Carol Mackay, Design Business Council, on finding your onliness

Carol Mackay, Design Business Council

Carol Mackay helps Australian creatives manage their business better - more effectively, more efficiently and more sustainably - so they can spend more time creating. After 30+ years running a graphic design firm, Carol moved from client-focused projects to consult to the design industry. Now with the Design Business Council she uses her experience, and research, to help creatives build robust, sustainable businesses, and to help businesses integrate, and profit from, design.

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What’s the difference between personal branding and onliness?

Personal branding is how you want to be perceived by others — or as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos would say, what others say about you when you are not in the room. I prefer to use the term ‘onliness’ – comes without the history and baggage of ‘branding’.

Was your own ‘onliness’ something you instinctively understood, or did it take a lot of trial, error and experience to work out?

I’m relatively new to the importance of thinking about my ‘onliness’ and that’s mainly because I’ve worked alongside my life partner for nearly 40 years. We first worked together for someone else, then in a design studio we co-founded and now at the Design Business Council. During the design studio tenure, we had distinctly separate roles that evolved over a long period of time. Greg had his clients and I had mine. He ran the external face of the studio and I ran the internal. Our roles evolved with the business.

This changed when I closed the studio after 34 years to re-join Greg in a side-hustle we’d co-founded five years earlier. We’d dipped our toes into a venture we thought might work, and then worked hard to get it to a stage it could fund us both.

While I kept the studio going to fund the venture, Greg had had five years to assess, define and refine his new role. And he is is really, really good at what he does. When I joined him, I had to work out how I could add value. Greg and I now have overlapping roles with far less clarity.

Anyone with a successful partner knows if you don’t have clarity around your own strengths and weaknesses, if you don’t have a strong sense of your value, you will continually be overshadowed. Especially if you are second to the table. I’d come from the comfort of a role I had for 34 years into a new challenge needing completely different use of my existing skills.

“I had to find my onliness, and I had to find it quickly. It wasn’t easy.”

Is onliness important when you’re first starting out?

Being aware of your onliness is absolutely of value to a graduate. It means you can stand above the cookie-cutter folio we all graduate with, and more easily sell your value into prospective employers, in writing, in visuals and in person.

What do you think the main obstacles designers come up against when running a small business?

Stamina and sustainability. That first flush of clients may last a year, may last five but we work in a rapidly changing industry that is constantly disrupted. Identifying, adapting and managing change is constant. It takes energy and it takes stamina.

Many small business are founded by people who love what they do, but don’t necessarily love the business of what they do. Sustainability comes from employing someone to work on the business so you can continue to do what you love. If you love what you do, stamina is less of an issue. Energy comes from enjoyment.

You’ve taking your wealth of design knowledge and client-focused experience and pivoted to consulting, are you enjoying the pivot?

I am now. But it took a couple of years to be comfortable in my new role.

Comfortable working as a partnership rather than with an in-house team and running a studio. Comfortable remembering I’m now a supplier to the design industry rather than a designer and comfortable referring projects from ex-clients to other designers.

What I am enjoying is having a forum to share my experience. I would have loved to have a ‘me’ to advise me through the tough spots – that’s what I’m trying to do with others. Running a creative business is hard. Your eye is continually on billings for the end of the week/month/quarter. Having time to future plan is really difficult.

Now I am relishing having time to research better ways of running a design business. I’m relishing having time to talk to others about what they do, why they do it and how they do it. And I’m relishing having a voice to share that knowledge.

Have you had to change your onliness at all?

I am naturally a chatty, enthusiastic introvert who is most comfortable chatting one-on-one. Five-on-one sometimes. Ten-on-one max. This is not a perfect attribute for my new role in the Design Business Council, and it could be said it limited my role.

It was the personal journey map activity (I’m going to share in the Masterclass) that helped me identify what I do well, and what I don’t –  and that helped me change my thinking because I understood where I needed additional skills.

Tell me a little bit about the work you do with Womentor (on hiatus at the mo) and how important do you think mentors are to women in design? And women in general.

Mentors are important. Having the counsel of others can open opportunities and remove obstacles. I’ve not had a mentor (apart from Mary Tyler Moore and Murphy Brown :) but I am sure with one I would have worked more efficiently and more effectively.

On the other hand, I’ve mentored many, as does anyone that employs others, and especially graduate designers. I’ve mentored employees, designers within schemes like AGDA and Womentor, and as a paid gig as part of my role within DBC.

“Mentoring is sharing knowledge and that comes easily to me. I think we all have an obligation to give back to the industry. ”

Where can women find a mentor that’s right for them?

I think many women struggle to find a mentor because of their mindset. They seek someone who will give their time freely, who has the perfect balance of knowledge, character and in an aligned career. Can you see the problem?

Mentoring should be a two-way relationship. Good mentors are open to continually learning, and to new experiences yet many mentees are only interested in taking. I’ve had designers request to buy me a cup of tea only to sit opposite me with an open notebook and grill me with questions until my eyes water and my bladder almost bursts. And then they ask when we can meet again.

Knowing your onliness is about understanding how you can give back to your industry at every level. Perhaps it’s not about finding the right mentor, perhaps it’s about making connections with people with whom you have something or someone in common and with whom you think you could share something you know in return for some advice. Who would not love that?

What’s the one bit of advice you would give women in business?

Firstly, that it’s OK not to be in business. If the business is a weight around your neck, if it is not giving you joy, and you don’t like the majority of your day, then it’s absolutely OK to walk away and support the work of someone else. The world is obsessed with start-ups but having a business is hard on every level.

 It’s hard making the tough financial decisions. It’s hard to continually disrupt yourself and your business in an attempt to stay relevant and it’s hard working solo, but then it’s really hard managing other creatives.

