0:00:00
There’s two components of a really successful web design business. Whether you’re a freelancer or an agency owner, you have to pay really close attention to these two things. One is pricing and the other is process. And what you’re going to find is that pricing and process are very intimately connected. So if you don’t have a rock solid process, you’re not going to have rock solid pricing and vice versa. What I’m going to do in this video is I’m going to lay out my pricing methodology to hopefully help you fill in any gaps and really understand why these two things are critical and how they play off of each other. And this is like make or break because if you don’t have a healthy business, none of the other stuff that we talk about on this channel is going to matter. So this is a very, very important video. I do want to give a disclaimer, actually two disclaimers. Number one is this is not clickbait. When I say that you can double your revenue or more overnight, I absolutely mean it. And then number two is this is not a money grab. Everything that I’m going to show you in this video is actually a benefit to your clients because clients when they work with an agency that’s not doing things properly, they get inconsistent outcomes. They don’t get the value that they’re supposed to be getting. And let’s talk about like the three mistakes before we were going to jump into a figma jam board in a minute.
0:01:26
I’m going to really go through this with you the whole methodology, but let’s talk about the mistakes that a lot of freelancers and an agency owners are making. There’s three big ones. Number one is they’re not providing enough deliverables. So the list of deliverables that you are providing to clients is too small and this does a disservice to you because you don’t get all of the revenue that you could be getting. And it does a disservice to the client because you’re not delivering all the things that you really should be delivering. The second mistake that people make is the deliverables that they are providing are not priced correctly. And then the third problem is you’re doing a lot of free work and you I call these hidden deliverables. You are providing value and doing things that you’re actually not pricing for and you need to be pricing for these things because you can’t have a healthy business if you’re doing a lot of free work and providing a lot of free value. That stuff needs to be billed for so that you can have a healthier overall business. So that’s the two things I wanted to really get out of the way. Number one is this is not clickbait and number two is this is not a money grab. We’re not doing a disservice to people by charging more and charging for more things. We’re actually just running a better agency and delivering better, more consistent outcomes for clients. So let’s go ahead and take a look at the entire pricing methodology and then you know if you have any questions you can drop them in the comments. Make sure you hit like, subscribe, all that good stuff, but let’s get into it.
0:02:55
Alright guys, let’s go ahead and dive in. We’re going to talk about web design pricing methodology. Before we get started, a couple of things. Number one is I will share this jam board with you. So look down below in the description. You’ll find a link. You can go here, save it in your resources, review it. I put some additional notes in here. Some of the stuff I’ve already covered, like the three big mistakes and how pricing is tied to process and on and on and on. So all of those notes are in here. Second thing is I’m not going to give you actual rod pricing numbers in this video, but I am going to give you a way where you might be able to get access to my actual pricing. I don’t know if I’m going to release it yet, but if there’s enough interest in it, I will provide access to my pricing. And I’ll do a video on how I actually go through and scope out real projects. Okay. And then the third thing I want to do just to kind of lay context here is the work that I do, the projects that we do as an agency, are typically $10,000 and up.
0:03:56
We’ve done some projects around $125,000. I’m actually right now in talks for a project that’s going to be about $96,000. So depending on where you are with your web design business and whether you’re a freelancer or an agency. If you’re kind of hearing those numbers and thinking, wow, I don’t know if I can even do that, do projects like that. Or if I’ll ever get there or how long it’ll take or even how those projects work and how pricing for those kinds of projects work, then you’re probably going to find a lot of value and what I’m about to share with you. If you’re already at that level, you might find some things here and there. But obviously, well, let me just let me just back up and say this. I’m also not presenting this as like to be all in-doll process and pricing methodology. It’s very likely that my pricing is going to evolve over time and my process is going to evolve over time. It’s already evolved to get to where it’s at. So I’m just sharing a snapshot. Think of this as a glimpse. This is where I am now with all of this stuff. Take it or leave it, right?
