12 What Does a $10K Month Look Like?

In that five-day email challenge, you really get everything step-by-step or day-by-day, I should say, that will help you land 12K clients. Welcome to the Profitable Graphic Designer Podcast. My name is Katie Sandel, and this episode was brought to you by Aventive Academy, an online business education platform that helps brand, graphic, and web designers get more clients, increase their pricing, and build a profitable design business. We have online programs, courses, and templates that you can use, and you can find out more about starting and growing your freelance design business at Aventive Academy. A lot of freelance designers set the goal to make $10,000 a month, because it's a high, round number, and it would take you to making six figures as a designer. Once you make your first 10K, you'll most likely try to increase that number to 12K, then 15K, 18, 20, at least. Going to 10K per month is absolutely possible, and there's no right or wrong way of doing it. You have plenty of options, offers, and pathways to get you there, whether you design websites, brands, logos, or anything else. And as mentioned, there are a few different ways that will get you there, but before you start working on those ways, you need to develop a plan, at least figure out how to do it. How many clients you would need per month, or quarter, half a year, or even like per the whole year to get to those 10K months. And you also need to know exactly how much you're going to charge each client. So let me give you a couple of examples. I'll go with four, and then from there, you would see what works for you. Okay, so let's say you need to make $10,000 this month. How would you do that? If you require a 50%, deposit at the start of your project, and you sign two $10,000 branding projects in one month, that means that in that one month, you would get two 50% down payments, which is $10,000 because each is $5,000. So that's, you know, 10K in your bank account. Now you have to figure out who those clients are going to be, where you're going to get them from. I mean, it's not that easy, but it's also not that hard to get two 10K clients a month. You also need to figure out what is exactly that you need to do for them for $10,000. Because if you offer a lot of things in those $10,000, maybe that's full visual identity, labels, packaging, even website, then that's simply not doable because you might not have enough time to complete even just two projects per month if you charge that much. And include a lot of services in those $10,000. So you have to figure out what is exactly that you're going to include in your packages in $10,000. And then who needs your services and who can pay you those $10,000, where they hang out and basically make a full plan on how to get about 24 clients a year. I mean, it is a lot of clients. So you still have to figure out how to get those clients. But this is the best way to do it, where you actually figure out how much to charge, how they're going to pay those 50% down payment and then, you know, go from there. Again, for $10,000, those projects might be a little bit bigger. But also there are designers who charge $10,000 for just visual identity or just packaging or maybe small WordPress website design or something like that. There are even designers who charge $10,000 for brand strategy only or even just like social media posts. Now, you might be thinking how 24 clients a year is a lot, and it is a lot, but it's definitely doable. And again, you just have to figure out what is that that you're going to offer in those $10,000 for those $10,000. But it's really, it's really not that hard to get 24 clients a year. Now, if you charge $20,000, then things get easier and then you need 12 clients only. So, you know, you see what works for you. Now, the other option is you could sign four logo projects. Just an example, at $2,500 each and finish them within the month. I am sure you can complete four logo designs in one month. That gives you one week per logo design. But in this case, you need to get four clients each month, which is now 48 clients a year. Again, it's definitely doable. And I've done this in the past, like six, seven years ago, I had about 60 something logo designs and a few more random graphic design clients that I had to work with. So basically, I had a lot of clients, but this kind of was a mistake because I was undercharging and I was working nonstop. Yes, I did get to, you know, I was making like $9,000 per month, $9,500, so like close to $10K. And but I was I was working all the time. I would work even like the whole night and then wake up early in the morning, work again. I didn't have life like I really didn't. It was it was so hard, but it was it was at the beginning of my career when I didn't know what I'm doing. I didn't know how much I should charge as soon as I started increasing my pricing. I was getting less clients and making the same amount of money. And then I had a lot of free time for me to figure out what is the next step in my business that I need to do in order to grow another way to get to 10K. And this one is amazing is when you provide services for clients, but also have some kind of passive income like e-books, courses and affiliate sales. So in this case, you don't have. To get all the revenue from working with clients and exchanging your time for money, you know, things like that, but you also get sales by selling, you know, those digital products. Now, when I say passive income, that sounds amazing. But really, passive income is not not passive at all. It's really, really active and you have to promote it a lot. Nobody's going to just come to your website and buy your online course or buy your book or even just use your affiliate link because they don't know you, they don't trust you. So you still have to promote your offers, even though those are not services anymore. And then if you're going to develop one of those passive income products, you need to think about like how long it's going to take you to develop one product, where you're going to host that there are lots of different platforms for online courses, e-books. You can even, you know, just write a book and I mean, I say just write a book, but you don't have to do anything like super, super fancy. But you could have a PDF on your website and then people can download it and pay you through Gumroad. Gumroad is the name of the software that I use. So those are a couple of examples of how you can make 10K a month. I mean, you could also get to $10,000 by designing 100 logos in a month for $100 each. But I don't recommend that option. However, it's on you to figure out how many clients you need, how much you're going to charge per each client, and what exactly