You probably have a vague idea of what type of design services you need, and maybe you even know who you want to work with. But maybe you have no idea how much (if any) work you’ll need to put in or how much it’d cost to hire the help.

That goes for pretty much anything in the service industry, right? But there’s Angie’s List & HomeAdvisor for those kinds of professionals. So where do you go to find out more about design services? (Please don’t say Fiverr or Upwork. 😄)

That being the case, whether you have/haven’t worked with a graphic designer before, I’d be willing to bet you’re not sure what to expect, especially in a remote work or freelance situation.

It can be scary to hand over your trust & money to a stranger you’ve never met in person & don’t know. Right? I totally get that!

Because I know that there are a lot of you out there who have no idea what to expect, I’m gonna share my process since basically it’s industry standard.

If you've been following along for the last several months, then you probably already know I use Dubsado for my business. In fact, I'm kind of obsessed with it!

Dubsado has an online scheduler now, but I still haven’t gotten around to setting it up and since it's not ready yet, I’m still using Acuity because it integrates well with Squarespace and it also has a lot of features, like the ability to take a payment when a client makes certain types of appointments.

Acuity has a free plan, but it allows limited customization among other limitations. At first that was fine, but eventually I wanted the features that the paid plans offer.

Holy shit, you guys! When something is this good, you don't keep it to yourself; you share it!

I don't know if I've been living under a rock, or what, but I'd never heard of this company until a few months ago. I'm scratching my head now, trying to figure out what the heck took me so long to move forward!?

This is my favorite advice to share, really.

As a freelancer myself, I know we're always looking for tools that will do everything we need, all in one place, without shaving off large chunks from our profit margin as we grow and scale our businesses.

So, when I came across a podcast about this free resource where several things could be handled all in one place, for less than $20/mo, my interest was piqued. I did some research and found a few different ways to do this!