Most designers never make it past survival mode. It's not because you're not talented. It's because someone has not shown you how to do this.
And over the past 10 years, I've helped thousands of creators just like you to grow and scale their business to six figures. So, here's the truth. If you know what you're doing, making $100,000 a year becomes a reality.
And it's up to you to make that decision. In this video, I'm going to go to the five stages so you know where you're at so that you can get to 100K. Stage one, survival.
When you're in the survival stage, it's because you're saying yes to too many things and not enough no to the things that you're getting. You're probably doing some logo design, social media posts, flyers. Some are paid, some are free for the exposure that you might get.
And it's a hot mess because the work isn't good. It's not consistent, and you're not working with great people and building long-term relationships. Money is unpredictable.
You're exhausted, and you're questioning the value that you are able to provide to people. But this stage isn't failure. It's just a lack of awareness.
I'm going to teach you what you need to know, the fundamentals that you need so that you can be a successful freelancer. And number one, you got to focus on the core technical skills. You can't expect anyone to teach you these things.
Luckily for you, there's an abundant amount of resources available for free or very low cost. I'm going to tell you what they are right now. There's a couple people you want to follow on social media.
They're going to teach you how to use the three core primary software that you need to know. Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Inesign. Now, if you don't have access to those tools, don't sweat it.
Find the free or lowcost alternative to those and you'll be just fine. But I'm an Adobe guy. I'm talk about what I know.
There's a couple of people who produce excellent highquality videos on this and you can find them on YouTube on Instagram. That is my buddy Paul. He goes by OG Zit Ze T.
You should follow Type Design class picks imperfect. There's Chad Casses who does a lot of AI workflows in conjunction with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. It's a powerful combination.
He's the next generation of how we're going to be using these tools. And last but not least, hey Adam Design. That's just a list a handful of creators.
Once you follow them and you follow the people that other people follow, you're going to get an abundant amount of resources and you're going to be able to learn and level up your game. This is critical that you learn the software and learn not just one way of doing, but multiple ways of doing something and learn the very best way to do something so you're not fussing around on the computer. Okay.
So, next you have the technical skills, but now you need to learn conceptual design skills. This is where I'm going to emphasize if you're a creative, if you're a designer, you need to learn typography. And there's several ways that you can do this.
I'm going to recommend some books that you must read. And when I say you need to read, some books you need to look at the visuals, but others you actually have to read the principles to understand what's going on. Here's my list of books.
Stop stealing sheet by Eric Spieman. Typography, Form and Communication by Philip Megs and Rob Carter. The next book is The Pioneer of Swiss Graphic Design featuring the work of Joseph Mueller Brockman.
Amazing work that you need to study and emulate that work for a period of time until you figure out what's happening. The next two books I highly recommend is The Geometry of Design by Kimberly Elam. It shows you grid systems and how to use grids so that you understand what's working underneath all that design stuff that you admire.
The last but not least book is a book called A Smile in the Mind, which teaches you conceptual design, communication design. Read those books cover to cover. Read it multiple times until you start to understand the principles.
I'm also going to make a soft plug here for my own typography course because so many people have taken it. Thousands of people over the years and I've seen them go from zero to hero with type. We'll include the links in the description below.
It's typography design one. The goal of this stage is just to get good with the fundamentals that you know the craft. I'm assuming because you're watching this video, you're mostly self-taught or maybe you've got a liberal arts degree and some kind of design program that isn't really the thing that's going to teach you how to be good.
If you can just get good with these technical skills and learn some of the principles of design, you're going to be much more viable in the marketplace, much easier to hire, and you'll command a higher day rate. So before anyone is going to hire you, you need to demonstrate that you could do this. They need to see some kind of proof.
So while you're learning design and typography, you're going to create a lot of artifacts. So in the beginning, if you're literally copying and tracing things, that's totally fine. But you cannot exhibit that work as original work.
You can clarify that I'm merely tracing this and literally show the before, meaning the thing that you're working on, and try to emulate this. I remember back in design school, what I would do is pick up a book on Swiss design, put over a piece of tissue paper, and literally draw with a ruler and pen what's happening on that page until I started to get a feel for proportions, spacing, and contrast. That's what I highly recommend you do.
Now, you can film all this stuff if you want and start to develop some content for social media. And for a lot of people, they're going to really enjoy watching the creative process. You'll initially first attract other designers on their creative journey, but eventually if you do this consistent enough and it's well produced, you'll start to catch the eye of art directors and designers who can see you developing and growing and they're going to keep you in their mind so that when you ultimately reach out, you're not going to be reaching out as a cold stranger.
I can't emphasize enough for you to slow down in this process in this stage and just really enjoy it. It's the work that very few people do and they skip this process and then they wind up struggling for the rest of their creative careers. So if you can really understand what the masters have done and figure it out for decades and you know it's going to work because the work that you look at is going to be fresh.
