How to Build an Ideal Client Profile That’s Unique to Your Firm

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An ideal client profile might include age, household income, family structure, location, and career. Laura Umansky and Melissa Grove, co-founders of DesignDash and hosts of the DesignDash podcast, look at those details too. They also ask which past projects were profitable, which clients made decisions at a pace that worked for the team, how those clients found the firm, and whether they would take the same project again. They’ve been in business for about twenty years and still revisit the exercise. Melissa points to changes in services, the market, and the firm itself as reasons to keep updating it.

Laura U Design Collective has enough project history to compare several years at a time, but Melissa doesn’t think you need a huge sample. One excellent client can give you plenty to examine. The work starts with identifying why that client and project were successful, then getting specific enough that your marketing can speak to people with similar priorities.

Start With the Projects You’ve Already Finished

Write Down the Projects You’d Take Again

Melissa recommends reviewing recent projects one by one. Laura U Design Collective might look back three to five years because its projects are large and run for a long time. A firm with shorter engagements could review a different window.

For each project, write down the project type, scope, referral source, profitability, furniture margins, billing experience, and whether you’d accept the same kind of work again. Then add what happened inside the client relationship. Was decision-making efficient? Did the client trust the team? Did the project take up a lot of time that couldn’t be billed? Did your team enjoy designing it?

A large contract with thin margins will get a different score from a large contract with strong margins. The same applies to a client who requires substantial unbilled time or makes the team dread another round of revisions. Melissa specifically looks at profit, furniture margins, billing, and how easy the client was to work with when she reviews past work.

Look at the Client Alongside the Project

Laura and Melissa also look at how the client works. How quickly do they make decisions? Have they hired a designer before? Do they already work with a builder or architect your firm knows? How much guidance do they want? Do they respect the way your firm bills and communicates? Laura treats business development as an interview in both directions.

Some profitable projects will still fall outside the profile, and Laura is realistic about taking them. A business sometimes accepts work because the financial case is good. The profile helps you understand what you want more of, even when every signed project doesn’t match it perfectly.

Describe One Person

Give Your Ideal Client a Name and a Life

Laura and Melissa build their profile around an individual. Laura U Design Collective has more than one avatar, but Laura describes one of them as “Mary,” a client with a young family and multiple homes who likes fashion, fitness, creativity, and design. She also trusts the firm’s guidance and values its work. That level of detail gives the marketing team a person to picture when they write a caption, website page, newsletter, or pitch.

Age, education, career, family structure, and household income can all go into the document. Melissa also looks at values and behavior. How does the person make decisions? What do they care about? What type of professional relationship do they want? Where do they spend time online?

Find Out How Your Best Clients Found You

Melissa puts a lot of weight on referral source. If several of your strongest clients came through Instagram, she wants to know what you were publishing when they found you. If your best projects consistently come through two architects, that changes who deserves attention in your marketing plan.

She also asks why that person chose your firm instead of another designer. Those answers can influence the language on your website, the type of content you publish, and the relationships you spend time developing.

Melissa says you can start even if you have only one client you’d happily duplicate. “Even if you just have one really good client, that’s all you need to build this profile.”

Your Ideal Client Might Be a Builder or Architect

Market to the Person Who Brings You the Work

A residential designer might picture the homeowner as the ideal client even when the homeowner has never contacted the firm directly. If your strongest projects currently come through builders or architects, Melissa would include those professionals in the profile.

A designer who wants high-end residential work might spend months trying to market directly to homeowners while the actual path into those houses runs through a handful of architects. Your marketing can speak to those architects now, especially if they already serve the homeowner you eventually want to reach.

Look at the Clients Your Referral Partners Already Serve

Laura also asks who that builder or architect works for. If their typical projects are smaller or less customized than the work you want, the relationship could keep bringing you projects you’re actively trying to leave behind.

If they work with the same end client you want, there’s a clearer connection. You can look at the builder’s project type, price point, location, and client base before deciding how much time to invest in the relationship.

That can make an ideal client profile more complicated than a single homeowner persona. You might have Mary as the end client and a separate profile for the architect who regularly introduces you to people like Mary.

