Episode 232: Using Boundaries To Grow Your Most Profitable Design Business

August 3, 2022

Setting boundaries in your business may not feel like a priority, but it truly is essential in building a profitable design business. When your mindset isn’t serving you and you don’t have the boundaries in place to support you, strategy will only take you so far. In today’s episode, I’m sharing how boundaries create longevity in your business, how you can set boundaries, and a few boundaries that I’ve incorporated into my own business.

If you’re looking to connect with other designers, get advice on boundaries, and have a safe space to ask questions, come join my free Facebook Group! I would love to see you there!

Building Longevity through Boundaries

When you started your business, you were likely motivated to take that step by something that would be beneficial to you. Whether you were doing it for freedom, flexibility, or some other motivating factor, you built this business to help you experience a certain outcome. Boundaries are a really crucial way to ensure that you’re taking action with longevity in mind for your business.

Considering that longevity and the benefits you entered your business with, you want to set up boundaries that support this. Let’s walk through what a few practical business boundaries look like.

Why Boundaries Are Important

Boundaries are meant to support you and protect you. This goes beyond the practical things like your office hours, your accepted methods of communication, or the days of the week that you work. Beyond those, you can have boundaries for yourself in balancing your life and your business—consider your energy levels, your emotions, or even your relationships.

Oftentimes, our boundaries will come from uncomfortable situations or tough clients. While these aren’t fun experiences to go through, building boundaries as you go through them will eliminate the chance of the same experiences happening again.

You also get to change these boundaries over time as you or your business shift—this is your business after all.

Setting Boundaries in Your Business & Personal Life

Now that we’ve established the importance of boundaries, let’s walk through when to know a boundary is needed and how to set it up. First and foremost, when you find yourself running into similar issues with clients, friends, or contractors, it’s important to identify what is causing that problem.

This could look like getting business texts or calls during personal time—if this is a probelm you run into often and it’s giving you anxiety or you’re just not enjoying the interruption, this is a sign that you need to set a boundary. Two boundaries to potentially implement here are working hours that you can establish with your clients and communication preferences.

Your clients will respect your boundaries and you will feel free from that unnecessary stress.

A few professional boundaries to think about implementing include:

  • Office hours & the days of the week you’re working
  • Preferred professional methods of communication
  • Your average response time
  • Communication preferences for feedback & timelines

As you build these boundaries, you may begin doing things differently in the past. While this can be scary, remember that this is your business and you started it for you. If you believe that everything is going to start working out for you, the way that you want, you will start to see all the possibility that can actually come into play for you. That’s when things dramatically start to change.

When you have boundaries in place to help support you to show up as the professional designer, your clients see that they see that you’ve got it together.

If you’re looking to earn more in your design business while honoring your boundaries and without adding more hours to your work week, come check out my free training! It walks you through how you can exponentially increase your income as a designer while honoring your time and your energy and your creativity

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Hi friend, and welcome to the brand strategy podcast. A show created to equip you with the inspiration, encouragement, and clarity. You need to build a brand of your dreams. I’m your host, Bonnie Bakhtiari, brand designer, strategist, and founder of the illume retreat from sustainable strategy to heartfelt encouragement. Each episode is designed to equip you with the tools you need to chase after your dreams, because you deserve a brand that empowers you to do what you love, connects with your dream clients and offers a deep sense of fulfillment along the way. So grab a cup of coffee and join me on this journey. Won’t you, Hey

Friends, welcome back to the brand strategy podcast. Where today we are talking about how to use boundaries to grow your most profitable design business. If you are new to the brand strategy podcast, then it’s important to know that what I share comes from place of wanting to empower you to pursue your unique definition of success. So whatever that looks like to you, whether success is tied to a monetary amount, whether it looks like a certain quality of life, whether it looks like having a certain kind of business, a certain whatever it looks like to you, I want you to be able to take the action that will support you best to build that kind of business and to experience that kind of life. And what I share here on the podcast comes from a place of my own personal experience. And with that, I give you full permission today, tomorrow, forever, and always to take what resonates with you.