It's going to look new but it's created decades ago and potentially even decades before you were even born. So we want to learn these timeless principles of design that's going to withstand the test of time. We don't want to be chasing trends here.
We want to follow what the masters have already figured out. Eventually, what's going to happen here is you're going to start to experiment. Once that foundational layer has been built, you're going to start to do things on your own.
This is a great time to start showing some of this work on social media. So, in this stage, you'll combine the work that you're copying with other influences to create a hybrid new thing. This is wonderful because you can bring in your own culture, your your other influences, and develop your own visual language.
If you do this consistently enough, you'll start to build up a body of work. Now, everyone always asks me the same question. How many pieces do you need in order to go get meaningful work?
And the answer is going to surprise you. It's not 50. It's not 20.
It's not even 10. It's somewhere between 3 to five pieces that show a consistent level of thinking and aesthetic. Now, I'm going to highly encourage you to edit out everything that doesn't fit within this criteria.
Because when we look at work and we see something bad or not well thought out, we assume that this will be the thing that you deliver to us. And so rather than showing more, rather than showing a diversity of skills that you may or may not have, focus in on showing three to five pieces of work that demonstrate a core competency. Now, if you're fortunate enough to go to a really good design program like I did, you will have learned this in school.
It's what you pay a lot of money for. But I don't want you to panic because you're going to sit there and think, "Chris, I don't have access to that." Of course, it's easy for you to say. Here's a story for you.
My younger brother, who is a working professional visual effects artist, learned typography from me. Basically, I'm telling you to do the exact same things I told him to do. And should you be so inspired to take my typography course, it's literally the thing that I use to learn how to design with type that I have taught thousands of people, including my younger brother.
So once he learned how to to to manipulate type on a screen, it taught him a lot of other principles about design, composition, scale contrast repetition consonants and dissonance that he was unable to apply for the rest of his career. And now he's been a working freelancer for over 25 years. In stage two, you're going to work towards stability.
Now, the thing that's preventing you from doing what it is that you need to do is because you're stretched too thin. You're probably managing a regular job. Maybe you have other responsibilities and you need to dedicate more time to learning your craft.
The only way I know how to do this is to say no to supposed opportunities. Okay, you're chasing too many things. You're feeling burnt out and you're not really making any money anyway.
So, why even do this? You're only delaying the learning process. So, you have to zero in on what is referred to as an ICP, an ideal client profile.
Now, it may hurt your soul to hear this, but you really have to think about who am I serving and what is it that I do that gets them excited about hiring someone like me. When you try to aim for too much, it becomes really hard to focus. We don't understand their pain points and challenges and every single thing that they ask you to do is a new thing for you to learn every single time.
That will erode your confidence. It doesn't allow you to build strong skills. And this is the thing that hurts most people that are transitioning out of the survival stage into the stability stage.
Here's what I'm going to tell you to do. Pick a handful of people. Figure out what's in common with them and follow them and make sure that you subscribe to everything they do.
They make a podcast. They have the newsletter. Just as much as possible, follow these five people.
And you can do five per month. I think that's a reasonable amount of people for you to follow. And you follow people all over the internet anyways.
This won't hurt you. But you may want to start to unfollow other people so that when these people post something, it's important that you respond and be one of the earliest responders. So the window is roughly the first 15 minutes.
And think about it, when someone posts something, and if it's a smaller company, when they post something, they're they just literally hit send or upload, they're going to hang around for a few minutes. And if you have the notification turned on for them and you interact with them over time, they're going to start to recognize, hey, Bob or Mary or Jane consistently show up asking thoughtful questions or contributing to the dialogue. And if you reshare and repost our content, they're going to feel like, gosh, this person's really excited about what we do and they're really trying to be helpful.
So, if you do this over a consistent period of time, hopefully you're going to start to stick out in their mind. And this is going to lead you to the opportunity of reaching out to them and doing some outbound cold outreach or hopefully, in this case, semi-lukewarm outreach. Now, I'm going to tell you what you need to do when you reach out.
Please, please, please do not do what 99% of the people out on the internet do to me all the time because what you'll get from somebody like me is an immediate delete and block and that kills the opportunity. After you've developed some kind of rapport over a period of time, I recommend at least 30 days of interacting with someone so that you have a chance to get to know each other a little bit better. Slip into their DM.
And what I would do is I would wait to slip into their DM until they respond or comment on something that you've done. Now you know they see you. So you can slip into their DM and say something like this.
And I I am a big proponent of full transparency, keeping messages short, but being really courteous. Here's how I would do it. Hey Bob, I really admire your company's work.
I've been following you for a number of years or months. And if there's ever an opportunity where you have overflow work that you can't do inhouse, I'd love the opportunity to help you out. It's important for me to work with people like you and I'm willing to work on a trial basis for whatever dollar amount that you think is fair.
Please give me an opportunity. Here's a link to my work. Let me know if there's a good fit here.
