> 9 times out of 10, if it would increase their income, they would have If you've ever worked on a design project inside a big company, you'd know that's simpl

> 9 times out of 10, if it would increase their income, they would have If you've ever worked on a design project inside a big company, you'd know that's simply untrue. Big companies are not actually streamlined profit machines, they're streamlined ego-perpetuating machines. Which is why you have the 10-committee problem, the 50-stakeholder problem, and "Marketing" owns the sidebar and news area of the site, while Copywriting owns only the front page and About Our Company pages, and Operations and/or the Boss' Secretary owns everything else... It's inefficient as hell to have 10+ people in a design meeting, for example. Wastes profits by the boatload. Committees do not create profits, they just increase the wastefulness of most meetings. And so on, so forth -- the good news is, as a consultant, they were wasting my time at $300+ an hour.[1] As long as I was content to sit there and do nothing but count my money in my head, it was a great gig. I remember one client that paid us quite a lot of money for research and initial redesigns, but in the end, the CEO got talked out of approving our $60k budget. Because Marketing was afraid it would cut into their budget -- which was $300k/mo. Keep in mind: This particularly company's whole business was delivering a web video experience. 12 mos later, they went from several hundred employees to about 60. Last I heard (months after that), they're down to 20. What a surprise. This problem doesn't exist only at startups, though. I've worked with a lot of big name companies you'd recognize, and almost everywhere it's the same. [1] The great thing about being a consultant to big biz is that your rates don't matter. Occasionally a client will initially balk when you throw out $300, $400, whatever per hour -- but it's usually them 'playing poker' with what they are willing to pay. The fact of the matter is, when they overstuff meetings (which they all habitually do), they are wasting $1000s per hour of their own employee time.