How one designer stopped talking about money with his clients to protect the romance of the creative process.

Michel Smith Boyd was driving to see a new client’s home for the first time when we connected by phone. The project will be featured on an upcoming television show, and he wanted to see the space without cameras rolling in order to be prepared. To make matters more complicated, he didn’t want to meet the family yet: Because the Atlanta-based designer wanted his immediate connection with the client to feel genuine on-screen, they agreed to leave the front door unlocked and stay sequestered upstairs while he assessed the first floor of their space. Boyd stopped our conversation to send the client a text letting her know that he was almost there—partly as a courtesy, but also to make the interaction a little more personal, or at least a little less awkward.

The situation dovetailed perfectly with what I had called Boyd to talk about—building trust with new clients, and getting them comfortable with writing big checks upfront. “That phase is really weird, even after all these years,” he says. It’s an issue he has been mulling of late, especially after making a recent switch from billing hourly to charging a flat fee. Still, the money he’s asking for now isn’t so different from payments for the first block of design hours—a big check is a big check. The larger shift Boyd made actually took place a decade ago, when he stopped talking about money with his clients altogether.