0:05:00
There’s going to be value in here, hopefully. And then if there’s something you don’t agree with or don’t like, then leave it. Like you, I’m not saying this is the one way to do things. So let’s go ahead and dive in. You’re going to notice that this is laid out in a process format. Because as I mentioned, pricing is intimately tied to process. If you have a rock solid process, it enables you to have rock solid pricing. And then that works in reverse as well. So I have this little philosophy blurb over here. And yes, I am going to we can the great thing about Figma Jamboards is you can get real, you can zoom in really close. So for all of those who had fear about not being able to read what’s on the screen, it’s all good. So there is this philosophy paragraph we’ve already gone over a little bit. There is a link in here to an article I wrote on value based pricing, which I think is very important for everybody to click on and review.
0:05:53
So that you really understand like, what are the different pricing models? Why is value based pricing important? Because as I mentioned here, a sound pricing strategy strikes a balance between time, deliverables. And when I say deliverables, I mean, all of them, even the ones that aren’t obvious, I call those hidden deliverables. Reputation, your reputation as a freelancer or an agency and value to the overall business that you are doing the pricing for. If you’re doing pricing for a startup, that’s very different than doing pricing for an enterprise level company for a lot of reasons. If you read this article, you’ll understand how that works. And then, you know, this is for freelancers and agencies alike. I want to make that very clear. So let’s get into the first kind of step in this entire process, which is bidding. All right.
0:06:43
Let me see if I can zoom in a little bit more. Just make this so we don’t, you know, get the urge to skip ahead and look at those other steps over there. So the first step in like landing at a new project is this bidding phase where you’re going to be doing some initial discovery, trying to figure out, okay, what does this business actually need? What can I provide for them? What are they like, how are they thinking about these things? There’s calls that you have to get on. You do discovery calls. You do follow-up calls. You do meetings. You do proposals. You might meet this client in person. You might do virtual stuff. There’s a lot that goes into it.
0:07:23
A lot of back and forth. There’s going to be emails involved in that. There might be text messages involved in this entire process. There’s a lot of time that goes into this bidding phase. And what you’re going to find is that as you do bigger and bigger projects, there’s a lot more that goes on in this bidding phase. It takes a lot more time, typically, to land the bigger projects. And the question is, like, who is accounting for all this stuff? Are you doing all of this for free? I bill for this process, this part of the process. I don’t necessarily bill for it upfront. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. But I’m getting paid one way or the other. At some point, all of this time and effort and expertise that goes into this, just this first bidding step gets built into the pricing somewhere.
0:08:09
There’s also the proposals that you have to create. And proposals are often very detailed. And again, the larger the project, the more detailed the proposal is going to be. There’s statements of work that have to be drafted up. You have to know, first of all, there’s practice and expertise that comes with writing proposals and writing statements of work. All of that time, just like your education for a doctor goes into why doctors are expensive. Same thing. There’s education that goes into all of these steps. And therefore, you should be seeing the value in that and billing for the value in that. There’s contracts. Who’s creating the contracts? And by the way, if you’re doing all this stuff, what you’re going to find? There’s a link here, right?
0:08:52
If you’re doing all of this stuff yourself, it’s easier to write it off and say, I don’t have to bill for this stuff. I can get by not billing for this stuff. But you need to start thinking about scalability. And at some point, somebody is going to have to write a proposal. If it’s not you, who is it going to be and who’s going to pay for that? Who’s going to draft up the statement of work? And if it’s not you, how are you going to pay for somebody else to do it? Who’s going to create the contract? Who’s going to do all the negotiations? Who’s going to do the invoicing? Even down to like e-signature stuff. There’s software involved in just getting signatures from people. So all of this stuff has value, all of this stuff takes time. And whenever there’s value and time involved, immediately your brain should think, I need to be billing for this.
0:09:39
So there are models where you can bill for some of this stuff upfront. And then if you can’t bill for it upfront for whatever reason, you build it into the price when you land the project. And by the way, all of the projects that you don’t land, that time wasn’t wasted. That’s all part of running a business. That stuff, like the loss of that time and value gets built into projects that you do win. And all of this stuff, again, as you’re going to see, and I’ll try to reiterate, is actually real world value to the client. And it’s stuff that they should be paying for and should be willing to pay for. Because it means that you, at the end of the day, are running a very healthy business and that you’re going to be around for them. And you’re going to be able to consistently deliver for them. And you’re going to be able to be the best partner that you can possibly be. That is value to them. All right?
