SPI 920: Get More Business than You Can Handle in the Age of AI with James Barnard

SPI 920: Get More Business than You Can Handle in the Age of AI with James Barnard

Pat Flynn: If I were to ask you, what do you think the trend is for people who are designers, you know, that design logos, they do client work in this world of AI, what would you say? Well, for the most part, it is true that they are struggling, but not this guy. James Barnard is a logo designer who is thriving in this space and he’s gonna reveal exactly how he’s doing that, using social media, using storytelling.

And he also reveals for us his exact strategy for creating content and not only creating content, but getting people who watch and discover his content to come and become clients or join his membership. He spills the beans for us. This is James Barnard. You can find him Barnard.co and on social media as well,  @BarnardCo. And halfway through this interview, I discovered that I actually watched one of his viral videos and I didn’t even know. And then he proceeds to say exactly how he scripted it, came up with the idea what happened as a result of that. He also tells us his exact business model. James is just, this is an absolute GOATed greatest of all time type interview, so make sure you pay attention.

Here we go, James Barnard.

Hey, James, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

James Barnard: Thank you for having me. Thank you for staying up late so that we can accommodate this huge time zone difference that we’re going through right now.

Pat Flynn: It’s definitely a huge time zone difference, but I am hugely excited about this because in the short time that I’ve really doven into your community and especially your socials, I’ve been very impressed.

I have to say thank you. Congratulations on your success, and you are, correct me if I’m wrong. Originally a logo designer and you’ve been helping other designers navigate that world. How did you get started with that?

James Barnard: Yeah, well originally I still am a logo designer. I use the social media to funnel people into my many businesses.

No, I’m kidding. I’ve, I basically have a logo design studio. I operate out of the Gold Coast Australia, but I’m originally from the UK so I got my start in the publishing industry as a designer in the UK and a few years back, niched down into logo design. And then eventually found my footing online on, on the socials and started using it to really generate leads for my business.

It’s really worked. It took a while to kind of get used to it, and obviously like a lot of people on social media just had a bit of a explosive moment on TikTok where one video went viral and changed the nature of how I kind of do business. But yeah, I’m an OG designer. I’ve been doing this for like 15 plus years, and I think that’s kind of helped with the socials is that I’ve got a lot of experience that I can share a lot with my community.

So that’s what. The aim is these days.

Pat Flynn: I love it. I’m excited to dive into what that video was, your strategy, how do you pull people from social to your community and all that stuff. But I do have to say, you’ve been doing this for 15 years. The design world has completely changed. We are all immersed in AI slop right now.

I have seen you address this on socials, but what’s your strategy as a logo designer? Something that some people would say is very easy to do now because you can just plug and play into ChatGPT, or Claude or whatever and get something back in a minute. How do you stay in front of that and encourage your clients to work with real people instead of ai, how do you answer that?

James Barnard: Well, you’re absolutely right in, in the, the perception is that AI can do it and it’s very easy, but when you actually try and use it and get a decent result from it, you’d be surprised at how tricky it is. It depends on the level that you’re at, and it’s one of the first things that people say to me when I tell ’em what I do is like, oh, isn’t AI doing it, everything these days. And, right, that’s kind of frustrating to hear, but at the same time, you know, us designers that, that aren’t using AI because it kind of isn’t, you know, good enough to do it yet. Our job now is to show the process, to show that we’re actually. Not using AI in this creative phase and to show the behind the scenes of how this is working.

And this is where the social media has like come in when I do case studies. Now it’s all about telling a story about how we got to that final point. And yeah, I guess it’s just a case of like how far along you are in your business, how serious you are when you want to get started. If you know enough about branding and you know enough about what it takes to start a company. You probably wouldn’t go to AI to make your logo ’cause it’s not gonna stand the test of time. And most importantly, most of them you can’t trademark because it’s all open source. So when someone wants to go to trademark your design, you can’t trademark it because you’ve used an AI platform to do it.

And that’s a real issue for people. So you need to come to an actual designer to get it done. So yeah, there were assist, assist assistive tools out there that do help with the kind of speeding up in design, but actually the generative stuff just, not so much. So I’m using social media to show the behind the scenes and to show the process of how it’s done to kind of add value to it.

Pat Flynn: I love that. In my experience, at least online, I’ve seen a lot of pushback against AI when it is obvious that something was used for ai, whether it’s a image or a logo or something. An audience is pretty keen to still understand that that’s not real. And I love how you’re using social media to tell the story behind that. More technically, what does that mean? What does that look like to tell the story of a logo?