Build a Negative Client Profile Too

Write Down the Boundaries You’ve Learned

Laura U Design Collective also keeps a negative client profile. Some of those traits only became obvious after projects were underway, which is why Laura and Melissa look back at prior relationships when they update the document.

Their examples are very specific. A client texting twenty times in an hour doesn’t work for the way the firm communicates. A client who agrees to hourly billing and later asks to convert the arrangement to a fixed sum has created problems before. A client who needs every design selection immediately may need a designer with a faster process. Laura has also changed how she handles urgency after years of accepting compressed timelines.

That experience changed their firm’s IDC profile. Kindness, patience, and respect for the firm’s approach or timeline now come up when Laura talks about the clients she wants.

Look for Clients Who Already Value the Service

Laura also pays attention to whether a prospect already understands why they’re hiring an interior designer. She doesn’t want the sales process to revolve around persuading someone that professional design has value.

She connects some of her regretted projects to clients who thought they should hire a designer but never really bought into the service itself. That can turn into repeated conversations about fees, recommendations, process, and why the designer is involved at all.

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Use the Profile to Rewrite Your Marketing

Get More Specific About Who You’re Talking To

Laura recently worked through an ideal client exercise with a DesignDash community member who was about four years into her business. She was attracting work she didn’t enjoy anymore and wanted to change direction, but she had built her proposed avatar around the client she thought she was supposed to want.

After an hour of talking through her experience, Laura and the designer ended up with a very different person. It was a client type she already knew how to work with and had been successful with before.

The designer’s website was also glossing over parts of her professional background that were directly relevant to this new profile. She had kept the language broad because she didn’t want to exclude prospective clients. Once the ideal client was more specific, Laura could see which experience deserved more space on the site. Melissa recommends very very specific in the earliest years of the business.

You can apply that specificity to your About page, services, LinkedIn profile, project descriptions, Instagram captions, and any other place a prospective client is learning what you do.

Check What Your Content Is Telling Prospective Clients

Laura U Design Collective learned this lesson through construction content. The firm gets involved early in a project and often shares framing walks and progress photographs. At one point, those posts started generating inquiries from people who assumed Laura U was a design-build firm.

The team hadn’t intended to communicate that. They were showing an important part of the design process without making the division between designer and builder explicit enough in the captions. Prospective clients filled in the missing information themselves.

That gives you another way to use the profile. Look through your website and social accounts from the perspective of the person you want to hire you. Can they tell what type of project you take? Can they tell what your role is? Do your captions make your process clear? If your firm wants to work through architects, does your content demonstrate that you already know how to collaborate with them?

Keep the Profile Close to Your Actual Life

Don’t Invent a Client You Don’t Want to Be Around

Laura and Melissa also talk about the temptation to invent an aspirational client and then build marketing around places, activities, or interests that have very little connection to the designer.

Laura uses polo as the example. If her ideal client likes polo but Laura has no interest in going to a polo match, she isn’t going to start attending them for marketing. She would go to an art event, gallery opening, restaurant, or flea market because those are places she genuinely wants to spend time.

The ideal client should have enough overlap with your interests and professional world that talking to them doesn’t require a new personality. Your marketing still needs strategy, but Laura doesn’t think the strategy should put you somewhere you don’t want to be simply because a hypothetical client might be there.

Revisit the Profile When the Business Changes

Laura and Melissa have been doing this for roughly twenty years and expect their ideal client to keep changing. The firm’s services have changed. Their boundaries have changed. The market has changed. Their referral network has changed too.

That is why they go back to completed projects instead of relying on the profile they wrote several years ago. The projects tell them who is hiring the firm now, which work is profitable now, and which relationships they want to repeat.

Melissa agrees that the profile will probably change again. Laura’s advice at the end of the conversation is: “Don’t force it. What feels natural to you. Give yourself some grace and know that you can change in the future.”

Written by the DesignDash Editorial Team
Our contributors include experienced designers, firm owners, design writers, and other industry professionals. If you’re interested in submitting your work or collaborating, please reach out to our Editor-in-Chief at editor@designdash.com.