Did you know that if you billed 20 hours a week, at $100 per hour, for 50 weeks a year (leaving 2 weeks off for vacation), you’d make $100,000?!
Did you also know that the average median wage for an interior designer in the US is only $38,000?!
Even with this information, are you feeling uncomfortable or uneasy about taking your design business to the next level with fee based designing? If so, you’re not alone. Many designers are stuck in the old hourly billing way that no longer works well in this new economy.
So what’s the problem with hourly billing? It’s a combination of money and time leaks: Not tracking all the time you spend on a job, not billing for all the time you’re spending, not invoicing for your time immediately, reducing your time on invoices before sending to client, spending way too much time on a project because of second guessing yourself, clients questioning your time billings and not understanding how much time it really takes, no limits on “do-overs,” no design project beginning and ending date… the list goes on and on!
This list is painful, and in order to make the shift to fees for design services, you need a new mindset and way of thinking about what you are offering your clients. This new mindset is NOT becoming someone’s “design slave” for an amount of money that you take a wild guess at when you give a quote. It’s thoughtfully based on assessing what the client is telling you they want, breaking down the necessary tasks and assigning time frames and money to each part.
A set fee for specific design services is far easier for clients to understand. When you’re clear with your client about what they can expect to receive (these are called deliverables), and it aligns with what they’re asking for, you get a quick “yes” to your offer. It also takes less of your time to accomplish the job that you offered. Why? Because you know exactly what you’re supposed to do AND you’ve set an intention for completing it in a specific amount of time.
Two things are guaranteed with fee based designs …
- You’ll get better at projecting how much time and fee you need the more you do it.
- You’ll dramatically increase your income and reduce your time spent on projects.
Will you always get it done in the amount of time you projected? Not always, sometimes it’ll be faster and sometimes things just happen… but you’re still in a better position when you go with fee based then by the hour! Join me on the next F-R-E-E training call – 3 Scary Design Fees Myths That Just Aren’t True: Debunking Design Fee Myths