James Barnard: So usually with a case study. It used to be a case of you would post a few images to Instagram, like five or six images to a carousel saying, look how cool this logo project is that I just did, and everybody check this workout and it would just bomb.

Nobody cares until I started sort of framing case studies with a kind of, you know, a bit of a story arc to them to make people more engaged with that content. And that can be in a number of forms. The, the most popular way is just to kind of show what the, the client that the problem had and then show how I solved that problem and show the rounds of amends that we did along the way.

And you know, the feedback that the client gave, sometimes it’s negative feedback and you gotta roll with those punches and, and come up with something good. But I’ve had a couple of case study videos like hit more than like a million views and just from telling the behind the scenes of, of how this is done.

And it’s kind of like voyeurism in a way. People a, want to hang around to see the end result, and B, they wanna find out like what it’s like to work in this industry and what it’s like to run your own sort of creative business from home. So yeah, those case study videos are hugely powerful and they’re also the biggest lead generators for my business, which is a huge, huge bonus.

Pat Flynn: Do you have a source for those case studies? Are they just clients of yours that you ask permission to use or where are you finding these?

James Barnard: Exactly. Yeah, so any, anytime I’ve got a client come on board now in my terms of service, I’m like, please, can I use this as a project case study at the end of the project?

And actually even now, people are starting to come to me for those case studies because it’s kind of free PR at the end of the the project, they’re actually getting a push to their company out there. You know, whenever I do put something on my portfolio, for instance, that’s kind of like a given that you would put images of the work on your portfolio.

Now I just go a step further and I make a video about it. It’s really great to have like a behind the scenes bit of content when you are, when you’re trying to show new clients that are coming on board, how the process might work for them, because clients are out there, they’re all watching on social media.

It’s not just other designers that I’m serving for, it’s actually hidden clients that are watching as well. So I’m kind of, every time I’m, I’m putting my content out there, I’m framing it, like, Hey designers, this is how it’s done. But my secret audience is the client’s watching. I’m like, this is what it’s gonna be like for you if you work with me.

So there’s like a, like a two part audience there. I’m always thinking about those clients. Whenever I do anything online, all the work is like, is my own, and I’m making sure that I’m framing it so that when the clients are watching and they can get in touch with me really easily.

Pat Flynn: I love that it almost gives people a glimpse of what it’s actually like to work with you.

James Barnard: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: You know, and if they like your personality, then they kind of already seen your resume in real time and, and what it might be like to experience that. And I, what I love about your videos that I’ve seen is you bring your personality into this. There’s like a very clear, kind of witty and then like the reactions you have are really humorous.

Was it always like that? How did you inject your personal self into your videos? Was that easy from the start?

James Barnard: Sort of. I wasn’t very comfortable on camera when I first got doing it, so there’s a lot of script writing involved and I’m, I’m lucky enough, I think I’m a decent enough writer, so I definitely write a script for my videos.

I still do, even when they appear like they’re off the cuff, I’ve, I’ve written a script and I’m recording it, you know, one line at a time to the camera and cutting those clips together. It’s just being self-deprecating. It’s such a, it’s a way to kind of like loosen the audience a little bit, soften their resolve a little bit when they’re watching a video.

And also it comes with being like 40 plus. Now you’re giving less and less of a toss what people think about you.

Pat Flynn: When I hit 40, I stopped caring about what anybody could totally say. I don’t know if this is about 40.

James Barnard: I think that’s it. Just there’s a bit of confidence there when you stop caring so much about what people think, you can kind of chill out a bit and, and get a bit looser with it.

And I just do goofy faces and funny stuff all the time and I, I make fun of myself constantly and people seem to like it, so I’m gonna keep doing it.

Pat Flynn: There was one video I saw where you were kind of commenting on an AI version of a logo on a soccer jersey, right? Like a wrinkled soccer jersey, having the AI sort of place it on a wrinkled jersey in action, and it kind of made it look nice, but the words were spelled wrong and all this stuff, and like just your reactions to like, Ooh, were really funny.

And then. When you started playing with, I think it was Photoshop. Photoshop to do it. Photoshop, yeah. In your way, which again shows that you know what you’re doing to everybody else, and then it looks perfect. In the end. It almost looks like magic, but then like every step, it went back to your face in between and you’re like, oh yeah, this is where we’re going.

James Barnard: You could get a little bit saucy with Photoshop.

