybe going to a fine art and there was a few different careers I was thinking about like I’m a musician as well so I was half thinking of going to the conservatorium, it was just really hard for me to land and when I landed in graphic design it worked for me because I hadn’t quite figured out my own personal voice, I guess, in terms of being an artist, in terms of having my own distinctive aesthetic and so it was really exciting for me to be able to step into somebody else’s shoes and create something that they needed rather than something that was a pure expression of me.
And that was something that I always took away as well. And I’m really grateful to that. My final year had a very big real world component, which is where I met Don, because she was my lecturer. And we worked on real projects and so it was like from brief through to completion right through to production and it was really exciting and that’s what lit a fire in my belly for going out to start my own business because I was working with these people that were like clients and I really just loved the whole thing like from start to finish in that way so,
#100 Raw Don: yeah, yeah. You were built for business. You, you had that whole left and right brain, gift that not everybody has. And, and, it was there, it was there for you. You were, you were able to look at it from a business perspective as well as a creative perspective. And, and often, creatives need to go through that process somewhere else before they, They come back to themselves and back to their own business.
But you’re blessed with that left and right brain thing. So it was like, you’re going to succeed. You’re going to land on your feet no matter what after the university degree. So,
#100 Raw Kris: Well, luckily I landed with a really good business partner who was also a graduate with me and she was really, I aligned with her because I was like, gosh, she’s doing some good work. We worked on some projects together in our final year and it was just meant to be. But where I lacked in business strength was being strong, actually being, strong and standing up for myself and not being a total people pleaser.
#100 Raw Don: And also not working for free.
#100 Raw Kris: Yes, and also being very perfectionistic because I mentioned that before. I really pushed every assignment to the next level. level. And so I started to do that with clients as well. So I was lucky enough to, learn that lesson because I needed to step into that CEO role of getting other people to do stuff, allowing other people to take the reins.
And that’s still an ongoing journey for me, but that’s just a little side note, that you might have as part of your personality as well. It’s like, there’s lots of aspects to being a CEO. It’s not just being open to the left and right side of the brain stuff.
#100 Raw Don: And it can be taught. That stuff can be taught. Some people have a natural ability to do that. And Kris and I are very similar in that way. But it, it can be taught if you don’t have that.
It’s, it’s actually okay. But yeah, it’s, it is interesting. You did have a really strong business partner out, out of the gate. I remember you two girls would do, markets and things during your final year at uni and maybe in the first year of business as well. And I was always there front and centre purchasing the market goods that these girls had designed.
I was just so, so impressed and so proud of them. And they were just, an entrepreneur can see an entrepreneur, right? And it was just like, you were there, there you were, doing wonderful things from the get go.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah, I did have a little market stall. I always forget about it. You always remind me of my little market stalls and things. We did like greeting cards and Christmas decorations. It was at that time of year. Like it was, it was fun. But it was our first foray into like a baby business.
#100 Raw Don: It was a business. And you did it really well. And it gave you the courage and the confidence to move forward. It’s very, very similar to how our, my first business started as well, we started with creating stationery and beautiful bookmarks and things like that and selling them and that kind of thing.
And I had two beautiful business partners who are now my dearest friends. And we have been together this whole journey, and when we first started though, I was not in a financial position to be all in. So I helped with the setting up of the business and also, going and traveling to get new clients and things like that.
And then I said, okay, I’ll be back as soon as I can, because we had just bought a house and things like that. So we, we just weren’t at that time where I could throw it caution to the wind and start my own business.
#100 Raw Kris: How many years were you in Sydney working for, Don, after your degree?
#100 Raw Don: So, I started my business in 99 and my degree, I had a gap year. My husband, my then, my then boyfriend, my husband and I had a year off in the middle. So I think I graduated in 94. I was working in 90, 94. So five years in, in Sydney and then, yeah, then up to back, back home. And, and then I was like, so two years, the girls were in the business for two years and were constantly checking in and I’m like, I’m in, I’m ready, I’m coming back, we’re getting married and I’m going to be in town and it, and it’s time.
