Scarlet Thread Consulting

Last week, some of the most dedicated design firm owners I know gathered in Atlanta for our Annual Strategic Planning Event, and I am still carrying the energy from those two days.

This event is reserved for Scarlet Thread Consulting clients, past and present, and it is one of my favorite ways to say thank you to the designers who have trusted me with their businesses. We spent two full days stepping out of the day-to-day and learning to analyze our firms the way a CEO would, with clear eyes and honest numbers.

Over those two days, we worked through:

1. Reading the story our financials are telling, not the one we assume they are telling
2. Identifying the operational bottlenecks that keep the business dependent on the owner
3. Building a clear, intentional plan for the year ahead
4. Making decisions from data instead of from emotion

We also made sure everyone felt cared for while they did the hard work. Each guest received a gift bag filled with thoughtful treasures, we shared a catered lunch together, and we closed the first day with a cocktail hour where the conversations kept going long after the sessions ended. Some of the best breakthroughs happen in those moments, when designers realize they are not the only ones wrestling with the same questions.

None of this would be possible without our incredible sponsors tagged above. Thank you to for investing in this community and for helping us create an experience our clients will remember.

If you have been on the fence about working with me, I want you to know that this is part of what you step into. Coaching with Scarlet Thread Consulting does not end when a session does. You become part of a community of firm owners who are building profitable, intentional businesses together, and this event is one of the ways we invest in you beyond the work itself.

I would love to have you in the room next year.

"What is she charging?"

If you have ever asked that question before sending a proposal, you are in good company.

Nearly every designer I have worked with has priced a project by glancing at a competitor, trusting a gut feeling, or quietly trimming a fee to avoid a difficult conversation with a client.

Caring about your clients is not the problem.

The problem is that a price built on comparison or emotion rarely covers what your business costs to run, what you need to pay yourself, and the profit that makes growth possible.

That gap is what keeps so many talented owners busy, stretched thin, and unable to step back.

Tomorrow I am hosting a free live mastermind to walk you through the framework I have used with designers for more than 15 years:

Setting a Price You Can Stand Behind
Tomorrow, September 22nd at 3 PM EST

Together we will cover:
🟣Where emotion sneaks into pricing, including the "emotional discounts" most of us give without realizing it
🟣The numbers every price has to cover before it can truly support your business
🟣 A simple way to test whether your current fees are working for you or against you
🟣 Live coaching time to talk through a real pricing decision with me and the group

Bring your questions and a recent project you would like to look at with fresh eyes.

Link in bio to register.

Another Strategic Planning workshop in the books. Beyond blessed by the incredible group of women I have the opportunity to coach!

💕👏🏻

Today we officially kickoff our annual Strategic Planning Event! Two full days of guiding my clients as they work on their business!

This year’s theme is “Analyze Like a CEO”, a topic we’ve been dreaming and thinking about since January of this year.

A quick thank you to our amazing sponsors!

Marketing Strategist | The Good Sower
The financial partner for the design industry
QUIPA Workroom Software
Shifting Rhythms Coaching
Elite Design Assistants

Nobody sets out to build that business. It arrives quietly, one reasonable decision at a time, until you wake up one morning and realize that of everyone connected to this company you started, you are the one making the largest sacrifice to keep it running.

Your team gets paid on the fifteenth. Your vendors get paid. Your clients get the extra hours, the extra revision, the install day that runs long. And you get whatever is left over, which some months is very little and some months is nothing at all.

That is not a character flaw and it is not a sign you are bad with money. It is a structural problem, and structural problems have structural fixes.

In my experience, it almost always traces back to the same place:

🟣A fee that was set from feeling rather than from numbers
🟣 Design work delivered while product markup carries the whole business
🟣 Scope that expanded after the proposal was signed
🟣 Costs like freight, receiving, and coordination hours that were never priced in

You did not start this business to be the last one paid by it. Let us fix the structure that put you there.

The next cohort of Pricing Without Emotion® opens October 8th - a 8-week group coaching program. Learn more here: https://www.scarletthreadconsulting.com/pricing-without-emotion-group-program

📸Cat Max Photography

Nobody hires me because they want a better profit margin.

They hire me because of what a better profit margin makes possible.

