Out of Hours™ · Japan · June 2027A few days with a handful of studio foundersRegister interest →

For studio founders doing $20K+ a month

You've built a really good business, but it feels overwhelming to earn what you're worth.

The demand is there. But everything still runs through you, so the studio only earns what your week can carry. I'll find where the money is leaking and tell you exactly where to start. Then, if you want it built, I'll build it from the way you already work, and you'll own every piece of it.

Profitable Designer
Tune Design Office
Artist Freedom
Stir Creative
Coral Design Co.
Majestic View Consulting
Hofer Studio
Side by Side

The problem

Everything still runs through you.

You got good, the work came in, and somewhere along the way the whole studio started running on your week.

The posts you mean to write. The inquiries waiting on a reply, and the calls that go nowhere. The proposals. The work itself, and the checking after someone else has done it. The invoices, the scheduling, and the tools that don't talk to each other.

Nearly every studio founder I speak to is caught somewhere in this.

Every part of the studio waits on you.

Marketing waits for a quiet week, and there never is one. Inquiries wait until you can reply. Proposals wait until you can write them. The team waits for your answer. So the studio can only grow as fast as your week does.

Handing it over brings it back to you.

You bring in a VA, a junior, a freelancer. They draft the reply, the proposal, the post. Then it lands back with you to fix, because how you'd do it has never properly left your head. The task moved. Your judgement didn't.

The tools you've tried don't fix it either.

The CRM, the project tool, the templates, the ChatGPT thread. Each one handles a piece. None of them talks to the others, and none of them knows how your studio does things, so the final calls still come back to you.

Growing the studio just means more of it.

Every new client brings more inquiries, more proposals, more invoices and more people waiting on you. Revenue goes up, and the hours go up faster. The studio gets busier every month, and you don't get any better off.

I help you build a studio that runs on your standards, so it stops running on your week. One process at a time, from the first post to the final invoice.

Let's work together

Tune Design Office

$130,000 a year of added capacity. From one systemised process.

Alex and Nic run a two-person product design studio. Their Product Reality Check Sprint was already in demand, and the constraint was doing more of them. "We're drowning in work," Alex says. Every Sprint carried hours of production that had to pass through their own hands, including assembling the finished thinking into the final InDesign report, so that was the first process we built.

Alex timed the manual version himself: 3h 34m to assemble the report. It now comes out of the same supplied content in 2m 55s. They run three Sprints a week, and Nic says the time saved gives them an entire day back every week to work on the business. Same Sprint, same judgement, same thing delivered to the client.

That recovered capacity is roughly another Sprint's worth of production. At their existing pricing, filling just one more Sprint a week is worth around $130,000 a year, from delivering more of something they already deliver.

3h 34m

Assembled manually

2m 55s

The same report now

"Reduced half of the delivery time for a certain project, which means we can do double the amount, doubled our profit."
Alex Buckman, Co-founder, Tune Design Office
"We do three of these Sprints a week, so that literally gives us an entire day back to work on our business."
Nichola Considine, Co-founder, Tune Design Office

Stir Creative

More profit from every project. With one conversion system.

Beck runs a presentation design studio that turns finished InDesign presentations into editable PowerPoint decks for agencies and large organisations. The work was already coming in. The problem was what happened after the design was approved: rebuilding it slide by slide so the presentation was usable as expected. They had already paid for conversion software, but on one real job it produced just 1 of 83 layouts correctly. The file could be converted. Stir's standard couldn't.

So we started with the standard. Beck's way of doing the work became 31 written standards, then those standards became the system. When we reran a deck that had taken Beck 5h 30m to rebuild manually, the finished editable PowerPoint was produced in 2m 09s. Same deck. Same standards. Same thing delivered to their client.

Every conversion job used to carry hours of production inside a price the client had already agreed to. Removing those hours means more of each invoice stays in the studio, without changing the work Stir delivers or what the client receives.

A job that used to take most of a day, or more on the bigger jobs, can now be produced in minutes and simply checked before it leaves the studio. The revenue was already there. Now Stir keeps more of it.

5h 30m

Rebuilt manually

2m 09s

The same deck now

"This is incredible. It does mean just so much more profit for us."
Rebecca Hannah, Stir Creative

Coral Design Co.

More time with her family from every website. With one system.

Coral's studio builds websites for Canadian agriculture companies, and she runs it around being a stay-at-home mum. Her week comes in small pockets of time, so every hour in the business is an hour away from her family. "My time is very, very, very valuable to me," she says.

Some of that time came back when she handed design to her own designer. The part we built was the creative direction brief: everything a client gives her, turned into the brief the site is built from. By her own count, it took between five and ten hours on every project.

Now she runs it in under an hour. Same brief, same direction, the same standard her clients pay for, and hours of her week back with her family on every site.

5–10 hrs

By her count, manually

Under 1 hr

The same brief now

"As a stay at home mom only working a total of 15 hours a week, a job that used to take me a week now takes me 1 hour."
Coral Blaikie, Coral Design Co.

The solution

Earn your worth, without it all running through you.

Picture the studio a year from now. Inquiries answered the way you'd answer them. Proposals going out without the tedious time required. The work going to clients at your standard, without passing through your hands. Your team running everything. The studio earning more from the demand it already has, and you able to take a few weeks away while the income keeps coming in.