So, it was really, really exciting times to, to dive into business. But it’s interesting that both of our businesses started with little. Markets and stationery. Yeah, it’s like, yeah, I found one of the bookmarks the other day. We did die cuts. We did these fancy die cuts and things. It was lots of fun.
#100 Raw Kris: Lots of fun. Yeah. Oh gosh. And I think that a lot of designers will probably relate to that as well who are listening that want to do wedding stationery. Wanting to do invitations and all those sorts of things. That is a beautiful aspect of design. Paper is so beautiful.
#100 Raw Don: Oh my gosh. Yeah, just the tactility of it. And we sourced the most beautiful paper and the most beautiful stock for our things. And it was just so much fun. Loved it.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah. So, what were you excited about starting your business? Why did you not want to work for somebody else anymore?
#100 Raw Don: Yeah. Essentially, we were moving back to our hometown.
#100 Raw Kris: Were you fed up? Fed up with Sydney?
#100 Raw Don: it was a bit, a little bit cray cray. It was just full on busy, busy, busy, busy. And I was working very long hours and, it was rewarding. I had. A really phenomenal boss and a really great company that I was working for and they were really respectful and they let me commute. In the end, I was commuting and then working from home as well and transitioned into working from home and that enabled me to then get into the business with the girls,
#100 Raw Kris: Wow, that’s pretty cutting edge back then, like 98, 99, working from home.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah. At that stage, I was the creative director, so I was really, I was accountable. I made sure that I met all my deadlines. I made sure that there wasn’t any squeaky parts so that I could work from home and I was respected to do that. And the relationship with my, my boss back then, we’re now really close friends.
We have a relationship that is deep like family. And I think that’s probably why I got to work from home way back then. Because we actually really loved each other and liked each other. And our families were really close in, in the end. I mean it took time. We did know each other from a bar of soap when I first started working there.
But it was it was the desire to do what I was doing for my boss in Sydney to do for myself and my friends in my hometown. So we had that same vision and it was just time.
It just felt right. It was a feeling. It was like, okay, we can make this level of money, do this quality of work, and Reap all the rewards, and that seemed to be really exciting and it, and it, and really, it was just, it was time, it was
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah. And was it different kind of work that you were doing as well? So what kind of work were you doing in Sydney? Like, what kind of agencies were you working for?
#100 Raw Don: I was in the advertising industry for the first five years of my career and we’d had design projects within that, of course clients had advertising needs and they had design needs and so they would come to us for a full service, we were a full service agency with a very big bend towards advertising because that was the The, the main crux of the business that I was working in.
However, I get to do these design projects and the design projects is where I really, really came alive. It was like, I love designing. I love the branding. I love doing the brands. I love it from the ground up. And, and so. It when we were in, when I moved to back to my hometown and we started our business.
It was a design business with a little bit of advertising. Yeah. So it was the other skew, and I really was really excited by that as
#100 Raw Kris: That really that would have been a driving force as well. It’s like, ah, I can do more design, more logos.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah. Yeah,
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah, yeah, I relate to that as well. I was always a little bit scared of the advertising industry for some reason. I I think because I put so much pressure on myself, I thought it would be extra pressure and that I would end up having a heart attack at 25 or something.
But it was a little bit of a push from our degree to go into that advertising world because there was a little bit of that an emphasis on advertising within our design degree.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah, there was, and there was this misconception that there was more, it was more of a career path and definitely would result in income if you went down the advertising pathway versus the design path pathway, that there was less money in design and there was more money in advertising.
That was the misconception and, I’d certainly discovered, yes, there’s, there was so much money in advertising back in the early 90s, mid 90s, so much money, but there was equally as much money in design. People were really spending money on their brands and, and their packaging and all of those things.
So it was, it was really like, okay, we could, we could do either here that there’s not one way is a better pathway.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah, yeah. We called it Corporate Identity.
#100 Raw Don: Corporate Identity. Thank you. I’ve been wracking my brains. All I had in my head was identity and I’m like, there’s more to it. There’s more to it.
