Special thanks to Jennings Anderson who looked over an early draft of this post and helped me refine it. Also, as usual,

For all the aforementioned examples, my soon-to-be trademarked methodology (3-C Discovery and EBA process) never changes, rather it adapts to the situation. My workshop and coaching materials don’t change, but are customized for each engagement with relevant case studies and tweaked questions.

Sell Wordpress and Squarespace templates to clients who can’t afford bespoke web design services. For example, check out EmPress themes, born out of a partnership between a programmer and web designer.

If digital products give you vertigo, you don’t have to hock ebooks or pitch courses to diversify your income. Hover closer to home and listen to what clients and prospects are asking for — can you retool your services to give them what they need while still making a profit? Can you offer off-shoots, remixes, or sprints? Experiment with products, review your results quarterly and tweak your process and mix until you have margins that feel sustainable. Remember, this is a test and learn approach. Some ideas will fall into the trash heap while others will take you places you never expected.

Work is done in advance of the sprint so the two days are focused and there’s no education ramp-up. I send the client discovery worksheets (homework, if you will) and an outline of the two-days so they can prepare while I onboard their business and industry. The coaching engagements consists of me guiding them through the process of building their brand or business, but they’re doing the heavy lifting. And it’s no shocker that the workshops have turned into longer-term engagements and referrals because clients have already mitigated the financial risk with a workshop buy-in.

For clients who require speed but have the budget, I’ll bundle their brand platform with the creation of key marketing collateral (website, brochures, About page copy, pitch decks, etc.) in a one-week, done-for-you sprint. They get the strategy plus executable deliverables they can use immediately. As you can imagine, the price jumps above my $10K minimum.

Sell a set of copy templates or swipe files, where you’re giving them the bones and best practices, but they’d have to customize. This could be in the form of: an onboarding sequence; sales templates for product-based businesses (e.g., order confirmation, abandoned cart, etc.) or service-based businesses (e.g., email funnels, cold emails, warm leads, etc.); email subject line templates.

Sell a scaled-down version of your services. If you’re known as someone who creates an entire brand identity, website, and marketing collateral, perhaps you can design an “essentials” or “get started” kit where the client has a logo, a few designed pages, and a few pre-designed collateral templates. They get a taste, but not the entire suite of deliverables.

Charge for “tear downs,” where you take a client’s existing collateral and show them tactically ways they can improve. Email marketing superstar, Val Geisler, used tear-downs as a way to market her expertise, but you can certainly charge people for this in the same way web designers/UX pros charge for site or digital media audits. I’ve charged clients for site and social media audits, closing with tactical, prescriptive actions they can take immediately to solve their most glaring problems. The concept here isn’t just to tell people what they did wrong, but it’s about getting them to get it right.

Sell a weekend sprint where you design the bulk of the creative work ahead of time, and you’re using the weekend to get feedback and finalize the designs in real-time. For example, check out Worstofalldesign’s jaw-dropping packages.

Offer coaching services or workshops where you help a client’s social media or internal copy team up-level their copy skills. Any internal team can benefit from a refresher or external perspective, no matter how senior its members are. Show a client — once their brand platform has been created — how to practically adapt their standards across channels, i.e., social media, website, newsletter, print collateral, advertising, video story-boarding, etc.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in seven years of consulting, it’s this — your income is rarely stable, regardless of talent and tenure. You could be dealing with an illness, a global pandemic, shifts in the economy. etc. What you can do to mitigate what you can’t control is focus on packaging your services at varying levels so you have a stronger mix of potential clients and you can weather downturns and Sahara-level project droughts.

Create premium long-term engagements where you build their website and are on-hand for strategy and maintenance on the client’s timeline. Emily Thompson of Being Boss conceived of this back in the day for her web design business because she wasn’t happy with the 6–8 week projects. She wanted her clients to benefit from her e-commerce strategy and web design savvy, so she created long-term “Indie Boom” engagements.

If digital products give you vertigo, you don’t have to hock ebooks or pitch courses to diversify your income. Hover closer to home and listen to what clients and prospects are asking for — can you retool your services to give them what they need while still making a profit? Can you offer off-shoots, remixes, or sprints? Experiment with products, review your results quarterly and tweak your process and mix until you have margins that feel sustainable. Remember, this is a test and learn approach. Some ideas will fall into the trash heap while others will take you places you never expected.

There was a time I was subsisting on creating copy for freelancers’ portfolios and doing site audits because I was going through a tough time and didn’t have the mental capacity for anything substantial. Clients gained access to my expertise while I weathered a mental health slump (to put it fucking mildly, but I digress).

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celebrated the holiday alone and may look toward a future where pending holidays will be more of the same. The year has pulled and twisted our hearts around, and we have all struggled with finding ways to show up for ourselves and others.