From $200 Projects to Confidence

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Do you feel underpaid, misunderstood, or stuck explaining why your work costs what it costs? Most agency owners don't wake up one day and decide, "You know what sounds fun? Running an agency." They stumble into it, usually because the job market fails them.

That's exactly how today's featured guest got her start. In this episode, she'll unpack how slowly building her confidence as she gained more experienced changed her perspective on pricing and why most "thought leadership" content does more harm than good.

Alicia Disantis is the owner and creative director of 38th & Kip Studio, a dual branding and design studio celebrating 15 years in business. She founded the agency during the 2008 recession, which is about as pressure-filled a launchpad as you can imagine.

Before building a sustainable agency, Alicia wore a lot of creative hats: video game character artist for early mobile games, comic book artist for an urban vampire/werewolf series, and unpaid intern at a graphic design. These experiences heavily shaped how she thinks about value, pricing, and positioning today.

In this episode, we'll discuss:

• Why agency pricing should feel scary.

• Educating clients who think your work is "easy."

• An approach to thought leadership that actually creates value.

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Sponsors and Resources

E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design, and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

Creating a Unique Path that Lead to Agency Ownership

Like many agency owners, Alicia didn't start with a master plan. She started with a student loan bill that arrived a month before graduation and over a hundred job applications that led nowhere.

When the traditional path failed, she did what resourceful creatives do: she pieced together work wherever she could find it. Freelance gigs turned into repeat work. Repeat work turned into confidence. And eventually, confidence turned into a business.

She went from being an unpaid intern, to game designer, to a comic book designer, and forged a unique path, going from charging just $200 for her first freelance job to earning the confidence she needed to believe she could build her own business.

Most agencies are born from survival more than a carefully thought business plan. The danger is that when you start that way, you often carry survival pricing and survival thinking far longer than you should.

That early context matters, because it explains why so many agency owners struggle to raise prices later.

From $200 Clients to Pricing That Feels Scary (In a Good Way)

Alicia's first client paid her $200. She also did a lot of free work, because at the time, that felt like the only way in.

What changed over the years wasn't some magic pricing formula. It was confidence.

Marketing and creative work is deeply undervalued, especially compared to STEM or "expert" services. People don't argue over a $250 legal consult but they will argue endlessly over a logo.

As Alicia grew, she learned three critical skills:

• Educating clients on the real cost of doing work right

• Having the confidence to say no

• Quoting prices that made her a little uncomfortable

It wasn't easy, but mostly it just took time.

How to Educate Clients Who Think a Logo Is "Easy"

Alicia managed to reframe the value of branding for skeptical clients not by arguing but by analogizing.

Instead of defending design directly, she compares it to plumbing, legal work, or real estate. You wouldn't hire a $5 freelancer to represent you in civil court, so why would you do that for the thing that represents your entire business?

This framing does two things:

• It removes emotion from the conversation

• It positions branding as expert work, not artistic preference

Clients should also understand the hidden cost of "cheap" solutions, especially with websites. Hiring a friend or a bargain provider usually leads to cut corners, broken functionality, and stalled growth when the person inevitably disappears.

The goal isn't to lead with fear. It's to calmly explain consequences and let the client decide if cheap is really cheaper.

Thought Leadership That Builds Trust (Not Clickbait)

Thought leadership is an area where Alicia found significant success creating valuable educational content. In her view, it's also something most agencies get wrong.

The problem isn't content volume. It's content relevance.

In her experience, the key to producing this content is leading with research on what people want to hear about. She's also encountered many white papers that don't even offer any takeaways or new perspectives, which ends up diluting the trust on your brand. Alicia insists that everything she produces or is a part of must have key takeaways that her audience can translate into a real technical plan.

She shared a four-part framework she uses before creating educational content:

1. Motivation – Why does the audience care right now?

2. Pain points – What problem are they actually trying to solve?

3. Literacy level – How well do they understand the subject?

4. Communication style – How do they prefer to consume information?

The literacy piece is where most agencies mess up. If you speak marketing jargon to an audience that doesn't have that literacy, you don't sound smart. You sound patronizing.

And nobody buys when they feel dumb.

Alicia is intentional about making sure everything she puts out includes tangible takeaways—things people can write down and act on. Without that, it's just noise.

Playing the Long Game with Content and Personal Brand

This podcast started over a decade ago not as a growth hack, but out of curiosity. The goal was to let listeners be a fly on the wall. The payoff took years, but now it's a massive moat. People join our community and say they've been listening for years before ever raising their hand.

That kind of trust doesn't come from ads with rented Lambos. But it also takes time and determination. Less than 7% of podcasts make it past episode three, and only about 1% make it beyond episode 23.

From Alicia's perspective, finding your unique personality and value proposition is the hardest part of business. People are afraid to be different, but different is the whole point.

Discovering your own value proposition on your own is like trying to tickle yourself. You need outside perspective to see what's actually special.

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