So nothing that I’m sharing is meant to be a one size fits all solution. Nothing that I am sharing is meant to be the only way of experiencing a certain outcome. I’m simply sharing my personal anecdotal experience in a way to show what has helped me. And if that resonates with you, even if just a little bit is helpful, then that’s worth it to me because I want this to be something that serves you and that supports you. And it shows you what’s possible. Even if, uh, you know what I share, maybe it doesn’t resonate. Then if anything, that is still a value because to me that, that means that you’re building that muscle of self trust so that as you listen, and if you hear something that you think, you know what, I don’t actually know if that’s, if that’s gonna work for me, that’s great because that means that you are listening.

You’re critically thinking and you’re analyzing what will actually work for you. And over the years that I have been not only a brand designer and strategist for my own incredible creative clients, but also that I’ve been a coach for graphic brand and web designers. I have been passionate about not only showing how to break up the feast or famine cycle for good, but how to do it in a way that protects your time, your energy and your creativity, and that’s where boundaries can come in. Because if we think about how to build a wildly profitable design business, yeah, we can sit here and we can talk about strategies. We can talk about marketing pricing. We can talk about value ads. We can talk about all the things, you know, for however long we want. But if your mindset isn’t serving you, and if you don’t have the boundaries in place to support you, those strategies will only take you so far.

And in a lot of cases, without the infrastructure, in terms of boundaries, that we need to show up as our best selves and our most protected selves and our businesses, those aggressive growth strategies can put us on the fast track to burnout. And that’s definitely something that I don’t want anyone to experience because that is not a life giving quality of life to put it mildly. So with that being said, this concept of using boundaries to grow your most profitable design business begins. When we understand that your business is a tool, it is something that you built to do something you built it because you wanted to make more money. You built it because you wanted more freedom. You wanted to leave your nine to five for good and build more flexibility into your schedule. You started your business because you want to have something that’s yours that allows you to work from home.

So maybe you’re present with your family as they grow, or maybe you want to have a business that allows you to try a lot of different things so that you can lean into your creative outlets and your ideas, why, whatever the reason is as to why you started your business, you built this business to help you experience a certain outcome and so boundaries and the way that you show up every single day within your business are a really crucial way to ensure that you’re taking action with longevity and mind. What I mean by that is when you show up and when you have those parameters, those outlines, those boundaries in place that show you how you wanna show up. When you show up what kind of energy you wanna bring to that conversation or that experience that makes it easy for you to know what’s expected of you.

And on the flip side, if you work with clients, which as a designer, you do, if you are working with your clients and you have boundaries that are clearly communicated, that also teaches them and shows them how they can connect with you, how they can reach out and ask for support when they can expect to hear from you, what methods of communication are acceptable and so on and so forth. So thinking about how boundaries can show up and how they can support you and protect you. It’s not just about the practical things like your office hours or your accepted methods of communication, or, um, you know, the days of the week that you work or anything like that. Uh, it, it can be even more personal, more relational. So boundaries in your business can look like how you show up in your business. So for example, if you are a person who is low energy and just the, the act of showing up every day in your business is energetically draining for you.

Maybe you have a boundary in place that says, if I’m having a low energy day, and I’m not feeling like my best self, I’m not gonna show up on Instagram or TikTok. I’m not gonna create content and show up and further deplete my energy. So, you know, that could be a simple sort of like method and a simple boundary that you have in place about how you’re showing up that only you follow. You’re the only person that knows about that, right? Like your clients don’t know that, um, your social media followers don’t know that it’s literally just something that you follow internally that helps you share your focus and your energy, the limited energy that you have that day, where it’s more impactful. So for example, if we’re looking at, you know, if you’re having a low energy day and you’ve got a client presentation or a client call on your calendar, that I would argue is much more of use to you of use to your business and of use to you and your client’s relationship for you to show up as your best self there versus split your energy between panic posting on social media, and then showing up for that client relationship and that call.

