What is a Design Day? How I Design Client Websites & Charge By The Day

What is a design day and why is it the only way that I work with my web design clients, one on one?

Hi, I’m Galen. I run a web design business and I make a full-time income from this business, working on client websites, anywhere from three to eight days per month.

Flashback to when I first started my business and it was a completely different story. I felt like I was working all the time and barely making enough money to get by.

In the early days of my business, I was trying to be as flexible as possible with my clients’ timelines, because I just needed them to keep working with me. I needed to see that income come in month over month in order to pay my bills.

And I thought to myself, flexibility is great. What’s not to love about being flexible. It means that I can be flexible with the hours that I work and with the hours that I don’t.

The problem was that I just ended up working all the time. All of this flexibility led to a lack of boundaries and systems, meaning that there was no clear separation between when I was working and when I wasn’t or when I was answering client emails. And when I should have been enjoying my time off.

I was able to grow my business, but it got to a point where I was working with several clients at one time. All of the project deadlines were piling on top of each other. Clients were delaying projects. I was delaying projects because I wasn’t caught up on work from other projects. This is the business that I quit my so-called dream job working in corporate marketing for. And so it felt pretty bad when I reflected back on what I had actually built over the last five years and realized that I wanted to burn it to the ground. To put it nicely.

I was hiding that misery from my friends and family, so they couldn’t see how defeated I was and how much I was actually working to make an income that was the same, or maybe even a little bit worse than I was making from that full-time job.

A few months into trying to transition away from client work, I realized that I needed income and I needed some form of client work back in my business if I was going to stay afloat and not have to go get another job.

But all I could think about was how miserable I was when I was working with clients consistently. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the design aspect of it. I loved designing websites and that was a passion of mine, even before I started the business.

But it was everything else. It was this sales calls. It was sending proposals. It was you never ending stream of emails. That would find their way into my inbox. It was the run on projects. It was the clients taking advantage of my time. There were so many things about my business that I hated.

So I had to sit down and ask myself, Was it the client work that I hated or was it the way I was doing client work? Could there be a better way that I could do this? That would be more fulfilling and that would align more with my energy levels throughout the week, and actually help me build the business that I had always wanted. The business that would give me the freedom to take time off when I needed it. Give me the freedom to go away on vacation and not have to check my emails every day, waiting for that panicked client email, because I had a project that I was still working on that I couldn’t quite tie up before the plane took off.

This was like an epiphany for me. I had this moment where I realized that This was my business. I was in control of the business and I could turn it into whatever I wanted it to be. And if that means that I was going to do client work, but I was only going to do it in a specific way, that felt true to who I was as a person, then that was okay.

I started offering design days and what a design day is, and it’s not a new concept. It’s also called VIP days or day rates, whatever you call it. This is what I call it specifically for my design business, because a client hires me for a certain design project that I will finish over a one, two or three day period.

Everyone always tells new designers that they should charge by the project and not for their time, because as you get better at designing, you’re not going to get rewarded for the amount of time it takes because you get better, you get faster, it takes less time to complete a project. Therefore you get paid less for actually having more expertise.

The problem with charging by the project though, is that you’re probably not tracking your hours because why would you, you don’t have to, but if you don’t know how many hours you’re putting into a client’s website, how do you know what your actual hourly rate is? And if you are more profitable going that way versus charging by the hour or charging by the day.

I market my design days as a premium service because my clients are getting my undivided attention during the day that we work together. And also because they can get their project done really quickly.

When I added up all of the hours that were going into a traditional design project and looked at what I was charging, I realized that I was heavily undercharging for my work and charging by the day just made it that much easier to look at the value that I was providing and to look at the amount of time that it was taking me and to charge appropriately.

Disclaimer, there are many ways to do business. And this is just the one that I found for me that works the best and gives me the most work life balance. But if you like the way that you’ve been doing business and you don’t want to consider a change, feel free to just click away from this video. But if you do enjoy it and you are finding value out of this video, make sure to like, and subscribe and let me know in the comments I would love to hear from you.

