Designers’ giving away their profits is a sad story that I’ve heard more than once.
There are a lot of ways were a designer can unintentionally lose money and yet the most common time it happens is right at the beginning of working with a new client.
Tell me, does this sounds familiar?
- You’ve asked your new client for a budget, they said they didn’t know what their budget is so you accept a retainer fee of a couple thousand to get started on designing.
- Quickly you find the first couple of pieces of WOW upholstery and the design takes off from there!
- You’re so excited about what you’ve created you present it to the clients, along with the first run at the pricing, only to discover that your WOW upholstery is about twice what they’re comfortable with paying.
- Now you’re faced with the dilemma of starting over and rebuilding the design on your (unpaid do-over) time, or reducing your purchasing fee (lots of potential liability)on the expensive upholstery so that it fits in the budget.
In reality, you lose either way. So, what’s the solution? Develop a client job budget with your client at the very beginning!
It’s an important part of programming that you can’t afford to skip.
Once you have that budget number agreed upon, you can then internally subtract your design fee, your purchasing fee, sales tax, freight, delivery etc. and what is left is the wholesale dollar amount that you need for this design job.
Developing your design from this budget number protects your job profit, your precious time and from ever worrying again about being under budget.
We all have a sad story similar to the one above and the good news this is your chance to not repeat history again!