Stop Wearing ALL the Hats in your Design Business!

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite picture books was the children's classic, “Caps for Sale” by Esphyr Slobodkina.  Do you remember it? In the book, a peddler selling caps would stack all the caps on his head at the same time, sky high, and balance them there while he walked around the town, calling “caps for sale!” There were some shenanigans with a bunch of monkeys stealing the hats and I’m sure there was some sort of lesson in there somewhere (lost on me, haha!).  Mostly I just loved that image of that peddler with all the different caps balanced on top of his head.  

When I first went out on my own as a designer, little did I know that I was going to be recreating that image of the peddler with all the caps balanced on my head at the same time!  Except instead of my hats being “red caps, blue caps, gray caps”, my hats were:

• Designer
• Graphic Designer
• Website designer
• Sales
• Marketing
• Drafting
• Design Assistant
• Business Development
• Accounting
• Bookkeeping
• Tech
• Project Management
• Customer Service
• Admin
• …and many more

Sound familiar?

Here I was thinking that I was going to be a full-time designer (one hat), and what I actually was was a full-time solopreneur (sky-high stack of hats), with a few hours squeezed in for design here and there among all of my other duties.  

It’s normal when you first go out on your own to wear all the hats.  After all, most of us have very little capital to begin with, and we’re trying to do everything on the cheap while we get our businesses off the ground. 

But over time, as we become more established in our businesses, it can be crazy-making to continue to wear all the hats all the time.  Why?  Because you’ll be spending the majority of your time doing lower-paying tasks that you hate, instead of higher-paying tasks that you love.  This is a recipe for burnout over time.

I don't want that for you!  So instead, I'd like you to imagine that all of the different tasks that you're currently doing as a solopreneur - these hats - are actually separate roles that can be performed by different people.   

Your goal as the CEO is to have people in roles that they love, that energize them and light them on fire.  This is how you're going to keep your employees happy in their roles and prevent them from burning out.  

As the CEO, it is also your job to make sure that you are making the best use of your resources and not wasting high-level employees on menial tasks that are below their pay grade.  It’s important to maximize efficiency and have the right people in the right jobs  - doing what’s in their zone of genius and making the best use of their time - earning at their highest pay rate.

As a CEO with one employee - you - it’s your job to do this for yourself.   

If you’ve never really thought about this, I have a little exercise that will help you.  So put on your CEO hat, and play along with me to decide how many hats you want to wear, and which ones they’re going to be to find the most Sanity in your design business.

Step 1: List all your Hats

The first thing I’d like you to do is to make a list of all the tasks you perform in your business, and the average pay rate for them.  How much would you pay a consultant or employee in your area to perform this role?  Put the roles in order of pay rate, starting with the highest and ending with the lowest.  

Here’s my list:

• CEO - $500/hr
• Accounting - $175/hr
• Marketing - $100/hr
• Website designer - $75 / hr
• Project Management - $60/hr
• Graphic Designer - $50/hr
• Sales - $50/hr
• Social Media - $50/hr
• Business Development - $50/h
• Bookkeeping - $40/hr
• Designer - $40/hr
• Tech - $40/hr
• Customer Service - $40/hr
• Admin - $35/hr
• Drafting - $30/hr
• Design Assistant - $25/hr

The goal of this exercise isn’t to get too nit-picky about the actual rates, they’ll obviously vary by area and experience level.  Rather, the goal is to ask yourself - how am I spending my time?  Am I spending it on my highest level tasks?  Or am I spending a lot of time doing tasks below my pay grade that I could easily pay someone else to do?  

Step 2: Rank your Hats

I’d like you to grab a pink, yellow and green highlighter and attack that list, ranking these roles in order by how easy they are to farm out.  Green is easy to hire out, yellow is medium, and pink is very hard to replicate or farm out - i.e. - can only be done by you.  

