The funny thing about design services is that it’s relatively easy to get started, but very tricky to make work. Lots of companies need design help in some form, so if you win one or two clients—which is actually fairly easy to do—suddenly you have a business with real revenue. The really challenging part is whether you can turn a handful of jobs into a financially lucrative client roster that consistently brings you creatively satisfying work. That’s a lot harder.

What is required more than anything is vision—articulating your goals and creating a plan to achieve them. Even more important is to make sure that the vision is mutually held by all of your partners. It’s hard to underestimate how valuable it is to agree, up front, on how big you want the company to grow, what kind of clients you want to win, how long you expect the company to survive, how you might exit the business—and even how hard you want to work each day. It’s easy to disagree about the answers to these questions at the beginning, but it’s incredibly stressful to disagree about them after the business has started to assume liabilities.

Khoi Vinh.