Pat Flynn: Right, right. I just love that. It was really like in 60 seconds, I got to know you from just. You didn’t even say any words, you just kind of were showing us how a designer would approach it. I, I love that.

James Barnard: It’s interesting when you mix the content up like that.

Sometimes I will talk on camera when something’s a bit more complicated, like a case study and I’ve gotta kind of explain something. But the videos that really pop off are the ones where there’s no language barrier involved and everything’s like timed to some sort of banger of a track. And obviously there’s a lot of anti AI sentiment out there right now. People are kind of looking for human creativity and looking to see the behind the scenes that people are actually still doing this. And I, I made, I made that video basically as a kind of like, God, I miss Photoshop, I miss doing it the old way. And I resonated with a lot of people.

I only posted that one yesterday. And it sort like. 300,000 views on Instagram already. I saw. Which is good. And like there’s clearly I’ve, I’ve hit on a nerve there. I think people are kind of, you know, there was that great example where Apple used OG authentic tech to bring their logo to life and they animated the screen turning and now that’s like the, the start of all of their Apple TV shows as it is like was a piece of creativity that was done in person. And no way AI was involved. And then you see people like Coca-Cola making their Christmas adverts using nothing but prompts and people, there’s a huge backlash to it. There really is like an anti AI movement out there right now. So if you can prove that you are still doing it the old way and you’re still, you know, showing up as a human to do this, then I think there’s something to that.

And I think people will really resonate with that.

Pat Flynn: I’ve heard this discussed before about when building a brand, finding like a common enemy, sort of like a villain that we can kind of all get behind in, in a way, AI has become the villain that you’re kind of showing up and, and trying to defeat and, and I love that.

Now, that’s not in every video, but I think that I’ve seen enough of your stuff to see that that is a common theme and those videos seem to do really well. I think it’s a, a wise thing to see what the sort of consensus is out there in the world and see how you might be able to lend your voice to that one way or another.

So a video pops off. It does really well. Some creators will just be like, yay, I got a lot of views and maybe made a few cents here and there, but how do you take that to the next level? How do you begin to use that as the start of a relationship with those yours or at least some of those viewers?

James Barnard: Well, the, the first part is having a great funnel in place so that when anybody, you know, does come to your account and you’ve got a good link in bio offering and your website’s there and everything’s all set up, look, look, the, the main reason for me doing this is to bring people to my business, and that’s always been the game. Like, yes, having a lot of followers is cool, and it’s kind of like a bit of social proof, and when people come to your account, maybe you get taken a bit more seriously because you can see a lot of people want to know what I’ve got to say. But at the end of the day, followers doesn’t lead to a bank balance.

Right? And I need to provide for my family. I, I’ve got two young children over here and I need to, you know, make those ends meet. And the way I do that is to bring people in in a way where, yes, you can get something free for me in terms of a bit of value and a bit of educational content, but if you want something further, I’m making it as easy as possible for you to get in touch with me.

All my ducks are in a row on my website. My, my website’s set up pretty well. I’ve got a few other offerings as well for if you’re a designer, I’ve got like a community that you can join and, and courses and that kind of thing. And if you’re a client. And you wanna work with me? Here’s how you do that. So, you know the, the website’s okay.

I’m in the process of like rebranding myself right now, which is tough, but also an opportunity as well. I can actually, you know, do behind the scenes of how I do a logo process for myself and treat myself like a client and share that online. So I’m halfway through a video series of me doing that, and then I’ll update the website eventually and, you know, try and refine this offering a little bit and make it look a little bit cleaner.

But yeah, trying to bring people on board. It’s just all from providing as much value as possible on socials and then hopefully those clients that are watching you just make it as easy as possible for them to, to reach out to you.

Pat Flynn: Do you offer a call to action in those videos, like click on the link in the bio, or what do, do you say anything specific to help with that?

James Barnard: So with case studies? Yeah, definitely. So if you wanna see more images from the project, hit the link in my bio to go to the case study on the website, and then what’s on the website now. Then I’ve got them, you know, I’m trying to get ’em in touch. Also, you know, I use tools like ManyChat. If there’s something like an offering, you know, comment the word whatever to get a link from me, that kind of thing.

Pat Flynn: You find that to work well?

James Barnard: Sometimes yes, sometimes not. It definitely doesn’t add to like the engagement, but in terms of links, you know, my financial pie chart has changed a bit over the last five years. I have a few other little ions to the fire and one of those is affiliate marketing. So occasionally I’ll, I’ll be a speaker on some kind of conference or an event and I’ll get a certain cut of sales for tickets and that’s a great way to do it if I can make a piece of video content, push people that way.

