Business Perspectives: Building financial resilience beyond project work

Project fees have always been the backbone of a design firm's revenue—but backbones can be brittle when a single client pauses a program, a sector slows down or a pitch cycle runs long. Increasingly, RGD firm owners are treating financial resilience as something to be designed, not left to chance: building income streams that don't rise and fall with any one project, client or season.

We asked RGD business owners: beyond project work, what approaches have helped your firm become more financially resilient—through new revenue streams, advisory roles or alternative service models? Their answers point to a few common threads—diversifying beyond the billable hour, deepening (rather than widening) client relationships and treating flexibility itself as a financial strategy.

Léo Breton-Allaire RGD, Creative Director & Partner at Caserne, Montréal, QC

One of the most important principles at Caserne is protecting our people and, by extension, our studio culture. Over the past decade, we've intentionally built flexibility into our operating model by maintaining a consistent percentage of our workload—roughly 15%—with trusted freelance collaborators. This approach creates valuable resilience when market conditions become more uncertain. Rather than reacting to a slowdown by reducing our core team, we can first scale back external production capacity. It allows us to protect long-term talent and maintain continuity for both our team and our clients. We also try to spread risk through a mix of project-based work and retainer-based relationships, which helps create a more predictable revenue base. For us, financial resilience is about building a sustainable studio that can navigate uncertainty while continuing to invest in its people.

Meggan van Harten RGD, Co-CEO at Design de Plume, Sudbury, ON

Developing our first digital product, the Indigenous Communications Toolkit, has been a key step in diversifying our financial resilience. It was created to support better, more informed Indigenous communications practices across the industry, addressing a clear and growing need. By offering it at an accessible price point, we've diversified our revenue while expanding our impact beyond project-based work. It's also opened the door to further education opportunities (which we love). We're continuing to explore new tools and modules to build out this ecosystem, allowing us to support the design and communications community in more flexible and sustainable ways.

Jim Hopkins RGD, Principal Creative at Baytek, Ottawa, ON

The most important thing we have done recently is focus more on being a partner to our clients, rather than just a project provider. Sure, we still do projects, but usually they are a product of long-term planning and truly understanding what our clients' needs are. We keep in constant contact with them, and so truly have a deep knowledge of their challenges. This helps us deliver all manner of recurring digital services, from technical consultation to social media and advertising design. It also makes planning ahead that much easier, knowing when a client is likely to need something in the future.

Elana Rudick RGD, Founder & Creative Director at Design Is Yummy, Montreal, QC

One of the most meaningful steps Design Is Yummy has taken to be more financially resilient has been to expand our service offerings through strategic partnerships with other creatives. Rather than referring work out or losing clients to larger firms, we've built a trusted network that allows us to offer a fuller range of capabilities. This model gives clients a reason to stay and grow with us, opens doors to projects we couldn't have taken on alone and broadens our revenue without requiring us to scale overhead.

Hans Thiessen RGD, Partner & Executive Creative Director of Design at Rethink, Vancouver BC

It sounds counterintuitive, but the best tool for growing revenue is self-initiated projects. Why? Because exceptional work is the ultimate magnet for new business. When we invest in passion projects, we strip away standard client constraints. We get to experiment with new tech, test alternative ways of working and show what our team can do when nothing is holding us back. Essentially these projects act as a live R&D lab. They prove our cultural relevance and strategic thinking to premium clients who would usually ignore a standard pitch. Treating self-initiated work as a serious investment isn't just a way to survive market shifts; it's how we design our own growth.