Well, I (Jen Fox) made it, because after over 20 years of working in this industry, I have a couple pieces of advice I want to share with younger or newer designers, in hopes that they can be as happy doing design work as I am, and maybe avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made. 

You will find my authentic, unfiltered advice here, along with words of wisdom from lots of other smart, experienced people I know. 

You can check out my portfolio at amarketingfox.com to see that I’m a real person.

Here’s a summary of my career and what I’ve learned:

In 1998 I graduated high school and started classes at Ivy Tech in their Visual Communications program. I really didn’t know what I was getting into, just that I liked doing art and maybe I could figure out some way to make money with my creative skills. A few months into classes, I was lucky to have the opportunity to do production work for a small design studio in my hometown. It was in this first job that I learned that the client doesn’t give a shit how much you think you know about design, they want what works, and that might break all the design rules you had to follow to get good grades in design school. 

I learned how much I like to teach when I got a contract job with a freelancer who was designing and building an intranet site for a large airline. A big part of my job was to go around to different departments and show employees how they could update their own part of the website. This was my first experience in a large corporate environment and I was amazed that anything ever got done because of all the red tape, and time-wasting I observed as I went from department to department. 

A little later, after I had more classes in web development at Ivy Tech, my advisor was able to get me an interview with the IT department at another Ivy Tech campus, for a job re-doing their entire campus website! Somehow I got the job with the little experience I had from the airline intranet project. I learned that there’s a lot of confusion around whether or not websites should be run by IT departments or marketing departments. Leadership at many organizations will default to letting IT run website projects, when it should be the marketing department leading with strategy (and working with IT on execution and security issues as needed). Lucky for me, the IT and marketing departments at this job got along very well and there were no egos. I technically worked for the IT Director, but my desk was in the marketing office and the VP of Marketing was the one approving my work. I planned, designed, and developed the entire campus website, mostly on my own. After this project, I felt like I could do anything, and at the same time, I was still insanely intimidated by “real designers” at big agencies. I stayed on for a while working on various graphic design projects with the marketing team.

It was time to move on. I looked at the big agencies in my city, but I was way too scared to apply with any of them. A chance encounter led me to an unconventional design job with an advertising company run out of a home. My job was to design ads that were placed in bathrooms on stall doors and above urinals. I had a limit of 2 hours to design each ad. This job taught me how to work FAST. My boss was interested in offering website and email marketing services and my past experience allowed him to start selling those services. Soon I was making 2 hour bathroom ads, building websites for small businesses, and designing and managing email newsletters for various clients.

My boss at the bathroom ads company sold his business and started up a new one with me as his only employee. He did the sales, and I did the work. We were a good team. Over time, the business grew… and grew… at one time there were almost 30 employees. I learned so much from my co-workers about branding and messaging, about marketing strategy, and about doing sales and pitching work to clients. My boss would often take me along on meetings with prospects and I learned how to ask questions and started to feel comfortable talking to people about what I could do for them. I learned that you don’t have to know anything about a prospect before you talk to them… that prospect is looking to you as an expert in design to know things they don’t know. (Wait, didn’t I say before that the client doesn’t give a shit how much you think you know? They want what works? Yes. That is correct. And they are also looking to you to tell them what you know. Both at the same time. It’s crazy. Welcome to life as a graphic designer.)

My boss decided to start a spin-off company that would be all design interns managed by me. Our clients were local small businesses with very small budgets. I came up with the tagline – Give a hand up, get a leg up – because that’s what it was all about. Small business owners giving a chance to brand new designers and getting good work overseen by an experienced pro (me) for bargain basement prices. I interviewed and hired our team and I’m proud to say we launched several successful careers. I learned that I LOVED working with new designers and filling in the gaps left by their college education. 

We had a good team that did good work, but we didn’t have a good sales process and therefore we ran out of clients. The spin-off company closed and I went back to the main business, where I spent the next year or so working closely with my boss on marketing and sales materials for ourselves and once in a while helping with other client work. I went along on more and more sales calls and I started helping out with marketing strategy work for our biggest clients.

I’d been doing design and marketing work for over 15 years and I was finally beginning to feel like I knew what I was doing. My boss offered to sell a small portion of the business to me and my husband (he worked there too doing SEO/SEM and operations). We bought in. Then we bought more. Then we bought the whole enchilada. I was not prepared for what I had signed up for and the first few months were some of the most unhappy months of my life. After a lot of struggle, I started to get the hang of things. But I was never good at managing employees and that led to ongoing problems and distractions. What I was good at was working with clients. I got really good at listening to clients and figuring out what would actually help them. But ultimately, I didn’t have the confidence in myself to lead my team the way I should have and my business suffered while I worried about making sure nobody got their feelings hurt. Hindsight’s 20/20. Speaking of 2020, that was the year my husband and I closed up the business, which had a lot to do with clients and prospects freezing their marketing spend amid the pandemic. 

It’s funny but after my spectacular failure running an agency, I began to feel more confident than ever, and happier too. I’m good at learning from my mistakes and growing. My husband and I started a new business called Outfox (just us, no employees) that is focused just on the kind of work we want to do. I also do freelance work, and I work part time for an awesome agency called Patterson Riegel. By 2023 I had begun working with Vertical Immersive, an immersive higher education program, teaching graphic design, and working with students on real-world marketing projects with clients. Through it all, I have learned, and am still learning, that everything, every experience good and bad, prepares me for what comes next, good and bad!