Now let’s talk about a typical design day and how it differs from a traditional web design project.

The first stage is sales, and this is where you actually attract new clients. You get them on a sales call. And if you want some of my sales call tips, you can check those out here. I’m gonna link that video here as well as in the description below. But you want to sell this differently than you would a traditional web design project, because you need to be able to give a really strong estimate as to what’s going to be included in the project. So you can tell the client exactly how many days you need to get it completed.

My sales calls for design days tend to be a little bit longer because I like to get to know the client. I like to ask them a lot of questions about their business and their website and what their dream website would look like if we worked together and it’s so much fun to pull all of this juicy information out of them, but I use all of this information to basically inform how I’m going to move forward on the project when we get started. This is really valuable time, and I want to be able to give them the most accurate estimate as to how many days it’s going to take to actually fulfill the needs that they have for their website.

One of the really nice things about design days though, is that the proposal is so easy to create and send because there’s nothing really custom about it. There’s no specific deliverables for one client. I have deliverables that I include with every client, like I always include a brand questionnaire. I always include launch support, basic SEO , but there’s nothing specific to that project because it’s all about the amount of time it’s going to take me to get that project completed.

That means I’m selling a set number of hours that I’m going to work on this project rather than selling the deliverables themselves. And again, that’s why this sales process is so important because I want to make sure that I never over promise. I always want to under promise and overdeliver.

The next stage is preparation, and this is overly important to the success of your design day because of the fast timeline and the quick turnaround. You wanna make sure that you have all these systems and automations in place to collect the information you need from your clients to begin working on their website.

That could be things like website copy logo files brand photos all of the things that you want to make sure you have in advance, because you don’t want to be chasing your client down for all of these materials after the project is already started, because you’re going to be wasting valuable time.

If you want to learn more about what these systems look like and how you can incorporate them into your own business, I’ve got a free challenge specifically for designers. I’ll include the link in the description below. It’s everything I wish I had when I first started my business and it would’ve saved me a lot of time if I had just implemented them from the start.

Once you’ve nailed the preparation stage. We’re now onto delivery. And this stage should actually be pretty short because you’re most likely delivering your project over a one, two or three day period, depending on your client’s needs. And you want to make sure you hit the ground running. When I schedule my design days, I always check with my clients first to make sure they’re available. Because even though I’m doing most of the work, I want to make sure that if I have any questions or if I request feedback that they are at or near their computer and they can respond quickly.

Getting feedback from clients was always one of the biggest nightmares when I was offering traditional web design projects, because I found that I would email a client on a Monday asking for feedback on a page layout. And I might not hear back till Friday or sometimes even the following week. Clients would get busy because they’re trying to work on their own business while I’m working on their project.

And because there were no set deadlines or set times that we were meeting to review things, it was always tricky, making sure that I heard back in a timely manner.

Now with design days, things run so much smoother because my client and I are both on the same page about the timeline. And we are both prepared to give our undivided attention to this project until it’s completed.

I used to think having structure in my business would take away from the freedom that I so badly wanted. The freedom to be able to choose my hours, to go on vacation, all of those things I thought were the enemy of structure.

But now I realize the more I structure my business, the more I use systems, the more I rely on those systems again and again, and fine tune them over time, the more flexibility and freedom I have in my life. Because I’m only working with one client at a time, I am able to schedule vacations on weeks where I don’t have clients or in between projects.

Just in the last few months, I’ve spent about three weeks out of office and I have two more vacations planned still this year.

I also structure my calendar. So that way I have all my meetings on certain days, I only work on client projects on certain days and Fridays, I typically reserve as a catch up day. So a lot of times I’ll take half days Fridays too.

As I mentioned earlier, if you’re interested in all the systems that go into creating a successful design day experience for you and your clients, make sure to sign up for my free challenge that I’ve included in the description below. And if you have any questions, let me know in the comments, I would love to answer them for you.

Doing business this way has seriously changed my life. It’s made it so that my business is way more profitable than it has ever been in the past. And my clients love it.

Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, don’t forget to like and subscribe and I’ll see you in the next one.