#100 Raw Kris:Which wasn’t really relevant for all businesses. Not everybody wants to be corporate. It didn’t make sense.
#100 Raw Don: Didn’t make sense. Branding’s much better.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah,
#100 Raw Don: So Kris that was my foray into business you’ve skirted around where you started with your business.
So what was your focus in your business?
#100 Raw Kris: Yes, so it was definitely branding. Like we positioned ourselves as the branding specialists. We, I think we had a tagline like Australia’s leading regional. Design studio, branding studio or something like that. Yeah, yeah, really putting it out there.
And we really loved print. We just loved, loved, loved all the aspects of print and starting from the ground up with a company. And as I said before, we, had the, the privilege of working with real clients in our final year. And my business partner at the time, Suzanna and I worked together as students on those projects and we just really, worked so well together.
It’s funny, we were business partners first and friends second. And we just, it was just this really great synergy of how we came up with concepts together. Our work was stronger together. Individually we did well, but together we’re really strong. Yeah, and I love, I realized that throughout my career I actually haven’t worked anywhere else, except for at a local supermarket when I was a teenager.
I’ve never worked for anybody. I don’t count lecturing at uni in that because we had such autonomy and we had to follow a curriculum, but we were really we were very instrumental in even creating that curriculum.
#100 Raw Don: It was different for me. I was the head of design and I was more accountable to the institution on behalf of Kris and I. So I count that as a place of employment.
#100 Raw Kris: Not a bad boss situation, but a boss situation.
#100 Raw Don: a boss situation, whereas Kris was It was able just to come to me and I was able to take it to the powers that be. So, yeah, that autonomy. Float in and float out. It was lovely. I had envy occasionally of that. But at the end of the day I had a lot of autonomy too. It was really, really beautiful.
But, yeah, it was a boss situation for me.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah, I remember when working for Avondale University. I did work really hard on the deliverables and the curriculum and making sure that it was going to be really top notch. And I always thought, what would I have wanted to have learnt?
And I was teaching those early years. So, the first years, straight into uni.
It’s like Graphic Design 101 in terms of everything, software, the whole thing. And As many of you may know now with a lot of educational institutions, it’s getting streamlined and, yeah, squished and squished. It’s too fast.
Like, we had a little bit more breathing space originally, where we could really dive into concepts and that was one of the frustrations while we left because it was just like, okay, take that 14 week curriculum and now squish it into 10 or, you know, it was four hours per week delivery. Let’s make it two, but still get the same results. So that was, that was one of the frustrations.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah.
#100 Raw Kris: But if I just go right, right back when I was first starting my business in 1999 as well as when I started my business straight out of uni with my my business partner Suzanna and we were both tutoring at uni as well.
And there was these jobs that came up at the uni in the design department and we thought what a laugh. Let’s go for them.
#100 Raw Don: wow!
#100 Raw Kris: Like seriously. That’s what we were thinking. Yeah. And we both got the job, right? Two different, not departments, but two different streams. So I was absolutely shitting myself because I was working under this lecturer who I respected so much.
She was such a force. And I was tutoring concepts of design. It was like very conceptual and very sort of high end kind of level thinking. And… She really believed in me. And so I had to step into like, there was so many stepping stones along the way where I had imposter syndrome from going into business, from doing that tutoring work to even when I started lecturing with Donna, because when I started even lecturing and taking on my full subjects, they were my, and I, I was in charge of delivering. I was like 26, 27 or something, like it was just crazy. And so I had to really step into that. Okay, I’ve got this. I know what I’m talking about.
#100 Raw Don: you did.
#100 Raw Kris: Well I did, but I didn’t know it at the time. But when I first started tutoring, I was fresh, like out of, like I would have been I guess 21, 22. And that was quite intimidating, but, in the end both of us could have gotten that contract renewed, but we decided we were, needed to go full into our business to really make it happen because we thought we’re going to give it 12 months.