You choose how far to go. Each step stands on its own.

01

Studio X-Ray™

Know exactly where the money is leaking, and where to start.

We work through your own numbers live, across how the work comes in, how it gets delivered and how the studio runs, with a check on your pricing. You get a written plan the same day, showing what each fix is worth and the order to do them in. It's yours to act on, with or without me.

The guarantee

If I can't show you at least US$10,000 a year the studio is leaving on the table, worked out from your own numbers, you get your money back.

02

The Pilot™

See it pay off on your own work before you commit to more.

The process costing the studio most, built from the way you already work and proven on a real job. Your standards are written down and agreed in week one, your team is shown how to run it, and you get 90 days of fixes after handover. You see the before and after, measured.

The guarantee

It runs on a real job of yours and meets your standards, or I keep working at no charge until it does.

03

Hours to Minutes™

Every month, another part of your studio stops waiting on you.

Six months, six builds, in the order the money says, across marketing, selling, delivery and operations. Each one is built from your standards, handed over and measured, and each one stands on its own.

The guarantee

If your first three months aren't on track to pay for themselves within a year, you can leave at month three.

04

Superstudio™

Step away for weeks without the income stopping.

The whole studio mapped in month one. Your standards written down once, in one place you own, with every build reading from them. Everything on the map built and connected, from the first inquiry to the final invoice, with someone on your team owning each part. Then two to four weeks away, on dates you choose.

The guarantee

Take the time away and the studio runs without you. If you're forced to step in, I cover the cost of the time away up to US$5,000, and keep working at no charge for another three months until it's fixed.

On every one of them

  • You own all of it. Your standards, the build, and the accounts it runs on.
  • Your clients' files stay yours, under NDA, and nothing gets reused.
  • No surprise running costs. You see them before anything launches, with a spending limit on your account.
  • After handover it runs without me.
Book a 20-minute call
Dillon McIntosh

Why me

I'm on a mission to create a billion dollars for the studios the world is writing off.

I've spent over a decade across design, agencies and software. Hundreds of clients, time inside startups and product teams, freelancing, and businesses of my own. That mix means I know what it feels like when the work is good, clients are buying, and you're still drowning.

I tend to see what's hard to spot from the inside. The patterns. The decisions you make every time. The steps you thought were instinct, but are consistent enough to be written down and built around.

The whole industry is being told the machines are coming for the work. I see it differently. The studios that know their own standards, run the business as well as they run the craft, and own what they build are the ones best placed to use them. That bet is my business.

The goal is the line between the judgement that should stay yours and the work that doesn't need to pass through you. More technology is never the point.

From overwhelmed to Superstudio™

Dillon McIntosh

Profitable Designer: the curriculum, built into 102 tools for over 300 users

Patrick coaches design business owners, and for years every member got tailored advice the same way, by asking Patrick. His platform now holds 102 tools, each one taking a member's business and handing back finished work with his method already applied, and over 300 people use them. The method was always his. Now the platform is too.

Untold Art: an app for professional artists, built in under two months

Lloyd coaches artists to sell their work, and every one of them met the same blank page each morning: the post to write before they could get to the art. Untold Art learns an artist's voice on the way in and writes the day's post in it, in Lloyd's method, built from his education and community calls with him. Live for his artists in under two months.

The five-storey pagoda above the town, with Mount Fuji behind

Out of Hours™ · Japan · June 2027

Become the founder who builds at the speed they think.

In June 2027, a handful of studio founders and I spend a few days in Japan. We find where your money is leaking, write down the standards you already follow, and build the first piece on your own files before you leave. You fly home with it running.

It's early. Register your interest and you'll help pick the city: Osaka, Kyoto or Tokyo.

Come to Japan

Anything in the studio that happens again and again, takes your hours, and runs on decisions you already know how to make. How the work comes in: the posts, the inquiries, the calls, the proposals. How it gets delivered: the report, the deck, the brief, the checking. How the studio runs: the invoicing, the scheduling, the handover to your team.

A simple test. You've done it enough times to know what good looks like, what bad looks like, and the calls you make along the way. If it's genuinely new every time, it may not be a fit, and I'll tell you that on the call.

It probably is. The client, the brief, the outcome. What stays the same is the way your studio gets from one to the other. The questions you ask first. What you check before anything goes out. What you'd reject on sight.

That's the part that gets built. Once we work through real files and real decisions, the steps that felt instinctive usually turn out to be standards you follow every time. The output can be different every time. The way you get there doesn't have to be.

Yes. It runs on your standards, pulled from your own files and your own decisions, so what it produces is measured against them. The calls that need you stay with you. What comes off your plate is the work wrapped around them, the hours it takes because your judgement has never been separated from everything around it.

That's in scope. How inquiries get answered, which calls are worth taking, how proposals get written, what gets posted: it all runs on standards you already hold, the same as the work does. And if more work is coming, the hours to deliver it need to be there too, so we look at both. If nothing's coming in at all, a build won't fix that, and I'll say so on the call.

For one build, about four hours of your time across the whole thing, calls and messages included. Mostly that's walking me through how you do it and providing feedback on progress.