As most of you know, I am not a fan of hourly billing. In fact, I only recommend you only charge clients based upon a billable hourly rate when you provide services that cannot be completed under a fixed bid agreement. These types of services include, but are not limited...
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Getting paid can sometimes be a traumatic experience for a freelancer or a small business. Typically, we email invoices to our clients and they push them through their accounts payable system. If your client is a small business, getting paid on time often has everything to do with whether they...
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Those of you who follow my content, have read my pricing book, or taken my course, will be familiar with my pricing methodology. In very brief summary, I recommend pricing your creative work based on three variables: Production Cost (i.e. How much does it cost you to produce the work?) Market Value (i.e....
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Niching is a frequent dilemma for so many business owners. How do you choose a niche? How deep should you go? What if your niche doesn’t work? How do I start saying “no” to clients outside my niche? All of these questions seem to regularly hit my inbox. Niching is…
Walking through the aisles of your local supermarket, you will find plenty of products with odd number prices: a gallon of milk for $2.99, a loaf of fresh baked bread for $3.99, or perhaps a small bag of chips for $1.99. For decades, products have been priced this way based...
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“We decided to go with another agency,” once again we weren’t selected for the project. “Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!! We thought we had the project in the bag. Why were we not chosen?” Every freelance designer or agency owner has been there, and probably more than once. The reality is that, as the...
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When I started freelancing, way back in 2002, I charged some clients hourly when they should have been fixed bid. And vice versa, some clients in hourly engagements were given a fixed price. Well, I learned my lesson over time and the truth is that every project that can be...
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"The client's management team finally saw the design work and they hated everything! What do I do?" If you haven't had this happen to you in your creative business yet, be patient, it will probably happen at some point. Here is a specific situation that a creative freelancer asked me...
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Hands down, no doubt, the most common business mistake creative entrepreneurs (and almost all entrepreneurs) make is not taking time to track and understand the metrics of their business. The true language of business is numbers...data. Numbers can tell you where your business is today. Numbers can predict the future...
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THE POWER OF EMPATHY IN BUSINESS // Michael Janda and Mario Quezada discuss the power of empathy in business. Understanding the perspective of your client, their customer, your employees and even your own position is critical to your success in any business endeavor.