Let’s see what happens. If after 12 months, it’s not where we want it to be, I’m going to get a job in Sydney, cause we’re based in Newcastle, Australia and Sydney is about two hours away. So we thought, well, that we’ll give it 12 months. See what happens.
#100 Raw Don: Many designers went to Sydney or Melbourne at the time. Yeah,
#100 Raw Kris: So I did tutoring for six months, but it wasn’t like a full, full time thing. It was just like supplemental income as we were building up our business. And then it was like, all right, We’ve got to give this last six months of our test, everything we’ve got.
And then we lasted for 10 years and we stopped not because of financial reasons.
It was like life changes, like life reasons, like when we finished our. Our final year of business, I was working four day a week, two days from home. We’d synced everything, we, we’d had a VPN, like a virtual private network, do people still have VPNs? I think they do.
#100 Raw Don: I think so.
#100 Raw Kris: We had a really clever employee who set that all up for us actually. So we were able to sync all our files and this is before cloud storage and all that sort of thing. And so our final year was our most successful year. So it was really interesting to shut the door on that.
But there was other things happening in our lives behind the scenes that it was time for a change.
And my business partner, Suzanna, she will say this all day long, she’s got like a 10 year capacity for something and it’s like shift, pivot into something. And I know that happened with Don’s business partners as well. One is a beautiful artist. One is a landscape designer now, like it’s shifts and pivots. We can move into different things if that’s what life is calling.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah,
#100 Raw Don: And I think that now especially, we don’t have to be something for three, four decades and we don’t have to start somewhere and finish somewhere at the end of our career. And I think with my business partners they left to have babies.
#100 Raw Kris: That’s what happened with me as well.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah. It was. It was just time, like it was time for me to leave Sydney and time to start the business or join the business it had already started. And then time then for the girls to go and have their next chapter.
I kept going, but it was time for me to amp up my lecturing. So I had the lecturing focus and I have literally been working from home since 2003.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah.
#100 Raw Don: And working with my business partners from home. So working from home for me has been a massive part of my life and, and choice.
And when having my own babies and things like that, that took a long time, it was a bit of a journey for me. So it was, it was just a decision, a choice that I was making all the time to just have this lifestyle.
My business, my way. And I’ve been doing that for literally two decades going, no, this is how I want to run a business. And I, and just because we don’t have a boardroom anymore, doesn’t mean I’ve lost half my brain matter. I’m still operating a business and things like that. Because back then, back in the early 2000s, it was almost expected you had bricks and mortar. It was expected you had a boardroom and a reception desk and somebody there to greet your clients and things like that. So I was pushing against that to run my business my way way back then, but now it’s the norm. Now it’s like, wow, this is great. This is, everybody’s realizing the power of having that level of flexibility and autonomy and how productive people can be if they are working to the beat of their own drum, and they’ve got their goals and they’re meeting their KPIs and they’re doing all of those things, but they have the flexibility to have a balanced life as well.So I’m excited to have been a part of the first wave of that. Yeah.
#100 Raw Kris: I feel like I was a part of it as well. Because what happened was in our final year, we had big plans, right? We had big, big plans to scale. And when it, when I discovered I was pregnant, my business partner was like, I think we should wrap up the business. And I was shocked. I was
#100 Raw Don: like, What? What What do you mean? We’re scaling!
#100 Raw Kris: And then it was a time to start reflecting and figuring out what we actually wanted out of life, the kind of life balance we wanted. I was lecturing at the time too. So I was doing my business, but I was also doing some lecturing as well. And it was like, I needed to check in and go, is that what I want?Do I want to just keep ramping things up? Do I want to give this much as myself? Do I want to be only working, say, 10 hours a week over the next chapter of my life? And what would that look like? And both of us came to decision that, yeah, it’s best to close the business. So, what I planned to do was keep on lecturing, do be more of a solopreneur, take on love projects that really lit me up and I was in a position to be able to do that. So that was exciting because I had enough contacts and I had enough people who knew me as a designer to be able to have enough work to live that balanced lifestyle. Because I think there is a little bit of a,
There’s a lot of communication in the world, like about scaling and scaling and scaling, but what if you don’t want to?