And then once the link is in their inbox rather than just a, you know, link in bio, those do a lot better. So I found that really works. Like there’s a summit on this week. They work on, the whole business model is on affiliate sales, and so doing a comment to dm, call to action works so well for something like that.

Pat Flynn: I’ll leave a comment. You send me a DM and you’re sending me whatever free thing that you have, or a link to the product. Specifically what, what am I seeing in my DM after I comment that?

James Barnard: So it’s usually a link. Yeah, so that’s that. The point is like if, if you go click the link in my bio. And they watch the video, they’ll, they might forget about it later on, but once it’s in a dm, it’s in their inbox, right?

So they can always come back to it later on. I think that’s more powerful than you think for those people that just happen to be sort of glancing by, they’ve actually got that link somewhere that they can click it later on. So yeah, it depends on what it is. It might be a link to my community, it might be a link to some kind of event or something like that. But ha, definitely having it in people’s inbox is, is way more powerful. Just provides a little bit more of a, you know, they can come back to it later if they were watching somewhere that isn’t quite convenient to click on a link.

Pat Flynn: Now when people come to your website, for example, click a link of the bio, they go to the website, they read the case study, they’re getting excited, they wanna work with you.

How are you getting them to get in contact with you? Are you selling just packages of various things right up front or are you trying to get on a call with them? What’s that sales process like for you?

James Barnard: I’ve tried this a few ways. A friend of ours, Josh Hall, has given me some advice on this, so I’ve tried it a few ways.

I, I almost. I, I’ll be completely transparent, I almost lost my business a few years back because I put my prices on my website and tried to package things up and get people to sort of look at a priced offering, and it really didn’t work. The leads just dried up completely. I found that my pricing structure is totally dependent on who the client is.

It’s about value of return rather than how long it takes me to do something. The only way we can discuss that is by having a conversation. So I might do something like reply with some kind of floor price so that we’re not wasting anybody’s time. If they can’t afford to work with me, we may as well have that conversation up front.

But I do feel like that lead needs to come in first before we have that conversation. And that’s just the case of when you click on a a button on my site, it goes through a, a very clever CRM platform that I have called Bloom and. It’s all automated. To the extent that that comes into my inbox, it’s all put into a, a client management portal and I can manage those leads kind of one-on-one from there.

And I do like to like do it myself, actually reply to the inbox if a, if a very promising lead comes in, I wanna do a much more personalized response and really kind of amp up that kind of client interaction. But yeah, no one will come to that had I not had the sort of social media content there in the first place.

And I think it’s something like, like 85% of my leads now come from socials. It’s insane. So I’ve just gotta kind of keep this hype train going.

Pat Flynn: When you say socials, which social platforms would those be and are any performing better for you than others?

James Barnard: So it started on TikTok, so I had a viral moment on TikTok four or five years ago, and I got something like, I think it was something like 70 leads in a single day from that one video. And I was like, wow, okay.

I need to be doing this more.

Pat Flynn: Is that a case study?

James Barnard: It wasn’t a case study. No. I got a couple of my logos, got into a logo design book and I was kind of bragging about it on TikTok and I used a stitch to kind of like, it had somebody else’s hook, so it worked really well. I’ve dissected this clip like you wouldn’t believe it had all the characteristics of a great story arc.

It had a great hook, bit of setup, bit of conflict, and a kind of a, a resolution at the end of it. And so, yeah, I started doing a bit, trying a bit harder on, um, video. Basically the start answering questions, posting it to TikTok and now, you know, maybe six months later, I was on posting the same content to Instagram and one of my videos on Instagram took off and I got a hundred thousand new followers in two weeks.

It was insane. One of my videos went crazy viral, and it was all like, I, I started to get a bit of a pattern with it, like trying to come out with like pillars of content. So education, you know, how do bezier curves work, software tips, case studies, and then funny. Entertaining, like goofy stuff. And so I just post everything everywhere.

I post it on TikTok, post it on Instagram, YouTube shorts, and LinkedIn as well now is doing really well. LinkedIn have really started pushing video content lately. Everything’s the same. One video goes on to multiple platforms and yeah, the, and we’ll just see which one does, does the best.

Pat Flynn: That’s really cool.

As a bonus, are you making some revenue off the ad platforms? On those as well?

