Kris: Hello and welcome to Design and Prosper episode 127. Today we are running through seven key things that we suspect are likely to be missing from your design estimates. These are the things that will impact your profit margins and bottom line. Let’s chat about this.

[Intro Music]

Kris: Hey everybody.

Donna: Hello, hello. Okay. So this is such a cool podcast. What we are going to share here, we want you to implement immediately. If you are missing these things from your cost estimates, we talk all the time with designers on the daily. And we see that a lot of what designers do to service their clients. You’re not charged for.

Kris: They’re not charging for it.

Donna: Yeah, that comes so easily to me. I didn’t think I could charge for that. Oh I just add that in. That’s just part of the service.

Kris: There’s so many tasks that we do as designers that are, that we just overlook and we take for granted just because we’re good at it, or it’s just part of it, like you said,

Donna: Yeah, that happened too easily. Can’t charge for that.

Kris: Yeah. But this stuff is your secret sauce. This is the special skills and knowledge that your clients are relying on you to do because they can’t do it themselves.

Donna: They can’t do it. That’s the key right there. It comes easily to you because it is your skillset. It is your secret sauce. You have learned that skill or you have that skill that you have worked on and crafted over time for it to be exceptional. And that’s what you’re being paid for. And it comes easily and quickly and swiftly to you, which is a chargeable service. Your clients can’t do that thing. It doesn’t come easily to them. They don’t know how, and it is something that they are likely to highly value because they can’t do it.

Kris: Yeah, they’re relying on you to do the job and to do it well, and they can’t do it themselves. And we’re just amazed at what designers are factoring into their quotes. And it’s no wonder that designers are feeling overworked and are working really long hours and then their hourly rate is poo and they just feel awful and this is no wonder, because there’s lots of things they’re busying themselves with, busy, busy, busy, doing, doing, and they’re not charging for it.

And it’s an essential part of the job. It’s not something that you can just like go, Oh, well I’ll skip that Because it’s not important. It is actually important. It’s essential. It’s part of the process, but you’re not charging for it.

Donna: Designers out there are leaving so much money on the table. They are not capitalizing on their skill set and understanding the value of their skill set. They’re not charging for these services and often they’re just blending and merging all of the bits and pieces together and not realizing that each element is a little bit separate and that needs to be charged for.

So in this episode, we want to run through seven things. There are many, but we’ve distilled it down to seven things that we are betting you are leaving out of your quotes and then therefore out of your back pocket. You are missing out on that little bit of profit margin because you are not charging for all of these things.

Kris: So the first thing that we see missing from design costings is client meetings and briefings.

Donna: Yes.

Kris: This stuff takes time.

Donna: So much time.

Kris: And taking a good brief is a skill and a strategy because a design project is only ever going to be as good as its design brief, right? It takes a skilled designer to be able to eke out all that information and it takes time.

Donna: Yeah, absolutely. And you have crafted questions to eke that information out. That’s your intellectual property. Your process is your intellectual property. You know the right questions to ask to get the right intel in order to respond to the brief in the right way. Often we’ll sit with a client, we’ll take a brief and they’ll go, Oh wow, what a great question. I hadn’t thought of my business in that light, or that’s such a good question. I hadn’t considered that. There’s a reason for that. That’s our secret sauce. We have crafted a brief in order to sit and take that brief with a client and get that information from them. It’s our job, it’s our business to know the answers to these questions that will inform our creative process.It’s a big part of the process.

Kris: And not charging for presentation meetings, even beyond the briefing meetings, like charging for those meetings that you have with your client to gather Intel and have a thorough understanding of the project and then to sell the concept. It’s all part of the project. It’s all a necessary, essential part of the process.

Donna: Yes, absolutely. Now, second thing missing, number two, brand strategy and market research.

Kris: Yeah, so many designers are doing this for their clients and they’re not charging for it.

Donna: Yeah.

Kris: They’re just like, Oh, this is just part of the process. This is just what I do. It takes so much skill and it takes a lot of time to do this.

Donna: Yeah, absolutely. Or they might charge for a little bit. When in actual fact it takes three hours or four hours and it should take you that long if you’re doing a deep dive with divergent research. It really should take you that amount of time. And it’s almost like you are apologetically throwing in a token 30 minutes.