What does success actually look like for you? And when my business partner and I sat down and looked at what success meant for us, it wasn’t scaling anymore. We had a really big plan. We’d been working with the business coach for the past like two or three years and we knew exactly how we’re going to get there and how we’re going to do it, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t part of our dream anymore.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah. So it was like, okay, and honoring that/
#100 Raw Kris: I was resistant. I was.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah. Wow. Wow. The courage it would have taken to actually acknowledge and accept that that vision was no longer part of your dreams, that’s, that gives me goosebumps thinking about it. I have a, equally goose bumpy moment. We were similarly going to scale and merge with another business.
And on the 11th hour, it was so obvious, so obvious to me that it was not going to be a fit, and it was not going to be right, and it was not my dream at all as well. And I think that’s the thing that Kris and I want to teach when we coach and teach inside the Academy. is that it really is your business, your way.
And those foundational steps, really understanding who you are in business and what you want from business is so crucial because it’s that information that gives you insight into what you’re willing to do and what you’re willing to not do in, in business. And what you’re willing to walk away from, in Kris’s case and in my case, we literally walked away from that next step to have the level of success that we wanted. And we wanted, for me personally, I wanted autonomy. I wanted to travel. My husband and I are massive travellers, love the world, travel. It was a big part of my life back then, since kids, it’s been less so, but we’re getting back around to it.
But it was, it was really important to be able to have that balance and to be able to financially be successful. have the balance and work on projects that we’re fulfilling. think Kris, yours is quite similar. It was like, no, baby comes first. This is what’s, this is, this is gonna be for me right now.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah. And I’d been working pretty hard, like for, pretty consistently. I worked hard all throughout my high school years, throughout my degree, I really pushed it, and then my business, and it was starting to fall into balance, yes, it actually was the most balanced that I ever was in that final year, and that’s why it was hard to let go of, but I still wanted more, I still wanted to be a really good mum, and focus on that. And I wanted that to be my priority for a bit, and I just loved the idea, but I knew I didn’t have to shut the door completely, but I just have to say, like, You did travel with a baby, Donna Pinter,
#100 Raw Don: I travelled the world with babies
#100 Raw Kris: I just think it’s so cool.
#100 Raw Don: Yes, I figured I’m going to be changing dirty nappies and feeding this child, at home in my lounge room. I might as well do it under the Eiffel Tower. What’s the difference? So it was lots of fun to travel with a baby.
#100 Raw Kris: I think It’s actually harder to travel when your kids have all these extracurriculars andall these, afternoon commitments
#100 Raw Don: Exactly. That’s what’s been happening. That’s why we’ve been stagnant. Our kids have got a more of a social life and more commitment than we’ve ever have had. so it was easy to travel when they’re babies and all, all they need to do is be loved and be fed. Yeah.
#100 Raw Kris: So that brought us to a good decade also for both of us of working as solopreneurs. We were also lecturing all throughout that time. So we’re in each other’s pockets. All that time. And then we always talked about this idea of creating the big textbook of how to run a design business.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah,
#100 Raw Kris: We were going to create a manual.
#100 Raw Don: a textbook.
#100 Raw Kris: We thought it might be some sort of ring binder situation.
#100 Raw Don: There’d be multiples.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah. It would be a series. And you get them sent to you, like as they, as they’re released. Now it’s all digital. You get your modules in a different way. So,
#100 Raw Don: The vision, Kris. We used to have coffees and have chats, and especially when we were working together at the university, we would, we would, it would just come so easily, what, what was needed, and we’d have these conversations and get all excited about it, and it wasn’t until Really, uh, we, we launched our business during Covid.
#100 Raw Kris: just before COVID
#100 Raw Don: Days before. And it was like, Hmm, okay, what are we doing? Yeah, it was tricky launching a business
#100 Raw Kris: Launching the business during that time. Yeah. And. So we’ve been doing this we actually had our official birthday in July because that’s when we really kicked off, started on socials, but we were doing planning before that. Yeah, we were doing Client work together. We actually started collaborating together probably at the end of 2018, , 2019. Yeah. We’re collaborating together sometimes just outsourcing to each other, like different parts of the project and then sometimes working on complete projects together. I really love collaboration when it comes to business.
