UI/UX: How to Make Real Money as a Designer
By: Nick Lawrence
Tags: Ui Ux Design

The Formula

This is the formula making real money in almost any profession, doing almost anything, for almost anyone. Here it is:

Your income is directly dependent on your ability to produce value at scale with ownership.

I’m going to say that last part again with the hopes that you will burn it into the back of your brain so that you never, ever forget it:

“Income = value at scale with ownership.”

Let’s break this down a little bit, and you will quickly see how applying this formula can completely change your life.

Value

What is value? To quote Joe Plumeri, the CEO and Chairman of Willis:

“Value is the gap between what clients can do for themselves and what we can do for them.”

This is the root of all value here: the ability to do something for someone else that either creates pleasure or takes away pain.

Let me ask you this: what pleasure do you create through your work? What pain do you take away? What problem do you solve?

If the answer is: “I don’t know,” chances are you’re not making a whole lot of money; not because you’re not worth it, but because you’re not solving a hard enough or big enough problem for people, which means that your personal relative value is very low.

Which brings us nicely to our next point:

Scale

After value we have scale. Now value is great, and you can be selling gold statues, but I guarantee if you only sell two statues, you’re only going to be able to capture the value of those two statues.

You need more; enter scale.

Scale is solving a large enough problem, while doing it for a large enough number of people, that you are able to create a huge amount of total value.

Generally, the best way to scale goes like this:

Eliminate any and all superfluous action on your part. Automate anything and everything that can be automated. Delegate anything that cannot be automated. Do anything that cannot be delegated.

Done in this order, scaling can and often will occur naturally, as your own time is freed up to be more creative and think of new ways to create value while expanding your reach to customers far, and wide.

Ownership

This last one is where most people completely miss the mark, and its why more people aren’t well off and don’t get paid anywhere near close to what they’re actually worth.

If you have no equity, no real ownership, the first two pieces of this formula DO NOT MATTER. YOU MUST HAVE OWNERSHIP OF YOUR VALUE!

If you want to make real money as a designer, you must own the value that you produce and be able to sell that value to many people in order to generate a sizable profit for yourself.

Your degree of ownership in the value that you produce is the degree to which you can capture the revenue produced by that value.

As a case in point: if you have no equity, you will get paid whatever the person or company you work for wants to pay you within the confines of your country’s laws, period.

If you own a percentage of the value, or have a percentage of equity in the profits, you will capture that percentage for yourself.

But if you own ALL of the value, and you have ALL of the equity in your own work, then you will capture ALL of the revenue that your work produces across all of the people you create value for.