i’ve talked to many young freelancers about how to elevate the kind of work they get and the kind of clients they get. 90% of the advice is to raise their fees/prices. once you’ve established that you do good work, there’s no value in doing annoying work for cheap people. they’ll nitpick you for every cent you charge, complain that something isn’t perfect, even though they’ve haggled you down to a rock bottom price, and constantly try to make changes to what they want.
so take a customer who pays you $25/hr and work 100 hours and be miserable doing crappy jobs. or charge $50/hr, dump the bozos, keep the good clients and work 50 hours. same money at the end of the day.
that leaves you more time for yourself or more time to go find more of those $50/hr clients. or maybe to find some $75/hr clients.
obviously it’s not quite that simple, but it’s also not as far from reality as people like to think. they’re just scared to dump the high volume, low profit customers because it’s income.
Very well said. I see this in wood working forums all the time. “I sell these at the flee market for $25” leave the flee market, work on polish and charge $125 for them! Sell half as many and still make more money.
LOL - my dad used to tell a story about how he and my uncle Chester both bought a bunch of drums to sell at the Pow Wows. Couple months after they bought them, they bumped into each other and compared notes, neither of them had sold any. So dad decided to knock the price down. That didn’t help much, so he marked them down again. Still no action.
A few months later, he and Chester see each other at another Pow Wow. My dad is still lugging around a bunch of drums, while Chester is sold out. His secret? Instead of lowering the price, he doubled it.
Sorry for the little storytelling tangent. Just a funny way to illustrate the point of perceived value
That is the the real issue that has plagued me from the first. If you say you are the finest artist ever, you can come off as a crazy person, but if someone else says so, even your spouse, somehow that is different. Toss in a variation of good cop bad cop and the results are amazing.
The basic structure of the sale is at heart schizophrenic. In one case you want to do the best the customer wants for the best deal possible, and on the other it is a privilege for them to actually hire you and they should of course be willing to pay for that privilege. Too much of either side and you are working for nothing or not working at all. Break that into two people and each can be the extreme.
Your customer of course has the same problem in reverse and again as two people haggling the results are stunning. I watched some diamond dealers in full form as the man and wife were almost yelling at each other and the diamond merchant had to almost give away his diamonds to provide a solution to their argument!
The dynamics between flimflam and genuine artistry has always been a tough call and never one I am co.mefortable with.