Obviously I love having a business partner and I think that that’s a something. I don’t like having a boss. I don’t like the idea of having a boss, but I love the idea of having a business partner. So, yeah, I was really excited to be able to work with Don on projects. And then we just kept talking about this idea and then Design and Prosper was born.
And so we’ve been doing that for, is it three years now? Or is it four years or three years? Oh gosh, it’s just so confusing. But this business has been, uh, it’s been a challenge. It really has. Like, if we’re really honest with everybody, it is this business model has been harder than doing a graphic design business model.
#100 Raw Don: So much harder.
#100 Raw Kris: So much.
#100 Raw Don: What we teach you in Design and Prosper Academy, and in one to one coaching, we could do that with our eyes closed. We can, we can run design businesses, we can run design projects, we’ve, we are designers who are in business, and we’ve got that. But running an education platform, delivered in a digital portal, Yeah. That’s a whole new world.
#100 Raw Kris: Creating an audience like that. Yeah. It’s really different to getting design clients. It’s justa whole new world. And yeah, gosh, it’s, it’s had its ups and downs, you know, we’ve had other things going on. Like, there’s been different. Health challenges and mental health challenges.
I’ve personally faced, my fair share of things like that over the last few years and challenges with my daughter and just all sorts of things like I’m solo parenting and that’s challenging and yeah, it’s, it’s been hard, but there’s something we are so passionate about.
This This business, the stuff that we have to offer, the modules in the academy. We just want to shout it from the rooftops. We want all designers to have access to it. It’s just like, we want to keep on going because of that. But if in the future you see, Oh, Kris and Donna, like doing a design studio again, you’ll know why, right?
#100 Raw Don: Because that’s easy. That’s easy for us.
#100 Raw Kris: Yes. Which might be sounding crazy to you at the moment because you might not be finding your design business easy.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I, and we get it. We get it because we’re not finding this um, online platform easy with the launch models and this model and that model. It’s a lot.
#100 Raw Kris: It does our head in
#100 Raw Don: It does our head in It really, does. It really really does. And that’s full transparency that this has not come naturally to Kris and I. The teaching has. We love the podcast. Because it’s just organic and chatting and sharing knowledge, which is really great, but marketing an online education platform. It’s a real head strain.
#100 Raw Kris: it’s a doozy and we’ve had our highs and lows with it. Truth be told. So,we’re always implementing changes. We’re always reassessing, looking at how to make it work for us. And we are very for the most part, really strict about how many days we work per week and all that sort of thing, whichwe think you should be as well because I tell you, if you decide you’re going to work seven days per week, you will fill them. If you decide you’re going to work four days per week, you will be efficient and you will fill those days too, but it’s absolutely doable.
So yeah, we as always, we love our community. We actually do need your support any way you can support us.
#100 Raw Don: absolutely
#100 Raw Kris: We’d love you to come on board because we actually do really want to help you. We want to help you so much cause we’re so passionate about it. We’re so passionate about designers thriving in business and not doing the hard way. .
#100 Raw Don: Yeah, and the community that we’ve built over this time, seriously the most divine people. And whenever Kris and I have a down week we’ll get some feedback where we have made a significant impact on somebody’s world, where they have really transformed their lives and their businesses. And we go, that’s right.
#100 Raw Kris: That happened this morning, actually. It was just so amazing in the Q& A session that we have. We have, uh, weekly Q& A sessions. And… They’re just incredible and the conversation is so rich and diverse. And we had one of those moments this morning where we found out that something that we’d had suggested had worked,
#100 Raw Don: had worked five times over.
#100 Raw Kris: And it was just so great to go, thank goodness. Thank goodness that this has changed for you, beautiful human, that you can now go into the end of the year with confidence and and not be feeling in lack and yeah, it’s just we want, we want designers to make money. We want you to make the money that you want to make. Whatever that number is for you. And we want you to be able to work the number of hours that you wish to work.