Something to that effect. Now, I just freestyled that. Write your own version, but get to the core of the message.
Make sure it's genuine. And if you don't follow them, that's a really poor sign that you're a fan cuz clearly you're not a fan cuz you don't even follow them. If you do this consistently enough and you if you're following my exact method here, every once in a while you're going to peique the curiosity of the other person.
But I would not get discouraged if you reach out a couple times or you reach out and you don't hear response. Sometimes they're buried in emails and DMs. Reach out again, but don't be annoying about this.
Try to send them another message, but don't be annoying about it. Say something like, "Hey, I just want to make sure this is floating back to the top. I'm still very interested and keen in working with you.
In fact, if you don't have any work opportunities, I'd love to take 15 minutes of your time to get a review of some of the work that I'm doing. If that's a possibility, please let me know. And then you got to let some time pass.
And if you don't still hear back from them, just chill out for a while. Don't hit them with another message cuz they're going to feel like, man, this is super aggressive and it's very spammy. Treat people the way you want to be treated.
That's generally a good rule of thumb to follow. Okay? So, if you don't like people pestering you in the DMs, getting super aggressive, don't do that to other people.
So, in stage one, you're really just trying to develop skill sets and to have some documentation or proof you know what you're doing. There's a good chance you're doing all kinds of different design things that may have zero application to the target audience you want to work with, and that's totally okay. So, we're going to develop our portfolio in two ways.
Number one, on social media, which you can share a lot of process behind the scenes and just a lot of different things because this is what interests you right now. you're passionate about a lot of different things, go ahead and post that. That's fine.
But the part that's kind of really important here is that you start to build a website that has three to five case studies of the work that you want to do for clients that would be joyful to give you money to help them with. This is really important. So if you want to work with biotech companies, the portfolio project should look like biotech companies.
If you want to work in consumer packaged goods, CPG, or you want to work in retail, whatever space that sector you want to work in, it's really good when someone who's in that space looks at your portfolio like, "Wow, we could have used this on our last campaign." That's what you want to do. It's a matching of two things, right? Uh like if you just think about it and we're talking about matchmaking, think about like how men and women meet each other.
Somebody's like really interested in tall people and you're not a tall person. Well, that's not going to work out. somebody is really into outdoor stuff and you're really more of a couch potato cinema geeky nerd person, that's not gonna work out either.
In business, it works a lot like that. We don't want to take a big risk when we hire someone thinking, will they get this or won't they? We want a sure thing.
We want to know that my god, if this person could only help me with this edit or with this designer, this poster, this campaign, we would go to the next level. You want to close the imagination gap. You don't want to make them work that hard to figure out how the heck is this person going to help me.
When you do that, you're requiring too much of their cognitive processing power and they're just going to move on to the next person that shows up who's closer to what they want than you are. So, this is where you need to really edit and curate and be judicious with what you include and don't include. It only takes three to five case studies.
And I'm tell you how to do this. Now, a case study isn't just your work. A case study includes words and images that tell a story about the problem that you solved and how you came up with a solution.
Generally speaking, it works something like this. Who's the client? Give us a little brief introduction to who the client is.
My client's a family business, family-owned business for three generations. They live in Italy and and they they sell pasta. Let's just say what that is.
Okay. Number two, identify the problem. The problem was they needed packaging that reflected their values that was inconsistent across different touch points and that was the problem you identified with your client.
Next, you want to show process, your ideational stuff, the stuff that you work through to arrive at an ultimate design. If you just show the design, people are a little confused as to how you work and what it's like to work with you. very important as you're working to save the work and to document as you go because it's much harder to recreate this work later.
What do I mean by that? If you're working on a logo sketch on the computer, you might have one file where you overwrite every single iteration of it. That's going to make it really difficult for you to have documentation.
So, what you should do is just copy, drag over, and paste and work on the next version. And this way, you have little artifacts of all the different things you've tried. One key thing here when I look at process, I want to see a breath of exploration.
I don't want to just see little variations to one design. I want to see that you tried this thing and this thing over here and a couple things in between and logically you figured out that these two or three things are the best options and you whittle it down. That's usually the design process that most professionals go through.
And then you want to show the finished thing that you designed, including mock-ups and examples. And do not underestimate the value and power of mock-ups. They allow us to see design in multi-dimensional ways so that we can see it in large scale or we can see it small like on a business card.
We can see on social media, we can see it on somebody's hat. And this allows us to feel like this was a real project and that it's something we can get really excited about. When you do this in conjunction with your social media stuff, these things talk to each other.
So in your bio on social you can say here's a link to my portfolio. So you excite people about what you do and you specifically drive them to a certain type of work such that they feel my gosh if this person helped us our project would go so much smoother and better. Somebody get this person on the phone.
We want to talk to them. When you master this it'll help you get to the next stage. So in this stage is important you'll be able to get work.
