From $500 to $5,000 Projects: How Megan Built a Full-Time Web Design Business
Meet Megan. She has a degree in songwriting and music business, worked retail, worked for a bank, did a stint in marketing, and ended up as a marketing director for the US Air Force — all before becoming a web designer. Web design wasn't a plan. It was something she fell into completely sideways, building websites for musician friends in exchange for pizza and entry fees to writers' rooms. It was never supposed to be a career.
It became one anyway. And the way it happened — through a toxic job, a credit card purchase, a layoff she describes as a relief, and a husband who told her she really needed to go back and do this full-time — is the kind of story that doesn't follow any blueprint. It just follows life.
Megan now runs Lily & Co. Creative, a web design business where her average project sits around $5,000 — a number that would have seemed absurd to the version of her who charged $500 for her very first website and nearly talked herself out of even asking that much. She got there through clear systems, firm boundaries, and a marketing approach built almost entirely on referrals and footer links. No Instagram strategy required.
I sat down with Megan to talk through all of it — the winding road to going full-time, the imposter syndrome, the debt she paid off, and what she'd tell anyone who's wondering if this could work for them too.
Prefer to watch? Catch the full conversation below, or keep reading.
From Nashville dreams to Air Force marketing to websites — the very non-linear path
If you ask Megan to explain her career history, she'll tell you upfront that it doesn't make sense to most people. Retail. Banking. A bit of marketing. And a degree in songwriting and music business from a college she attended specifically to become a songwriter in Nashville.
She did write. She did record. She did all the things.
But it wasn't paying the bills. So while she was navigating the music industry, she started building websites for friends on the side — musicians who needed an online presence for executives and producers to find. Payment was loose. Pizza. Swapped favours. Entry fees to writers' rooms. Nobody thought of it as a business.
Then she took a job with the US Air Force as a civilian — working in their marketing department, using Squarespace for their sites just as she'd done for her musician friends. She was Googling something Squarespace-related, couldn't figure out how to customise it, and stumbled across my website. That was the beginning of what she describes, looking back, as a very well-guided journey she didn't realise she was on.
The moment everything clicked happened at 5:30 p.m. on a Friday, in a windowless office. Megan was a marketing director by then, non-stop busy, exhausted, and working for someone she describes, diplomatically, as not a very nice person. She was scrolling her inbox, miserable, and my email came through — a sales page email for Square Secrets Business.
She read the sales page. She was deep in debt at the time. She put it on her credit card anyway.
"This is literally what I want in my life," she told herself. "I have to make this happen."
Paying back the investment: six months, a pandemic, and a lot of Honeybook
Megan bought the course in late 2019 — around October or November, she thinks. She went home from her Air Force job every evening, sat on the couch with her laptop, and worked. Every day. Not just learning the design side, but doing everything the course laid out: setting up a CRM, getting contracts in place, getting her email marketing sorted. She didn't just buy a course — she built infrastructure.
She launched her business in January 2020.
Then the entire world went sideways.
It took her about six months to earn back her initial investment — and she's quick to note that timing had something to do with it. Launching a business right before a global pandemic introduced a few "outside factors," as she puts it. But she also notes that being already set up as a remote worker had its advantages. While everyone else was figuring out how to work from home, she'd been doing it for two months. Small comfort, but comfort nonetheless.
Once she got the first couple of clients moving, it started to make sense. She could raise her prices. She could try different things. She could see what she loved and quietly stop doing what she didn't. The business kept going. She kept investing in it — a business coach here, a podcast she started and wants to revive, tools and subscriptions that made her more professional and more efficient.
She has no business debt now. A healthy savings account. And no desire whatsoever to go back to a windowless office.
Word of mouth, footer links, and almost no social media
Her very first paid client was a close friend — a wedding and elopement photographer who had a bridal expo that weekend and needed her website to look professional, fast. Megan charged her $500. She was terrified to ask for it. Her friend said yes immediately.
That website brought her friend so many clients that Megan still updates it to this day. They grew together, she says. It's genuinely fun to look back on.
From there, she posted on her personal Facebook page — "Hey, I'm doing web design now, if you know anyone who needs help, let me know" — and the word-of-mouth engine started turning. Most of her clients today still come from referrals. People she's worked with pass her name along. It compounds quietly over time.
The other source? Footer links.
Every website Megan builds includes a small credit: Designed with love by Lily & Co. Creative. People see websites they love, they click the link, they end up in her inbox. It's not a marketing strategy that requires her to post three times a week or figure out the algorithm. It requires her to do good work and put her name on it.
She barely posts on social media. She had a social media manager for a while when her business was genuinely slammed, but even then she found it stressful and not particularly her thing. She scrolls Instagram happily. Running her own account made her anxious. She uses it mainly now to prove she's still alive, she jokes — and she's completely at peace with that.
The season she went back to corporate — and what it gave her
A few years into running her business, Megan's life changed in ways she hadn't planned for. She was going through a divorce. She has a chronic illness that requires ongoing medication — expensive medication — and she knew that without a steady income and employer health insurance, she could be in serious financial trouble.
So she made what she describes as "the very sad decision" to take a full-time corporate role: a remote marketing job that would cover her health insurance and give her some breathing room.
She ran her web design business on the side for about two and a half years — taking clients as her workload and life allowed, keeping everything ticking over, not pushing hard but not walking away either.
She's careful not to frame this period as a failure or a detour, even though it felt like one at the time. The ego had to take a step back, she says. Her business was still there. It wasn't going anywhere. And working inside a larger corporation taught her things about how bigger businesses market themselves that she now brings directly to her smaller clients — a perspective she genuinely thinks makes her more useful to the people she works with.