So, um, I know that’s just one example, but other examples that you can think about about the way that energetically or emotionally, or, uh, relationally you’re showing up in your business boundaries can look like anything from the way that you allow people to speak to you, the, the kind of energy, the kind of tone, the kind of emotion that you accept or will not accept. It can look like, um, the way that you are, what you’re choosing to focus on. So if you have a boundary within your business, knowing that I only spend my time and my energy focusing on profit generating tasks, well, then that frees you up from thinking about, or even looking at all of the other kind of busy work type tasks that aren’t directly generating revenue, or that are not creating a path to generate revenue for your business in the long haul.

So if we’re thinking about using boundaries as a way to protect yourself, this is deeply personal. So the boundaries that I have in my design business might not serve you because we’re different people. And we have, you know, different capacities. We have different energy levels. We have different client loads. Perhaps there are a lot of different things that mean that boundaries are not a one size fits all kind of process for people to follow. But in the design industry, you know, we spend a lot of time talking about some very simple practical client facing boundaries and client process type boundaries. Like for example, how we accept feedback from clients, how we accept revisions, our contracts, our client agreements, those are examples of, of professional boundaries that we have in place of kind of the terms of what’s acceptable and how we’ll work together and what the scope of work looks like.

We talk a lot about how to deal with challenging clients, right? I’m a member of quite a few Facebook groups, and I’ve even see this in my free Facebook group for graphic brand and web designers where, you know, if you’re having a kind of a struggle sort of a, a challenging time with a client who maybe they’re not speaking to you respectfully, or maybe there’s a disconnect over the work that you’re delivering and the vision that’s in their head, right. I see lots of these posts online, where people are asking for kind of they’re crowdsourcing support or compassion, or some understanding around, you know, a difficult client relationship. And all of those are opportunities for us to think about what kind of boundaries we want to implement. And sometimes since boundaries in your business are quite personal, sometimes it takes some of those not so ideal client situations or, you know, professional situations for us to identify the opportunity to implement a boundary.

Like if you, if you have a client contract and you’ve never had any, uh, you know, pushback against that, or you’ve never had any issue pop up that wasn’t outlined in your contract. If let’s say you have a scenario with a client where they’re asking for something that isn’t outlined in the contract, and you don’t have a clause that speaks to that. And so you don’t have a frame of reference of how to address that and how to deal with that. And you’re kind of scrambling a little bit to figure out what to do, right? That is a beautiful opportunity. I know it doesn’t feel like it in the moment when it’s uncomfortable, but immediately after that is an opportunity for you to implement a new boundary that ensures you don’t experience that again. And you don’t have that question, come up again with a client or a situation where you’re, you know, encountering something that is not adequately outlined on your client contract or your onboarding process or anything like that.

When we think about how we’re using boundaries, like I said, they’re personal. They are also sometimes kind of, what’s the word I’m looking for. They are circumstantial. They are, uh, something that will show up every now and the, and again, and what works for someone else like your, your, you know, best friend in the industry might not work well for you. But I think it’s important that we talk about boundaries more and we normalize implementing boundaries in our businesses more and more because it shows people what’s possible and it shows people what kinds of, of ways of working, what kinds of ways of showing up as a person in your business can, can help you can serve. You can support your energy, support, your nervous system and support you being just a happy, healthy human. Because I think that a lot of us are fed this narrative.

And this is something that, you know, coming from my own personal experience when I started my business back in 2012 there, and honestly, even before then, there’s always been this narrative and startup culture where we have to hustle where it has to be this kind of like nose to the grindstone, working late into the night, sometimes working all night long, working weekends, working, you know, way, way, way harder than you ever would work. If you worked a traditional nine to five, right? Like we’re told that that’s the norm and in some circles and a lot of circles actually that’s praised. And if that works for you, if that method of, you know, that constant kind of like hustle and grind, if that actually does work for you and you love that, and you generate energy from that, and that is life giving to you, then that’s amazing.

