Most business advice tells you to work harder, hustle more, and say yes to everything. Krishna Solanki, founder and creative director of Krishna Solanki Designs, joined Fab ahead of Business of Marketing with the opposite advice: be kinder, say yes on purpose, and build a process you only have to think through once.
Krishna is one of the speakers at Business of Marketing, our in-person event in London on 13 November. Grab your ticket to meet her and the rest of the line-up.
About Krishna Solanki
Krishna Solanki is the founder and creative director of Krishna Solanki Designs (KSD), an award-winning brand and Squarespace website design agency based in Cambridge, UK. With 20 years of experience, she helps established independent businesses, startups, and SMEs elevate their online presence through distinctive brand identities and bold, converting Squarespace websites. Known for making the complex feel simple, Krishna brings design flair, trusted processes, and spot-on project management to every client she works with.
She also teaches business owners how to package and productise their services through her signature course, Package Your Services. She has spoken on the international stage at Squarespace HQ in New York, and featured as a speaker at global online summits. When she is not deep in design, you will find her with a slice of pizza, very strong opinions about fonts, and a to-do list that somehow keeps growing.
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- Course: Package Your Services
Kindness Is A Business Skill, Not Just A Personality Trait
A lot of business advice tells you to be sharper, tougher, harder to read. Krishna makes the opposite case: kindness is one of the most useful skills you can bring into client work.
It sounds soft, but it isn’t. When you’re generous with advice, you listen properly, and you help someone feel less alone in a decision, you build trust faster than any pitch deck ever will. You also become the person people remember, refer, and come back to.
In practice, that looks like:
- Sharing what you know, even before someone’s paid you for it
- Listening properly instead of jumping straight to the sell
- Being honest and useful without making it feel transactional
- Helping someone feel seen when they’re stuck, not just sold to
People don’t just hire you for your skills. They hire you for how safe and clear you make the process feel.
Say Yes With Boundaries, Not Without Them
Krishna’s other big piece of advice is to say yes more. Not recklessly, not to everything, but on purpose.
Saying yes can open doors you’d never have planned for: speaking, mentoring, a collaboration that turns into something bigger. Her yes always comes with awareness, though. She looks at the season she’s in, checks whether the opportunity actually fits, and if it does, she says yes with clear limits around timing and capacity.
That might look like:
- Accepting the project, but starting it in a later booking window
- Saying yes to the conversation, not the unrealistic deadline
- Taking the opportunity that leads to growth, while protecting time to rest
- Leaving room for life, holidays, and whatever else is already on the calendar
The real skill sits between saying yes to everything and saying no too fast.
Productise Your Services To Buy Back Your Time
The biggest practical shift in Krishna’s business came from productising her services: turning an open-ended, bespoke process into a clear offer with defined steps, timelines, and outcomes.
It started with noticing repetition. The projects were different, but the process wasn’t: onboarding, a start date, revision rounds, delivery. Once she saw the pattern, she wrote it down and turned it into a template.
That one change did a lot of the heavy lifting:
- It made the process easier to explain and easier to buy
- It gave her realistic timelines instead of guesswork
- It cut the back-and-forth with prospects before they’d even signed
- It made her time easier to protect, because the scope was already decided
Instead of “it depends,” she can now say: here’s what’s included, here’s how long it takes, here’s when I can start. Krishna’s own proof point is a five-page website, designed and built in a week, because the process was already built before the client ever showed up. If you’re repeating the same steps for every client, you don’t need to work harder. You need to write it down once.
Want the full walkthrough? Krishna’s course, Package Your Services, breaks down how to turn your own repeatable process into an offer. And if you want more practical lessons like this, have a look at the AMS course library.