99% Of Creatives Lose Money With These Pricing Mistakes

double or even triple your prices overnight let's look at pricing mistake

number one if you've ever been asked to reduce the number of days or hours that you work then you are definitely making this first pricing mistake this is a very common request from clients when we price in this particular way so if you've ever had that happened to you the chances are you are making this mistake the second thing that might have happened to you is you might have had this awkward conversation at the end of a project or even during a project where that client has used the amount of required amends or there seems to be some kind of scope creep and you tell them that if they want these extra things then it's going to cost them more money this is a very classic symptom of this first pricing mistake the third thing that you may have experienced as a result of this pricing mistake is having clients pressure you to do things faster so whether that's like a deadline approaching or whether you just feel like you're kind of under pressure to do things quickly that is typically a symptom of this first pricing mistake the fourth thing is micromanaging clients there's nothing worse than this I'm remember the feeling when I ran my own agency of clients constantly breathing down my neck asking what I was working on in that day asking where we were with particular project amends often when I was Contracting clients would want me to come into the office so that I could work near them or they could kind of check on what I was doing this is a very typical symptom of this first pricing mistake and then finally if you feel like your time isn't valued appropriately I hear this often from creatives it's like people just don't seem to value my time that can show up in lots of different ways it can show up where people are requesting meetings very often or um they're trying to negotiate with it can show up in a variety of different ways but the feeling ultimately for you is that your time isn't valued appropriately so what are all of these symptoms of what is pricing mistake number one is hourly billing charging by the hour or charging by the day is one of the main reasons that we attract low value clients and that we don't get paid what we deserve now you've probably seen Chris talk about this a lot on this channel in fact I think it's one of his most popular videos the reason this is such a negative way to run a business is because the essentially the faster you work the less you get paid so the better you get at your skill and the faster you become at this thing the less money you earn the other thing I used to find really frustrating when I build by the hour was I always felt like there was a lot of work that I was doing which was kind of outside of billable hours it was things that were very difficult to charge the client for this could be like project management it could be research something where if you charge by the hour or charge by the day and you start listing these items it's often very difficult for a client to swallow those things and agree to pay for them the third thing is there is just a limited amount of hours in a day or a week so there is this kind of glass ceiling and the reason this happens is because the hours aren't quantifiable and what I mean by that is the perception of value for an hour of somebody's time isn't really quantifiable it's kind of based on their own metrics like how much is an hour of this person's time worth well that's very hard to measure right maybe it's dependent on how good they are how successful they are or whatever it's usually Quantified internally by that person in terms of what they believe that hour of time is worth opposed to the other way to price which I'm going to tell you shortly so let's

look at mistake number two so ask yourself if you've experienced any of these symptoms so the first one is it feels like a race to the bottom these are words that creatives often tell me so they're constantly competing on price like prospects come to them and say oh this is all sounds great but so and so can do it cheaper and they feel like their price is the only thing that they can adjust the second thing is they have nightmare clients now most of us know what nightmare clients are like we've all had them myself included but some of the typical things that we experience from Nightmare clients when it comes to this specific pricing strategy is wanting a lot more than we feel they've paid for that's something I hear a lot so for example I've got a client at the moment who works in branding and she delivered this brand project for somebody and this person said that's a lot of money and then started trying to add things on top said that they weren't happy with this weren't happy with that and for that client that person who delivered The Branding it felt like a very low budget for what they delivered so this is a really typical symptom where there's almost like a mismatch of expectations and you have these nightmare clients that are just stressful to work with that seem to want way more than you've agreed to deliver the third thing is that you feel you can't do your best creative work right imagine what you would do for your clients if your Project's budget had an extra zero on the end what would be possible what else would you do differently who else would you bring in so what I hear when people are making this mistake is they just really feel like they're not doing their best creative work they're not doing everything that they know they could do for that client and then the final thing is they're constantly haggling so they constantly feel like they're being beaten down on price they constantly want to know how do I negotiate this how do I build better negotiation skills so what are we talking about here well the second big pricing mistake is under charging now I know that sounds simple but I think most people know when they're doing it they're quoting a lower fee because they're hoping that if they are cheaper or within budget for that client they will have a better chance of winning that project and that is a fundamental mistake that a lot of people make they undercharge because they think it's going to help them to win that project and in my experience the opposite is actually true and what I mean by that is it attracts the wrong kind of clients so undercharging and chronically undercharging some of the people that I've worked with some one of the reasons we've been able to get such big uplifts with them is because they were chronically undercharging when they first came to us and in my experience this is like 80% of the creative Industries are chronically undercharging this is a great one that I love because when I met will and when we first started working together he was doing kind of 1,500 logos that's kind of the price range he was in, 1500 to 2,000 by the time we finished working together he was doing 15K plus branding projects but he wasn't doing 10 times the work and I really want to stress this the strategy I'm sharing with you isn't just about delivering way more value it's also not about just adding an extra zero on the end of what you do like I'm assuming if you're watching this video you're already good at what you do and you're already delivering value for clients but there's a difference between reality as in how good you are at what you do and perception how that client perceives those things and the reason for that mismatch of reality and perception are these mistakes that I am talking about right now so undercharging is a chronic one and this is the result of that okay so when you get this right when you flip this round and when you do the thing that I'm about to share with you can 10x in this case the price of your work without 10x the workload so let's look at the final