When I sit down with a designer for the first time and ask what this business is supposed to fund, the answer is almost never about the business at all. It is about her life.

Every one of those outcomes requires the same thing: a business that produces consistent, intentional profit.

Profit is what turns a desire into a plan, and a plan into a decision you can actually make (rather than one you keep postponing until the timing feels safer).

So let me ask you the question I ask every client in our first conversation.

What is your business supposed to fund?

Overwhelmed with gratitude as I wrap up planning for another year of my private strategic planning event.

For two days, my past and current clients come together in one room to work on their businesses instead of inside them. This year we are digging into what it truly takes to analyze a business like a CEO, because the decisions that move us closer to our vision are the ones built on real information rather than a gut feeling.

We will be looking at the numbers, the patterns hiding underneath them, and the skills it takes to read both with confidence.

I cannot wait to see everyone in person shortly. Until then, I will be reminiscing on the years that brought us here.

I built my business as the doer. I did it all because I wanted to and because financially I had to.

As the business has grown and the demands on my time and energy have shifted, my mindset has shifted with them. I shared three of those shifts in my newsletter today, and I want you to have them too.

🟣 Moving away from doing the work and toward working on the business. We hear it constantly, work on the business and not only in it. My focus has extended even further than that. I identify what I want the business to do for me, then I work on it until that becomes true.

🟣 Moving away from solving problems and toward creating systems that prevent them. So many of us operate in reaction. Answering questions in advance is how the phone stops ringing, and preventing the issue entirely is how we move faster and better. That is CEO thinking.

🟣 Understanding that growth cannot depend on us alone. We need people, and we need a culture worth joining. We may be amazing, and we still should not do it all. Identifying our Queen Bee role, then protecting the time and energy that role requires, is what only we can do.

Twice a month my newsletter arrives with coaching like this, at no cost, written for design firm owners who want the business to serve the life they envisioned.

Comment NEWSLETTER and I will send you the link to join.

📸 Cat Max Photography

It is entirely possible to be busy, respected, published, and still underpaid.

That is the part nobody warns us about, because a full calendar and a beautiful portfolio feel like proof that the business is working, and so we stop asking whether it actually is. The work keeps coming, and the pricing never gets examined.

If you are wondering where you stand, sit with these questions and answer them honestly.

✨When a project closes, do you know the gross profit it produced, or only the revenue it brought in?
✨Are you paying yourself a consistent, market rate salary every month, before anything is left over?
✨If you counted every unbilled hour spent on revisions, vendor follow up, and site visits, what would your effective hourly rate actually be?
✨Does your fee cover the work of running the project, or only the work of designing it?
✨When a client asks for one more option, does your fee change?
✨Is your markup still intact after shipping, freight, receiving, warehousing, and damages?
✨Would your pricing hold if you were not in the room to defend it?
✨Are you turning down work because you are full, or taking work because you are nervous?

If several of those answers made you uncomfortable, what you are feeling is not failure but information you did not have before, and information is what makes a decision possible.

Underpricing is rarely a confidence problem first, because it begins as a math problem that no one ever handed us, and the confidence arrives only once the numbers are clear. Correct pricing is what produces confidence rather than the other way around.

Send me a message and I will send you the details on Pricing Without Emotion®, the eight week group program where we build pricing that holds without you having to defend it.

We start in October!

📸 Cat Max Photography

I sold my own company in 2012, and the months leading up to that sale taught me more about business structure than anything else I have done. A buyer does not see the relationships or the late nights. A buyer sees one question on a spreadsheet: will this keep producing profit after the owner walks away?

In the years since, I have reviewed financials for design firms at nearly every stage. The firms that could sell and the firms that could not were almost never separated by revenue. They were separated by three conditions:

✨Financials a stranger can read, with owner pay stated as a real salary
✨ Pricing that holds without you in the room
✨ A firm that does not route every decision through you

Read that list again, because it is also a description of a business you can comfortably live inside. The work of becoming sellable and the work of becoming free are the same work. Only the reason for doing it changes.

The alternative is a firm that functions only when you are in it every day, which means the only exit available to you is closing the doors.

If you want the full breakdown, including where to start if a sale is genuinely on the table, the new blog post is linked in my bio.