4 ways to make money as a designer without adding more clients
Are you feeling like you've maxed out your capacity? And I am not talking about capacity in that you're fully booked with design projects.
I am talking about capacity in terms of time, energy and mental space to take on more clients.
Many of the clients I work with have been in business for many years. And while they have the desire to make more money they:
Fill all their time with the clients they currently have (and often this also included evenings and weekends),
Are already exhausted at the end of each week from trying to complete everything that was on their huge to-do list (which never seems to happen, even with the extra hours)
Are already so overwhelmed with everything they need to do that making time to create content and being active on social media to sell their design services or taking on more design projects to earn more money seems impossible.
That's why in this blog post we’re look at 4 ways you can make more money as a designer without taking on more clients at the same time or finding more clients:
Make money as a designer by reaching out to past clients
Make money as a designer by upselling current clients
Make money as a designer by increasing your pricing
Make money as a designer by reviewing your spending
Make money as a designer by reaching out to past clients
Reaching out to past clients is a great way to add additional income. Just because they have not reached out to you for additional work does not mean that the work is not there. How often do you not have the time to work on all the things you feel you should?
The same is true for your clients. But when they see your name popping up in their inbox that design project they have been thinking about all of a sudden comes to the forefront of their thoughts.
But the struggle with reaching out to past clients is that it might feel like you're begging for money or feel awkward because you have not spoken to them in a long time.
Action steps: Delivering the best design possible and having a streamlined design process will help with this. However, one mistake that many designers make is not having a solid offboarding process. So this is where you need to take off your creative hat for a moment.
As a designer you need to embrace business thinking, and this is one of these moments. While onboarding a client almost goes automatically, even when you don't have an elaborate onboarding workflow mapped out, there is so much more that you can do in the offboarding phase than handing over the project that will have a huge impact on your success of getting referrals and makes it so much easier to reach out to past clients.
Elements that can be included in the client offboarding workflow for your design clients are:
Sending the final invoice
Final File handover or Website handover
Sending a thank-you email and/or a client gift
Requesting feedback for testimonials
Following up regularly after the project
Just this last step has led to a lot of recurring clients in my business. Even this week I received a request from a client from 2020 for a couple of design updates after catching up with her in January. And I have a catch-up planned with another past client from 2020.
When you check in with them every couple of months or even twice a year just to know what is going on with them, they will often come to you with business without you even having to ask for it.
Want to update your offboarding process? You can read more about the client offboarding process here.
Make money as a designer by upselling current clients
With this method, you want to think about what you could offer to the clients that you are already working with or ones that you are talking to about working together.
Let's say you're designing a 5-page website for a client and while doing this you're realising that there is one page that is just too long and tries to sell services for clients in too many different phases in business, muddying the copy and reducing the chance of a conversion.
You could suggest creating a separate page for each service to help your client speak directly to the ideal client for each service. As your contract states it's a 5-page website, you will need to charge extra (make sure this is already in your contract) for these pages.
Or if you're still in the proposal process, you could upsell by adding an add-on section. This could be brand collateral for a branding client like a business card, welcome guide or pricing guide. For a website design client, this could be landing page design, extensive SEO if you only include basic SEO setup in your packages, a maintenance package or a Google my business setup.
Both options are great ways to increase your revenue without adding more clients. My only suggestion would be to only do this when this really serves your client and their results and not just for the sake of making more money. I always like to think about how I would feel in the reverse situation and when I would feel someone is just trying to squeeze more money out of me, I would lose all trust.
And honestly, I would probably suck at selling it as well as I would know I would be just doing it to increase my revenue, which would not sit well with me.
Action steps:
For clients that you are already working with I think the biggest chance of success is when you have delivered an outstanding service up until the point that you make your suggestion. When you have supported your client every step of the design process and have shown that you cared about them and their business (and not just about handing over a deliverable as quickly as possible) you will have earned their trust. So when you suggest an extra page or additional brand collateral they will see it as you supporting them instead of trying to make a sale. Having a CRM like Dubsado with solid client workflows and emails to support them every step of the way will help with this.
When it comes to clients for where you're still in the lead phase it will help when you have a website design proposal template with an add-on section. This will make it part of your process instead of leaving it up to chance.
But what also will help is having a thorough discovery call. I recently saw a question in a Facebook group about how long a consultation call should be and the overwhelming opinion was; short. One comment said: My discovery calls are only 15 minutes and it's really to assess if we're a good fit. I like to have a different approach to discovery calls and don't mind if they take 45 min, an hour or even longer. Having a very short discovery call is only for the business owner's benefit, not for our clients.
