Episode 128 – How this Designer Hit Her First $10k Month with Katie Harms

Are you a designer wondering what the secret is to another designer’s success? How do they offer so much value for their clients and how can you do the same? How is she hitting a $10k month when you’re doing everything you can to keep your head above water? What is the secret? Today on the podcast we are joined by brand strategist and web designer Katie Harms of Queeniekathleeni Designs who is sharing all the juicy details on how she hit her first $10K month as a designer. We’re diving into the fears she faces, the mindset change she endured, and how creating a strong brand strategy process and client experience you can replicate time and time again is the game changer in your own business. I’m so excited to dive into this conversation because Katie is not only a hugely talented designer and strategist who takes what I consider to be a very elevated and artistic approach to design, but she’s also a part of team b is for bonnie design as my associate designer! It’s been amazing to watch her business grow over the few years and it’s been incredible to get to celebrate with her as she made her first $10k month a reality. And today in this conversation we’re going to peel back the curtain on how she made that happen so that you can make it happen in your own design business, too. THE #1 STRUGGLE AS AN ENTREPRENEUR Katie shared the entrepreneurial life is not the original path she set off on back in college and that she fell into it kind of backwards, which I know many of us can relate to! In Katie’s first year of entrepreneurship her biggest fear was failing. Like most of us do, she took on a ton of volume and said no to very little. She shared that she sacrificed a lot in order to take on that volume and didn’t value her work the way she should have.  “I can look back on last year now that I’ve gone through it and I realize it just really wasn’t a healthy way for me to be running my business.” So often as entrepreneurs, especially designers and branding professionals, we get into this mindset that in order to earn more we need to do more. And with Katie’s story you can see that is simply not the case. She did the hustle and it wasn’t healthy. It’s not sustainable to do business in a way where your ability to scale your income or your ability to earn more has to always be tied to taking on more work because that teaches us that our time equals money. That mindset is a slippery slope to be on because I ultimately believe that time is our most valuable resource and if we’re always willing to trade time for more dollars that comes at a really high cost.  So how do you break out of this mindset? Tune into more of Katie’s story and how she broke through the “trading time for dollars” mentality. The Brand Strategy Process That Changed It All “One of the most valuable things I got from the Brand Strategy School that I was not expecting was this emotional shift around my work,” Katie said. “The Brand Strategy School has not only helped me raise my rates, but also have that value reflected in my prices as well and talk to the clients that I really want to work with and say no to everything else.” In this episode you’ll hear Katie share a conversation she’s had with her husband recently about how this mindset shift has not been easy and actually is quite uncomfortable because it’s such a different way of doing business then she...