“Win Without Pitching”: a foreword still stood behind
In 2014, I translated and wrote the foreword for the French edition of Blair Enns’s manifesto, published under the French title Gagner sans idées gratuites – La stratégie commerciale gagnante du designer entrepreneur, by the association Moneydesign, in partnership with Alliance France design and APCI.
The book has since changed its name. Written in English in 2010 under the title Win Without Pitching: A Manifesto, it reverted to that original title when it was republished digitally in 2023, once the French print edition had sold out. The substance, though, has not moved: twelve steps for designers to stop giving away their expertise in pitches and to build a pricing policy that matches the value of their work. This manifesto has since shaped the practice of many designers in France, who found in it a way out of the free-pitch treadmill and a way to put money back in its rightful place in the relationship with their clients.
I am republishing here the foreword as I wrote it, without changing a word. It sheds light on a principle I have carried at Copryce ever since: the value of design is not negotiated away in exchange for free ideas, it is built.
Foreword
Warning: a cultural and commercial revolution. This manifesto is about taking power. The power of designer entrepreneurs in their professional relationship with clients, and in their emotional relationship with money. To what end? To return to a simple idea, one that can get lost in the churn of an activity where the ferment of a creative mind meets the pragmatic facts of business: growing a design business and making it thrive. What is at stake is the very point of working for oneself: building the freedom to create and to run a business. Nothing less.
The principles Blair Enns develops draw on marketing, the rules of commerce, psychology, neuroscience, and his long experience working alongside what he calls “Gifted People.” That’s his name for us, the designers. Blair Enns admires our capacity to find solutions to problems through creativity. In his view, designers hold a very high level of expertise and a unique talent: they see the solutions. Working closely with us, he has observed the inconsistencies in some widespread practices. Because we were never taught to negotiate fair payment for our work, most of us unwittingly apply methods that let clients dictate our working conditions and our fees. There is no reason designers should submit to this. It is from that premise that Blair Enns has, over the years, built a training program specifically for us. He explains why, without meaning to, we place ourselves at a disadvantage from the very first contact with a prospective client, and what that costs our creativity and the profitability of our business. Finally, and above all, he shows us, in twelve steps, the way out of that trap and toward what every entrepreneur is after: to prosper.
Blair Enns lives on the northeast shore of Kootenay Lake, in the Canadian Rockies. From there, he drives to a small airport, takes a small plane to an international airport, and flies long-haul around the globe to meet the “Gifted People.” From the Americas to Asia, by way of Europe and the Middle East, Blair Enns gives talks and coaches an impressive number of designers and business owners of every size. I met him some years ago, at a seminar in one of London’s smarter neighborhoods. For me too, it was a cultural and psychological shock, and an exciting one: he described with precision the complicated, emotional relationship with money found in creative professions, a subject I have worked on my whole career. He put his finger on a habit many of us share: giving away our ideas. So why do most designers squander what is theirs this way? Habit, from presenting work to teachers? Blindness, from an irrepressible need for recognition? Before rushing to judgment, let’s think it through: who benefits from this? In what other profession does anyone behave this way? What most of us are missing is a single skill: knowing how to sell. Then Blair Enns explained how to take back the advantage. I could feel the impact of his words on a room packed with designers, skeptical at first, then buoyed by the optimism he brought out in them.
I went through the journey Blair Enns describes myself. I started out giving my ideas away for free. “That’s how it works in this business,” I had been taught. Even after winning pitches, my enthusiasm soon wore thin, and I eventually decided the energy I put in wasn’t worth the meager reward that came back. Out of weariness, and then out of principle, I walked away from the absurdity of that system. Not without some anxiety, I decided that from then on, no professional relationship of mine would be built on handing over my thinking without fair return, even if it meant changing careers. My career was not hurt by it. Quite the opposite: it grew on solid ground. I said no to free ideas, though without ever building a real sales strategy around it.
At that seminar, I found in Blair Enns an alter ego. What I approached from the angle of ethics, professional values, and civic duty, he approached from the angle of business and economic value. What I had preached to fellow professionals within a trade association as moral values, without offering a method, he recommended as the intelligence of a sound business strategy for growing a company, and he explained exactly how to do it. Here, in front of me, was the missing link in a logical chain to help designers grow both their craft and their business. Blair Enns doesn’t deal in ethics, or does he. The values he stands for are professionalism, listening to client needs, respect before profit, building real expertise, ongoing learning to keep improving, among others. Through their effect on our work, these values serve the interests of our profession, and in that sense align with what designer associations advocate.
“Design is a business” is a concept more present in the minds of English-speaking countries than in France, but it is gaining ground among more and more people. Professional design associations around our globalized world now reject practices that push us to give away our expertise and ideas for free, because they undercut what we have to offer. But the business methods needed to learn how to grow a creative company on different footing are sorely lacking. Why is Blair Enns, who gives us the name of an Indigenous people, the “Gifted People,” trained in marketing, a field I have often experienced as a rival to our own, sought out by designer associations across the world for his guidance? Because beyond his account of how our creative minds work, a mirror he holds up to us, sometimes provocatively but always with humor and respect for our profession (empathy, perhaps?), he builds, with real pragmatism, a business strategy grounded in the refusal to give ideas away for free. He breaks down the mechanics of power within a professional relationship. He corrects our bad habits, refocuses us on the right goals, shows us how we can be recognized as experts, and why that recognition is essential to our economic growth. Some of us already apply a few common-sense principles, but what gives this manifesto its strength and its worth is the coherent, interdependent whole that Blair Enns lays out. He warns: following it is not easy. Giving up and slipping back into old, uncomfortable, seemingly reassuring habits is the easier path. Putting the twelve steps he recommends into practice means unlearning a great many assumptions picked up throughout our studies and our early working lives, finding the courage to rethink how we approach client relationships and briefs, and changing our working methods accordingly. Decide to follow every one of these steps, and everything becomes possible. Once this strategy has been absorbed and put into practice, it can be worth rereading this manifesto from time to time, since our creativity is quick to play tricks on us.
A taste for business and a sense of ethics meet here to promote the best professional practices. Blair Enns, an authority in his field, has been widely imitated in recent years. He dedicates this manifesto to us. As for me, as the one carrying it across, I am proud to finally deliver it to you. Now that it has reached you, it is yours to take hold of.
François Caspar Saint-Mandé, France, 2014
