Most freelancers and small agencies dream about The Big Job™:
A big-name client.
A big paycheck.
Work that makes you feel proud.
For some, that’s $5,000. For others, it’s $50,000. Or even $100,000.
It’s the kind of project you brag about. The one that finally makes your friends and family say, “Oh, now I get what you do.”
But here’s the truth:
Even if a big project landed in your inbox today…
You might not be ready for it.
A free 6-day email course for design freelancers and agency owners who need revenue fast—without a funnel, large audience, or fancy pitch deck.
Get Lesson #1 NowIf you take on a project that’s too big for you, you risk failing.
Big clients don’t just want beautiful work.
They want results.
They want to see real money come back from what they pay you.
That’s called ROI: return on investment.
I use one simple rule:
👉 Deliver 10× ROI.
That means if a client pays you $1,000, you should create at least $10,000 in value for them.
If you can create $1M in value, you can charge $100K. (10× ROI.)
Can you deliver $1M of value to a client?
I’m not talking about “in theory.”
Not some hand-wavy “timeless design is priceless” harangue you’d put on your About page.
But $1M of value that your client—and their CFO—can see show up in their P&L (profit & loss statement).
If not, can you deliver $100K of value?
What about $10K?
If you’re even uneasy about that, have no fear:
I’ll walk you through how you can be confident about it.
Imagine your client sells a $100 product.
Here are 2 simple ways you can deliver $10K of value for them.
If you help them sell 100 more of those, they make $10,000.
Making the most beautiful website doesn’t always lead to people buying.
If no one visits the site, it doesn’t matter how beautiful it is.
To a paying client, a beautiful website that gets traffic is more valuable than a beautiful website.
And a beautiful website that gets customers is even more valuable than a beautiful website that gets traffic.
And here’s the real kicker:
For most clients, an ugly website that gets customers is more valuable than a beautiful website that doesn’t.
More than just making sure the grid is tight and the fonts are popular, you could:
If you help them sell those 100 items, you’ve delivered $10,000 of value. And you’ve earned a $1,000 fee (10× ROI).
Value isn’t just about making money.
It’s also about saving money.
Say your client pays $10K a year for web hosting. You find a way to cut that cost… maybe by switching to a cheaper provider.
Maybe you just so happened to have a coupon for a free year of hosting because it was in the goodie bag from the last conference you attended. You look into your client’s hosting requirements and discover that this free host supports everything your client needs. You migrate their site, test it out until nothing’s broken, and help them cancel their old hosting.
Voilà: you’ve just saved them $10K.
If you save them $10,000 in hosting fees, you’ve delivered $10,000 of value. And you’ve earned a $1,000 fee (10× ROI).
You might wonder: if you made them $10K, why not charge $5K instead of $1K?
Two reasons:
First, it’s easier to convince a client to give you 10% than 50%. If your friend bought a pizza pie, it’d be easier to ask for 10% of their pizza than 50% of their pizza. It‘s harder to convince someone to give up more of what they have than less.
Second, 10% implies that you’re not solely responsible for the outcome. It signals that you only play a part in the success. In the case of selling 100 products for the client, you couldn’t have brought in $10K if the client didn’t make the product in the first place. Maybe you needed to work with their in-house copywriter for the website copy. Maybe you needed to build on top of their existing brand assets. Whatever the case, 10% signals that it’s something you couldn’t have done without them. And, especially if the client believes that you’re responsible for more than 10% of the outcome but are only taking 10% of the bounty, they’ll see you as generous and more than fair, which is great equity to have in the bank of your relationship with them.
Many freelancers and agency owners skip the hard work of practicing creating and articulating their value.
They jump straight to chasing big jobs.
For good reason: practice is difficult.
It’s easier to chase the biggest possible project and think it’s the shortcut to financial freedom.
But charging $10K for something that only creates $5K in value isn’t just unsustainable.
It’s stealing.
It’s leaving the place worse than you found it.
The design businesses that win long-term are the ones who scale into bigger projects only after they’ve proven they can create real, outsized results on smaller ones.
Start with a $1K project that delivers $10K of value.
Then practice seeing if you can figure out how to deliver $50K of value, because then you can confidently charge $5K.
You’ll learn how to sell 500 products instead of just 100.
You’ll start asking your clients what they spend $50K on, so that you can help them save it.
You’ll realize that earning and money and saving money aren’t the only things that are worth paying for.
You’ll see that more intangible things are valuable, like speed and friendliness, and you’ll figure out how to quantify those things.
You learn by working on a lot of things, and talking to your clients about them before, during, and after your work.
A former client once told me they referenced our 20-page strategy deck every day in standup for a year after we delivered it. It allowed them to not hire a creative director for a year, which means it saved them somewhere around $150k–$250k. We charged them $10K when we were charging $10K/week, but with this context, we could have charged $15K–$25K and still have it be a 10× ROI for the client.
So, the next time a similar client came around, we didn’t charge $10K for a week of work to make a deck. We charged $25K for the ability to not hire a creative director for a year—even though it was still a week of work to make a deck. Same deliverables, same time, different story.
Eight years later, I sat in a boardroom with VPs and pitched them on establishing an enterprise design system practice that would save them $20M–$40M. They showed me graphs and charts about how their current annual goals were to unlock $250M of incremental demand. I didn’t know how to help them do that. I had ideas but no proof or experience. The project was bigger that what we knew how to achieve. We didn’t win that work.
A year later, we earned $960K from one client because we helped them raise $45M in their Series B round. That’s a 46× ROI. Again, we weren’t solely responsible for the outcome. That’s why we only charged what ended up being 2% of the value of the opportunity. It’s the same skill and principles of making a strategy deck that subs for creative direction, as well as helping a client sell a hundred $100 products in a $1K project.
If we had tried to sell a $960K project nine years earlier, we wouldn’t have known how. It wouldn’t have been the right size project for us at that time. We wouldn’t have been able to deliver 1× ROI, much less 46×. We wouldn’t have been ready for it.
Here are some project price benchmarks for you to assess the right size projects for you:
Of course, your mileage may vary and there’s a lot of nuance missing, but hopefully this gives you a reference point.
Overall, here’s the framework for growth:
That’s the game.
Not chasing prestige. Not chasing the biggest paycheck.
It’s about matching the project size to the value you can deliver. And then climbing, one step at a time.
Keep doing the right size project.
One day, the $100K project will be the right size for you.
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