0:10:30
And that is worth paying for. If you’re not a healthy business, you can’t be a great partner. And ultimately, you’re going to be a liability to your clients. That’s what we need to avoid at all costs. So that’s the bidding phase. You’ve got to think about this. A lot of this stuff is hidden deliverables that people do not charge for or don’t build into their pricing. And that’s a big mistake. All right. So the next thing is the actual discovery. Let’s say that you’ve, the contract is signed. The first payments are made. Whatever your payment structure is. Again, I’ll provide access to how I do all events with specifics and with numbers. But right now, we’re just talking about pricing methodology.
0:11:11
So let’s assume that the contract was signed. First payments made. Now what? So we go into this discovery phase. Now what you’re going to see here is that a lot of the discovery phase actually creates more deliverables that you can then charge for in second phases and third phases. And I think it’s a good thing to explain here is that when you are wanting to do projects correctly and you’re wanting to do larger projects, this isn’t going to be a one and done thing. It’s not going to be, here’s the price. I’m going to deliver and then we part ways. What we’re actively trying to do as an agency is build an ongoing relationship and an ongoing partnership with our clients. And they should be looking to you for strategy and direction. And so when phase one is done, it’s like, what should we do next? What is the next step here?
0:12:02
And you’re kind of guiding that. And then of course, you’re doing the execution as well. So this discovery phase is important for two big reasons. Number one is it gives you a full scope of what’s actually needed. Because how can you provide what’s needed for a business without doing a lot of research and a lot of discovery? There’s time involved in this. So you’re absolutely billing for this process right here. And then second is this lets you really understand the scope of the entire project and the roadmap of the entire project. So back here, if we back up to this bidding phase, what I’m really bidding on here is step number one. If I haven’t build for discovery upfront, which I again is possible. And in some cases, I do that. And it’s important to do that in some cases, not every case. And it’s not possible in every case. But if you haven’t build for discovery upfront, then what I’m billing for, what I’m quoting, what my proposal and my statement of work is for, is for phase one, which is the obvious deliverables.
0:13:06
And then in discovery here, this discovery process is going to basically unveil or uncover what phase two, phase three, phase four, et cetera need to be. We need to look like. But you’re going to be doing business discovery in this phase. So you have to learn about the clients business, how they do business, how they nurture leads to sales, how they currently get leads, what their conversion rates are. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into just understanding how the business works. All of the services that they provide, all of the residuals and stuff tied to that. So a lot of discovery in terms of business discovery. Next is SEO discovery. So if we’re going to build a website for a client, we have to know what the site architecture needs to look like. At base level, what are your services? What are people searching for around those services? What are your service areas? And so we have to do discovery so that we can set up the website architecture properly. We don’t want to get into a situation where we’re just making up names of services and, you know, hoping for the best. And we’re making up URLs because at some point if they do want to invest heavily in SEO, we don’t want to get into a situation where you’re having to rewrite all of the URLs because the URLs were written properly because there was no SEO discovery.
0:14:24
And there was no real site architecture developed. The next is competitor research. Oh, and by the way, this SEO discovery, this is how deliverables go from five pages on a website or 10 pages for a business website to 50 pages quickly. So we can say, and of course, we’re not doing all 50 pages at once, but this SEO discovery, when I create an SEO optimized site map for a business, very often I will end up with 40, 50, 60 pages that need to be created. Well, in phase one, the clients only wanting, you know, 10 pages. Cool. All right. So we explained to them, we’re doing the 10 pages. We already quoted you for 10 pages, but in order to get to where you want to get based on the goals you told us you have, your website needs to be far more robust. And if you look at the sites that are doing really well online and dominating the digital space, they are robust websites with, you know, usually hundreds of pages if you count blog posts and things like that. So we show them the site map game plan and we say, we’re going to build the initial 10 pages now. And then after phase one is live, we’re going to come back and we’re going to talk about phase two. And we’re going to talk about phase three to get your site to where it ultimately needs to go. That only comes from an SEO discovery process. So if you’re not doing that SEO discovery process, you’re missing out like you’re failing to provide the road map and all of the deliverables that a website. Truly requires to dominate the digital space. Next is competitor research. So you are going to want to take a look at what that business competition is doing correctly. What are they doing that’s successful?