She met a wonderful man during all of this. They got married a couple of months before we spoke. He looked at her business and said: you really need to go back to doing this full-time.
She was already thinking it.
Her plan had been a gentle transition — maybe later in the summer, early autumn, ease out of corporate life and back into her own thing. But it didn't happen that way. There were layoffs across the larger corporation she was working for. She was let go.
"I was so relieved," she told me.
That same day, she jumped on a client call. Within the same week, she had two or three new enquiries — without having told anyone about the change. It felt, she says, like the doors just opened.
What it actually looks like to side hustle without burning out
When I asked Megan how she managed to run a business while also holding down a full-time job, she said something I think is genuinely underrated advice: it was actually easier for her to come back to side-hustling than it would have been for someone starting from scratch, because she already had everything in place.
Her systems were set up. Her contracts were ready. Her CRM was running. Her process was documented. When a client came in, she didn't have to figure out how to handle it — she just ran the process.
If you don't have your systems in place, side-hustling a business on top of a full-time job will eat you alive. The admin alone will crush you. But if the infrastructure is solid, you can take on clients at a pace that actually fits your life, deliver a professional experience, and not lose your mind.
Her advice for anyone in that season: get the tools set up, get the systems set up, and set boundaries on how much workload you'll take on. Working a 9-to-5 while building a business is daunting — especially if you have any kind of personal life. The boundaries aren't just nice to have. They're what keep you from burning out before you ever get the chance to go full-time.
From $500 to $5,000: the pricing leap and the confidence that made it possible
Megan's first paid client paid $500. Now her average project is around $5,000 — and she has a "done in a day" option for clients with an existing site who need updates taken care of, which runs around $1,200.
The $5,000 figure isn't fixed, mind you. It depends on how many pages, how many integrations, whether someone is a course creator who needs a Kajabi or Teachable backend set up alongside their site. Each project is scoped to the client. But roughly $5,000 is the centre of gravity.
Projects now take her about four weeks from start to finish — down from the six to eight weeks she allowed when she was still employed elsewhere. She works faster when design is her full focus, and she prefers it that way. She gets a little restless sitting inside long timelines. She wants to get it done for her clients and get it launched.
The gap between $500 and $5,000 didn't close overnight. It closed because her results started speaking for themselves — clients getting their first paid enquiries from sites she built, reporting spikes in website traffic after blog launches, sending the kind of feedback that makes you realise the work is actually doing something. That feedback became its own kind of evidence. And evidence is what erodes imposter syndrome.
"I felt like I couldn't charge more because I didn't know everything," she told me. "But news flash — you're not supposed to know everything."
You grow your skill set. You get responses. You raise your prices. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just incrementally, as the evidence builds. You trust the process enough to keep going through the bad months — and there will be bad months, Megan says freely. Months where you're convinced you've made the worst decision of your life. And then the door opens again and you remember why you're doing it.
The debt, the wedding, and what she's building now
When Megan started her business, she had a lot of credit card debt — from just living her life, she says, and doing all the things. She used the business to tackle it methodically. It's all gone now. No credit card debt. Just a car note.
Last year, her business income — combined with her husband's contributions — paid for their entire wedding in cash. No wedding debt. Not a small thing. They set a budget, kept it reasonable, and she's visibly proud of it.
The goal now isn't paying off debt. It's building. Saving. Investing. Maybe an investment property by the beach she could turn into an Airbnb. Her husband is, by her own description, very budget-conscious — her friends were shocked, she laughs, because she's historically more of a "goes to HomeGoods and buys whatever she feels like" type of person. But a bigger shared goal makes it easier to make different choices.
This year, her goal is to fully replace the income she was making in her corporate role. She says it like she knows it's going to happen. There's no option that involves going back. That door is closed and she's relieved to have it closed.
What the course actually gave her — and when she decided to take it
Megan took Square Secrets Business before she had a single paying client. She made a deliberate choice not to take on paid work until she'd finished the course, set up her business properly, registered the name, built her own website, and was ready to present herself to the world with everything in order.
She didn't even tell anyone she was doing it until all of that was in place. Then she announced it.
"I felt legit," she said. "I felt like I had my sh*t together." She didn't spend the first weeks of client work wondering if she was doing it right. The foundation was already laid. The contracts were ready. The CRM was set up. The process was mapped out. She just ran it.
What she valued most about how the course was structured wasn't any single lesson — it was the feeling of being guided from point A to point B to point C in a way that actually made sense. Some things she already knew and could move quickly through. Other things she hadn't thought about at all. Both were valuable in different ways.
"If you get out of your own way, it makes going through a process like this so much easier." That's her advice for anyone on the fence. The foundation matters. If the foundation isn't there, everything feels uncertain. If it is — even the hard parts of running a business feel manageable, because you're not also scrambling to figure out the basics.
And then here she is, five years later, talking to Paige on camera. She called it a pinch-me moment. Honestly, I felt the same way hearing her story.
If there's one through-line in Megan's story, it's this: the path doesn't have to be straight to get you somewhere good. A songwriting degree, a bank job, a windowless Air Force office, a divorce, a layoff — none of it was wasted. All of it wove together into a business she's proud of, clients she genuinely cares about, and a life that now includes garden flowers, a pool in Florida, and the freedom to go for a walk whenever she wants without logging back in by a certain time. If you're wondering whether this could work for you too — the question worth asking isn't whether the path will be straight. It's whether you're willing to take the next step.
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