3D graphic designer seeking professional advice regarding sales, clients and etc.

[chingizkh]

Hello everyone.

This is my first post and first topic on this forum so please excuse me if anything I say might seem inappropriate. Im just seeking for any advice might be very helpful and that will be highly appreciated.

Also, I'm not a native English speaker so please excuse me.

I'm a 3D graphics designer (I build up and visualize mostly residential, commercial interiors and furniture). I'm 21 years old and I have been doing this for almost 4 years now (2.5 years as a career profession). To make sure my point and question is delivered, I want to say a few words about my previous employment. I'm from NIS country (New Independent States) or what is also called a post-soviet country. I was lucky enough to get a job in London and work for a furniture dealer, that sold expensive office furniture, from '04-'06. I had a permanent full-time job however was getting paid very low (£830 a month). My low pay didn't bother me even in London because I wasn't paying for house & living expenses, food, clothing and etc. My pay was pure pocket money. Year later, I received a bonus and a salary upgrade to £1500 and everything was going just fantastic. However, my visa ended and I returned back to my home country. Now, this is where the fun part starts. To this present day (it's been almost a year since I returned) I'm still working with the same company as a freelancer but they kept my monthly pay. Just as a comparison, a designer with skills at my level in my country gets a salary of only USD $500 which is about £250 a month! Once I had an open talk with my boss in London and he said that if I was a British citizen, with a British college degree and a little older, he would have paid me around £2800 a month. Well, after he said it I could clearly see that I’m getting underpaid. I took his words as an advice and saw a perfect business opportunity. £1500 a month is a lot of money in my country but is “cheap labor” in London. Perfect! I can deliver high quality service for cheap! Who doesn’t want that?
Right now, I want to build a business based on these prices however due to the fact that I know nothing about business, sales, marketing and have absolutely no experience in this area I’m sort of in a dead end. I’ve tried posting an ad on the internet and emailed different companies offering my services, but none seem to be interested. The problem is I don’t know how to get them interested. Those emails that I wrote might be (I’m pretty sure they are) unprofessionally written. I go to London to visit every now and then and talk with different furniture dealers and while meeting with different people in the industry maybe because of my age and my looks people don’t want to talk serious business. I can’t understand why, but I’m not seemed to be moving anywhere with this. I’m not giving up with this idea because there’s a lot of money in this involved for me, plus running my own business sounds extremely good. Time wise, I can work on as many projects as I can get. The thing is, as a way out (in case if I’m overbooked with projects and deadlines to meet) I can always hire local designers to do the work for me; I just make sure they do the job on time and at appropriate quality level. In fact, that is exactly how I am going to run my company – I stand back, let them do the work and I just organize and control everything and get involved more with expanding my business to other sectors of design. Basically for every UK company that is willing to pay £1500 a month I can hire a local designer to do the job for a high local salary (average rate is £250 a month and I’m willing to pay £350-£500). That way I can have the best designers in the country working with me. All I need is just 3 companies to start with. I’ve got 1 (my current employer) but no matter how hard I try, I can’t find two more. I’ve struggled like this for several months now and this is what I came up with: ideally I’m looking for people who have experience either in sales, marketing, furniture, design or anything related, or even people with good communication skills to go and talk to clients, find projects and make them work with me on a permanent salary basis. Obviously, this sort of help needs to be fulfilled with a financial reward. I thought of this side as well. £2800 - £1500 = £1300 a month is a good enough margin for the sales agent. A person who finds 3 companies gets £1300 x 3 = £3900 a month! It basically depends on sales agent’s skills, how he can talk and make business. All he has to do is take care of his job and responsibilities to make this work. That is – just being an unofficial (because my company won’t have a branch in UK) representative of my company and deal with whatever issues might come up, make sure projects are going fine, talking to clients, taking them to lunch and making sure they are happy and of course updating me with everything. Halfway across the world, I take care of organizational matters, payment matters, design, quality, staff and everything else.

Now, I’ve bored you all enough.

Any comments, suggestions and advice from your side will be highly appreciated!

THANK YOU ALL!

Regards,
Chingiz Kh.