The Work My Clients Value Most Isn’t What They Originally Hired Me For
For several years, I wasn’t really sure what my job was anymore.
If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll know that I started my business as a graphic designer and brand strategist. Graphics, websites, branding—all the design stuff. That was me. That was what I did.
And if you’re new here, you’re now caught up. That is the very, very shortest version of my first decade in business.
But somewhere along the way, “graphic designer” stopped describing a lot of what I actually did.
I might be designing a sales page, but I was also building it, connecting the funnel software and figuring out the integrations. I was creating materials for my clients’ courses, then going into the platform and setting up the dashboard they lived inside. Increasingly, my clients were bringing me problems that weren’t really design problems at all.
For a while, I wondered whether I’d fallen victim to ten years of increasingly ridiculous scope creep. And there was another uncomfortable question sitting underneath that one: as design and creative assets became easier and easier to DIY, did people even need what I did anymore?
The funny thing was, my clients weren’t needing me less. They were asking me to do more than ever.
Eventually, I realized those two things might just be connected.
Before we jump into the post, if you prefer to listen, I’ve covered this topic in more detail on the latest episode of the Connect + Create podcast! Listen below, or add the show to your favorite podcast app to get notified when I release a new episode!
When “graphic designer” stopped describing what I actually did
For probably the first half of my ten years in business, graphic designer was a perfectly appropriate label. It was how I thought about myself professionally, and it was what people hired me to do.
But over the last few years especially, the gap between that label and what I was actually doing day-to-day became bigger and bigger.
Calling myself a designer—or graphic designer, brand designer, or some combination of those—felt incomplete. Design was still a decent portion of what I did, but it was only one part of the work. On the other hand, actually listing everythingI did made me sound like some sort of chaotic freelancer doing a little bit of everything with no discernible specialty.
A lot of conventional business advice tells us to find our niche. Have your specialty. Know the one thing that makes you better or more knowledgeable than the alternatives. I’d subscribed to that idea for years. Design and branding were my specialty.
But I knew I didn’t really fit inside that box anymore. Limiting myself to it meant limiting the problems I could help my clients solve, but I wasn’t totally prepared to declare myself a generalist either.
Except my clients didn’t seem particularly concerned about any of this. Many of them had been hiring me for years. They loved what I did.
It didn’t matter to them that there wasn’t a perfect label for it.
The real problem with running a small but complex online business
The businesses my clients run today are infinitely more complex than they were when they first hired me. They have more offers, more websites, more products, more content, more ways for customers to interact with them and more systems held together by a collection of different integration tools.
But a lot of these businesses still have relatively small teams.
That creates a problem, because the work involved in running an online business does not neatly respect the boundaries between everyone’s job descriptions.
Take launching a new offer. You’re not just designing a sales page or creating some ad graphics. There might be a waitlist that flows into the sales page, which connects to a checkout, which connects to your funnel systems and automations.
How do those platforms connect? Where is the customer information going? What happens after they purchase? What do they see when they log in? Is the dashboard easy to navigate, and how are you presenting the information?
And yes, somewhere in all of that, someone also needs to make it look good.
Traditionally, getting from I have an idea for this offer to this offer exists and people can buy it could mean coordinating copywriters, designers, developers, tech support, integration specialists, customer service and more.
What I see most often is that the founder ends up being the person holding all those pieces together. You hire people because you think it will mean less work for you, but instead of doing everything yourself, you become responsible for coordinating everyone else doing it.
The work hasn’t necessarily disappeared. It’s just changed.
What many founders actually want isn’t simply someone who can make them a beautiful landing page. They want somebody competent, with enough knowledge and context, who can take the whole thing away so they don’t have to think about it.
They don’t want to figure out how two platforms should connect before handing the instructions to somebody else, or work out the best layout for a dashboard before asking a designer to design it. They want some of the thinking and figuring-out time taken off their plate.
Why crossing the boundaries of my role made me more useful
I think understanding this—and naturally being someone who always wants to solve the problem—is how my role started expanding in the first place.
Whenever I hit one of those professional boundaries where something was technically “not my job,” I started asking a different question: Can I actually solve this?
If I could do it confidently, or knew I could figure out how to do it, more and more I would just keep going.
For the longest time, I wasn’t sure how to feel about that because we’re told scope creep = terrible. Define your scope. Stick to your scope. Never do anything outside your scope.
But when this was happening every day across multiple businesses, it started to feel less like unreasonable amounts of scope creep and more like an opportunity to expand the skills underneath my work in a way that made me infinitely more useful.
Some of my client relationships now stretch back five, six or seven years. During that time, I’ve accumulated an enormous amount of context. I know their offers, customers, platforms, automations, processes, the way their teams work, and the workaround we put together three years ago that is somehow still holding everything together.
I also have context from working across several other online businesses, with different apps, tools, systems and integrations. So when a client comes to me with something and says, “I don’t know if you know how to do this, but could you find out?” very often my answer is, “Yeah, sure.”
While internally I’m thinking, I have no idea.
But I know where to start.
Then there’s the part that ties all of this back to being a designer.
People often think about design as making things look pretty, creating graphics and doing the visuals. But underneath good design is problem-solving and creative thinking.