 It is not for everyone and I don’t think enough people consider walking away. That said, the one bit of advice I would give is understand your onliness – what you do differently to others, what makes you distinct. Understanding your strengths and your weaknesses makes it easier to play to your strengths and buy skills that plug your weaknesses.

And that’s what makes it easy to portray a successful personal brand.

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Join us for Carol’s Masterclass on Friday November 6th at 1pm. Subscribe to her weekly article that helps designers manage their business. You can view her current work at Design Business School and see an archive of her design work at mbdesign.com.au

Socially Aware by Design: Matters Journal

Matters Journal

Editor's note: Tomorrow night (Friday, 16th March), Creative Women's Circle are holding a sold-out Melbourne Design Week event titled "Socially Aware by Design: Building successful values-led small businesses", featuring female creative industry leaders and Certified B.Corp companies.

We hope to post an audio recording for members further afield and those who can't make it soon, but in the meantime, we wanted to share some insight from another Certified B.Corp female leader (and CWC Member!), Nikki Stefanoff, editor of Matters Journal.

Why we chose to publish responsibly

I’m writing this on International Women’s Day, which makes pondering the ways we, as women, can make a difference to the world through our work seem so wonderfully connected.

For me, both personally and professionally, it all starts with connections. Whether that’s through connected voices giving individuals the confidence to show others how they see and experience the world or simply a personal connection with ourselves to ask the question: ‘what do I want?’, ‘what do I care about?’, ‘what do I stand for?’ and ‘what really matters to me?’

Discovering what matters, and why we choose to do what we do, is just as important in business as it is to personal lives. Simon Sinek famously talks about starting with the why. ‘Why do you get up in the morning? Why does your organisation exist? Your Why is the purpose, cause or belief that inspires you to do what you do,’ he says. ‘When you think, act and communicate starting with Why, you can inspire others.’

Asking ‘why’ is what spawned the very existence of Matters Journal because our ‘why’ was, to us, very clear. We wanted to connect good people with people doing good things. It was to tell stories that came from a place of sustainability, impact and business while connecting two or more of our chosen topics: health, art, design, technology, environment and food. It was a way to build human-to-human connection. The kicker being that we wanted to do all this while making responsible decisions along the way. We wanted to remain connected to our planet while producing a magazine that left very little footprint.

Matters Journal is published through Local Peoples, a B Corp design studio in Collingwood, Melbourne. And so, as a B Corp, it was always part of our DNA to be advocates for sustainable design. This included our own carbon neutrality, something that would go on to drive every decision the design team made when getting issue #1 ready for print. It resulted in a process that created a print title that’s as small in its carbon footprint as it is in size and as friendly to the planet as to the humans who read it.

Mini Matters: a 'teaser’ mini print publication

Turns out it’s not so hard to publish responsibly and while there are only a few printers and vendors out there printing sustainably, once you get into it the process isn’t that difficult. Ergo, in case you might want to do the same, these are the 10 responsible and sustainable design decisions we made for Matters Journal.

1. We used two types of paper supplied by Ball & Doggett - cyclus offset 100% recycled paper for our mini issue and ecostar 100% recycled for issue #1.

2. Our paper is post-consumer, which means that the paper (and carbon) has already been through a life-cycle. Pre-consumer paper is usually an offcut of someone else’s printing process and so the carbon hasn’t yet had a lifespan, making it less sustainable.   

3. We chose not to use toxic finishes.

4. We paid a lot of attention to our carbon neutrality, which started when we realised that our paper had to be imported as Australia doesn’t have a local source. This meant that the nearest thing we could do was to carbon offset by planting trees. From that point our distributor covered the offset to the printer and as we used carbon neutral printer Finsbury Green, their carbon was already offset.

5. We chose not to use thick paper as we believe that our value lies in our stories and not our paper. So our paper is just thin enough that you can’t see through to the next page and thick enough that it holds up and doesn’t perforate too easily or degrade quickly.

6. The size of our page was informed by the greater size of the mill paper, with trimmings taken into account. If you can be aware of the mill pack (parent sheet) size, then you can design a page that minimises waste and maximises efficiency.

7. In terms of colour most printers already print with water-based ink, that’s just the way the market is going, which is a good thing, environmentally.

8. Saddle stitching is more environmentally friendly, so we used it for our mini issue, however, the adhesive that we used on issue #1 was more toxic and needs to be noted, for transparency.  

9. The sleeve design that characterises Matters Journal is a design embellishment that didn’t involve compromising our environmental footprint. The fold was a great way to provide the reader with something different and interactive whilst not demanding that we sacrifice our carbon neutrality.

10. We choose to use less pages to tell a story.  

Those 10 points may not seem like much but to us they are everything. They are our ‘why’ and by stopping and taking the time to connect with that ‘why’ it helped guide our entire process.

We also understood that the stories we told were our greatest asset and that by connecting readers to themselves and the world around them we could begin to make small changes. We wanted to tell people that small changes can make a big difference to someone. So, use a keepcup for your coffee, buy your clothes from HoMie, your toilet paper from who gives a crap, use Thankyou for your bathroom and baby products and make a greater effort to choose B Corps over other businesses. We’ve all got to start somewhere.

My personal ‘why’ goes back to this concept of connections and stories. I believe that each and every one of us is connected and if we all took even a minute to slow down and listen to ourselves and the people around us, we might be surprised to find out what matters the most. To us and to them. And then, we can act on it. Then we can really try to make a difference.  

Nikki Stefanoff is editor of Matters Journal. After spending 13 years editing and writing for newspapers and magazines in London, Nikki now uses her journalism background and love of a good chat to find powerful and meaningful stories to tell.