But for me personally, that doesn’t serve me. I don’t work that way because it does not protect the quality of life that I wanna experience. I personally find it incredibly draining and exhausting, and it’s not healthy for me. And so I’ve built a business that has boundaries, like literally built into the foundation that make it impossible for me to work that way, unless I’m just like going rogue and I’m breaking all of my own internal boundaries. I mean, I’ve built a business where I have very clear days of the week in which I work. And over the years that has shifted and those days have actually decreased. So it used to be kind of a Monday through Friday situation. And now it’s more of like a Tuesday through Thursday situation. And I love that for me, because that’s something that serves me and it serves the quality of life that I wanna experience.

And my business gets to be this tool that, that helps me to experience that. And it protects my time and my energy in that way. And I, you know, that’s something that, like I said, boundaries evolve so that my, my days of the week, my kind of like office hours, so to speak that has evolved over time. And so I think it’s important to remember that whatever boundaries you’re implementing, you’re not married to them. You do not have to follow them forever or use them until the end of time. Hypothetically, you can change them literally whenever you want, because, Hey, it’s your business. And you get to make those calls and you get to decide what works for you. And if it worked for you for six months, and now it doesn’t, Hey, it served its purpose and you can change and grow and shift at any time you want, because remember you can trust yourself, you make good decisions, you’re doing a good job and you are safe with yourself.

So when you’re building boundaries in your business, if you’re looking to your left and your right, trying to figure out if you’re doing it right, quote unquote, I want you to remember that the only place you have to look is in, you only have to look inward to find the guidance that will support you as you build a business that honors your definition of success. So, like I said, for my business, I have boundaries upon boundaries. So, you know, I’ve got a very, um, and it looks strict. I will say to a lot of people, it looks strict, but I’m okay with that because I actually know that boundaries. It’s not that that means I’m unavailable or that I only work, you know, like 10 hours a week. What it means is that I have figured out for me when I can be most available and I can be my best self for that amount of time.

So when I show up for my clients or when I show up for my students, or when I show up for my team during those office hours, I am operating at 100%. I’m bringing all of my energy, all of my effort, all of my attention to those relationships and to those projects. And that translates into quality, work into powerful coaching sessions, into great conversations with my team. And we’re able to make progress in that way. So boundaries to me, they’re not limiting. They actually are just clearly defining here’s how we can work together and how we can do so when I’m at my best. So for you, if you’re the kind of person where you have not implemented office hours in the past, and you’ve been kind of vague about when people can contact you. And so, as a result you get, let’s say you get phone calls from clients or text messages from clients on the weekend, or maybe in the evening when you’re trying to like unplug and unwind and be present with your family.

And if that is not serving you, if you see those texts come through, or you, you see those calls and you’re sending them in a voicemail and you’re feeling this like sense of dread about it, and it’s like making it feel a certain way. To me, that’s a sign that we need to implement a boundary there. That there’s a change that can happen. That frees you up to be completely available to your clients during your office hours, when you choose to be available to your clients and they can expect to hear from you within those office hours. So, and also maybe another boundary is you don’t give out your phone number anymore. That’s one of my boundaries. You people don’t have my phone number and that’s because you don’t need to contact me, you know, via phone. You can contact me so many other ways.

The primary method of which is email. And that is, that is, that is great. And my clients respect that my students respect that my industry, friends, my colleagues, they get it. And that works for me. So with that being said, that can be an opportunity for you to say, Hmm, I don’t love how I feel when this happens. What kind of boundary can I implement so that I feel freer so that I feel more spacious so that I feel like I can finally catch my breath and I can finally focus on what’s right in front of me, which might be putting your kids to bed or making dinner, or sitting on the couch just completely like zoning out while you binge watch your favorite show for the like 20th time, right? Whatever you’re doing, you deserve to give your full attention to that thing, those people, or that experience when you’re in the moment and boundaries can help you do that.

So with that being said, thinking about some personal boundaries, some things that can help in the way that you’re showing up and professional boundaries. So professional boundaries, I would define those as the way that people are communicating with you, the way that people are contacting you. Um, you’re off you, um, your office hours. So the days of the week that you’re available, the hours each day, that you’re available, um, your preferred professional methods of communication. So how people can get ahold of you and your average response time, right? And then from there, we can get a little bit more granular, like as a designer, you probably will have preferred ways of accepting feedback. So if you are sending over a visual brand identity and that presentation is something that then requires your client’s feedback, what are the ways, right? Like your, your process here, that workflow, what are the accepted forms of communication there?

