From Solo to Studio: How to Charge When You Introduce Freelancers (and What to Fix First)

If you’re at the point where you’re considering freelance help, you’re on the scaling path that every growing studio eventually has tread: separating delivery from your own personal capacity.

The moment you stop doing everything yourself, two questions arrive almost immediately.

First: how on earth do you charge for work delivered by someone else?

Second: how do you bring that person into your business without creating chaos, errors, or a constant management headache?

This is the first of two posts on working with freelancers in an interior design practice.

Part one focuses on the commercial side: what’s normal, what’s defensible, and how to transition your pricing with confidence as you move from solo to studio.

Part two will be the operational side: what to get in place before you onboard help, how to find the right freelancer, how to brief and quality-control the work, and how to build a working rhythm that protects both your time and your standards.

Now, let’s start with the charging question.

When you run a studio as a solo designer, pricing feels wonderfully simple.

You set an hourly rate (or a day rate), you do everything, and everything you do is billed at that rate: CAD, sourcing, site visits, procurement, client calls, the lot.

One human. One price.

Then business grows, projects get more complex, and you hit the ceiling every designer eventually meets:

There aren’t enough hours in your week to deliver everything and still grow the business.

That’s the moment you start thinking about freelance help. CAD support. A virtual assistant (VA). A junior designer. Maybe, one day, permanent staff.

And this leads to a tricky question, one that can make designers wobble:

“But you can’t charge your rate for somebody else’s time, can you?”

Let’s sort that out.

This post will cover:

• what’s normal in practice when you introduce freelancers or staff
• three charging models you can use (and when each one works)
• how to protect profit without feeling ‘cheeky’
• how to communicate the change to clients

First: the mindset shift you have to make

When you outsource something, you are not selling “someone’s hours”.

You are selling delivery through your business.

That includes:

• briefing and managing the freelancer
• checking quality
• maintaining consistency
• carrying liability and responsibility
• holding timelines
• dealing with errors and revisions
• and absorbing all the invisible admin that clients rarely see

So yes, it is normal to pay £45/hour and charge out at £90/hour (or whatever your technical rate is).

That margin is not “profit for nothing”. It covers overheads, risk, management time, and the cost of running a professional practice rather than a cottage industry.

I liken this to supply as principal: the retail price you charge for the output of, for example, your curtain maker, without revealing the cost price to your business. You mark this up as it passes through your business and, in exchange for this margin, your business holds all the responsibility for satisfaction.

So, what’s the norm in interior design and similar industries?

Once a practice has more than one level of resource (principal plus others), the most common norm is:

A rate card with different rates for different roles.

Not one blanket rate across everything.

So you might have:

• Principal/Creative Director
• Senior Designer
• Junior Designer / Technical / CAD
• Procurement/Admin support

Even if the “team” is freelancers rather than employees, you can still structure it like a team.

Clients generally accept this easily because it mirrors how professional services work everywhere else. The principle is simple:

Different work is delivered by different levels of expertise, billed at different rates.

Three pricing models you can choose from

1) The role-based rate card (best for growing studios)

This is the cleanest transition model, because it:

• protects margin
• feels fair and transparent
• makes delegation easier
• stops clients paying principal rates for technical tasks

You might still do plenty of the work yourself, but you now have a structure that can scale.

Example structure (illustrative only):

• Principal: £120/hr
• Senior: £90/hr
• Technical/CAD: £80/hr
• Admin/Procurement support: £65/hr

Your freelancer might cost you £25–£60/hr, and you might charge them out at £65–£90/hr depending on skill level and responsibility.

2) The blended studio rate (simplest, but not always defensible)

One rate for everything, regardless of who does it.

This can work when:

• you’re still mostly solo
• your projects are small
• you want absolute simplicity
• the proportion of junior/technical work is low
• you are transitioning to a rate card, but still need data to set this up profitably

But it gets harder to justify when:

• your principal rate is premium
• you’re clearly using a team
• the client can see that not all tasks are equal

If you go blended, the key is clarity:

“This is a studio rate for delivery through my practice.”

3) Fixed fees per phase or deliverable (best for confidence and scalability)

If you’ve been around here a while, you’ll know I’m a big proponent of fixed fees (calculated based on an hourly rate) and - ideally - charged on retainer for the duration of the project.

Rather than selling time, you sell outcomes: concept design, developed design, procurement, install, snagging.

This model is brilliant when:

• you have a repeatable process
• you can estimate phases reliably
• you want smoother cash flow
• you’re delegating behind the scenes
• you’re **** hot at managing your clients, keeping timelines on track, and renegotiating when circumstances slow progress down.

