» A word of advice, part 5: price yourself right
Posted by Kasper Tidemann on Sunday 26th of December 2010 02:42:17 AM
The fifth installment in this series of posts is about pricing yourself right. Doing business and sales, you will experience people wanting to bargain, wanting to squeeze as much as possible out of their pennies, potentially leaving you with deals that barely make ends meet.
The fifth word of advice is: if you really want to be successful, you have to price yourself right.
Allow me to put forward a bit of a bold disposition: clients can be divided into two categories, they can either be eagles or vultures. Eagles soar high in the sky, they see the big picture and know exactly when to strike. On the other hand, vultures aim low, preying at whatever easy target they can find.
If you work as a consulant in some form, be it as a web developer, designer, programmer or whatever, you will run into people who’ll ask for your services and expect for your assistance to be free of charge because, hey, fiddling with graphics or coding stuff is your hobby, right? I mean, it’s your thing, so answering calls and helping out inserting clipart icons into a Microsoft Word document in the middle of the night is no problem, right? Come on, it’ll only take 5 minutes. Okay, maybe 30 minutes, because there’s this virus that keeps making popups appear, and you’re into the whole computers thing, right, so you’ll get it done, right? Free of charge, of course, I mean, it’ll only take 30, well, 45 minutes perhaps, but hey, come on, it’s your hobby, you’ll get it done easily.
These people are vultures, and what you want is to avoid these people at all costs in order to attract the eagles, the clients that see the big picture and acknowledge the value that your work constitutes — and thus, clients who’ll pay what it costs to reap the benefits of your work.
As a new-comer to business, pricing yourself right is an important step to take, because it will seem to hinder you in your endeavors at first. Pricing yourself right means saying goodbye to a good deal of potential business here and now, because you say no to developing a full-blown web site for $200 and because you say no to creating a shiny new logo for $50. As you turn this type of business down, always remember that what you’re really doing is refusing to be treated like dirt, because you refuse to price yourself like dirt.
Pricing yourself right should be a balance between 1) the extent of the actual job needed to get done and 2) the scope of the business relation between you and the client. If the client has a limited budget, but more work for you once the job is done, find a price that matches this relation. And always make sure to price yourself in a way that allows for your full ambition on behalf of the client to be realized.
Pricing yourself right means saying yes to the right type of clients. If you price yourself like quality, you will be treated like quality and you will produce quality. Everybody wins!
Be dedicated, find the right people to work with, think like a winner, stick to your agenda, price yourself right, and you will be a success.
