I sat down with Nicole Delger, CEO of Studio Delger, the creative studio she runs with her husband, creative director Tim Delger. Nicole is one of the clients I work with regularly, and one thing has always stood out to me: Studio Delger is a deeply creative firm that runs with a level of organization and discipline you rarely see in creative work. Nicole knows where every cent in the business is going in any given week. I wanted to understand how a design studio gets there, and the answer started long before Studio Delger had its name.
When people ask Nicole how long Studio Delger has been in business, she has a go-to answer: “We’ve been paying our own health insurance for a little over five years.” That’s when she and Tim officially made it a joint business in 2021. But the foundation goes back much further. Nicole ran an independent marketing and communications practice for about a decade, with Tim moonlighting on her client work while he held a full-time job. He’d provide a logo here, a look and feel there.
Those years were her training ground. “In that 10-year warm-up to Studio Delger official, I made a lot of tax mistakes,” she told me. “I made bookkeeping [mistakes] and all those kinds of things.”
By the time Tim joined her, they’d already learned a lot of hard lessons, and they could support their family pretty easily right out of the gate. She compares it to an action movie: two cars racing side by side until the hero jumps from one into the other. Once they made that leap together, she says, “one plus one equals 11.” It’s not the glamorous version of the story, but it’s the one so many business owners need to hear.
Even after the official launch, the money side wasn’t polished. With no employees, there weren’t great systems for paying themselves. “It was like, oh, I need a new fence. I’m going to take $6,000 out of the business,” Nicole shared. That changed in 2023, when their employee Bella joined full time.
That’s when Profit First came in, along with support from an accountant and a bookkeeper (yours truly). When it’s just one or two people, Nicole explained, it’s easy to go on gut. But once software and equipment expenses start adding up, gut isn’t enough. Today she tracks everything in what she calls “My Dashboard”: revenue, profit, pacing, projections, and whether they’re hitting targets. “Those things you set up for yourself in a great Excel can just really bring along a lot of peace of mind.”
I appreciated hearing the before story. Nobody starts out doing everything right, and that includes me. Having a system to come back to is what makes the difference.
When I asked about a turning point that shaped how she shows up for clients, Nicole went straight to a book: Win Without Pitching by Blair Enns, along with his follow-up, Pricing Creativity. Enns makes the case for value-based pricing, meaning a set project fee instead of an hourly rate. Nicole and Tim found his work before Studio Delger even launched, so they practiced it from the start, though not perfectly. Some projects, she admits, they didn’t value correctly. Her example: a small dog-washing business needs a logo, and an experienced designer works through ideas in two or three days.
The team still logs hours internally so they can look back and price the next similar project more accurately. “Hours doesn’t necessarily go away,” she said. “The client just doesn’t see it.”
That margin also creates room for generosity. On one recent project, they had budget left over, so Nicole had an intern spend a couple of days building the client a beautiful website that was never in scope. On another, she realized they’d already completed a future phase, and she told the client on the invoice that phase three was on them.
Nicole walked me through how Studio Delger approaches what they call visual identity. It’s not just a logo but horizontal, vertical, and round versions, plus patterns and textures. After mood boards and research, the team sketches, but clients never see the sketches. Instead, the team usually develops three full directions and tests each one on a hat, a shirt, a car, a step-and-repeat, and a sign.
Here’s why. Sometimes the cleverest sketch falls flat once it’s applied. Her example was a fancy “B” in Baker that becomes “just a B on everything.” Meanwhile, a simpler mark with a shape and texture looks incredible on a business card and letterhead. “You would be shocked how much that happens,” she said. If she’d simply asked a client which sketch they liked best, they’d pick the fancy B.
She’s upfront with clients about what the process feels like: “You’re going to pay me a lot of money and then you’re not going to hear from me” for about six weeks. “But when you do hear from me, you’re going to have a lot to see.”
Scroll through Studio Delger’s social media and you’ll find almost no photos of Nicole or Tim, just the work. Tim’s phrase for it is “skins on the wall”: the projects, the case studies, the track record. Nicole sees an endless list of marketing tasks a business could do, and the job is to pick the ones that move the needle toward your goals and ignore the rest. That holds even when a competitor’s polished videos make you jealous.
She’s careful to say it’s not a judgment of other strategies. Her advice is to trust your gut: “If something doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel like you, it doesn’t feel authentic, it’s not going to be.”
When we got to money, Nicole opened with a line she lives by: people who feel comfortable talking about money make money. Most of us rarely talk about it honestly, she pointed out, so her first invitation is to understand your own money story.
As the youngest of five, with a dad in public service and a mom who was a massage therapist, Nicole had every need met. Anything extra, though, she had to earn, sometimes by making friendship bracelets until she got blisters.
As an adult, she had to work through a belief that being wealthy was a bad thing. Now she and Tim, whom she calls a great saver, use Profit First at home as well, with allocations for their house renovation and family vacations. She was also refreshingly honest about how hard this is:
Her favorite example of the math winning out: when Tim’s old truck died, they ran the numbers on insurance, gas, depreciation, and the occasional rideshare, and decided not to replace it. Even if that sometimes means asking someone for a ride home, she’d rather keep that money invested. “Two working parents with two children and we have one car,” she laughed. “But it makes way more sense [for us].”
Nicole is an audiobook devotee, so much so that she and Tim made up their own verb for it. When she says she “read” a book, she’ll often call it “snarfing” instead, because she actually listened to it, usually at high speed, sometimes in a single day. If she falls in love with a book, she’ll go back and get the hard copy to read through.
Her list includes The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav, Conscious Luck, The Big Leap, The Metaphysical Millionaire, Fulfilled by Anna Yusim, and parenting books from Dr. Shefali and Dr. Becky. The thread running through all of them is self-knowledge. “The hardest thing is to know what you want,” she said. “That’s harder than figuring out how to get there.”
She rereads How to Win Friends and Influence People almost every year, and one lesson from it shapes every new business meeting: be interested, not interesting.
That honesty carries all the way through to pricing conversations. When someone asks what a new logo system will cost, Nicole tells them plainly: this is what it costs to work with our team. There will always be someone cheaper and someone more expensive. So she asks them to weigh the things that matter: the track record, how they’re being treated, whether the process feels right, and whether they can afford it.
When Studio Delger isn’t the right fit, she says so and points people elsewhere. That might be a newer designer for a business just getting started, or a larger firm for an organization with a board and layers of red tape. Nicole especially loves second-generation projects, where a successful family business is finally ready to invest in its brand.