Posture
On the visionary role and what distorts it.
The presentation is in four days.
Your team has been deep in it. There’s an electricity in the air—the kind that builds across both the studio and the client when something long-anticipated is finally about to come into view.
And while that momentum is gathering, an invoice sits twelve days past due.
You’ve drafted the email, rewritten it, tried to find a tone that threads the needle between clarity and warmth. You don’t want to sound deferential, and you also can’t afford to soften the ask. It feels off. You feel off.
You don’t want that uncomfortable exchange to bleed into the meeting you’re preparing for—the one that carries excitement and lift. You don’t want to walk into the room as both the person shaping the vision and the person enforcing the terms that keep the project standing.
It’s difficult to be the visionary and the enforcer.
Two roles the client experiences as energetically opposed—one expansive, one corrective. One invites depth; the other introduces consequence. When they're asked to coexist, each one thins the authority of the other.
The relationship between you and your clients rests on a kind of interpersonal alchemy of trust, admiration, and the sense that you're guiding the project from a higher vantage point. When you're in that posture, something opens. The work carries more dimension.
Imagine an artist whose work you feel deeply connected to—whose process, materials, and inspiration feel almost sacred in the way she carries them. Then you commission a piece, and she’s also the one negotiating the agreement, costs, and logistics.
The frame tilts.
A little of the magic fades.
This is the reality inside a small design studio —
Your name is on the door. You DO carry the vision and the business.
But the internal truth—that you hold both roles—doesn’t translate to the external perception.
Internally, the visionary and the enforcer can sit side by side.
Client-facing, they collide.
Studios that protect the visionary posture aren’t separating the principal from the business. They’re refining how the business meets the client. Boundaries, rules, and expectations are articulated once and held consistently. And someone else—a studio manager, a project coordinator—carries the conversations that uphold them, communicating with the client when something needs to be reinforced or brought back into alignment.
Support doesn’t mute your authority.
It preserves the way it’s perceived.
The work and the business are received in the coherence they deserve.
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