“But I’m So Busy!” Why Your Full Calendar Might Not Mean a Healthy Design Firm.

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If you run a service business (whether that’s an interior design firm or a creative studio), you’ve probably experienced the strange paradox of entrepreneurship: you can be fully booked, constantly in motion, and still feel financially strained. This is because many owners equate busy with successful. But in reality, the two don’t always align (especially not in the first few years of being in business).

Being overwhelmed with work is not the same as making money. In fact, many service businesses chip away at profit because they’re busy. As a firm owner, there is so much “unbilled” work that stretches across multiple clients and multiple projects; think, marketing, researching new software, networking with partners, drafting project write-ups for awards submissions, and more.

Let’s talk about it.

Accounting for the Work That Doesn’t Make It Onto Invoices

A surprising amount of a design firm’s week is completely outside the formal scope of any project. It’s the work that supports your entire business rather than a single client: updating your portfolio, chatting with the editor at a magazine you’d love to be published in, researching new tools that will make workflow more efficient, interviewing new team members, etc. Most firm owners recognize that these tasks take up a lot of time but underestimate how much unpaid work they’re really doing. When it isn’t measured, it’s easy to lose track of how deeply tasks like these impact the firm’s finances.

Track Unbillable Hours

One of the simplest and best ways to gain clarity is to monitor this category for a short stretch of time. A month is usually enough. Keep a simple list of how long you spend updating your portfolio, writing captions, reviewing website edits, researching new tools, meeting a contractor, or preparing materials for an award submission. You don’t need special software. A notes app works fine. The point is to see the actual number of hours these tasks require rather than guessing.

Trim the Fat or Delegate

Now, assess. If the firm is covering its expenses and making a comfortable margin, this work is simply part of operating a studio and should be built into your pricing. If you’re covering bills but not much more, it may be time to raise your fees so the business reflects the reality of your workload rather than the version you wish were true.

And if this category has taken over to the point where it’s crowding out billable work altogether, you have a few options. You might cut back on the tasks that aren’t producing clear results, or hand them to someone who can do them more efficiently and at a lower cost than you. A part-time assistant or marketing contractor can often complete the same work in half the time, and their rate won’t interrupt the firm’s cash flow the way your own hours do.

The goal isn’t to eliminate these responsibilities; they are key to the daily functioning and future growth of your firm, after all. You just need to place them where they make sense so the business doesn’t absorb the full cost without profiting.

Refine Time Spent on Projects, Too

Next, take a look at the time you spend on projects but feel guilty actually billing clients for. Every designer has a category of work that feels necessary yet somehow “off-limits” when it comes to billing. It might be that extra round of sourcing you do because the first option didn’t feel quite right, or the time spent reorganizing a presentation so the client can understand the direction more easily. Sometimes it’s answering questions that fall outside the original scope, or reviewing drawings one more time because you want the details to be clean before they go to a contractor.

These tasks aren’t frivolous fluff. They’re part of delivering a polished project, and they take real hours. But when you aren’t sure whether they’re billable, you may skip recording them altogether. Over a few weeks, this adds up. Over a year, it can create a noticeable gap between the effort your studio gives and the revenue it receives.

Again, Track and Trim or Fold Them In

There are two steps here. The first is simply to track the time, even if you don’t bill for it yet. The second is to study the pattern. If clients consistently need more support during procurement, it may be time to adjust your scope to reflect that. If presentation prep always expands, your fee should account for that extra work. And if the team spends hours smoothing out issues created by vendors or trades, you may need a clearer communication structure to prevent those tasks from becoming your responsibility.

You’re not trying to nickel-and-dime clients. You’re trying to understand the real shape of your workload so the business can function without relying on unpaid labor. Once you know where the hidden hours sit, it’s easier to decide whether to fold them into your pricing, outline them more clearly in your contracts, or streamline them with a better process.

Refactor Pricing to Reflect Your Reality

Once you’ve tracked both the unbilled hours and the project tasks you haven’t been charging for, the next step is to look at whether your pricing actually captures the real workload. Many designers hesitate here. Not because they don’t know their value, but because quoting a higher fee can feel risky when you’re still trying to build a strong pipeline. It’s also easy to rely on outdated benchmarks from previous jobs or to price based on what you think clients expect rather than what the work demands.