My list looks like this:

• CEO - $500/hr
• Designer - $40/hr
• Accounting - $175/hr
• Marketing - $100/hr
• Website designer - $75 / hr
• Project Management - $60/hr
• Graphic Designer - $50/hr
• Sales - 50/hr
• Social Media - $50/hr
• Drafting - $30/hr
• Business Development - $50/h
• Bookkeeping - $40/hr
• Tech - $40/hr
• Customer Service - $40/hr
• Admin - $35/hr
• Design Assistant - $25/hr

I have “CEO” as pink because only I can have the vision for my business.  That’s not replicable.  For me, pretty much everything else can be hired out.  I’m good with having a high-level employee do design, so this is yellow for me (it may be pink for you meaning only you can do it, and that’s all good!)

Step 3: Play Favorites

Next, put these roles in order from love to hate - starting with your favorite role and ending up with your least favorite.   Which ones make you feel really alive, and which suck the life out of you?  

Here’s what my list looks like:

• CEO - $500/hr
• Designer - $40/hr
• Sales - $50/hr
• Design Assistant - $25/hr
• Business Development - $50/h
• Marketing - $100/hr
• Customer Service - $40/hr
• Social Media - $50/hr
• Project Management - $60/hr
• Drafting - $30/hr
• Graphic Designer - $50/hr
• Website designer - $75 / hr
• Admin - $35/hr
• Bookkeeping - $40/hr
• Tech - $40/hr
• Accounting - $175/hr

Oh wow, look at that!  All the green roles just made their way conveniently to the bottom of my list.  Other than “design assistant” it turns out that the easiest roles for me to hire out are also the ones I like the least. For the most part, they’re not the most expensive, either.   

Step 4: Take Action

Here's where the rubber meets the road.  It's not enough to just understand you're wearing too many low-paying hats that you hate, you need to take some of them off!  This will be an ongoing process, so give yourself time.  This is all about having the vision, and moving toward it as you are able.  

Over years of trial and error, here are all the the hats I removed from my head, in order from first to last:

• Website designer - $75 / hr
• Accounting - $175/hr
• Bookkeeping - $40/hr
• Tech - $40/hr
• Design Assistant - $25/hr
• Drafting - $30/hr
• Graphic Designer - $30-50/hr
• Admin - $35/hr
• Customer Service - $40/hr
• Designer - $40/hr

And my happy stack of hats that were left was:

• CEO - $500/hr
• Sales - $50/hr
• Business Development - $50/h
• Marketing - $100/h
• Social Media - $50/hr
• Project Management - $60/hr

As you can see, I was able to remove quite a few hats from my head.   Each time I removed a hat I didn’t love, I felt lighter, happier, and I had more time to dedicate to the parts of my business that I enjoyed the most, not to mention the parts that paid me the most.  Over time, this meant more profits, and most of all more Sanity for me.   

You might be surprised to see the designer hat removed.  That was a very recent development, as my Design Assistant was promoted to Associate Designer, and I hired another Design Assistant.  It was a bit of an experiment to me to see how it would feel to lean into my role as CEO more fully, and free up the majority of my time.  Guess what happened?  Designer Sanity was born.  I found a whole new passion project to light my fire! 

So what does this look like for you? What are your favorite hats, and the ones that you want to remove from your head?  What steps could you take to start moving in that direction?

 Feeling sane in your business means:

• Wearing Fewer hats overall
• Wearing only the Hats you LOVE, and taking off the hats you hate. 
• Prioritizing higher paying hats over lower-paying hats, or removing them altogether

By the way, if you’re wondering how I removed the “admin” hat from my head, I have a free resource you’re definitely going to want to check out all about how to hire a virtual assistant in your kitchen and bath design business. 

Believe it or not, it's easier than you think to remove a lot of the tedious admin tasks from your plate so you can focus on higher level tasks that light you up.  This is not on the radar of many designers, so when I figured it out, I wanted everyone to know about it!  

 Click here to download your free e-book and learn all about how to work with a virtual assistant.