7 Signs Your Business Needs to Outsource Graphic Design

It's Monday morning.

You have a campaign going live on Thursday. The ad creatives aren't done yet. The social posts are half-finished. And the person who was supposed to handle design is already swamped with three other things.

So you open Canva. Again.

An hour later, you have something that looks... okay. Not great. Not what you pictured. But it'll work for now.

You tell yourself you'll sort out the design situation properly next week.

Next week comes. Same problem. Different deadlines.

This isn't a time management problem. And "getting more organised" won't fix it either. This is a signal. Your business has grown past the point where doing design yourself or hoping someone else figures it out actually works.

The longer you ignore that signal, the more it costs you.

Here are 7 signs it's time to outsource your graphic design.

1. Your Team Is Doing Design Work Instead of Their Real Jobs

This happens more often than most business owners want to admit.

Your marketing manager spends Friday afternoons resizing social media images. Your ops lead is editing a pitch deck at 10pm. Your sales rep is trying to make a brochure look good in PowerPoint.

Every hour your team spends on design is an hour they're not doing the job you hired them for.

Every hour your team spends doing work outside their core role is an hour your business isn't moving forward. That's not an opinion, it's why outsourcing has become standard practice for businesses at every stage of growth.

When design keeps pulling your team away from their real work, it stops being a small inconvenience and becomes a real cost to your business.

2. Your Designs Don't Look Professional and You Know It

You've probably seen your competitor's Instagram posts. Their ads look sharp. Their brand looks polished and expensive.

Then you look at yours.

There's a real business cost here. Research published in Behaviour & Information Technology found that people form an opinion of your website or marketing material in just 50 milliseconds. That's faster than a blink.

Research from Stanford's Web Credibility Project found that nearly 75% of people make judgments about a business's trustworthiness based on how it looks. If your materials look homemade, that's what people will think of your business.

Professional design isn't a vanity expense. It tells a stranger: "This business is serious. You can trust us."

If you already know your designs aren't good enough but don't have the time or skills to fix them, that's your signal.

3. You're Missing Deadlines Because of Design Bottlenecks

You have a campaign launching next week. The ads aren't ready. The landing page still needs graphics. The email banner is sitting in someone's drafts.

Design bottlenecks are one of the most common reasons marketing campaigns launch late or don't launch at all.

Trillion Creative put it plainly: when teams are stretched too thin, "quality drops, deadlines are missed, and morale takes a hit."

If design work keeps slowing down your launches, your campaigns, or your sales process, it's a bottleneck. And outsourcing can remove it fast.

An external design partner works through a queue. Your request goes in. Your design comes out. No bottleneck.

4. Your Brand Looks Different Everywhere

Your website uses one shade of blue. Your Instagram uses another. Your pitch deck has a different font from your brochure. Your social media thumbnails look nothing like your ads.

This is called brand inconsistency and it has a direct impact on your revenue.

According to the Lucidpress State of Brand Consistency Report, companies that present their brand consistently across all platforms see an average revenue increase of 23%. That's nearly a quarter more revenue, just from looking and feeling the same everywhere.

When people see your brand in different places, the visual experience should feel identical every time. When it doesn't, customers sense something is off, even if they can't explain why. It quietly chips away at their trust in your business.

This usually happens when multiple people are making design assets without a shared system or when different freelancers are each handling a different piece of your marketing.

Outsourcing to a dedicated design team solves this. Your designer learns your brand, your colours, your fonts, your tone and applies them consistently across everything they make for you.

5. You're Spending More on Design Than You Should

Let's talk numbers.

According to Indeed and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average US graphic designer earns around $61,300 per year. Add in benefits, software licenses, equipment, and recruitment costs, and a full-time in-house designer can easily cost $70,000–$90,000 per year.

Freelancers look cheaper at first, but they charge $50–$150 per hour for professional-quality work. If you need design support regularly, that adds up fast and the quality and availability are unpredictable.

Compare that to a flat-rate design subscription starting at $399/month, and the math becomes clear.

According to IAOP's Global Outsourcing Report, companies that outsource report average cost savings of 15–30%. For design specifically, the savings are often even higher because you cut out recruitment costs, software subscriptions, and the cost of paying a full-time salary during slow periods.

If you're paying for design in fits and starts, sometimes a freelancer, sometimes a staff member squeezing it in and the costs keep surprising you, it's time to make design predictable.

6. Your Design Needs Are Inconsistent Month to Month

Some months you need 30 assets. Other months you need 5.

This is one of the clearest signs that hiring full-time doesn't make sense for your business.

Bringing on a full-time designer to handle your busiest month means paying a full salary during your quietest months. That's not efficient, it's wasteful.

According to Parallel HQ, outsourcing gives you "a flexible bench" you can scale output up during a product launch or campaign push, and pull back when things are quieter. You only pay for what you actually use.

A design subscription is built exactly for this. Stay subscribed when you need regular output. Pause or cancel when you don't. No long-term commitment, no wasted salary.

7. You Keep Putting Off Design Because It Feels Like Too Much Effort

This is the most honest sign of all, and the most overlooked.

When design feels hard, slow, or frustrating, you avoid it. The social media post doesn't get made. The ad doesn't go live. The sales deck stays "good enough." The website banner hasn't been updated in eight months.

Meanwhile, your competitor is putting out fresh, professional content every week. And slowly, visibly, they're pulling ahead of you.

Piktochart's research found that 81% of businesses use graphic design in some form and the top reason is to communicate better with customers. If you're avoiding design altogether, you're quietly losing ground on one of the most important ways businesses build trust and generate leads.

If you catch yourself thinking "I'll get to that design stuff later" every single week, later has a cost.

Key Takeaways

1. When non-designers do design work, you're losing hours from the jobs that actually grow your business.
2. People judge your brand's trustworthiness in 50 milliseconds, unprofessional visuals silently kill conversions.
3. Design bottlenecks are a leading reason marketing campaigns launch late or not at all.
4. Brand inconsistency across platforms can cost you up to 23% in potential revenue.
5. A full-time designer costs $70k–$90k/year; a flat-rate subscription starts at $399/month.
6. Fluctuating design needs make a full-time hire wasteful, subscriptions let you scale up or down.
7. Avoiding design entirely is a slow, invisible way to lose ground to competitors.

‍

So What Should You Do Next?

If three or more of those seven signs felt uncomfortably familiar, you already know what needs to change.

You don't really need to ask whether to outsource your design. The real question is: how much longer do you want to keep losing time, money, and momentum before you do something about it?

The good news? You don't have to commit to anything long-term to see if it works.

A flat-rate unlimited design subscription like Design Shifu gives you a dedicated designer, 24-hour turnaround, unlimited requests and revisions, starting at $399/month with a 14-day money-back guarantee. No contract. No risk.

Your first design can be in your inbox within 24 hours of signing up.