Leveling Up From A Freelancer To A Business Owner To Make $20k/mo | With Lydia Kerr Of Telltale Design Co

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 193

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood, and today we have a very wonderful guest that was actually a recommendation of a past guest we have on the podcast, which are some of my favorite guests, because usually when we have an awesome guest on the podcast, they recommend the best guests. So Rachel from Green Chair Stories recommended our guest today, Lydia Kerr from Telltale Designs. And Lydia's got an awesome business because she's a designer earning multiple 6 figures a year, and she just started 4 years ago. And I feel like our audience is going to get a lot out of this because she did the thing that I think is the hardest way to do this, which is she had one foot in a day job that she didn't like, another foot in her design business, trying to match the income of her day job and try to build those at the same time. So while maintaining her day job, she's building her business on the side. And this is the area that I think some people struggle with because they can't figure out how to strike that balance. And I think she did an awesome job of that. And then from there, she scaled it to multiple 6 figures a year in less than 4 years. So she's got a lot of cool things that she's doing in her design business. And that's, by the way, anyone listening right now, I cannot think of a more competitive environment than the design world. The audio world is not as competitive. The photography world is, okay, that's probably about as competitive. But the design world is incredibly saturated. And Lydia has done a great job of making a name for herself and going from charging like $200 projects to now she's charging $10,000 to $20,000 for projects. So this interview is a treat and I can't wait for you to get into it. So without further intro, here's my interview with Lydia Kerr of Telltale Designs.

I'm here with a wonderful guest today, owner of Telltale Design Co, which is a multiple six-figure design agency based out of Colorado. And it's funny, we actually connected with you through one of our past guests, Rachel from Green Chair Stories.

You are like basically worked together in this whole wonderful referral network. We'll get into that later in this interview. But I wanted to bring you on the show today because you have a lot of great stuff in your background that I think is incredibly relevant to our audience as people are trying to transition out of a day job they may consider less than ideal or maybe soul sucking is that bad.

You have a similar story where you came from a day job that you did not love is the way you put it. You would say not quite soul sucking, but it was headed that direction.

And I would love to hear the story of how you transitioned from a day job to a part-time design company to now you're up to the six, multiple six figure a year mark as a designer. And I think it's fascinating to hear how these people like you transitioned out of a day job that what I call the old way of making a living where you worked at the same company for 20 years, like back in the 60s, 70s, and then you retire, 50 years, retire from the same company. That was your track. You said, no, no, no, not for me. I'm going to plant my flag on the ground and launch my own design business, but you didn't do it the dangerous way of just jumping ship. You did it slowly and surely. And I'd love to pick up the story there where you decided, you know what? I don't want to do this anymore. I want to do this. I want to work for myself.

Lydia Kerr (3:16)

Yeah, totally. First of all, thank you so much for having me. So happy to be here. And yeah, so kind of thinking up there, I got what felt like a dream job right out of school. It was for a company that I was really excited about and had a long history with. And I was the marketing director for all the United States and all of Canada, which also felt just like a really big job out of school.