pricing mistake and then I will get to the strategy that will actually allow you to overcome these and really charge what you're worth so if you are making this final pricing mistake then you will attract clients that constantly expect discounts this one is super common not only did they expect discounts but the people who they refer you to also want a discount and so you're kind of Trapped In This cycle and then second to last you feel like you're giving away too much so you feel like you've agreed to something but maybe now you're regretting agreeing to that thing and then finally feeling like you always have to give discounts it's almost like you're stuck on this roller coaster or this cycle of giving people discounts so what is the pricing mistake what am I talking about well you might have guessed it already it maybe too obvious but it's discount these things are created by giving discounts in the first place it's the act of discounting your services that actually creates all of these symptoms and I know that sounds simple but I also see way too many people doing it so I can tell you what to do instead but this is what discounts create as I said we're trapped in this cycle the other thing is when you give a discount clients don't value as you as much because essentially what you're saying is I told you it was this price but really I'm actually happy to accept this price so really this is what it's worth because something is worth what someone is willing to pay for it that's how much it's worth and so if you allow them to pay that for it in their mind that is what it's worth right there's no room for amends when you discount and then it comes back to our previous point of undercharging it's like you charge less than you want and then you might even add a discount on top of that and by the way the difference between discounting and undercharging is when you set your price there because that's what you think is going to win you the project so you don't have to Discount to undercharge discounting is literally saying to a client here's how much it would be and they say oh that's a bit out of our budget and then you lower the price so discounting is where the client is aware that you are lowering the price based on their budget or based on the fact you think that's going to help you win the project undercharging is just you can do that without the client even knowing right so that's the difference between these two so discounting creates that and it really attracts a certain type of client it attracts a type of client who is looking for discounts they are barging Hunters these people okay and so you will attract these people into your experience to your agency so do not