you're going to provide within that offer for $10,000. Really, there are endless ways for designers to get there. And I will now look into one of my months from a few years ago and then tell you how exactly I got there, like I will break it down into the sections of how my 10K months look like at the time. But before I do that, I just want to let you know that we have a free five-day email challenge that will get you to 12K clients. And if you want to download that, you can visit AventivaAcademy.com and then find free resources. And again, it's called Five-Day Email Challenge to Lending 12K Clients. OK, so here is an example. In that one month, I made $7,100 off of clients. I don't know exactly what was included in that nor how many clients I had, but basically it was for sure something branding related. So either just visual identities or yeah, I assume it was just visual identities because websites are a little bit more than that. And then I made $2,403 off of selling online courses. And then I have paid PDFs. These are basically like e-books where I'm teaching my audience on some topics that's 294 in this one month then i also have some mini courses that are half an hour to an hour long and i sold a few of those and that was 588 then my book plus amazon affiliate links made 98 dollars as you can tell that's not my focus that's just on the side and then gumroad which is really short pdfs such as 10 best health and wellness fonts or something like that that my potential clients can download i made 46 dollars off of that so the total is 10 529 so again clients 7 100 courses 2 403 pdfs 294 mini courses 588 so again clients 7 100 courses 2 403 pdfs 294 mini courses 588 my book and amazon affiliate links 98 and small pdfs 46 so yeah so that's how i got you 10 529 dollars and that's how you can do it too so you know it's not that you have to make all 10k from your clients but you can also have passive income now what goes in that passive income you know it depends on you and what is you can write a book you can write an ebook it doesn't have to be super long it can be 10 15 pages and you can start from there just to see if that's something that you would like to do if that's something that you know how to promote or you would like to learn how to promote because nobody knows when we start so you know write a book 10 15 pages educate your audience on something that can be what's exactly included in visual identity how to do it so in that case you can maybe your target would be other graphic designers but you could also talk about how visual identity can help people make more sales of their products if for example your clients have skincare lines because that's what they care about making more sales of their products and things like that you know you can also create mini courses which is just come up with a powerpoint presentation teach something either designers or your potential clients and then go from there and then you would also have to learn how to promote it on social media or maybe do a little bit of ads again you know it's really not passive however it's really fun and it's a another source of income when clients are not around because in the freelance industry even even if you've been in this industry for a very long time and you're getting a lot of clients through word of mouth or you just you know you're getting a lot of clients through word of mouth know how to get them either on linkedin or you are connected to a lot of people that you can always reach out to or whatever it is let's say you're getting a lot of clients there are months no matter what there are months where you will have no clients or where you will have like one to two clients and maybe that's not enough to get to 10k so it's up to you but the variety is really cool really good for us as graphic designers and also you get to do what you love without depending on the clients because you will see once you start doing the education part and teaching your potential clients about either that's visual identity or websites or branding or book illustration or whatever it is you will see how much you love what you do not to mention that writing a book or having an online course or even small pdfs like ebooks or whatever it is sets you as the industry leader and positions you as an expert so clients would love to work with you even more for example i just got a client a few months ago where she told me when i asked her how did you hear about me she said oh i found your book on amazon i went through your book like i read the whole book and then decided to hire you because i learned how much knowledge you have and i just wanted to work with you and i just wanted to work with you so you know writing a book is basically credibility you're building that credibility and trust within your potential clients and then they hire you because of that so it's kind of like my passive income but also brings in more clients and not just more but like easier i don't have to sell too much because for example like when she came to me she didn't talk to any other designers she came to me hey i read your book i want to work with you that's it and then i sent her proposal and we went from there so it's not that i had to like convince her nor tell her how i'm different nor send her a lot of portfolio case studies and so on you know it was just very easy for me to land her as a client because she already trusted me so yeah i just gave you some examples on how you can get to ten thousand dollars a month now go back to your notes either that's pen and paper or blank document and write it down how many clients you need to have per month how much you're going to charge them what's exactly going to be included and again don't forget that we have a free five-day email challenge that will help you get to 12k clients if you want to download that it's on our website at eventiveacademy.com and i'll see you next time thank you for joining us today on the profitable graphic designer in addition to this podcast we have created some great content for you to check out and i'll see you next time some amazing online courses to help you set up your business get more clients and scale to the income level you desire if you need help developing your freelance portfolio so it stands out if you want to learn how to create proposals new clients will say yes to if you're still trying to figure out how much to charge for your services and if becoming the go-to designer for your dream clients is your goal this year then i invite you to enroll in my signature 12-week program the profitable designer course and i'll see you next time bye bye or one of our other specialized online courses to learn more about the programs and get started visit eventiveacademy.com see you next time