And if you want to make $100,000 a year, which is the target what we're looking at here, is on average you need to build about $500 a day for about 10 months. That'll get you to your $100,000 goal. And you want to focus on doing design work probably for markets that can afford you.
At least here in the United States, it's on the coast. We're talking about San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and down to Miami. Something on the coast.
They tend to have better budgets. companies that are used to working with people who have a higher cost of living. And this is where arbitrage can work really well in your favor.
So if you're from a small country, if you're from a little island, or if you're from middle of the country of the US, cost of living is much lower. You don't have to charge the local rate because the people are buying this stuff already expecting to pay this kind of price. Now, I know what you're thinking.
But Chris, they called us cuz they wanted a better deal. I'm in South America. I'm in Asia.
I'm in Thailand. Wherever I'm at, they want a better deal. This is where you need to learn to act to to walk and to present like a professional on these coastal cities that we're talking about.
If your work is at that caliber and the language is clear and your process is super clear, I would just not accept it at that point. So, the reason why people call people in those markets, they're they're looking for a bargain. They're looking to exploit the fact that there's a low minimum wage where you live and they want to pay you less.
But if you present like everyone else, they will be forced to hire you and pay you that rate because you're that good. That's the goal here. So, you've done everything that I've talked about.
You've generated some leads and every once in a while, someone reaches out and they feel like they're a qualified prospect for you to talk to. What do I mean qualified? It means they have a real project with a real budget and a timeline that's reasonable for something that you do.
Once you get on the phone, you're going to have to be able to assess their needs to determine fit. This is what we call sales. And if you can sort that out and they feel super excited to hire you, I'm going to recommend you do a couple things here.
You need to tell them what it's going to cost on the call. For a lot of you, you're going to be scared to do this. But if you don't do this and you kick this down the road in a proposal, you're going to be in the proposal building business, not in the design business.
So if you're thinking, I'm $500 a day, just say that upfront. If you're going to give them a project rate, say that project rate just up front. Be super clear.
And what you want to do is you want to gauge their reaction to the price. And if they hem and haw about the project rate, you need to ask them, I feel or sense some hesitation on your part. What do we think?
And then they'll tell you the budget. They sometimes will say lower. Every once in a while, they'll say, it should be much higher than this.
We're prepared to pay more. We want to make sure you have all the resources to be able to do this project correctly. This is really good news for you.
So, you're going to do everything you can in these kind of formative moments of your company or your business to get some real work under your belt. I would be very selective here, especially if you're not being paid very much, to pick projects that are going to be showcase pieces. There is absolutely no point, in my opinion, to do lowbudget work that also looks like ass.
What are you getting out of that? A horrible client experience, no money, and a whole lot of resentment. So, make sure if you're going to do a project for little or no money that they have a couple things.
Number one, the project is going to turn out great. Number two, it's exactly in the vertical or the industry that you want to work in or possibly number three, they're really great people and they're going to encourage you to do the very best work that you can do. And sometimes this might mean that you're actually freelancing from a bigger firm that have people working there that you really look up and admire and they can really help you make better work.
So, those are the trade-offs. You don't always have to make money upfront if what you're getting is of greater value than the money you would have received. Let's fast forward to the next stage, which is now you're getting work and now you're going to have to say no more often to the projects that aren't good for you.
The budget isn't right, the timeline is wrong, or you don't believe in the company or the person you're working with. This is where you have to exercise a lot of discipline and courage to say no. Because every time I know one door closes, another door opens, something else is going to come and you have to believe in that and manifest that into your life because otherwise you'll be constantly doing this busy work or what you'll do is you run face forward and smash your face into the wall of burnout.
And this is what we're trying to avoid. At this point, you're going to want to focus in on very specific industries and types of clients you want to work with because you'll start to notice patterns. When you notice these patterns, you're going to be able to develop processes and systems to account for what's going to happen.
Nothing feels more like confidence than when you speak to a vendor and they have seen everything before. And you can't achieve that if you're constantly switching verticals and doing different services for people. Over time, what I want you to do is I want you to develop a five-step process.
What are the five things that every project goes through that you can identify into a clear stage? Typically, it's discovery, like trying to figure out what the problem is. Perhaps there's design exploration, final design, and then applications, and then quality assurance, QA.
It's something like that. You can develop your own five-step process, and then you can document this and write about it on your website. So, everyone who's interested in working with you, every prospect can look at this and say, "Wow, they really have a clear five-point process." And you can explain to people, should they be so curious?
How does this work, Chris? And you can say, "All our clients go through a five-step process. It's how we can ensure the work always turns out good.
Are you good with me following this five-step process?" They should say yes. If they say no, you can say, "Great. Well, we can do it your way, but I can no longer guarantee the outcomes.
If you're okay with that, I'm okay with that." Just remember this one idea. Clients do not choose the best option. They choose the least risky one.
