With 15 years of branding and design experience, Sarah Masci is a leader in the online industry for clients looking for high-quality, aesthetic digital design. As the founder of Book Me For A Day™, her signature one-day intensive program, she thrives on compressing professional branding, web and digital design into one day, versus weeks or months.
When she’s not doing intensives for her own clients, Sarah teaches fellow designers how to ditch the feast or famine cycle and create more income and freedom with a one-day intensive business model, following her exact blueprint.
Sarah’s down-to-earth personality and distinctive way of simplifying even the most complex problems have earned her the trust and respect of hundreds of clients and students over the years.
Here’s what we covered on the episode:
- How Sarah helped me when I switched my membership site to MemberVault how we were both in Krista Miller’s Simply Profitable Designer Summit in 2020
- When Sarah started 15 years ago she wasn’t doing design, she was doing more blogging and had an online boutique for children’s products
- Sarah had a successful Etsy business, doing printables and custom iPhone cases but started dipping her toes into freelancing in 2012/13 where she then let go of her business and started in branding
- While branding, Sarah got into web design around 2014 which is what she does today
- Sarah shares her Book Me for a Day offer which is a one day intensive for her design clients
- When Sarah was doing traditional design projects she had heard people talking about designing in a day but didn’t give it much thought because she never thought she could do it
- Sarah tells the story of how she helped an interior designer with a simple website in a day, which was the first time Sarah proved to herself she could do work in a day but didn’t do anything about it for 2 or 3 months
- Sarah says the idea to do a day rate really came to her while doing a punch list for a client and telling them she could get it all done in a day
- Slowly, Sarah started offering it to other people and soon it was all she was doing, which caused her to give up all the traditional client work she had been doing
- Why Sarah only books a few intensives while her school aged kids are home for the summer
- How Sarah makes sure there are no distractions, including kids when she starts her intensive at 8:30am and how she works until around 4:00pm
- Sarah explains that it’s has taken a lot of testing to figure out how much work she can get done in a day and makes sure not to promise a client more than what she believes she can get done
- When people book a day with Sarah, she explains that they have to understand that they’re not going to get an elaborate design logo or website and explains what she can get done in a day
- Sarah explains that people can book multiple days with her and shares a story of a client who booked three days and how she tackled the tasks that client needed
- Sarah uses Divi Theme and WordPress to develop and design so she doesn’t have to outsource development
- Sarah shares that she will use SquareSpace, but feels limited on how creative she can be with the design because she does custom designs for all her day rate clients and doesn’t use templates
- When working on a day rate project, Sarah sets it up for them to message throughout the day and lets them know what she’ll be working on at the start of the day
- Sarah explains that clients need to be available all day during an intensive because she relies on their feedback and is sending them screenshots and concepts throughout the day
- She guarantees her time for the entire day, not necessarily the outcome and explains if the design is going in the wrong direction she’ll get on a call with them
- How most people find sarah through word of mouth, social media or through referrals and how on her website they can send her a message through a chat feature, which has cut down the amount of discovery calls she has to do
- After a discovery call, Sarah explains that everything is automated so she doesn’t have to do anything until their kick-off call a few days before the intensive
- When kick-off calls happen in relation to the intensive and how it gives clients enough time to finish any pre-work Sarah has asked for and ensures the information is fresh in her head
- Why Sarah put the chat box on her website for her clients’ convenience and how it works with messaging and notifications
- Sarah shares that she is in a Facebook group with other designers where they share what they are working on and how she told them about her day rate offer
- How some other people in her group were interested so she created a 30 minute walk through of her process and received great feedback from them
- After Sarah shared her video with them she thought she could teach other people how to do a day rate offer since her process is so detailed
- Sarah shares that she always wanted to create a course but never had time due to always working with clients on long and draining projects
- When Sarah started doing day rates, she had more time to create a course because she was only working 1 – 2 days a week
- Sarah explains that she sells her course concept before she makes it by having buyers who want the course and then building it one week at a time through the live course
- Sarah shares a story of how she opened a waitlist to see interest and then opened up the course and how she designed it to cater the people taking it
- How Sarah shares her waitlist on her personal page, Facebook group pages and takes advantage of promo days within Facebook groups
- Sarah can’t say enough good things about the day rate model and how it can give you time to build courses or work on other projects and how even testing it with one client might do you wonders
- Connect with Sarah on her website and check out her free training for day rates
Links mentioned:
Connect with Sarah on her Website
Sarah’s Free Training on Day Rates
Like what you heard?
Click here to subscribe + leave a review on iTunes.
