The Design Business Show 156: Building Your Business For Freedom and Profitability with Kelsey Kerslake The Design Business Show

Over the last decade, Kelsey has helped hundreds of online business owners like you build their brands and online presences as the Founder and Creative Director of Pinegate Road - personal branding and web design agency.
She has her MFA in Graphic Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and is a life and business coach. In 2016, she successfully made the transition from working in Corporate America while pursuing a side hustle, to the CEO of her own online design agency and education business.
She deeply believes that everyone has the potential to make their dreams a reality, and Pinegate Road helps people do just that.
Fast forward to today, Kelsey leads a 6-figure+ virtual design agency, and is at the point where she has complete freedom to create her own schedule (aka: currently working about 10h work weeks so she can be home with her little fam most of the time). She wants this freedom for you too! She has a passion for supporting online service providers, coaches, and educators to help them lead businesses and live lives that are fulfilling and profitable.
 
Here’s what we covered on the episode:
Heading  From Corporate America to Running a Design Studio In high school, Kelsey was artsy and knew she wanted to do something with that but also make money, so she decided to become a graphic designer and that’s what she went to school for  How Kelsey started a lifestyle blog which turned into people asking her how to design their own websites which grew into a studio that she always had on the side After Kelsey graduated she went to work in Corporate America where she was designing stationery for Target, Walmart, and other national campaigns as a hand lettering artist  In 2016, Kelsey’s business grew enough to where took her design studio full-time   There are only two companies in the country that hire hand lettering artists on salary, Hallmark and American Greetings; Kelsey interviewed with both while in grad school and went with American Greetings, which is why she moved and currently lives in Cleaveland, Ohio  While in grad school, Kelsey needed a creative outlet which is why she started her lifestyle blog where she was talking about boyfriends, design trends, and color palettes and shares she accidentally grew her business by putting her color palettes and designs on Pinterest  How Kelsey’s blog business turned into her editing peoples blog headers, then it became full-on brands and websites and by the time she graduated grad school it had turned into a legit design studio where they had packages offering branding, full logo suites, building out the brands on people’s collateral and then the website Kelsey shares that she has endometriosis and knew it was time to make the switch to full-time with her design studio when she was laid up in bed for several weeks at a time due to her health and says she was fully prepared to make the switch, she had savings, was making more money with it than her salary job and working fewer hours  How Kelsey’s team reached out to share her story with me and asked about her being on the podcast, which was great because she was actually on my list of people to invite to have on the podcast  Productizing Services + Team Support  One of the biggest things that helped Kelsey get her business where she wanted it to be financially was productizing their services and having a very solid process for each of the things their clients would be going through   How Kelsey was hiring out team members to support those processes while she was working full-time because she didn’t want her personal schedule and availability to dictate how fast the business could grow — this allowed her to grow and scale the business to where she was making more money than at her salary job   Kelsey shares that the first logo she sold was $300, and then when she started running her design studio, their logo package was $1,500 and the website was also $1,500, and shares she