Your job is to appear to bring them the least amount of risk, the lowest risk. I know what you're thinking. You're going to say, "But Chris, I like to do a lot of different things.
It keeps me fresh. It keeps me vibrant." And to that, I say, "You can choose whatever path you want to go down, friend. If it works out for you, congratulations." But as we've seen in many things in life, whenever we want to hire someone and pay them a lot of money, we want the very best.
We don't want the second best. We don't want the third best. We don't want someone who's working on this part-time.
anything that's critical, anything that's of real value, we generally seek the best that we can afford. So, by prolonging this process of being good at lots of things and never great at any one thing, you're only going to hurt yourself. And I'll tell you from personal experience, when we first started my production company called Blind in 1995, I did what you did.
I did logo design for somebody who would pay me for that. We would do broadcast design. We would do main titles.
I would do a little web design. All of these things we did for anyone who would pay us. And it became very apparent to me really early on within months of doing this that outside of my core skill set, which was logo design, everything that came in, I was an amateur.
I was struggling to figure things out. And I knew there was a pretty big gap between where I was and the work that I was seeing and the work that I looked up to. So much in fact, that one of our clients sent one of their senior animators to babysit the project cuz they weren't sure we could pull it off.
And I knew then and there if I'm not going to drill in and be focused on one thing, I'm never going to be really great at anything. And luckily then, I decided I'm going to pursue motion design as my core focus. I got rid of everything else.
Now, those skills still live with me, but I didn't market those. I didn't accept those projects until I got really good and well known for doing motion design. Ironically, 20 years later, a client came to us and said, "We know you're great at motion design.
do you know anything about print and logo design? And to that I smiled. This is what I know how to do really well.
So that's how committed I was. And this allowed me to grow from doing tens of thousands of dollars for a project to hundreds of thousands and even up to million dollars for a project. This is the reward of you being a specialist and being really good at something.
So the goal here is if you're repeatedly exposed to the same problem as you spot patterns, that's what intelligence is. It's pattern recognition. And when you see patterns, this equals leverage.
And leverage equals power and money and value and everything else that you desire. So once you have this kind of leverage, you're able to command a higher price and shift away from selling your time to selling outcomes or deliverables. So we want to stop exchanging our time for money.
That's very hard to get ahead because you're always going to be limited by how many hours you can work. And that will lead us to the next stage. Okay.
In the previous stages, we focus on developing core competency, technical skill, creative skills, and getting your first couple of clients. As you've been able to master those stages, we have to figure out how to build systems. And we're now transitioning away from being a freelancer, selling our time for money, and moving into deliverables or outcomebased project fees.
This is really critical. Now, one other thing I need to mention here in this video is to tell you that you need to do something that can be done offsite because any of these skills that you do on-site does not allow you to grow your practice because they'll still see you as labor and labor is measured against time. So, if you're able to do your work at home at your own studio using your own equipment, you are now afforded a lot of luxuries.
Meaning you can set your own hours. You can employ other people to help you. And you can use any tools and software that you want to make your work process faster.
And that's the general goal. We don't want to work longer and harder unnecessarily. We want to work smarter and faster.
So the problem with hourly base building or day rates is that it punishes you for being efficient. It disincentivizes you to invest in equipment, processes, plugins, and everything else that you need to make your work work faster. Now, at the end of the day, you need to know this.
When you price based on hour, you create a lot of anxiety in the buyer's mind. And you've all been here before. How long will this take?
What will this cost? And the answer is, I don't know. I can only give you a best guess.
So, what we do is we remove the anxiety about the unknown by giving them a flat project fee. Lots of ways to figure this thing out, but I'm going to tell you how to do it really simply. When you give the clients a project fee, they know it's not going to exceed that price unless they change the scope or make too many revisions.
So, this is where you start to develop real skills around sales, bidding, and estimating, and invoicing. Those are three key skills that now you need to develop that you didn't need in the previous stages. So, now we have to build systems for that.
So, I'm going to give you one quick tip here to seem more professional. When you're sending out an invoice, don't start the invoice at number 001. It literally is the first invoice you've ever sent.
And when a client receives this, they're going to smile and say, "Oh, yeah. This person has not been in business very long." I highly recommend you start the invoice at number 00201. Even though it's your very first invoice that you've sent out, it will appear as if this is invoice number 201.
This creates a little bit more confidence. And I know these are all optics, but perception is reality here. So, how do you figure out a project fee?
Now, if we get back to the goal of you doing $100,000 a year, roughly, you need to do $10,000 per month, assuming that we're going to work for 10 months because there are down days and you need to take time off so you don't burn out. If we divide $10,000 by what we think is an average reasonable amount of work to do, about four projects per month, every project must be at least at minimum $2,500 because 2500 * 4 is guess what? $10,000.