#100 Raw Don: It’s your business, your way. And we don’t say that to be like buzzwordy about it. We genuinely mean it. And we have been running our businesses our way literally since the early 2000s.
And so when we say that, we mean that. We’ve actually made hard decisions, like really hard decisions to, to pivot at the 11th hour where. There were going to be people disappointed, but, but it, it needed the, the hard, hard decision needed to be made to stay on that path or, that Kris was about to have a baby and that it was hard to walk away from a business that on paper was ticking all the boxes.
Her yearning wasn’t there as much as it was for her baby girl. And, and so it’s incredible that you’ll make hard decisions, but you will be making decisions that support the way you want to live your life.
That, that’s the message, like, that’s the key takeaway, that what we teach allows you to do that.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah, we’ll show you how to do it.
#100 Raw Don: That’s the thing, because we’ve been doing it, we’ve been, we can walk the talk. We’ve made hard decisions, we’ve done hard things, and we’re here to tell the stories about it, and talk about the joy of running a business your way, Yeah. So if you want all the operational systems, all the, just so many templates and so many resources. To make your business exactly what you want to be. And the tools to understand how it’s possible to make your business work in the way that you want it to work.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah, come and join us. Come and join the Academy. Work with us one to one. We love working with you in either of those capacities. They’re very different, they’re both really beneficial.
I know personally that I love one to one coaching for me personally and Don does too. We just love having a coach I get a little bit private about sharing things in a group, for some things some aspects, but then other other times I’m like, I love this group I just want to share everything that’s happening and then you really bounce off each other and feed off each other.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah. It’s so beautiful and uplifting
But the things that we don’t want to share might be things like, Our financial forecast. And for you as a designer, there might be things like that, that you want, want us to dive into the nitty gritty of, and, and really all highly conceptual things for your business that you wanna keep under wraps because you, you wanna, unpack a lead magnet that you are, you don’t really wanna share with the greater design community as a whole.
You wanna keep it under wraps until you’ve launched it and you’re the first one to have done it. So there are. Definitely advantages of that one to one journey and it’s an elevated touch point with Kris and I as well. . You get to actually have access to us for One hour, twice a month, one to one, we really focus in on what’s happening in your business
as well as, you have complete access, keys to the castle, of the academy modules. Because we want our one to ones to have access to every template, every process, every training video, everything, so that we then can go, Uh huh. You need that thing, and, and we’ll get it to you. And also our one to ones get unlimited access to us via voice messaging as well. Which is really important.
#100 Raw Kris: You’ll be able to check in and go is this right? This just happened. What do I do?
#100 Raw Don: Yes. I love it. I love it. Often when we go into Voxer and it’s our one to one peeps in there and when the Voxer office hours are open we’ll get a little alert and it’ll be, this just happened.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. This just happened. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it’s like, that’s what it’s for. It’s like, this thing just happened. How do I deal with that?
#100 Raw Kris: What do I say? How do I respond? What’s the next step? Am I on the right track? Sometimes it’s just validation, like, yeah, you’re amazing. That’s, that’s exactly what you should do.
But then sometimes it’s like, okay, well, we’ve got a perspective to add to this and it’s interesting.
When we’re in our group coaching sessions or when we’re doing one to one there’s some curly things that come up, like there’s some like, Ooh, that’s, that’s a nasty client or that’s, that’s an interesting thing that’s happened in your business.
But there’s very rarely anything that we haven’t seen before. That we haven’t experienced ourselves over the years.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah.
#100 Raw Kris: And in some of those situations we would have changed how we responded.
#100 Raw Don: Oh, one hundred percent. We have made the mistakes, especially early in our careers where we didn’t want to upset anybody. I can certainly speak for myself. We were like, well, we can’t upset the client.
We’ve got to make sure they’re happy. And, our hindsight is your foresight. That, again, we’re not saying that because it’s like, oh, that’s a good thing to say in marketing.