That’s the same part of my brain I’m using when somebody hands me a half-formed problem and says, essentially, Can you look into this, figure out what we should do, and come back when you have some ideas?
Over time, I was getting handed more of those problems and fewer perfectly crafted design briefs. And I truly think my ability to say, “Leave it with me. I’ll figure it out,” is a huge part of what has kept me embedded in my clients’ businesses for so long.
The real value wasn’t only in making things look good. It was in putting the pieces together.
DIY tools changed design—but they didn’t remove the thinking
Which brings me back to that uncomfortable question I had been asking myself: Do people even want design anymore?
And the answer is… no, but yes, but no, but differently.
With Canva templates and AI, there has theoretically never been an easier time to produce creative assets without hiring somebody to do it for you.
If you want to keep your team very small, you absolutely can create your own social graphics, landing pages, sales materials and program resources. I don’t think it’s useful for me—or anyone—to pretend these tools don’t exist or that people aren’t successfully using them.
But those tools don’t necessarily remove the thinking time.
What are we actually building here? How should these two pieces connect? What happens when somebody clicks this, and why does it break when they do? Will the thing we want to do actually work inside the platform we use? And, ultimately, who is responsible for making sure this whole thing actually gets finished?
If you’ve ever had AI confidently tell you something will work and then discovered that it absolutely will not, you’ll already know how much time the “figuring it out” part can consume.
So in a funny sort of way, worrying about whether my job was still valuable forced me to understand which parts of it were most valuable to my clients. And many of those were things I’d never originally signed on to do.
I still do plenty of regular old graphic design. But increasingly, it’s the creative thinking, design thinking and problem-solving underneath that work that has become integral to what I offer.
Sometimes that means designing and building the sales page. Sometimes it means thinking through an entire customer journey, working out which apps and pieces are involved, setting them up and making everything look good along the way. Sometimes it means developing the creative direction for a new offer and then creating all the branding, assets and materials that go with it.
Sometimes it means spending two days figuring out why that Zap stopped working, and sometimes it really is just updating the PDF.
You can bring me a clearly defined task with all the instructions ready to go, or you can bring me the problem.
Why hiring more people doesn’t always give you more time
Once I stopped looking at this solely as a question about my career, I realized the same problem was showing up for my clients.
You can hire an enormous number of specialists—contractors for this and experts for that—and still end up carrying most of the responsibility yourself. Someone still has to decide what needs doing, coordinate everybody, ask the right questions, provide the information they need and make sure all the individual pieces eventually turn into one finished thing.
In a huge company, there might be entire layers of people responsible for managing those things. But many of the founders I work with don’t want a huge company. They built an online business around their knowledge, expertise, product or idea because they wanted the flexibility that came with it.
And there’s a difficult gap between hiring a few people to take tasks off your plate and hiring enough managers that you no longer need to manage those people yourself.
If you run a small established business, you might know this feeling very well. You’ve hired people—maybe you’ve hired lots of people—and somehow, you’re still the one changing the sales page at midnight.
I think we often approach hiring by saying, I don’t want to do this particular task, so I’ll hire somebody to do it. But there’s another question worth asking:
After I hand over the actual doing of this task, how much of it am I still responsible for?
If you’re still diagnosing the problem, deciding on the deliverables, writing the brief, answering questions, coordinating everyone and checking that it all works, you can end up spending almost as much time doing the work around the task as you were spending just doing the task yourself.
And this was ultimately the space I realized I could step into for my clients: not simply taking meaningful chunks of workoff their hands, but taking meaningful chunks of thinking about the work off their hands too.
Final Notes: I don’t need the perfect label anymore
After ten years in business, I think I’ve finally landed on the fact that I don’t need a perfect box or label to put all of my skills and expertise into. I know what I’m good at, I know where I’m useful, and the clients who work with me see it too.
The thing I thought made my business difficult to define turned out to be the thing that made it most valuable.
I’m still a designer. That’s my training, my background and still a decent portion of what I do every day. But I’m equally comfortable zooming all the way out to problem-solve, put the pieces together and make a plan—and then zooming all the way back in to actually start doing some of it.
Giving myself permission to expand that definition has brought a lot of the excitement and motivation back into my work. And it’s ultimately why, in 2026, I’ve restructured my offers and built Creative Partnership the way I have.
Over the years, I tried retainers, packages, fixed deliverables, hours and all sorts of structures. But they continually struggled to accommodate the flexibility that fast-moving online businesses actually require. Having to renegotiate the scope every time a business changed direction introduced friction into a relationship that needed to be flexible.
If you’ve been reading this thinking, Yes. I would love somebody to take more of that thinking and problem-solving workload off my hands, that’s exactly what I’ve built Creative Partnership around. You can learn more about working with me at emilybankscreative.com/work.
And if you know another online business founder who hired people to give themselves more time but somehow still spends every waking minute coordinating and thinking through everything for everyone else, send this their way.
If you have thoughts on this topic—or questions you’d like me to answer in a future episode—you can also head to emilybankscreative.com/podcast or DM me on Instagram.
See you in the next one!
Emily Banks