Do you require feedback within a certain, a number of days, do you re require feedback to specific questions? And do you require feedback be submitted in a very specific way, like filling out a form or signing off on something or replying with a loo video, right. We can get incredibly, incredibly detailed here with all of the different systems that we have in place that actually serve as boundaries that protect us so that we can do our best work professionally. And as your business continues to grow, I encourage you to also think about some personal boundaries of how you want to show up in your business and how you want to feel, um, a boundary could be for, you know, for you that maybe you’ve gone through a season where you’ve been really available to your industry, friends and to clients. And to just about anybody who’s interested to do a virtual coffee chat, but maybe in this season, you don’t really have time for those anymore, or you don’t really enjoy them the way that you used to.

And so you just need to take a break for a couple months. Well, Hey, that’s a boundary that you can implement that, you know, says, Hey, I’m gonna close down my coffee, my coffee, date calendar, and I’m not available to connect because I’m spending my full focus on my clients in this season. And people will understand that. I think that, um, something that I hear when I’m chatting with my students inside the brand strategy school around boundaries is, and this is common. This is really normal is that we have this fear that when we implement a boundary, that people are gonna think that we’re closed off. That we’re mean or aggressive that we are unavailable, that we are some kind of something. And it’s, it’s never a good kind of something. It’s always, it’s always like we’re telling ourselves that if we implement this boundary, then people are going to think something negative about us.

Or we’re telling ourselves that if we implement a boundary, like maybe you work less, right? You say I’ve been working five days a week, nine to five in my business for two years now. And you know what I wanna take Fridays off. That sounds amazing. That gets me excited. And that would be such a beautiful thing for me to rest or have fun or be present with the people that I love. Right. Well, if you’re going to make that shift and you’re going to say, I’m going to work four days a week instead of five, for a lot of people that can spark up this fear of, if I’m not doing it the way that I’ve always done it, my business is going to come crashing down around me. My inquiry streams are my stream of inquiries. That’s gonna just dry up. Um, you know, like my business is just not going to survive if I’m not there like that, that taking that one day off every week, that’s gonna mean that I’m so backed up.

And, you know, like we, we tell ourselves these stories where we’re kind of like making the worst case scenario. And so if we’re listening to that, if we’re buying into that, then we’re not actually taking the action, the desired action that we want to experience the outcome that we want to experience. So nothing changes. And then we’re continually finding ourselves, worn out overworked and overwhelmed, and we wonder why nothing is changing, why we still feel this way. And it’s because we’re keeping ourselves changed to ways of being in ways of doing in ways of operating that no longer serve us. So with that resonates with you, if you’re hearing that and you’re thinking, wow, I’ve, I’ve definitely told myself that story of if I implemented this boundary, or if I stopped taking on clients that did not respect my expertise and my professionalism, or if I stopped taking on, you know, these projects that don’t light me up anymore, right?

You might have been telling yourself a story about how the worst might happen, but I wanna encourage you to think about what if it all goes according to plan. What if you take that four day work week and having Fridays off allows you to return on Monday, feeling fully energized, full of ideas, and you’re operating at a higher level because you’re happier and you’re more rested. What if you stop taking on those clients who do not respect your expertise and do not honor your professionalism, and you started taking on and having more space in your project calendar for clients who do respect you and do value your professionalism and will pay more because you’re such a professional. And what if you finally stopped taking on projects that don’t light you up anymore. And instead you created more space and you had more creativity to devote to the kinds of projects that do light you up, and that do excite you.

