Bonnie Dean has spent her career selling heavy industrial products like engines and power regeneration sets, and representing big industrial brands that turnover billions of pounds each year. She is also a powerful advocate for design and began our breakfast with a story about a company which brought in a designer to take a fresh look at an engine. Not only did the engine end up looking better, it functioned better, too.

“When I took the product out to sell it people got excited because it was a better fit for the engine casing. It became so much easier to sell.”

Not only did she encourage our audience to look again at the industrial sector for projects – "it’s smaller than it used to be but what is there is in robust shape" – she also told everyone to feel more confident in their abilities. Designers need not be intimidated by the size of the projects or competition from conventional consultancies.

“The McKinseys, the Bains, they have a very valuable perspective, but it is very narrow. They can’t think across a business the way you do. You are going to be training your clients to look at the world differently. You will be the only person around that table who can think the way you do.”

She highlighted the benefits that designers brought to business. Firstly, they saw things from a user perspective, and secondly, they were able to be brutally honest.

“Designers uncover the truth,” she explained. “In most businesses people don’t tell the truth. What’s more, telling the truth at the top is the hardest because the chief executive has so much invested in a product. A designer can tell him it is boring, but also how it can change. If you can do this in a way that can be heard you can become a trusted adviser which is where you want to be.”

Designers also had the ability to ‘de-risk’, she said. This is valuable as industry is typically conservative and risk-averse. Designers allow innovation to flourish because they are able to show how changes will succeed. Where designers did encounter difficulty was when it came to money. “When you mention fees, whatever the figure, the client will always express surprise,” she said.

“You have to monetise the project on both sides. You have to be able to produce metrics.” She gave the example of a design team brought in to help a brand that turned over £80 billion each year and which was expected to grow that figure by five per cent. The design team was tasked with setting out how their work was going to achieve two and half per cent of that growth.

Bonnie encouraged people to take case histories to clients showing how their work had improved the company’s position. “Be commercial,” she said, giving the example of Ben de Lisi who had recently redesigned workwear for the NHS and who had brought the same hard-headed sensibility to the project that he did his glamourous evening gowns. “When Ben de Lisi designs evening gowns for film stars he is helping them secure their next contract, their next film. In his design work for the NHS he was giving employees work tools, too.”

Bonnie’s final point was that design is fun. Designers have every reason to value the part they play. “People understand it in a way that is different to ‘we have to turn the company around.’ It gets the community on side in a positive way,” she said.