these people to your agency so do not discount last little case study I'll show you when we stopped alesandro from discounting and we showed him the strategy I'm about to share with you he was able to take a client budget from 12K to 25 5K in one conversation and I just love some of these case studies I love when clients share this with us because it gives me so much fulfillment because I knew that he should have been charging 25k in the first place so this is what it can lead to and I just want to show you that this isn't just like a one-off I want to share some of the messages that we get in our community and some of the things that our clients share with us when they start doing this is Will who I just used as an example and this is another win that he was Shar but I just want to point out some things from here it's like their budget went from hey we can only um afford 5K Max to actually we can afford 10K so how are they doing that well I'll tell you in a minute um and the great thing here is we didn't really need to push them on it right so this is a really great strategy because it's not about sales it's not about being a Hard Sell or doing anything that is going to be uncomfortable for you so that's really important quick one from Matt you know we work with clients that have uh a variety of ranges of project sizes Matt's AR typically on the higher end so he won a contract for half a million pounds over 12 months um and the cool thing about the way he implemented this is they got two months of that Revenue up front so they got a chunk of that money up front um other people like Cameron booked a 10K client but the thing I love about this is one of the advantages of the strategy that I'm going to share with you in a sec is that she was able to use some of the things like these storytelling techniques and branding that she'd been studying but she hadn't been able to use it because clients just didn't want to pay for it they didn't see the value in it right but when she framed things in the new way then she was able to do that and actually get paid for some of the things that she really wanted to do so these are just some examples of other advantages of the strategy that I'm going to share with you which helps you to avoid these pricing mistakes so let's talk a little bit about the fix what do we do to flip this on its head so we're not making these pricing mistakes we're attracting the kind of clients we really want to attracted we're charging what we're worth and we're getting the kind of budgets that we really want to get so for this strategy to work there are a couple of things that we really need in place the first thing is the who right you can see that I majored in art um who do we actually want to work with Target and unfortunately it's not enough just to say small businesses or business owners or Brands it's just a bit too vague we need to really zero in on who is our ideal client who is that person that we really want to work with that we really care about that's going to pay us well and that we're going to be able to get a great result for if we don't know this the strategy that I'm going to share becomes harder and harder to implement so the first thing is who do we want to help the second thing is we need to know where are they now right so where is the now and I've done this in red because the thing about the now that we want to get really clear on is what's the pain or what's the frustration or what's the challenge that they are currently facing and we need to get really clear on this not or they don't have a great website or their branding is off or they don't use video well that's not the thing that's actually going on the important part of identifying the pain the frustration where they are right now is it must be languaged in their terms so it must be something that when you say that they identify with it and if you the question that's coming to your mind right now is how do we find that out the answer to that is through conversations go and speak to those people go and research if you have to look on Facebook groups ask friends like whatever you have to do to find out that information it should be something they're saying rather than something that you see really important so we want to know where they are now what's their pain then we really want to get clear on where they want to be the future no pun intended what are they trying to get to and so the pain is the pleasure or the desire like the desired State now this is kind of business 101 but it really is important before we look at this next piece of the strategy which is the fix to all of these pricing pieces if you don't get this right the strategy I'm going to share will not work with for you and for your business okay so we need to establish this who do you want to help or who are you looking to help where are they now what are they frustrated with what annoys them where do they want to be what is their desired state so the concept is that we first want to focus on the outcome the desire the future state where do they want to be that's the first thing we're really going to think about and get clear on once we are clear on that we want to think about how we can get them as close as possible to that outcome and this is what I talk

about with your process or unpacking your intellectual property how do you actually get your clients from where they are now to where they are trying to get to what is the process and one of the best questions that I ask when clients are trying to figure this out is if you only got paid when you delivered that outcome for your clients what are all of the things that you would need to do to feel confident that you were going to get paid and that question allows us to take a little bit of responsibility for that outcome it allows us to think like what are all the things that we would need in place both from their end out and from our end in order to get them as close as possible to that outcome now I know that we can never guarantee anything an outcome but we can get really good at getting people as close as possible or getting people to that outcome consistently and that's all we really want to do as creative service providers we want to take the focus off of ourselves and what we offer branding design illustration whatever it is and put it onto the client and what they want so how do we get them there the second part is then how we present that process and this is where packages come in so I really want you to think about instead of selling a service we're selling a product so we're selling an outcome this is an example I went through and asked some of my clients if I could use their packages as an example but unfortunately due to confidentiality I couldn't do that here's an example of something I just pulled off online and this really shows how you could package that process and this is kind of different tiers depending on what the outcome is and what that person wants to achieve so these things are really based on outcomes like what are you trying to get rather than what are we doing in terms of hours or manp power or whatever else and so packaging our services in this way is one of the most powerful ways to attract high value clients that will pay you what you want and more importantly allow you to Showcase and demonstrate how you get those outcomes for people so once we've done that then we can really start thinking about what do we want to charge for this and we want to think about that in the context of the outcome that we're getting for that client so the big idea here is that clients are really buying a result and the better we get as creatives at delivering that result the more money we can charge and the bigger the budgets clients will have and I learned from Daniel Priestley early on that if you want to charge a lot of money you have to solve a big problem so the bigger the problem the bigger the transformation from A to B the more money you will be able to charge for that so think about the kind of clients that really have decent Siz problems they have some of the things in place that they need in order for you to help them and you get excited about solving that problem and you know that you have the ability and the skill to solve that problem and then package that up present that in a way that is based on the outcome that they're getting not on the process that you do internally like they don't care about the web design the illustration the animation they care about what that can potentially do for them so I said at