0:16:09
Next is market research in general. How do the customers in this market behave? What are they wanting? What are they needing? What are they looking for? So there’s a lot that goes into that site mapping I just talked about, which is a big part of SEO discovery specifically. And then there’s general planning like project planning. How are we going to tackle this project? How are we going to break this up into phases? So this is a discovery process is a big first step once the bidding is done, contracts are signed and all of that. Again, sometimes this happens before this bidding stage happens. So you might do a discovery package with a client. I do this often, but not again, not every time. And then we actually get a much clearer glimpse of what needs to happen for this bidding process here. Okay, next is UX design. And when you do UX design, this is typically what I refer to as wire framing the version one of the website. We create wire frames for every single key page of the website. I’m going to talk about why that’s important. This is a part of the process that I think a lot of people don’t do, especially freelancers because they feel like, well, I can determine the UX in the layout as I do development or as I do design. And again, we have to think about scale. If I zoom out for a minute, we’re going to just take a look real quick. So there’s UX design, UI design, there’s content, and then there’s site development, right? So we’re going to go back to UX design for a second. The reality here is is that there’s very few people on the planet who are experts at all of these things. And so when you start to think about scale, you’re going to need to put people in the right seats on the bus, as we say. So there’s going to be a UX designer. There’s going to be a UI designer. There’s going to be a content person. There’s going to be a developer. And you might have multiple of these things eventually. But if you really want to deliver the best results for the client, each of these things should have a person who, that’s their area of expertise versus a jack of all trades master of none who’s doing all of these things in very mediocre fashion, right? Which is often the case. That’s something that we have to try to get away from. So when we think about UX design, we need a UX designer. Well, if we need a UX designer, that means we have to pay for UX designer, which means that we better be billing for this step.
0:18:45
And then when there’s multiple people involved, there has to be structure to the process. So think let’s talk about UI design for a second. We’re not going to do the bullet. Well, come back and do the bullet points in a second. A UI designer, it’s going to be very tough for them to do their job. If they don’t have a UX blueprint to work from UI designers aren’t necessarily well versed in UX, right? These are two very separate things, very different things that require different abilities and different skill sets. There’s a lot of people who are amazing at graphic design and web design in particular, but they don’t really understand user experience. They don’t really understand conversion rates. They don’t really understand storytelling and why certain sections should be presented before other sections and the order that section should be presented over presented and overall. That’s that’s all part of UX design that not every UI designer understands. So you can’t say, well, we’re going to have to find a UI designer who’s also an expert at UX design because you can find UX designers who are amazing who can’t do UI design, right? So you have to see these things as independent parts of a process that require independent people. And when they require independent people, you need to number one bill for it accordingly. And number two, have this process set up so that each piece doesn’t have a block. If your process has a blocking point, it’s going to fall apart. So we go from this discovery right into it would immediately go to the UX designer. So the UX designer is creating the blueprint for what we’re going to build. And once you have a blueprint, you can then have you can then make that blueprint pretty. You can hand that blueprint to a designer and say, here’s the blueprint, make it pretty according to the brand guidelines of this business. So you see how these two things play into each other and and are really require each other in order to do all of this stuff properly. So when the UX design phase, you’re doing more discovery because now it’s the UX designer is trying to figure out, okay, well, what’s the user experience of all of these competitors sites like and what are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? What did they miss that we can actually put into place and create a better a better website for our client? There’s strategy that goes into UX design, obviously. There’s the actual wire frames that get created and the time that goes into those. When you’re doing wire frames, there’s some ideas that you’re going to want to experiment with. So think about a homepage wire frame, for example, there’s not one homepage wire frame when this stuff is done properly. There’s like three, four, five versions, a lot of times of what a homepage might look like. So there’s multiple different layouts. There’s things where it’s like, here’s an idea I had, but if we don’t want to go with that idea, here’s a different idea. So when you’re doing this stuff right, you’re not creating one wire frame. You’re creating multiple wire frames and then eventually a set of wire frames that become the game plan for building the actual website.