Now, if you should charge more for a project, that means the other projects don't have to cost as much, don't have to be priced as high. And so once you get locked in on this number, and I do want you to lock in here, is because when a client says, "I have $1,500. I have $1,800." Whatever they say, you're going to smile.
You're going to stay really cool, and you're going to look back at them very stoically and say, "My minimum project fee is $2,500. It's policy. Is there a way that we can figure out to give you what you want and that you're able to meet my minimum?
Otherwise, I can't take you on as a client. You don't have to get into value based pricing. You don't even have to have a value conversation.
You just tell them in order for me to do this. And you have lots of options to choose from. And I'm even telling you it's worth it.
I'm going to need $2,500 at minimum to do this for you. And you have to stick to your gun. Now, in the reality of it all, $2,500 might sound like a lot for you, but in the buyer's mind, if they have a bigger problem to solve, and this has been a big challenge or headache for them, $2,500 is easy cost for medicine to make a problem go away.
So in this stage, you're getting some consistent workflow, but you have no systems. So it's a lot of chaos. Nothing seems the same, and it's a lot of extra work for you and potentially work for your clients.
So you need to really develop systems and structure so that this can run on rails. I know this might sound really overwhelming for some of you, but it's actually really good news. So when you have more demand than the capacity to do the work, this is a great opportunity for you to raise your prices.
The market is literally telling you, we want more of you and there's not more of you to give. So, the only way you can control demand is to by raising the prices. And I know it's really uncomfortable for you to think about that, but in my own life, every time I raise my speaking rates, it does slow down a little bit.
And that's the whole point. But eventually, it picks back up. And then now you're doing the same amount of volume at a much higher price.
And look, if it were me, I'd rather work half as much, charge twice as much while I'm making the exact same amount of money. That makes sense, right? So instead of working so many hours at $500 a day, charge double and work half the hours.
You'll make the exact same amount of money and you'll save something left for yourself so that you can work on your process and you can do personal development. You can learn more. You can read books.
You can attend webinars and go to networking events. Then you can go to conferences and just learn from other great people. So the goal of the system stage is to take the chaos that you experience and to productize your services.
So this is about creating packages and pricing to automate your workflow so that everything is automated and works and delivers on time. You're removing a lot of the guesswork for both you and your customer. You start treating your creative work as an offer and not just output.
And here's where you start seeing consistent $5 to $8,000 months. And if you're not here right now, relax. You're closer than you think.
you're just missing some leverage. So, here's how you're going to take what is a chaotic and bespoke process and to productize it. You're going to design the customer journey.
And you can do this on a clean piece of paper and just lay it out. And you can say birth to delivery, right? From the minute in which somebody reaches out to you, what has to happen in order for you to do the work.
So, at some point, you can map this out and it's going to include things like um a client onboarding documentation. You probably need to set up file structures for the specific client. For me, it's like probably Dropbox.
You might have a Trello board where they're able to manage and watch the trafficking of items. I highly recommend Trello as a project management tool. Perhaps there's a calendar set up with clear milestones that they need to see.
And you probably have a spec sheet of things that they need to deliver and what you ultimately plan on delivering back to them so that everyone's on the same page. So, as much as you can map out the customer journey process from beginning to delivery and make sure you have documentation, files, and templates already set up. If you design a lot of identity design and logo work, you probably have already a brand style guide template ready to go, which has a place for things like topography, colors, and usage guidelines.
You don't want to be building these things from scratch. as much as possible. Spend the time necessary to develop the templates and it will be a lot of work upfront, but every time you use it, you're going to save so much time and energy, and you get to focus on what's really important for you.
Other people like to include mockup templates, right? So, you can build mock-up templates for t-shirts, signage for merch, caps, signage for delivery trucks, packaging tape, those kinds of things. And you can set up beautiful templates and you can have a number of different options so not every project looks the same.
So that when you are doing identity design, you can just plug those things in, output it really quickly and the clients will be blown away at how quickly you can put highle highquality work together. This also includes invoicing systems so that when you hit key milestones, you're building and if you've been watching this channel, you build 50% upfront, 25% when you hit a key milestone, and 25% upon delivery of the project net 14 days. So there's a couple different things that you can use to display your work.
I'd highly recommend that you do it on all these things. You should use Adobe Behance, probably Dribble, and you could build your website. Some of the tools people recommend is Squarespace or Wix or some equivalent of that.
I think Frame has even a tool that you can build a website and it doesn't need to be like crazy HTML coding. It just needs to be functional. It needs to load fast.
It has to be super clear. I want to caution you a little bit. Although it might be tempting for you to get work through Upwork or Fiverr.
I understand how Behance has an option now. Now there's a marketplace. The reason why I'm concerned about the first two, Fiverr and Upwork, is because people who generally visit those sites really want to pay the least amount of money, have very low standards, and really cannot appreciate good design.