Kris: Yeah, I’m sorry I had to do a bit of research on your project to make it really amazing.

Donna: yeah, exactly.

Kris: gosh, and we recommend like pulling it out in your design proposal, like making a bit of a song and dance about it. You know, it’s like, this is really important. I’m doing the brand strategy. I’m doing market research. We’re not saying here, just, just a little side note. We’re not saying here to tell your clients in the quote, like to have a blow by blow of like the hours you are spending on all these elements. But you can describe it in the description. This is part of the process. This is what I’m doing. And here’s the total. Here’s the one total for that.

Donna: I love that you reminded everybody of that, Kris. We don’t itemize our proposals, but we are saying all of these should be included. Well done. Good to bring that one out.

Kris: So another thing missing from your design costings is price per element. Right? So this can be per page for long document design, or it might be per side for packaging, or it might be, you know, even per page. Per social media graphics for a whole suite of social media graphics. I think a lot of designers just lump it all in together. They cross their fingers, they pluck a figure out of the air and go, I hope that I’m covering the amount of time it will cost for a 20 page document or a 50 page document, or for all these little elements that I’m designing for a package design or whatever, but they are not being strategic about it and they’re not breaking it down enough. And that’s the key. You’ve got to break all these things down.

Donna: I am nodding and agreeing and going, break it down. Even like with a collateral suite for a bigger business, you might have you know, 20 staff. There’s 20 business cards. That’s 20 applications, 20 lots of finished art, 20 lots of proof checks, all of that type of thing. These have to be accounted for. You might do a tea range for packaging. You’ll have 15 types of tea. Each type has to be considered, that type of thing.

There’s elements for each one that is going to be on repeat in terms of time, the time it takes for the checks and things like that. So, we’re really noticing that when we share our cost estimate calculator with our one to one clients or the academy students, they’re like blown away by this per element part of the costing. They’re like, wow, I charge for that once. And they’re literally missing out on hundreds of dollars, leaving that right on the table there, just doing it for free.

Kris: Sometimes thousands.

Donna: Exactly, yeah. And it’s like, don’t do work for free, beautiful people, don’t give away all of that work for free. That’s essentially what you’re doing when you don’t charge for it.

Kris: And I think when Our designers use the easy breezy cost estimate calculator for the first time they actually get a bit scared at the result, like the total, but that is the true cost of the project. They haven’t been quoting the true cost of the project previously. And now, guess what? They’re really struggling because, and that’s why they come to us, because they’re like, help, I’m drowning here. It’s not working. This business model is not working. Why is it not working? And it’s because you’re not covering all your bases here.

And just another little side note, you know, we’ve, we’ve talked about pricing quite a bit. We don’t just price per hour. We do add value to the overall project, like a percentage and a complexity factor.

We have a value factor and a complexity factor that we add in at the end, but we do believe that you need to work out all the elements and how long it’s going to take you because otherwise it’s guesswork. It’s too risky and designers are going to low ball. They’re going to go low.

Donna: Yeah. There’s been so many times when we’ll put an estimate together and we’ll go, Oh, Better pull that back a bit. No, better pull that back a bit. But when you’re using a sophisticated estimate calculator like ours, you can see when you pull back, you’re allowing yourself five minutes on certain tasks.

That’s what that lower price means. You are only allowing yourself bare moments on projects. And when you realize you are not being paid, you’re literally doing work for free. That’s when you go, okay, I have to have to start talking about the transformation. So Kris was saying, the value factor we add on the value factor, it’s the transformation or complexity factor, which is the value. Same, same. But we need to base it on our understanding of how long things take us. So that’s why we like to track our time on projects, understand the true impact of how long things take us so that we can quote with accuracy. So if you’re not doing this out there, beautiful designers, track your time, make sure you’re basing your estimates on fact, how long things actually take you.

Kris: And take you as an individual, not another designer you’re comparing yourself to. You. Because maybe you are slower, maybe you are quicker, but whatever the case, that is the time that you need to get the results that you need, and it’s individual and it’s different for everybody.