0:21:55
There’s iteration that goes into this. This is an insurance step in this process. And you’re going to see this word show up over and over and over again, where by doing this the right way, by doing wire frames and presenting wire frames, because wire frames are, I would say, not necessarily easier to make in a fidelity sense, they’re easier to make than design, right? But we’re doing one step at a time so that we can take this step to the client and say, okay, here’s our thought process. Here’s why we’re doing what we’re going to do. Here’s the blueprint for what we’re going to build before we go any further, you need to say, yes, or no green light or red light or yellow light, where are we at? And this is insurance for you as an agency or freelancer and it’s insurance for the client as well. When we hear horror stories and web design, it’s because people tried to do design and UX and content and development often all at the same time. And the wrong things get built, things get missed. You have to go backwards, like it’s two steps forward, one step back or even worse, two steps forward, two steps back, you got to start over, right? Like there’s just it all falls apart when the process is not rock solid. We feel that this is a rock solid process where we start with a blueprint. It’s just like building a house. You would never get your interior designer to make the blueprints. That’s what I’m trying to communicate here, right? And you wouldn’t try to do blueprinting with interior design at the same time. You do the blueprint first, right? Then you do the construction, right? And after it’s done, you started it now. Houses are a bit different, obviously, but you understand that there’s a reason houses go through a very specific process. Okay? And there’s a reason that the people, there’s a reason you hire an architect to do blueprints and not an interior designer. And the same thing is true with with web. So UX design, we have a UX designer doing all of this stuff. This is following this process is insurance for the entire process. Okay? Am I saying the word process too much? I don’t know. So next after blueprints, we can send it to UI to a designer, right? And so they’re going to make this pretty. But the UI designer has to do their own discovery, right? So they have to see like where the UX designer went to the competition and said, okay, what are they using for layouts? How are they presenting the information? What order they presenting the information and so on? A UI designer is saying, oh, what kind of design elements are these other competitors using, right? How are they approaching design? What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? How can we do this better? Can we be creative in some form or fashion? Where do we not need to be creative? Where do we need to be more straightforward? We have to do discovery on the brand guidelines for the business. We have to go back and forth with what are they wanting in terms of a look and a feel. So there’s a lot of strategy here. There’s a lot of discovery here. So we haven’t even got to making anything yet. When we pull up fig months, start doing a high fidelity design, that’s where the actual work is starting to get done. That has to be built for but all this other stuff has to be built for as well. Or at least it has to be built into the pricing, right? Like the client we’re explaining this high level. But when you see me do actual pricing and scope, all of this stuff gets bundled into one price per page typically or per element or you know, it’ll make more sense when you actually see it.
0:25:23
But this is what goes into this is what gets built into the pricing. There’s also experimentation here, right? The designer is not going to create one design be done and and hand it off, right? They’re going to go through a lot of iteration. They’re going to experiment with different ideas. They might design five different things and then delete it all because they don’t like where the direction that it was going in. So all of that time and talent and expertise has to be built into the pricing. It has to be it has to be front and center in your mind. You can’t pretend that that part of the process doesn’t actually exist. You can’t only look at the finished design and say, okay, that’s the finished thing. This is how much it’s worth, right? There’s a lot that goes into getting to that point. There’s iteration with the client. So you know, you’re not going to hand over designs. You’re not going to hand over wire frames to the client, especially when it’s a big client and they just say, it’s perfect. Let’s move on, right? There’s going to be some iteration built in there. So you have to count for that happening. This again is insurance because all of these things are milestones in the process and a milestone is where the client gives green light or red light. And here’s what’s critical. And here’s why I say it’s insurance when they give a green light. We are not going backwards. There is no point in this process where if we’ve gotten a green light, we’re going backwards. Whereas if you’re not doing these steps, right? Let’s say you start with development, which is like low level freelancers and quote unquote web designers just hop right into development. They’re like, we’re going to design as we go. We’re going to do the UX as we go. It’s all going to be the same thing. You’re going to go backwards so much. You’re going to, oh, no, that’s wrong. Change it. Oh, no, that’s wrong. Change it. Oh, no, where, where’s this thing? Right? Why wasn’t this thing accounted for? And it’s extremely hectic. Okay. So the reason you see this word insurance is because we’re doing this in a milestone format where we’re getting a physical signature sign off from the client at every milestone. Do you like this blueprint? Yes or no? Is this good? Can we move forward? Yes or no? You I designed. Do you like how this looks? Can we move forward? Yes or no? Yes? Okay. Cool. We’re moving forwards. Now we have to think about content. Right? So in the content phase and now some of this stuff happens parallel. That’s important to understand. So if I can zoom out here for a second, right? Content and UX design sometimes happens at the same time. Content and development often happens at the same time. Content might span across these, across these steps. That is very often the case. But let’s talk about content because this is one of the biggest sticking points that a lot of agencies and freelancers have. Content when it’s handed off to the client takes forever so many times. This can derail projects. Absolutely 100% can derail projects. It can make a project that could be done in eight weeks, take six months. And we have to understand that.