James Barnard: Not really. They don’t have the creator platform in Australia, which is unfortunate. Oh, and I only just got accepted to the YouTube one. It was the criteria for meeting that was something like, is it 10 million Shorts views in 90 days?

It’s something insane. So it took a while to get to that. It was, it was quite a lot. But I’ve got it now. I had a video about, I told a bit of a story about the HBO logo and how there was a mistake in the logo.

Pat Flynn: Wait, was that with you?

James Barnard: That was me

Pat Flynn: where you, like you drew a line and you’re like, it didn’t line up perfectly.

James Barnard: That’s the one. Yeah,

Pat Flynn: bro. I saw that video.

James Barnard: There we go. 9.1 million other people did as well.

Pat Flynn: Oh wow.

James Barnard: It was crazy. I actually just did an interview for the Daily Mail about that and there was an article about me in that, about that.

Pat Flynn: So somebody could have that idea and noticed something like that, right?

Like, oh, the HBO logo, like the B hangs lower than the H. Mm-hmm. And it’s like, you know, why? What was your thought process and how to masterfully make that video.

James Barnard: Okay. So what originally happened, it was somebody else who spotted it and it was doing, there were a few videos on TikTok. I think it was just someone was like getting a piece of paper and holding it up in front of their screen.

And I did. I made a video about it and like how mistakes like this can easily happen. So I’ve actually made like a couple of pieces of content around this. The first one was like, wow. I’ve downloaded the SVG from the website and measured it in Adobe Illustrator, and there’s a mistake in the HBO logo. The B hangs lower than the H posted it and did okay.

A couple hundred thousand views, something like that. And then loads of comments came in that were like, who cares? It’s, it’s a tiny little error. It’s honestly, it’s a tiny little mistake. Why are you making such a big deal of this? So I thought, this is interesting, like this is a massive company who’ve made this huge faux pas. Also, when I made that video, the original designer of the 1975 version of the HBO logo emailed me with an attachment that had his original trace from 1975. They used to do it on paper and then scan it in and. And there’s no mistake in his original trace.

Pat Flynn: I was gonna say it probably was aligned back then.

James Barnard: Yes, it was perfect. So I got him on the community, the original designer, we had a like an hour long chat about it. We talked through like, how does this happen? How does a massive company like this make this kind of mistake? And obviously it’s a huge, it’s, it’s been out for ages, copies of logos. Somebody probably traced it into digital and made a bit of a rush job of it, and there was a little error in it.

And we talked about this. And so I made this piece of content following up saying, well actually some people do care. Check this out. And the original designer got in touch. So it was kind of, I think that video had a bit of like vindication. It was like those people that called me out, maybe, you know, I’m not the pretentious one.

Maybe you are. And that one absolutely exploded. It was like, yeah, 9 million views across all the channels it was in.

Pat Flynn: That is so cool. Do you ever, when you’re preparing for a video like that, go, uh, why would anybody watch this? Or do you just kind of go for it and kind of see what happens?

James Barnard: I do. You know, I was saying before about I don’t really care what people think, but when it comes to like making a piece of content like that, I will try and like, at least write it out in a way that I think is entertaining. I’m not very good at kind of talking off the cuff on camera and just recording myself having a chat. There’s too many ums and ahs. I’d lose your attention too fast. So I will script something like that out and write it out and see if it actually, if I can frame this in a way that’s a short enough and be entertaining enough that I can make this into a piece of content.

And if that script works, I’m like, right, let’s give this a reel. Red hot shot and then the rest is kind of like just how well I can edit the video afterwards.

Pat Flynn: That’s so cool. You had mentioned there’s a bunch of, sort of pillars or buckets of content that you create, educational or entertaining? How do you decide which bucket to pull from and when?

James Barnard: Usually, just what I’ve done too much of lately. I’m trying to mix it up as much as possible. I mean, look, you can find a bit of a format with videos and sometimes they’ll do very, very well, but usually what tends to happen is people get bored of that same format if you do it too much. So for a time there all I would do was to bombshell software trick timed to an absolute banger of a track in some kind of funny way. And they would absolutely kill. ’cause there was no one, you know, no language barrier like we were saying before. And then people kind of got a bit bored of that format. So I started trying to mix it up a little bit.

I’m just basically trying to vary it as much as possible, but. For me as well. I’ll get bored if I don’t change this content up enough. And I, I want to keep this sustainable. I want to keep doing this. I found like a sustainable amount that I can post each week, and if I don’t, if I do the same thing every time, I’ll just kind of get bored of it.