And because you’re bringing more creativity and more excitement and more energy to those projects, you can actually start charging more because your quality of work is improving along the way. So what happens is if we believe that everything is actually gonna start working out for us and the way that we want and that the best is going to happen, not the worst. We start to see all the possibility that can actually come into play for us. And that’s when things dramatically start to change. Uh, you know, the whole topic we’re talking about today is building a wildly profitable design business. And how boundaries play into that. Well, when you believe that your boundaries are there to protect you and not just protect you and your quality of life, but also to empower you as a service provider, as a designer, to do your best design work, then that is where we start to create the space for big moves to start happening in your design business, right?

Because when you have boundaries in place, when you have those structures identified that help support you to show up as the professional designer, that you are, your clients, see that they see that you’ve got it together. They see that, you know what you’re doing, and they are impressed. They are experiencing a higher quality of client experience. They are loving this, this kind of like up-leveled experience that they’re getting as well. There’s no confusion. You look like a total pro. They know exactly how to contact you when to contact you when they can expect to hear back from you. They know what’s coming, they know what’s up next on the timeline, how they can pay you all of those things, right? All those professional pieces are in place. And that creates space for you to focus on your design work, that then allows you to focus on the client relationship that then allows you to leave them with this incredible experience that they cannot wait to tell their friends about, which then generates more inquiries for you.

And when we think about some more personal boundaries that you’re implementing, then not only do you have the, these professional boundaries in place that are helping you to run a profitable business that has longevity in mind, but also we have personal boundaries in place that ensure you’re able to show up as the designer and the CEO that you are without the fear of burnout and the way that you’ve experienced it in the past. And it allows you to show up feeling the way that you wanna feel as the human that you are, because you deserve to have a business that gives you not only the income that you want to generate, but that also helps you have more fund and more freedom and more spaciousness and more ease in your life. We’ve lived with this narrative long enough, that business has to be hard. And we’ve lived with this narrative long enough, that business has to require this like nonstop hustle and all this sacrifice.

And it needs to be all of this. Like all of this struggle in a lot of ways. And I don’t know about you, but about living a life that is full of hustle and grind. I am not about living a life that has this business. That is this negative source of energy in my life because it’s demanding so much of me that I have nothing left to give to the people that matter most at the end of the day. And I am done with having a business that is not serving me, right. I am done living my life in a way where I exist for the benefit of my business. No, absolutely not. No I’m done with that. My business exists for my benefit. My business is a tool that I created so that I’m able to do incredible things for my family. And I’m able to do incredible things for the people that I serve.

And if that ever changes, if I feel like I am this, this person who is in the weeds bogged down in my business and I exist for the betterment of my business, no, that’s not it, I’m not doing that anymore. And I hope that you’re not either because why I just honestly, friends, why, why would we, why would we continue to prop up that narrative when that narrative never served us? Why would we continue to believe that business has to be hard when business has always been possible for us in a way that is full of ease. Now, please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying to mean that we can have these like fluffy. I don’t have to work hard. You know, like success and money just rains down from the heavens upon me for no reason. Like, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that you can experience a sense of ease and a sense of flow in your design business.

As you show up and you work hard, you can experience that quality of satisfaction, that feeling of fulfillment and still work hard, but there’s a difference. , there’s a really big difference between hard work and directionless hustle. And I believe that we’ve seen for years now, we have seen people teach us that hustle just for the sake of hustle is the only way to go. But I would argue that the people that told us that the marketers, the gurus, the experts that told us that hustle for the sake of hustle is the only way to do it or cared about your quality of life in the first place they gave you advice that worked for them, but did not take into consideration who you are, your unique quality of life that you wanna experience your definition of success that you want to create. They did not care about your emotions, your health, your wellbeing, your current responsibilities, your families.

They don’t care about that. I, I I’m, I’m serious. Like the people that give us that advice, that hustle for the sake of hustle is the only way to grow a six figure or seven figure or an eight figure business. No, I don’t believe that. I believe instead, that you can build an incredibly profitable design business to the tune of 5, 6, 7, 8 figures, whatever you want. You can build a design business that helps you generate whatever kind of income you want in the way that works for you. Because if it is, if it is aligned for you, if it, if is energetically healthy for you, if it is what you feel called to do, then how could the opportunity, how could the growth, how could the money, how could the clients not come to you? You know what I mean? If you’re living in a way, if you’re showing up in your business in a way that serves you and it works for you, why would the opportunity and the growth and the wealth not follow?