0:28:16
So in fact, one of the things and when you talk about, you know, how do I get from just a $5,000 project to a $10,000 project? Content alone might get you there. Might get you from $5,000 a 10. If you’re not building out this step in your process and pricing for it, then of course, right? Like this one step could could potentially, depending on, you know, what’s actually needed here, double your revenue. Now again, do you have a content person because not everybody can write great content. There’s SEO copywriting that’s involved. There’s sales copywriting that’s involved. There’s editing. There’s photos. There’s images. So let’s talk about photos, for example, you’re going, are you going for free to stock photosites and sourcing photos for your clients? That built into your pricing, that time and talent that that requires is that built into your pricing. If it’s not, then you’re making a big mistake. Just organizing content, right? Like how many times is the client? Like you have to babysit the client on, here’s how to how to get us the content that we need. Here’s how we need the content organized. If they don’t, you know, give it in an organized fashion, you have to do some of the organization. Somebody has to build that into a project management dashboard. There’s a lot that goes into that. So the question is, are you building appropriately for it? Can you do SEO copywriting? Can you do sales copywriting? Or do you need to bring in somebody who’s really good at that? Who’s doing the editing? Because editing and copywriting are often two very different things. So we have to understand all of these components, why they’re important. And what I was about to say is, almost never do I let the client create their own content. I tell them upfront, listen, it’s like being your own lawyer, right? What is they have a saying about being your own lawyer? You know, you have a fool for a lawyer if it’s yourself. I don’t know how the saying goes. It’s almost the same thing with content on web. Like you’re almost a fool if you’re going to create your own content. Have us create your content. We have experts to create your content. And we can ensure that it gets done right? That it’s effective and then it gets this project gets done on time that this is not a block for your entire project. We tell them horror stories about clients trying to do their own own content. And here’s the thing is it’s not just about it being a sticking point. It’s also like the critical ingredient and whether your site is successful or not. So whether your site ranks depends on how well the SEO copywriting was done. Whether your site converts all depends on how well the sales copywriting was done. So we can design a pretty website. And if it doesn’t say the right things, it’s not going to rank and it’s not going to sell. It’s not going to convert. And so we have a failed project. It all can hinge on just the content alone. So it’s really important that you invest in this section, that you invest in content.
0:31:06
And it’s really important for you as an agency and a freelancer to sell this piece of the puzzle to your clients. And again, like I said, this one piece could take you from a $5,000 project to a $10,000 project. So this is not rocket science on how we get to the higher price points. We’re just selling the right things and then we’re pricing them appropriately. So after we’ve sold content, and by the way, that has its own discovery phase involved in it as well, right? And strategy phase involved in it as well. Then we have the development side of things. The development side of things is, you know, this is part where you probably understand a lot of the technical work that actually goes into this. But there’s laying a solid foundation. There’s the technical execution. If you watch my videos on oxygen, not every oxygen developer is, and I’m assuming you’re doing everything on oxygen, not every oxygen developer is of equal talent and ability. And so when you look at an oxygen website that’s being built, it’s how consistent is it? How much quality is there? How much future proofing is there? I put that on here, right? Because if we create a site that’s very messy, there’s no class organization, there’s code all over the place, extra code is none of its organized. It makes it difficult to do basic maintenance and management in the future. It makes it difficult for other people to come in on the team and understand how this site was built. There’s no, are there any standards with the development process so that you can actually scale and have other people work on this project? All of those things are important, right? And so when you’re pricing the stage, you’ve got to take into account, like, we’re not just building this site. We’re not just doing oxygen development. We’re doing oxygen development really well. And here’s how much time and study and practice, it took to get to this point. You have to pay for all of that because you can go to these online sites and hire people who claim to do oxygen, but what is the end result you’re going to get? So there really should be insurance in here as well. There should be an insurance billable, right? This isn’t actually a line item on an invoice or anything, but this is how you have to think about it. When they choose you to do this, you know what they’re getting, right? They’re getting a high quality result, hopefully. And I’m, you know, I, in doing these videos, want to hold everybody accountable and say we should all be doing the highest quality work possible. And then if, you know, pricing according to the quality that we can actually deliver, all right? So, you know, if I show you access to my pricing, you can’t just copy it if you can’t deliver the value and the quality that I deliver and the consistency that I deliver, right? But you can use it as a framework for yourself and work to eventually get there and be upfront with your clients.