So yeah, it’s basically about my own joy out of this.

Pat Flynn: I kind of follow the energy and the energy will come through the video.

James Barnard: That’s it. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: How many times are you posting per week, would you say? And how many hours are you putting into it?

James Barnard: So I have a day job. I run this business from my home studio here.

So my time is limited to an extent, but you know, I’ve discovered that I have to make time in order to do this. It takes me a couple of hours to edit a video, probably from writing the script to filming all of the screen recordings and shooting it. And editing it two to three hours, something like that.

So that’s a fair chunk of time for something that I think is like reasonably polished. So, um, maybe two to three times a week I’ll get a video out there at least two. And I have noticed that. I don’t grow all that much if there’s anything less. Like over Christmas break, I took some time off and lost like a thousand followers because I didn’t post it hardly anything in like two weeks, three weeks.

And so yeah, I found that, you know, I do have to keep this going and keep the content churning out. Otherwise, we’ll start to lose followers. It’s, it’s, it’s quite depressing. You gotta keep it going.

Pat Flynn: All the more reason to find the fun in it and do things that energize you. How many clients are you working with at this very moment, would you say, or what’s optimal for you in terms of leads coming in and getting people to pay you for work?

What is a good number that you’d shoot for for that?

James Barnard: I usually try and stagger them like two weeks apart, so I’ll usually, I’ll be running about three jobs concurrently so that while amends are being considered on one project, I can be starting another one, but two weeks is like a, what I found, like it’s like a good amount of time for me to go from like a full discovery call into delivering a first presentation for a client to take a look at.

And the whole project most of the time usually takes about four to five weeks. So I can’t wait four to five weeks for each job. I’ve gotta keep each one kind of coming in any more than like three jobs in one running concurrently, it gets a bit stressful, especially when I’ve gotta put out social media content and I also have another job, which is running this, um, designer’s community, and that takes a fair amount of time as well.

So yeah, three jobs is kind of a sweet spot. And anything else, I’ll just kind of wait list just to keep it going.

Pat Flynn: When you say like you’ve had videos that have brought in 70 leads per day. I mean, that sounds like way more than you really need. Do you find that there’s a mostly a wait list this whole time because of the social media and the videos and the way that they’ve been doing?

Or do you feel like you have to kind of fight for leads to come in?

James Barnard: So the leads have slowed down a bit from the social media. It was explosive when I first started, but it’s definitely slowed down. But the level of. Kind of qualified leads has gone up. Do you know what I mean? Like people are understanding that it takes a certain level, you have to be a kind of like a, a decent level to work with me. And that’s not me being headed. That’s me, you know, years in the industry, charging what I’m worth. What’s great is, is that now that I have this community of designers and a lot of them are up and coming leads that I can’t work with a because of time or B because of budget, I can give to them.

Oh yeah. And so what happens is I’ve created this lovely jobs board on our community where guys, there’s this project here. This guy needs a designer to work on this project. The project’s only a couple of grand, but. Have a, if you want to go back to this person, you can. And then that client has agreed to receive portfolios and applications from designers.

And then as soon as somebody wins it, we kind of turn off the email to someone. Doesn’t kind of get bothered, but it’s another little bonus added value thing for the community to have like a little jobs spot on. This a cool little business model.

Pat Flynn: Have you thought of expanding into agency work? I mean, are you still working by yourself or have you thought of ever like having a team of your own, of five 10 designers that you’re managing to handle all the client work?

James Barnard: I have, and again, our friend Josh Hall, always trying to convince me to scale this thing up and like to move into like agency space. For me it’s lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle choice to not scale this. I mean, I’ve been really tempted to. Even, you know, yesterday I was looking at office spaces just could I, could I scale this thing up, hire a couple of employees, and take those smaller leads and just have them work on them and, and turn this into an agency? But I, I do like my life. It’s very cool. I live in Paradise here in the Gold Coast, Australia. I’ve got two young kids who I’m always, you know, when they come home from school, I’m always here, I’m always there to have dinner with ’em at night and, uh, put them to bed.

I just, you know, I just changed my hours a little bit and work a little bit later so that I can. You know, speak to people like you across the pond. I don’t really feel the need to want to scale this yet. I got to a point in my career before I went freelance, where I was sort of managing teams and I was, the last role I left was like head of digital design for a, a big newspaper company.

