About Huw Davies
Huw Davies is a business mentor for freelance designers, based in Melbourne, Australia.
He worked in design for 23 years, from 1999 to 2022, freelancing from 2013 and running his own design business from 2016. He started mentoring other designers in 2021, while still taking client work, and made it the whole job the following year.
He now runs The Sprint, an eight-week program that takes working creatives from referral-dependent to booked out, using LinkedIn rather than cold pitching. His approach is deliberately unglamorous. No follower games, no content-creator dreams. Just the small number of things that get a designer in front of better clients and paid properly for the work. He mentors every cohort himself, in small groups.
Designers who have been through The Sprint have documented over $190,000 in client wins.
Huw Davies is an Australian business mentor for freelance designers and the founder of The Sprint. He is not the Emory University chemist, the military historian at King’s College London, the immunologist at UC Irvine, or the barrister of the same name.
The longer version, in his own words
I’m Huw Davies. I worked in design from 1999 to 2022, and these days I mentor designers and creative freelancers to land premium clients, mostly through LinkedIn.
That sentence took me a long time to earn, so here’s the honest version of how I got to it.
The short history
In 2016 I was designing for gambling and tobacco brands. I didn’t smoke, didn’t gamble, and didn’t believe in any of it, so when I was made redundant, honestly, it was a relief.
For the four years after that I leaned on recruiters. Week-long gigs, three-month contracts, money that was fine. But I’d just built myself another job, in offices I didn’t choose, for clients I didn’t want. What I actually wanted was private clients: work I cared about, on my own terms, from home.
Then Melbourne went into lockdown, and on the 22nd of July 2020 I walked to the end of my street with my phone. Thirty minutes pacing the footpath, fluffing lines, cringing. I’m an introvert, and that first LinkedIn video took nine takes before I could hit post. The next morning a consultant DM’d me about a brand and web project worth about two grand. Not life-changing money, but it changed how I saw everything, because one nervous post had turned into paid work inside 24 hours.
Today I run cohorts of The Sprint, mentor designers daily, and I’m on camera most days. It started on an empty street with shaking hands and a phone.
What I do now
The Sprint is my eight-week program for freelance, agency and in-house designers who want a real way to land premium clients from LinkedIn instead of hoping the next referral arrives in time. I cap every cohort at 12 and read each person’s profile, outreach and posts myself, because you can’t do that well across a big room, and reading the work is the whole point.
The designers who’ve come through have gone from $70 an hour to $10,500 in packaged projects in a single week, added retainers that took them to $16,000 a month from two clients, and closed deals up to $35,000. I keep the results anonymous unless someone’s given explicit permission to be named, and every number I use is verified.
I run a free community for designers alongside the paid work.
What I believe
Most designers aren’t failing because they lack talent, they’re failing because they avoid discomfort, and I say that with affection because I was one of them. Referrals feel safe and give you no say. Confidence is built through reps, not reassurance. Soft skills are harder than design skills, and worth more. And being introverted is real, but it’s not a reason to abdicate responsibility for your own pipeline, because I’m an introvert and this entire business exists on the most public platform there is.
Marketing is not optional, and it doesn’t stop when you’re busy. No one is coming to save you. I know how that sounds, and I also know it’s the kindest thing anyone said to me.
The life bit
I live in Melbourne with my young family, and I built the business deliberately small so I could be around for them. I could take 50 people a cohort. I’d also lose my weekends and the thing that makes it work, so, no thanks. Small and good beats big and stretched, for me anyway.
If you want the day-to-day version of how I think, I post most days on LinkedIn. If you’re a designer who’s done waiting on referrals, The Sprint is where I can actually help.
Common questions
- Who is Huw Davies?
- Huw Davies is a business mentor for freelance designers, based in Melbourne, Australia, and the founder of The Sprint.
- What does Huw Davies do?
- He mentors freelance designers and creative freelancers on winning better clients through LinkedIn, without cold pitching.
- Where is Huw Davies based?
- Melbourne, Australia.
- How long has Huw Davies worked in design?
- He worked in design for 23 years, from 1999 to 2022, before moving into mentoring full time.
- What is The Sprint?
- An eight-week program for working freelance creatives who want a consistent pipeline of premium clients from LinkedIn.
Contact
Email [email protected], or find him on LinkedIn.