So if you're there, you're competing with a lot of people who are just going to be throwing up design work for as little money as possible. On Behance, I think it's a little bit different because there you have highly curated, beautiful design work and they're looking for the very best, I think, generally speaking. So, it's kind of like how I can be the same person, but if I'm going to a swap meet versus like a high-end retail store, my mindset is very different.
I don't dare to even ask in a high-end retail place for a discount. I'm just either going to buy it or I'm not. But I almost feel the exact opposite when I'm at a swap meet that I want to negotiate because the whole game of it is they overpric so that you can negotiate and get the the price lower.
You always feel like a jackass if you can't get it for less. So be careful where you present your work and where the clients come from because they have a very different mindset. Look, I'm old school or maybe I'm just old.
Maybe I'm an old fool, not even an old school kind of person. I have a lot of bias against these kind of websites. And even if I don't have any professional work or paid work, I'd rather do work for friends or family or do spec projects on my own because it's ultimately going to represent the kind of design work that I can do.
Because as I've said before, there's really no point for you to do lowquality work for stupid clients and get paid nothing. I'd rather just stay at the wall and do nothing. But you don't obviously have to do nothing.
You could develop your portfolio. You can develop spec projects and say, "I want to do a redesign of a big brand that kind of missed the mark and do your own take on that." There's a person in particular, his name is Alan Peterson, and he does a lot of work like this. He's the logo fix guy and he uses his spare time to do hypothetical projects.
None of that is real, but it generates so much interest and leads for him that they turn into real paying clients. I would prefer or recommend that you use your time this way. In stage four, we're starting to talk about scale and how do you scale your business.
So, at this point, you are now consistently hitting $10,000 months. This is fantastic and you just want to be able to do this. And so the way that we're able to scale is we we know how hard it is to get a real client.
It's much easier to go to that same client and get more work from them or to get referrals from them because the way the nature of the way people work is people like to hang out with people just like them. It's kind of how it works. So when your clients are saying thank you to you, our friend Phil M.
Jones recommends asking for a referral right then and there. In the past, I've not been really good at this. I'm like a little sheepish about asking for referrals, but when they express genuine gratitude for the high quality work that you've done, you need to ask them right then and there.
And they're most primed to help you in that moment. You'll probably say something like this. And if you want to know more about it, read about it in Exactly what to say by Phil M.
Jones. And if you want to get a deeper dive on this, check out this other video. I'll put the link right here.
You're going to say something like this. Can I ask you for a favor? And they're going to say yes, of course.
and you can say, "Do you know one person who is like you who would need something like what I've been able to do?" Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you for their name and contact information right now, but do you know one other person? And most likely, they're going to say yes. And you can say, "Okay, so when you said yes, who are you thinking?" And they'll say like Bob from blah blah blah.
And then you ask for another favor. You said, "Can I ask for one more favor? could you reach out to Bob or Mary or whoever they say and let them know a little bit about me so that when I reach out I won't be a stranger to them and if it's okay I'd like to follow up with you in a week to see if this was done.
Of course they're going to see yes and that's pretty much it. So this is how you're able to scale the kind of clients you like and get more of them. Either you get more from the same client or you get more from the clients that or other people that they know.
In this stage, it's very important for you to get consistent lead flow. In this scale stage, I want you to stay focused on the three Ps. People, product, and promotion.
People are the people who are going to support you in doing design, project management, and marketing. And for product, if you remember in the previous stages, this is where you need to build systems so that you can stay really organized and build templates and workflows around the things you do over and over again. and promotion.
This is you developing systems so that your content creation games on point and you're being very consistent so that you can generate leads even while you sleep. Well, beware of this trap when things are going really well and you're getting good lead flow and you're converting your clients that you think things are gravy and you're going to be doing this work and money's flowing in. You're going to feel really great about yourself.
Well, first of all, congratulations. But do not take your eye off on the need to create content because this is what fills the top of the funnel awareness. This is how we build awareness around what we do.
If you slow this down, what inevitably will happen is the clients will dry up and you're going to have this long buildup time again to generate leads. And we can't just make it rain instantly. So be disciplined.
Spend at least 10% of your energy and your resources focusing on your marketing, content creation, editing, promotion. Make sure you do this consistently. The goal of this stage is to make sure that you have support that you can delegate the work so that you don't burn out.
So, anything that you can delegate to other people, maybe it's production task or some of the design or sales or marketing efforts. Uh you can hire somebody to help you do this. Here's the simple rule of thumb.
If you can pay someone less than what you charge to do, you should definitely find someone else to help you. So, in this stage, you're going to do your very best to protect the most valuable resource that you have that's nonrenewable, that's perishable, and that is called time. You can make more money, but you can't make more time.
In order for us to consistently at $10,000 a month, assuming that we do four projects a month, and assuming that you can close 50% of the time, highly recommend that you need about 10 to 12 live leads every single month. So, when you have fewer leads than that, that's a sign that we're going to be in trouble, that you're going to have some down months, and we're trying to prevent that at this stage. Don't become the bottleneck of your own business.