To be honest, I didn’t really enjoy it. I prefer doing the work. I prefer actually being hands-on and being kind of in the trenches and still doing it. I have an assistant who helps me out with some of the other elements of the business and she’s remote, so it’s about me kind of like getting the most enjoyment out of this.

And the added bonus of that, obviously is that because I’m doing this work and I’m still in the trenches and using the software, there’s so much content that can come from it. There’s loads of kind of like tips and tricks stuff. Whenever a new update in something like Adobe Illustrator comes out, I’m one of the first people to see it ’cause I’ve got like partnerships with Adobe now. Speaking at conferences around the world for this kind of design thing. Having this kind of business allows me to do things like that and to step away from it from time to time, which is, I I really love that freedom.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that’s true. Like why in the world would you start an agency that wouldn’t make any sense.

James Barnard: I know, I feel like it, it would add legitimacy a bit. I, I hang out with a lot of other designers that have agencies and I kind of part of me is jealous and part of me is kind of like in relief that I don’t have that lifestyle.

Pat Flynn: While you see them go out in the hallway ’cause they gotta manage a team and, and put out some fires and you’re like, well, I’m going to the beach now with my family.

James Barnard: That’s it. I’m gonna go have a nap.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, exactly. Tell me about your community. When did you begin that and, and why?

James Barnard: Basically, my wife’s been telling me to do this for years, and of course it’s doing really, really well now. So she’s loving the fact that she was absolutely right. She was right. Uh, yeah. Yeah.

So we had a bit of, um, not like a quiet spell, but you know, the, the, the amount of logo design jobs that were coming in towards the end of the last year wasn’t like as huge as it was. I didn’t have a. An an enormous wait list. So I had some time on my hands. I thought, maybe now’s the time to try this. And so yeah, I spun designers up in about two weeks.

It was in August last year. Got on circle, fired it all up, made this whole thing happen. I was worried that I wasn’t gonna have enough to give, do you know what I mean? I, I have a lot of course content. I have a whole course about how to go faster in Adobe Illustrator, but I found that people. They, they’ll pay for a course and half of them won’t even complete it.

They’ll just, you can see the analytics on those courses that, you know, you know, 10% of people that have bought the course have actually finished it. It’s like, is this really the best way to be, to be doing this? And so basically I just packaged everything up that I’d already done all those digital products through them into the community, added sections around like design reviews, this is a huge part of it as well, is like I need someone to sense check my work from time to time that isn’t my wife. And so it’d be nice to have designers on board that can actually help me do that. And I think, you know, lots of other people will probably need that as well. So we have a whole section in there about design reviews.

People showing their client work before it goes to clients so we can sense check it and make sure that things are legible. And they haven’t accidentally designed a swastika in their logo, which happens more than you think. And then there’s like, you know, we’ve got sections on like guest interviews, we have competitions and design challenges and, and all sorts.

It’s been really great. It’s, it’s fun for me as well, like actually having, I work on my own all, all day. Um, I’m sat here in this office by myself and so to have a community of people to call upon has been brilliant. So, it’s pretty selfish reasons really, but you know, it is worked out pretty well.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, well, congrats on that.

And it sounds like it’s where everybody can win. You can win. People who are in there can win and everybody’s happy, and your wife can always tell you that she was right, so.

James Barnard: That’s right.

Pat Flynn: What’s the price point of the membership and how long are people staying in there for?

James Barnard: Okay, so it’s, it’s pretty new.

So we haven’t had a lot of churn. We’ve only had a couple of people leave, actually, it’s been fantastic. We’ve got like a 150 members now, something like that. So it’s not the cheapest price point. But the value of it is pretty unbelievable. We just partnered up with Adobe Express, so for everybody that comes on board for a yearly subscription now gets a free year of Adobe CC Pro.

So that’s great. Like it’s, that’s me using my connections at Adobe to kind of make this happen. And all I have to do is say, powered by Adobe Express every time I mention the community, which is fine. I’ll do that. Yeah, it’s been great. So the, the price point for a yearly subscription is, is $599 a year, which is not cheap.

Pat Flynn: No.

James Barnard: But that’s absolutely cheaper than a year subscription of Adobe CC Pro. So it’s actually like, kind of like printing money if you come on board. I think the year subscription to Adobe CC is like 800 bucks. So you’re just saving 200 bucks just by joining the community.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Wow.

James Barnard: And hopefully people will stay on afterwards as well.

Pat Flynn: That’s kind of a no brainer.