0:34:03
If you’re going to go at lower price points because you have less experience, tell clients that upfront, right? A lot of them will still use you. It’s okay. But be honest with them. You tend like you’re going to knock it out of the park with the highest quality thing out of really low rate, all right? But just look at all the stuff. Like there’s punch lists. There’s site performance you have to worry about. There’s future proofing. There’s testing. There’s mobile usability. There’s like the laundry list goes on. So, is all of this stuff properly being billed for as the question? Next is the launch phase. So, you have all your standard launch items. You have URL redirects that you probably have to put in place. There’s more testing that has to be done. There’s speed optimization that has to be done. A lot goes into launch. And the question is, are you pricing for all of those items? Are you just saying, hey, that’s just deliverables I do for free. Like most of the time what I feel like is people scope out a website. Here’s the work I have to do to actually build this site. And I’ll design it as I go. And then they say 2500 bucks. And then everything else just gets done for free. All the discovery research either doesn’t get done at all, which is not a disservice to your client or gets done for free. All the launch items afterward, all the punch lists, all the logistics. Let’s zoom out and look at this because I have this little blue line. What does this say project management? You have much project management phone calls, emails, team logistics, software, timelines, goes into a project. And that often just gets done for free. It’s like, oh, that’s just the cost of doing business. No, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not the cost of doing business. If a large client, and you really see this when you use large client, when you do work for large clients, right. So I have a client who, you know, they’re spending $100,000 a month on Google ads, right. This is a 125,000 dollar project that just to us, right for for this. If they were to hire an internal team to build their website and do UX and do UI design and all of that, they would be they would have a project manager. Do you know what they would be doing with that project manager? Paying that project manager, they would that project manager would have a salary. This is a completely separate line item that gets paid for it. This is not work you do for free. This is not the cost of doing business, right. If they would have to hire somebody to be a project manager. And by the way, as an agency, you have to hire someone to be a project manager. Eventually you are the project manager and you have to pay yourself for project management.
0:36:30
And if you’re going to scale, you have to bring in a project manager and you have to pay that project manager. So guess what, that is billable to the client. The client has to pay for you to be the project manager or for your project manager to do the project management, plain and simple end of story, right. So think about how much is that project manager worth? What is their salary? How much does that inflate the cost of a project. And again, this is an insurance step. If a project doesn’t have a project manager or proper project management, it goes off the rails. And if it goes off the rails, a lot of time and a lot of money is lost. So this is insurance against those losses. It’s not just a standard billable. It’s an it’s half of it’s an insurance billable in a lot of ways. That’s how I think about it. Okay, so here is the process that pretty much every project every website project goes through that we touch, right. So we start with bidding, we do discovery. Sometimes these two things are flip flopped. Then there’s UX design, then there’s UI design, then there’s content, then there’s development and then there’s launch. And yes, some of these things are done in parallel, but there’s it’s because multiple people are doing them. There are everybody’s in the right seat on the bus. There’s a lot of really solid project management, a lot of really solid communication. We’re working in a milestone format. So we’re getting sign offs at every step of the game. So we’re never going backwards. And there’s never any delays. All right, cool. So we talked about all of that next comes down to like website management, right. Like what is the management process and the billables going to look like going forward. And then who is driving the digital strategy and execution for this project. So that needs to be thought about and that can be an entirely separate thing. So often if I’m doing a website that’s $25,000, there’s a digital strategy and execution package that’s attached to that a lot of times that might be $60,000. And so now we have a project over the course of maybe a year, this is $75,000 project. Now, not every web design agency or freelancer has the capacity or the knowledge or the experience to be able to execute a digital strategy to plan and execute a digital strategy. But if you do, that’s how again, revenue goes up because you’re