Where’s the Profit? It’s Time to Give Yourself a Paycheck

If you’re running a successful design business but still aren’t paying yourself, I want you to stop for a minute.

I hear this all the time: “I’m leaving the money in the business so I can keep growing it.”

Sounds responsible, right? But there’s a problem. You are part of the business. And when you never pay yourself, you’re quietly telling yourself that your time and your work don’t count.

That’s not true. Not even a little bit.

A real business pays its employees and subcontractors for the work they do. And guess what? You are an employee of your business. You just happen to be the owner, too.

Your Business Is Not You

This is the big mindset shift.

When you’re starting out, your design business is you. You find the clients, create the designs, manage the projects, solve the problems, and make everything happen. But eventually, you have to move from “I’m a designer, and this is what I do” to “I own a business that provides interior design services.”

Those are two different things.

Your business needs to make a profit. Every job needs to make a profit. And you need to be paid for your time along the way.

I learned this one the hard way. At the end of my first year in business, my partners and I sat down to review everything we had accomplished. We had checked all the boxes. Marketing? Done. Community project? Done. Board of directors? Done.

Profit???

We hadn’t even put it in the plan. And, of course, it didn’t happen.

Once we decided exactly how much profit the business needed to create and intentionally built it into the numbers, something rather amazing happened: we hit the number. Right on the nose. Funny how that works.

You Are Not Free Labor

This is where things get really interesting.

When you price a design job, you have to include the cost of producing that job—and that includes you.

If your business would have to pay a lead designer $80 an hour to do the work you’re doing, then your business needs to account for that $80 an hour. You don’t become free labor simply because you own the company.

Say you have a $12,000 design fee on a $100,000 bathroom remodel. If your internal rate is $150 an hour, you have 80 hours available to complete the work. I’d aim to finish in 70, leaving yourself some breathing room because, as we all know, there is always something. It’s practically Murphy’s Law of design. 😉

If you pay yourself $80 an hour for those 80 hours, that’s $6,400 going to you as your paycheck. The remaining $5,600 goes into the business to cover overhead and, ultimately, create business profit.

That is how the pieces start to work together.

And when the business makes a profit, take it out of the operating account. Don’t let it sit there indefinitely. Your business exists to create wealth for you—not just to collect money in a bank account.

Give Yourself Permission to Get Paid

There is something incredibly powerful about seeing a paycheck land in your personal account every two weeks.

It says, I did the work. The business paid me. This is real.

And it changes the way you see your business.

You stop treating it like a personal practice where you’re endlessly giving away your time, and you start treating it like the profit-making business it was always meant to be.

So please remember this: just because it’s your business doesn’t mean you’re free.

Your time has value. Your work has value. And every design job you sell should have profit built into it—over and above what it costs to pay you.

That’s how you move from working harder and hoping someday it all pays off to building a business that actually supports the life you want.

Design something beautiful. And get paid what you’re worth.

You can listen to the full podcast episode here.

Until then, design something beautiful… and get paid what you’re worth.

With love,

Terri