131: How Freelancers Can Pivot to Life-Changing Day Rate with Sarah Masci

Our guest for today’s episode is Sarah Masci and we’re going to be talking today about how freelancers can pivot to life-changing day rates. She’s actually the founder of Day Rate Mastery and its online company that teaches creative service providers how to work less and make more with a streamlined day rate business model. Years of running a traditional design business filled with scope creep, inconsistent timelines and overlapping client projects, eventually resulted in the classic burnout, becoming the catalyst that sparked Sarah’s desire to create a better process. 

She has been in the freelance space as a designer since 2005 and she pivoted to add a right business model back in 2018 and has never looked back. She has  been able to work a lot less, take more vacations, but also make more than I was prior to shifting to this. 

She had read a book that inspired her to go into her business model. When a client asked her to change something on its website, the idea of day rate came to her because she didn’t have the time to do a whole bunch of little things. She suggested to pay her for the day, and she’ll do all of these things, and the client agreed with pleasure.

Then eventually, she got the confidence to able to start offering full web design.

Day Rate Mastery

Sarah has a small mini-course called the Day Rate Quick Start. It’s some kind of a little push, and if they’ve tested the model and find it enjoyable, they can scale to the full flagship course that has everything for people to learn how to do it. 

Everyone who is just learning about this business model and is considering it really means to test it before diving and full course.

So the first thing you want to do is figure out what it is. You’re actually going to offer. The first-day rate that Sarah did was a punch list of things that her return client had. She offered to get it all done in a day. Offer something that you can do in a day. It has to be something that people are asking for because it needs to be kind of high in demand in order to be able to sell it consistently effectively. This type of work should be something you truly enjoy because you want to wake up in the morning excited for your day because 50% of your success in the day is your enjoyment and your happiness in doing it well. 

You should also decide. In the design world, never promise deliverables because it’s designed. Don’t promise a three-page website in a day because if a client changes their mind, or say they didn’t like the colors,  you’ll have to start again, and there’s no way that you’re going to be done by the end of the day, but because you promised a website, now, you’re going to cram to try to finish it. We’re only committing our day to them and getting done as much as we can. So that’s something everyone should really consider.

Connect with Sarah at https://instagram.com/sarahmasci

or on Facebook at https://facebook.com/groups/simplifywithdayrates