providing the deliverables that the client actually needs because what happens with a typical website, right. $2500 website with no digital strategy, no digital execution, not a lot of discovery, not much UX design, you know, it was basically limited and not content, right. It was limited to design and development, the two obvious steps of the process, like that was the limit on a $2500 project. You build the website, you launch the website and nothing happens because we know in the web design and digital marketing game, it’s not a if you build it, they’ll come type of thing. So the business quote unquote invests in a website and at the end of the day, what they got is a digital brochure that doesn’t really bring in any traffic, it doesn’t really convert people very well, they still have to rely on their sales people, they still have to rely on, you know, budget of other digital advertising, getting direct calls from PPC, like the website is is there, but it’s not a it’s not the linchpin in their in their online market, it’s not their online marketing hub as it should be, right. So what will we say, will we say, well, that is the successful project, no, that’s not a successful project, the successful project is one in which the client pays for all the things that they need to pay for to make this thing successful, we execute on it, we deliver it on time, and then we drive the strategy and execution going forwards, we nurture the website with all of the right digital strategy and execution to where the website actually brings in traffic and business and eyeballs, and we’re going to do that. So the website actually increases the brand awareness for the company, the website actually acts as as the company’s best salesperson, it works 24 seven to fill their sales pipeline, it actually does the job of converting leads into sales without anybody physically touching that lead, all of those things are possible, all of those things should be happening in the real world when you’re when you’re doing actual valuable work for businesses, this should be something that grows. And the business a year from now should be able to say, wow, we put $50,000 into that website and our revenues up $500,000, or we put $100,000 into that website, our revenues up three quarters of $1 million, right.
0:41:11
Like that’s the outcome that should be happening and it’s not going to happen if you don’t have this process and this process can’t happen if you don’t have the right pricing and vice versa. All right, so that’s why all this stuff is super important. All right, so I’ve put it some additional notes in here, but this is the pricing methodology. And if you want to see actual numbers, I’m considering making my full web design priceless available for a small fee, I can’t make it free. I’m not just going to give this away for free. Number one, I don’t I don’t want just anybody to have access to it. If you’re super interested and it’s important to you and you think it would be very valuable for you to have, then you can pay a small fee. You know, I’m not going to make it astronomical or anything like that, but you got to pay to play, right. And I’ll also consider doing a video on how I take that pricing list and actually scope out 10,000 plus projects. Okay, so you can see exactly how the item by item by item, what gets built into the price and how the final price becomes what it is. I can pretty much guarantee you that if you currently do websites for $2,500 overnight, minimum $5,000, but probably more along the lines of $7,500 to $10,000. If you’re currently doing sites for $10,000, I’ll show you how to get to 20, 30, 40,000. And again, it’s not a money grab. It’s because there’s almost always really important things being missed. And then the things you are building for the correct appropriate pricing is not baked into those deliverables. All right. If you found this helpful, hit the like, hit subscribe, hit the notification bell, drop a comment, and then look down below in the description. You’ll find a link to this jam boards that you can keep it. And you can review it. You can read my little notes here. And then you’ll also find a link to like a waiting list that I’ll set up to just to see, you know, who’s interested in seeing actual pricing, who’s interested in, you know, paying a little something or other to get access to that pricing and get access to a video on how to actually scope these things out. And then future videos like we’re going to cover all this stuff. I’m going to show you how to do discovery calls, how to write proposals, how to write statements of work, what your contract should say, how to do the negotiations, how to do the invoicing, what the payment plan should be, what pricing options should you recommend, how to do SEO discovery, how to do competitor research. This is kind of a roadmap, honestly, for a lot of the content that I’ll be producing on this channel. So if this stuff is exciting to you, if it’s valuable to you, hit subscribe, hit like, hit comment, and that’s it. I’ll see you guys very, very, very soon with another video. Peace.