Start by comparing your tracked hours against the fees you’ve been charging. If a project that was supposed to take forty hours consistently takes sixty, or if you discover that procurement support routinely eats into your week, your pricing likely needs an adjustment. You’re not aiming for perfect accuracy. You’re simply trying to align your fees with the way your studio actually operates instead of the way you hope it operates.

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From here, you can choose how to adjust. Some firms increase flat fees. Others introduce clearer phases or add service categories that used to be buried inside a single line item. A few decide to raise rates slightly across the board so the business doesn’t constantly carry unpaid labor. There isn’t one right answer. The goal is to make sure your fees reflect the reality of your team’s time, not a guess that puts pressure on your margins.

If the idea of raising prices feels uncomfortable, remember that clients hire you because they trust your expertise and want the job done well. Clear scopes and fair pricing protect that relationship. When you charge appropriately, you can deliver higher-quality work without rushing or overextending yourself, and clients benefit from that stability just as much as your studio does.

Set Clear Boundaries to Protect Your Time (and Your Profit)

Client work can quickly creep beyond your estimate of billable hours. A handful of extra texts, a few “quick” questions, or an unplanned round of revisions can pull several hours from your week before you even register what’s happening. None of this comes from bad intentions. Most clients simply don’t understand how much coordination, decision-making, and detail management lives beneath the surface of a design project. But without boundaries, the firm ends up carrying more work than the client budgeting, and that missing time eats into your margins.

Clear communication helps prevent this. Define how clients should reach you, when you respond, and what falls inside or outside the scope. When a request doesn’t fit into that, offer alternatives instead of absorbing the task. Even simple boundaries, like holding design questions for weekly check-ins, can free up hours.

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Clean Up Your Systems So the Work Stops Spilling Over

Internal workflows can drain just as much profit as unclear project scopes. When procurement steps vary from project to project, or when revisions get circulated without a clear approval path, the team ends up backtracking and draining time. These small inefficiencies scatter time across the week and make each project consume more unbillable hours than they should.

A few simple systems can make an immediate, impactful difference. Organize your project folders the same way every time. Clean up Dropbox so blog posts and portfolio projects make it to the site on time. Build a clear procurement checklist. Create a standard client onboarding process so expectations are aligned from day one.

Don’t Forget to Zoom Out and Strategize

Here’s a lesson from outside our industry, as described by Graham Kenny in an article for Harvard Business Review. Kenny talks about a company where the executives were so caught up in daily operations that they barely had time to think about the future. They were handling production issues, sorting out staffing, checking invoices, and stepping into tasks that should have been delegated long before. Because leadership worked this way, the entire organization followed their pace. Long hours but little reflection.

“I noticed that they were flat-out busy doing everything except thinking about strategy…And that set the pace for everyone else in the organization.” —Graham Kenny, Harvard Business Review

Design firms fall into this pattern, too. When you’re moving between client questions, vendor updates, drawing revisions, and constant marketing tasks, the day fills itself. The problem is that a full day doesn’t guarantee the business is moving in the right direction. Activity can drown out strategy, and without regular space to review numbers, pricing, or project mix, the firm grows by accident rather than intention.

This is why vision planning matters so much. Creating time to look ahead gives you a chance to shape the business instead of reacting to it. It’s one of the reasons we build structured vision work into the DesignDash Community. You need a place where long-term thinking isn’t something you squeeze in after hours, but something you treat as part of running the firm.

Build a Firm That Works as Hard for You as You Do for It

Running a design firm comes with a constant pull toward busyness, and it’s easy to assume that movement equals progress. But once you start tracking your unbilled hours, refining your project time, resetting your pricing, and tightening your systems, the picture becomes clearer. Profitability isn’t accidental. It grows when you understand where your time is going and make choices that support the long-term health of your studio.

Think of these adjustments as the foundation for a more sustainable practice. None of them need to happen overnight, and you don’t need to implement everything at once. A few small changes can make a massive difference. When your studio supports you rather than draining you, the business becomes something you can grow with instead of something that controls you.

Written by the DesignDash Editorial Team
Our contributors include experienced designers, firm owners, design writers, and other industry professionals. If you’re interested in submitting your work or collaborating, please reach out to our Editor-in-Chief at editor@designdash.com.