Stage five is sustain. You've been able to get consistent leads. You got a process that you develop.
You productize your services. Things are going really well and you've even started to bring in a couple people to help you. What you have to realize, this is not a short game.
This is a long game. Because if you love design like the way I love it, you want to do it until the wheels fall off the wagon. The only way you can do that is you must protect your piece.
And the way that you're able to protect your piece is you have to be really clear about who you love to work with. And you have to say no often to the clients that are poor fits and and not chase after the quick fix, the quick buck because that's going to ultimately lead you to burn out. And the biggest other thing that you're going to do here that's going to help you catapult beyond the $100,000 a year into the 2 three 4 $500,000 a year is you multiply yourself.
So in this stage, you want to be able to really clearly document your creative process so that new team members coming in can do the work the way that you do it. And you're going to elevate yourself to the person who's like the quality control person. So when clients hire you, they aren't literally hiring you to physically do all the work yourself.
They're hiring you because of the standards of quality that you're able to deliver. So your job here is to maintain those standards. We can fall into this trap where we overd deliver, where we feel like we have to get our hands into everything and put our thumb printint on the work.
Otherwise, we don't feel good about ourselves. I want you to think of it differently. Give the client the best work that they paid for, not the best work that you can do.
That's a big difference. Okay? I'm going to say that one more time.
Your obligation is to give the clients the best work that they paid for and not the best work that you can do. So, imagine you are in a restaurant and you order the T-bone steak and they bring out the prime rib or they bring out the flameon. Those are much more expensive cuts.
Clearly, that's the best steak that they can make, but that's not the steak you paid for and that's the fastest way for you to burn out and go bankrupt. How do we do this? So, we have a standards of excellence, a quality of work.
That's the minimum that we must deliver by otherwise you'll start to lose clients. So when your team does work at a certain level, what you do is you coach them up to hit that mark and you do this through art direction by being thoughtful with your feedback and critique so that they learn over time. These are the standards which we must deliver.
What I would also include here are little checks and balances so that everything passed a quality control check. oftentimes, if possible, as as you're making more money, you would hire an art director to replace the job that you used to do. And the art director is generally the most senior qualified designer who works for you already, who has the potential to get into management and can now pass on the skills that you taught them hopefully.
And what they'll do is they'll elevate everyone else underneath them. It gives them room to grow upwards into management. And this is the way that you build a team and a company around a process of continued growth and development.
Inevitably, no matter how good you are, you're only going to be able to grow the company a certain level until you acquire new skills. And the new skills don't come from where the old skills came from. The old skills come from you repeatedly doing the same thing and seeing patterns and getting really efficient and good at doing that.
The new skills come in things like personal development strategy business coaching, those kinds of things. So there's that expression and it perfectly encapsulates this idea. What got you here won't get you there.
This is the mistake that a lot of people make. They think, well, I got so far by doing this. If I just repeat that or do twice as much, I will then generate twice as much revenue.
What you don't realize is to play at the next level requires a different skill set and you are not playing in the majors, you are playing in the minors and it's a very different skill gap that you need to acquire. This is where I think you'll benefit from business training, communications training, strategic thinking, and probably learning how to be more innovative with not just the design work, but business design. This is where I personally benefited from because I was able to take my company at that time, a couple years in, from about $2.2 million a year to $3.9 million a year.
The way I was able to achieve that was to bring in a business coach. And that business coach, his name is Kier McLaren. He taught me some very small tweaks that I was able to do that had the biggest impact.
This is a common myth that a lot of people have that business coaching requires you to change everything that you do. Maybe some of it does. I've not personally experienced that myself as someone who's been coached and someone who coaches lots of people.
It's usually the small tweaks. Say this instead of that. Use this phrase.
Use this idea. Change this one thing about how you're delivering or ask clients this one question before you get off the phone. It's little things like that that make the biggest difference.
If you've found this video series to be really helpful to you, imagine what would happen if you're able to work with me on a more intimate level behind a paid wall. This is what we do inside the future pro group. I help and coach entrepreneurs just like you from a lot of different disciplines how to level up their business to provide those exact same small tweaks that might be unnoticeable to you and that could take you from the level which you're at to the very next level.
I'll provide the link in the description below. Think of these different stages as climbing a mountain and going from one level to the next requires a different kind of strength. At the bottom, it's about endurance and doing the reps.
In the middle, it's about structure and learning how to climb smarter. At the top, it's all about perspective and leading others on the journey. You don't have to jump from survival to sustain overnight.
You just need to take the next step. Let us know what stage you're at right now. Because getting to 100,000 isn't about luck.
It's about systems, clarity, and intention, one stage at a time. If you found this video to be helpful, make sure you give us a like, drop a comment, and share this with one person you think would benefit from watching this. Yeah.
Yeah.