How often are your clients hiring a designer for the first time? Can you imagine how nervous they might be about the investment they are making? About having to give the design process out of hand completely while they have been doing it themselves this whole time? Having to trust that the designer will understand what they are trying to achieve?
So again, I like to think about what would I like if I would be on the other side. Would I want to have a 15 min chat to decide if I am going to invest 2/3/4/5K? No probably not. But I would like to have a chat where the designer was interested in me, my business, and my goals and feel like they care about the project.
This approach allowed me to convert more than 90% of my discovery calls. Most calls felt more like conversations than sales calls. And I often did not even feel like I was selling. So when you then include additional services in a design project proposal that you feel would be a good fit because you already know so much about the business through your discovery call the client is much more like to take you up on it if they have the budget.
Make money as a designer by increasing your pricing
This might seem like a very obvious one but in practice, this is not easy at all. Pricing your services is one of the toughest things you need to do. Because your pricing is not just a number, there are often a lot of emotions connected to your pricing.
Maybe it's connected to how you feel about yourself, how confident you are in your design skills or the feeling that because you're not in business as long as competitor x you can not ask for the same prices.
The reason I hear most often from clients is that they feel they should first spend some time on their back-end processes and client workflows before they can raise their pricing.
And there is something to say for each of these reasons why a higher price is not achievable, but it is often more our feeling or our mindset that is impacting this.
And I don't often mention mindset because it is so often used against us in marketing.
If you aren't making the money you desire you don't want it enough.
You just need to charge your worth (this might be the worst of all).
Or that all you need is a positive mindset and that money will come your way.
If only...
But if you can't or don't want to take on more clients, this is, in terms of how much effort it takes, an easy way to make more money.
If you're feeling hesitant about this, I think it's good to take the emotion out of your pricing and base it on numbers. How?
Evaluate how much profit you are making now in your business and your packages.
I won't go into detail here on how to calculate if your services are making a profit, but you can find more information about this in this blog: How to price your design packages for profitability Or you can download the pricing workbook that helps you do this step-by-step.
Then at least you know if, on paper, this is something you should consider.
Just be careful with adding extra deliverables because you feel you need to add more value to justify your new brand package pricing. This might give you more revenue but will only lead to you needing to spend more time on the project which might even decrease your profit.
Action steps: Raising your pricing and being able to sell your higher price can feel like 2 different things. So what can you do to impact your chances of being able to sell at higher prices?
Your package: is it clear what your design packages include? Who they are for and who they are not for? Is it clear how the design process works? Are you taking away the question marks a potential client can have on your website and in your content?
Your positioning & messaging: is it clear who you serve and why you are the best person for the job? What makes you different? How is your process different from other designers? Can you make what you feel is your weakness (I often hear from clients, and I had this as well, that being a self-thought designer is making them feel less confident) your strength?
How easy is it for potential clients to get in contact with you? How many hoops do they need to jump through to get on a call with you? Or is it very easy?
Make money as a designer by reviewing your spending
This is technically not increasing your revenue as you won't make more money but you'll be increasing your profit. This still leaves you with more money in the end and that's what you're going for right?
When it comes to the cost of doing business a lot of your expenses will be related to programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, website hosting, client management systems like Dubsado or Honeybook, project management systems like ClickUp, meeting software like Zoom and accounting software like Quickbooks.
But this also includes any costs for contractors, coaching and any marketing activities. And let's not forget processing fees from payment processors like Paypal, which eat up some of our revenue.
If you don't do this already on at least a yearly base, I would suggest going through your expenses and reviewing if there is somewhere you can cut down on your costs.
Like paying your website hosting for the full year instead of per month. As a reward, you will often get a discount for paying for the full year, saving you 1 to 2 monthly payments.
And do you need all of the programs you're using? Or could you manage with a cheaper plan? Maybe there is a free alternative.
For one of my clients, we were able to save her $500 just by reviewing her Adobe membership and getting a better deal.
Action steps: Make checking your expenses and reviewing your tech stack part of your monthly financial routine so that you can stay on top of it and don't spend more than you need.
And there you have it
I hope that seeing this overview of options helps you to feel more confident in your ability to grow your revenue without having to create new services, work with more clients at the same time or be active on social media to sell your services.
Will generating more revenue this way be THE thing that will allow you to reach your financial goals? Probably not. But it is a step in the right direction to create a sustainable design studio if you currently feel like you're already at capacity in terms of time, energy and mental space.
Being able to bring in more money will probably already positively affect your energy and mental space because it will feel like you're making progress.
And just a quick reminder, if you're trying to upsell or increase your pricing and the first person, doesn't say yes, don't give up or convince yourself you're not able to do this. You need to keep on trying and focus on the small wins on the way to you achieving your goals.
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