James Barnard: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great deal. That’s, I think it’s one of the best deals I’ve negotiated in my entire life. But thankfully I’ve had like great, you know, some having done this social media thing and got my name out there as this designer. I’ve made some connections in the industry and I have a lot of friends who are kind of higher up in Adobe and, and could really help out with that.

And you know, there’s been a, a great partnership. So yeah, it’s added real value to the community.

Pat Flynn: That’s so cool. This has been really, really great to hear, especially as we often hear about designers and other types of work getting replaced by ai, that there are little pockets in the community that are thriving because of people like you.

So congratulations on that, James. That is, that is incredible. And just keep up the great work. My final question to you here is for everybody who’s listening, who’s encouraged and inspired by you who is still at the beginning of their social media and sort of lead generation phase, what advice could you give them as they’re putting themselves out there for the first time, trying to tell good stories, trying to hit a viral video to get more clients, but they’re not quite there yet.

What advice would you give them before we go?

James Barnard: Well, firstly, if you’re uncomfortable on camera, write a script if that’s the best piece of advice I could give, is write a script for your content. It’s so hard to just like off the cuff, talk in front of a camera and be comfortable doing that. It’s really nerve wracking.

You make mistakes, you feel silly. Just write a script, read one line at a time to the camera, and then cut those clips together. Easy peasy you, you know, you sound nice and succinct in the video will be tighter for it and, and more engaging. And then just find a repeatable model that’s sustainable for you.

Just don’t try and overdo it. If it feels like it’s too much and you’re burning out because of it, and it stopped being fun, then. Maybe that’s not really the route to go. And like I say, my amount of content has been something like two or three times a week, and that’s probably not enough. Considering you’re doing like a 30 day challenge right now, or you’ve just finished one.

Pat Flynn: Since today actually. Yeah.

James Barnard: Yeah. One a day would be way too much for me considering the level of effort that I have to put into making this content. So yeah, just find something that is sustainable for you and it’ll be, it’ll keep it fun and you’ll be able to do it for longer rather than just kind of burning out straight away and not being able to maintain any kind of presence online.

Pat Flynn: Love that. James Barnard, thank you so much for being here. Where can people go to check out your work and what are your socials or maybe the top one that you wanna recommend people check out?

James Barnard: All the socials are @BarnardCo and my website is Barnard.co. And if you wanna join the community, it’s Designerrrs.com with three R’s..

And then, uh, yeah, you can, you can join me there and, and I just wanna say Pat. I was so nervous about doing this podcast because you know, you teach this kind of stuff and so I was making sure that my camera was like eye level here and I got my microphone set up properly.

Pat Flynn: You’re great man. This is one of my favorite. like James Barnard bar none, this is one of my favorite interviews in a long time.

James Barnard: Oh, good. Dad jokes love it.

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

James Barnard: Also, I was in LA recently for Adobe Max, the creativity conference there, and I was taking an airport transfer on the way home and I was talking to the driver and we got onto Pokemon somehow and I said, are you on TikTok?

And he goes, yeah. And I said, alright. I’m not gonna say anything. Just do the theme. Tune in 3, 2, 1. He goes, should I open it? I should. And I was like, amazing. What recognition? So yeah, you’ve got the international acclaim, man. You’re in Australia, you’re in the uk, you’re in England.

Pat Flynn: That is right.

James Barnard: You’re killing it.

Pat Flynn: That’s audio logo design in my world.

James Barnard: There you go. That’s called a sonic trigger, isn’t it? There you go.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Yeah. James, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. We’ll link to everything for, for all the listeners here, and congrats again. What you’re doing is great, and I’m so happy again to hear that people in the design industry are thriving.

You just gotta kind of get creative with it. So well done, my friend.

James Barnard: Amazing. Thanks a lot.

Pat Flynn: Okay. Did I tell you this was amazing? This is absolutely one of the GOATs. James Barnard, you can check him out again at Barnard.co to see how he does it. His website’s changing, as he says, but I’m looking at it right now and it looks great.

Love how he’s gotten Adobe into his community to just make it a no-brainer and just everything you revealed. This was one of my favorite interviews. I hope you pull something away from this, and again, check out James online as well, and some of his videos, how he’s put his personality into things. Very, very important and especially for a designer to thrive in this world of AI right now, I think this is the most encouraging thing I’ve heard in a while related to AI. so I love it. James, thank you so much.

Thank you for watching and or listening to this. Be sure to hit subscribe because we got more great stuff coming your way. A lot of fun things to reveal for you later this year and keep up the good work.

I’ll see you soon. Cheers.