So when I say we can build these businesses in a way that works for you, what I mean is that when you have boundaries in place, when you have systems in place that help you show up for a business that operates in the way you want it to, and as the person, as the CEO, that you want to be the head designer inside that design business, that allows you to then see the opportunity and see the spaces where you can work more efficiently, where you can work harder, where you can work. And when I say harder, I mean, you know, we’re there business is, is work. Like there is, there is kind of that, that effort that we have to put into it, it’s, it’s not necessarily going to be, um, you know, this like making money in your sleep kind of narrative that we’ve been told, but what it can be is it can be this ebb and flow of seasons of diligent work, where you’re, you are focused and you are working in a sense of flow and seasons of spaciousness, where there’s more margin on your calendar.

And you’re able to take more time away. Right? When I look at my design business over the years, I’ve had, I’ve had seasons where I was, I was busy. I was real booked and busy, but I was so happy being booked and busy cuz I was working with incredible people. I was honoring the boundaries, the professional and personal boundaries that I had put in place. And it was serving me. And there have been seasons where I’ve been able to, because I worked those seasons where I was booked in busy and my bank account was telling the same story. I was able to take a longer sabbatical. I was able to take more time away. I was able to, you know, do what I wanted to do because that is how my business is built. It’s built in a way where it serves me and it’s a tool that allows me to help my clients, my incredible brand design clients and my incredible students inside the brand strategy school.

And it allows me to experience that fulfillment in a way that supports me and my family. So without being said, friends, I hope that you’re walking away from today’s episode, feeling encouraged, feeling curious about what kinds of boundaries you could begin to implement, or you could judge up a bit, or you could explore that would help you. That would make it easier, make it more spacious, make it more fun, make it more joyful for you to show up in your design business, feeling how you wanna feel doing the kind of work that you wanna work and working with the kinds of people that you want to work with. And if you get excited about that, if that’s something that you are really looking forward to experiencing, and you’re wanting to know, how do I begin to earn more? And how do I begin to exponentially increase what I’m able to generate the income I’m able to create in my design business, without the directionless hustle, without taking on so many people that I just like cannot see which way is up.

Then I would encourage you to check out a totally free training that I’ve created. It walks you through how you can exponentially increase your income as a designer while honoring your time and your energy and your creativity. And you can head to BS for Bonnie design.com/training to crap, your spot to check out this free on demand, Netflix style training friend. I hope that today’s episode is given you lots of good things to think about. And as always, my DMS are open, say or talk through anything that I shared in today’s episode, then feel free to reach out to me at Bonnie joy Marie on Instagram, that’s the best way to get ahold of me. And as always, I’m grateful that you are a part of this community tuning into the brand strategy podcast. It truly means the world to me means that I’m able to show up in this space and share these, these thoughts and this experience with you. So again, I’m grateful for you and as always, I’m gonna be cheering you on from Waco.

Thank you so much for joining me today, friend, before you go, I would be so grateful to receive your feedback on the brand strategy podcast. If you enjoyed this episode or the podcast in general has helped you grow your brand. I’d really appreciate it. If you left us a review in iTunes, your positive reviews enable the brand strategy podcast to continue to grow and reach like-minded creatives. Just like you. Thank you for all your support and encouragement as together. We pursue building brands with purpose and intention until next time I’m cheering you on from Waco.

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My name is Bonnie – I’m a brand designer, strategist, and writer which all adds up to one eclectic conglomeration of qualities that enables me to serve you well! Past clients have dubbed me "the Joanna Gaines of brand design," and I've had more than a few call me a dream maker, a game changer, and a design wizard (my Harry Potter-loving heart didn't hate that one, let me tell you!). At the end of the day, I'm a big-hearted creative who will get teary-eyed as you share the heart behind your business; who will lose sleep over the perfect font pairings and color selections to bring your brand to life visually; and who will work tirelessly to empower, encourage, and equip you to share your work with the world intentionally. 

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