Literally, we’ve got the hindsight. Literally, we’ve had the majority of the experiences and we can stop you from falling. We can stop you from that trip. We, we’ve, we’ve got you.
#100 Raw Kris: So if you want us in your corner, we’re here for you. You can reach out to us via Instagram DMs. Uh, you can email us at team@designandprosper.co. We’ve got an online web form. You can book in an appointment as well. If you go to our work with us page, you can book in a free appointment. We can send you the link as well if you DM
#100 Raw Don: if you DM us. If you just want to have a chat to us to see if we would be a good fit at the end of it.
There’s no obligation. We will just hear you out, tell you how we can add value to your business and then if you go that’s not right for me, it might not be right for you for right now, but it might be in the future, whatever,
#100 Raw Kris: it might not be right for people right now, it might be in the future, whatever, we are cool with that.
It’s like I don’t know the heavens have opened up over these people because they’re all just so incredible and so beautiful And so we’re protective of that space as well. And hopefully that we’re communicating who we are enough will continue to attract those Good fit people, those people that just fit so beautifully into the Design and Prosper family.
#100 Raw Don: It’s a family. It really is. And we’ve got every, everybody’s got everybody’s back. Yeah. Yeah. We that the really rich community tells us that on the daily.
Mm. So that’s it in a nutshell. Well, it was a big one.
#100 Raw Kris: Goodness me, yeah. Not so nutshelly. So maybe you, maybe you found out a little bit more about us today, and our journey, and, gosh. 100 podcasts. It has not been hard to come up with content for 100 podcast episodes. It’s like the ideas keep on coming. We love it when you give us ideas for podcast episodes and actually that’s what happens most of the time. It’s a conversation we’ve had with a designer. We also have our little form on our website, on our podcast page, it’s https://www.designandprosper.co/podcast. You can fill in and have your question answered as well on the podcast, but yeah, keep the suggestions coming. We love having these conversations. We love helping to elevate you and we love working with you.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah. Bring it on.
#100 Raw Kris: Another hundred.
#100 Raw Don: Another hundred. Let’s do it. I think we’ve got enough topics in our spreadsheet, haven’t we already? Without even any of the organic questions.
#100 Raw Kris: Yes, We got you covered. And we might even do some again, because some of them are worth revisiting. Yeah.
#100 Raw Don: Well that came up in the Academy Q&A again today, didn’t it? A question was asked and the person said, I don’t know whether you’ve, you’ve probably said this and I can’t remember and we said, look, on repeat is great because the time that you hear it is the time you’re meant to hear it and you might not have been ready to hear it five episodes ago or 50 episodes ago if we do a repeat from way back then. Usually the community tells us.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah. And for our beautiful new listeners, if you’re new around here I know what it’s like to stumble across a new podcast and they’ve got this back catalogue and it’s like a bit overwhelming to have to revisit them all. So we’re going to make sure that we keep bringing out episodes that are really relevant, really current for what’s happening right now for designers.
#100 Raw Don: Yeah, and now, like I was saying, our community tells us, We’ll see an issue rise for multiple people at one time and we’ll go, uh huh, you need to hear this thing. The energy is there. And it’s like okay.
#100 Raw Kris: This is the theme of the week. This keeps coming up.
#100 Raw Don: yeah, yeah.
All right. Beautiful people. Well, thank you so much for your support, and we really would not be here at episode 100 without you, and we love it. Our podcast is one of our favorite things, so we cannot express enough how grateful we are for you listening to us.
#100 Raw Kris: Thank you so much. Thank you. We lovev you. And we’ll be in your ears again very soon. Yeah We’ve had a little break. you might noticed.
#100 Raw Don: Yes.
#100 Raw Kris: We had a little break.
#100 Raw Don: love how you’re whispering. Remember, Kris, our business, our way. You can shout it to the rooftops. We’ve had a break and we’re back. We thought we’d come back with a bang, with episode 100.
#100 Raw Kris: Yeah. We’ll see you next time.
#100 Raw Don: See ya. Bye.
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