the beginning that I would give fixes for these specific mistakes and I'm a man that is true to my word so just to summarize instead of hourly billing we want to build based on value okay what is it worth to the client not how much time are we spending on it and if you don't know that then you need to have more conversations and you need to ask better questions rather than undercharging we want to price accordingly to the outcome right so rather than just saying oh I think this is what it is under budget we want to price to the outcome and this is one of the best ways to handle that objection this is a lot of money or this is too expensive is around this because if you are anchored to the outcome and what that is worth the value that is for the client then it's a really simple question back to that person it's like I hear you I understand this feels like a lot of money to you I'm curious a lot of money compared to what right and we want to make sure we're comparing it to the outcome not to what they think an hour of your time is worth or what Joe down the road charges for his Services right expensive compared to what so we want to Anchor this on the outcome so instead of undercharging we want to price for the outcome and then instead of giving discounts it would have made more sense if I did these in red and these in green but hindsight is a wonderful thing instead of giv discounts we want to give bonuses so instead of taking things away add things on think about something that is easy for you to deliver that wouldn't cause too much pain or that wouldn't take too much time or additional budget but that would add some value for the client right what's a nice little bonus that you could throw in that is really nice for the client but doesn't really cost you much so for example one of our clients used a strategy day as a bonus they threw in a strategy day where they just did a half day over Zoom it was half a day of their time not a crazy amount and it gave the client loads and loads of value because they got really clear on their mission on their Vision on their goals now that might be part of your process already but there's nothing to stop you throwing that in as a bonus right so give bonuses not discounts so they are the three most common pricing mistakes that I see that prevent agency owners Freelancers creative business owners from really charging what they're worth and attracting big budget clients I'd love to know in the comments which one of these are you making maybe it's all three so one final thing I want to

leave you with is this idea that I've discovered recently I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on courses coaches seminars some were amazing some double triped my business some didn't work at all and I've realized that if you want to take these insights that I'm sharing with you in this video and turn them into income there are three things that you need that you must have the first one is the strategy and I've just given you that right so you've got that you can check that box the other two thing that most people don't get is they don't get support and from the right people either people that have been there and done that before or people that are very good at guiding them through that strategy so maybe there's a part of the strategy you didn't quite understand or maybe you've tried part of this already and it didn't quite work for you there's probably some nuances that are specific to your situation that you just need some support or some guidance on so the second thing you really need to get is some support from somebody who understands the strategy and this the third thing is the system and this is crucial most people don't have the systems to actually track and Implement these processes so as an example in relation to what we just did most people don't know what their average project value is they haven't been measuring that they haven't had a system that tells them that so when we package their services when we do all the things that I've just shared with you and then we say well what's your average project value now they don't have anything to compare it to okay so they don't have the system to track the progress to know what's working what's not working maybe they present the offer and packages to people but some people say no but they don't know how many people have said no so they're not tracking the percentage of sales that they're making so we really need to make sure that we have the systems in place to be able to track and implement the strategy if you'd like

some help with this I currently do have three coaching spaces left for agencies or Freelancers doing 10K and above that want to double or triple or even maybe 10x their prices and attract higher value clients I will put a link in the description below if you would like to apply for one of those spaces if you got value from this video please let me know in the comments and don't forget to subscribe to this channel already if you're not subscribed it is one of the best channels out there for Creative business advice my name is Matt essim thanks for watching this video I hope you got some value