The client doesn’t need to know who did what hour. You manage resourcing internally.

Many designers eventually land here, even if they used hourly at the beginning.

TIMESHEETS

I feel I should pause here for a piece of solid advice. Even the best managed design projects have highs and lows. The most efficient studios I work with keep timesheets. They don’t necessarily charge by the hour, but they can justify every hour spent on the job.

This data has internal and external uses. Time on task is critical data for calculating effective hourly rates and profitability. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter at all…until it really does. When a project hits bumps in the road (even if you are entirely innocent) the maintenance of accurate timesheets behind the scenes can reassure a spooked client, and help get trust back on track.

The big client fear: “Am I paying for your overheads?”

Yes. In the same way you do with:

• an architect
• a solicitor
• an accountant
• an agency
• any professional practice

Overheads aren’t a dirty secret. They are what allow a practice to deliver properly: systems, insurance, software, training, admin, project control.

A solo designer can sometimes survive by brute force and late nights.

A studio has to survive by process.

How to introduce the change without drama

The goal is calm, professional confidence. Not defensiveness.

Here’s language you can borrow:

“As the studio has grown, I now deliver projects using a small team structure so work is completed efficiently and at the appropriate level. Different tasks are billed at different role rates, which keeps principal time focused on the creative and strategic parts of the project.”

And, if challenged, and you need to address the freelancer question directly:

“Even when I use freelance support, you’re still working with my studio. I brief the work, check it, and I’m responsible for the output. The rate reflects delivery through the practice, not the freelancer’s take-home pay.”

The trap to avoid: accidental double charging

Clients don’t mind paying for management time if it’s real and stated.

They do mind if they feel charged twice for the same thing.

So if you bill:

• 10 hours CAD production plus
• 2 hours principal review/checking

That’s fine (and often necessary).

But be explicit about what those hours are.

A simple line item description does wonders:

• CAD production (Technical Designer)
• Design review and coordination (Principal)

A staged transition path (if you don’t want to overhaul everything at once)

If you’re currently solo and hourly, here’s a neat progression:

Stage 1: Integrating a freelancer into your business (e.g. CAD technician, or Junior Designer)

• Continue to work from a single rate
• Adopt rigorous time tracking - for both of you
• Post-project, analyse time on task for the stages of the design process
• Wait for this to stabilise, for the new joiner to feel like they are “up and running”
• Overhaul how you estimate fees based on this new data - based on facts - how long each of you typically takes at each stage of the job. (NB this level of wash-up should be standard at the end of every project).

Stage 2: Add one additional rate

• Keep your existing principal rate
• When you're ready, introduce one new “Technical Support”, or “Junior Designer” rate
• Steady as she goes: the solvency of your business is a priorty: ensure you aren't leaking profit. 

Stage 3: Expand to a simple rate card

• Principal
• Senior/Design Support
• Technical/CAD
• Admin/Procurement support

Stage 4: Move repeatable phases to fixed fees

• keep hourly for unknowns/variations
• quote fixed fees for predictable phases
• see my "Fees and Charging" course for a deeper dive into fee calculation and presentation. 

That way you evolve without a terrifying “rebrand your entire business model” moment.

Introducing freelance support is one of the most powerful moves you can make as a founder, because it gives you back the one thing you cannot manufacture: time.

But to do it well, you need to hold two truths at once:

• You are not selling a freelancer’s labour at cost. You are selling delivery through your practice, with all the responsibility, coordination, checking, and liability that comes with it.
• The more your studio grows, the more your pricing needs structure. A single blanket rate might have worked when it was only you, but a rate card (or fixed fees supported by solid time data) is often the cleanest, calmest way to scale without wobbling.

Sometimes highly commercial, CEO-type clients develop an inappropriate curiosity about the internal costs of your business, probing in an attempt to renegotiate value.

This is a moment for calm, confident boundary-keeping. Clients are not buying your cost base; they are buying a service. You would never ask your hairdresser how the wages of their salon assistant factor into the price of your haircut. A haircut costs what it costs. Interior design services are no different.

You either accept the terms, or you choose another provider.

Clients don’t pay you for effort; they pay you for a professional outcome delivered reliably.

Your pricing model simply needs to reflect the reality of how that outcome is now produced.

In the next instalment, we’ll move from “how to charge” to “how to deliver”: the practical preparation to do before you bring a freelancer in, the systems that make delegation smooth, where to find good people, how to brief them, how to check work without redoing it, and how to build a repeatable workflow that makes freelance support feel like a genuine upgrade, not an extra job.

Because, the pricing is only half the story. The other half is creating a business that can actually hold the help.