I make good money. But it doesn’t scale.

As a result, I have two goals this summer:

• Make $100,000
• Learn French

Learning french is for my own enjoyment, because I love to learn and I’ve always wanted to be fluent in it—I don’t know why, just have. More relevant to my blog is the $100,000 goal.

Why such a high goal?

$100,000 in 3 months is a pretty lofty accomplishment to make, but it’s not even about the money. I’ve noticed that the more freelancing work I do, the more clients are sent and attracted my way, almost all of them via word of mouth. With a growing reputation as a freelance designer, my identity is being cornered into that image. My personal brand is having the ‘Entrepreneur’ part stripped from it, leaving me as just a designer. This isn’t what I want for myself, or those around me.

So this is where the goal comes in. In order to accomplish such a high mark in just a few months, I would have to do freelance work for 15+ hours a day to grow my income linearly to reach that point. Doable? Sure, but definitely not my ideal of a rewarding effort. Instead, this goal will force me to create my own product or purchasable/subscribe-able service that can provide income per purchase rather than per amount of time spent in Photoshop.

Linear vs. Scalable Income Models

Currently, my freelancing rates increase about 15% per month, but each new project has higher demands and the clients tend to request more and more revisions per ‘price level’ which slows my production rate substantially. It’s tolerable as it is now, but with a little insight, I can definitely see myself getting trapped in this game.

So I’ve discussed in this post what I need to do—go from a per project/per hour basis to a scalable, product-based income—and in the next few posts I’ll be going into more detail about how I am going to achieve this and discuss the finer details of design, production, and marketing.

Do you think I’m making the right choice? Why or why not?