Donna: Yeah, yeah. So, definitely, we want you to make sure that you are pricing per element, you are really aware of how long things take you, and you’re not leaving anything on the table there.

Kris: Another one. Another thing another thing you’re missing from your design costing could potentially be presentation prep. Right? So these are the rationales like doing a rationale for why you have made all your beautiful decisions, mock ups, beautiful presentation visuals, slide decks, all the things. Not including this in your price is going to set you up for failure. You’ll be wondering why you’re working all hours, but not making good money.

Donna: Yeah, absolutely.

Kris: This stuff takes time.

Donna: It takes time. This stuff can be systemised, mind you, for efficiencies, but at the end of the day, it still takes time, and you need to be charging for that. You wouldn’t be sitting there creating that presentation unless that client needed you to. You’re not doing this work for free. Don’t work for free. I think that’s the bottom line on all of this.

Okay, another one. The fifth thing we believe could be missing from your cost estimating is colour selection. It’s so time consuming and so essential for ensuring the end result is amazing. It’s so essential.

Kris: We were actually talking about this in the academy this morning. You know, you’ve got to get all the color codes, correct. You’ve got to pick your Pantone colors. You’ve got to pick your uncoated Pantone colors, your coated Pantone colors, your, your screen colors, your,

Donna: Hex Codes.

Kris: All the things. And it takes time to align them all so that they’re all beautifully matched. Gosh, it takes time. It really does. You have to allocate this in your quote.

Donna: Yeah, absolutely. Make sure you do. Another one, number six. Production management. This is huge. We’ve had people confess to us they’re doing this for, for free, completely for free.

Kris: Gathering all the quotes.

Donna: Oh my gosh. And the amount of knowledge that this requires to manage production is huge. It’s a skillset that your clients don’t have. Otherwise I wouldn’t be asking you to do it, to really be across it, to understand it. It’s essential to the outcome. The end goal is this beautifully printed collateral piece that needs to be a match to the brand colors and the whole integrity of that brand. And if a ball gets dropped during that process, you could end up with rubbish. You really can. And it’s such a shame that the investment of whatever the client has invested in, the time that you’ve invested all falls apart.

Because production management hasn’t been taken care of. So if you come to the party and do that job, you need to be paid for that. So it’s not going to fall apart at the seams if you’re at the helm, if you’re doing it, if you’re taking care of the quotes, if you’re taking care of the proofing, if you’re taking care of the press check, that needs to be paid for.

Kris: Yeah. And sometimes it takes a little while to find the right supplier for a project. And if you haven’t allocated that in the quote, then whose shoulders is that falling on? That’s your time, your precious time. And that’s what we want you to understand. Your time is valuable. Your time is precious. For example, if you quote on some signage and then you don’t allocate production management or you don’t quote on it, you don’t reference it. And then you’re just stuck with it. It’s like, okay, I’ve got to find somebody to realize my vision and that’s not as easy as I thought. And now I’ve got to find this signage manufacturer and this one, and I’ve got to get quotes. And then I’ve got to then put it all together in a way that makes sense for the client to understand. And all this stuff takes time, which needs to be charged for.

Donna: Yes, absolutely. You could do it. You do all of these things, as long as you’re being Ha ha ha, yep.

That’s right. And the final one that we believe may be missing from your estimate. In fact, we’re pretty confident that this one’s missing from most designers estimates, are the right amount of revisions. Allowing for the right amount of revisions.

Kris: And allowing for the time that it might take, you know, it’s likely that changes can occur just even minor changes, even with proofing and that sort of thing. And of course we, we restrict it in our estimate process. Like in our proposal process, we’re going to make sure that we, we don’t have it open ended. We make sure that we have revision control or version control. But yeah, the true scope of edits can be definitely underestimated.

Donna: Absolutely. And we want to say that even if you allow for two revisions, two, as a part of the offering, and the client signs off on that, and they’re pushing it over and they’re wanting more and they’re wanting more and they’re pushing, pushing, it’s okay for you to say, we’ve met the limit. We had two revisions allocated, we’re going past that now and popping in a subcontract and getting paid for that. So it’s okay if you think you’ve got an idea of how many revisions are going to be required, for you to then step in and say afterwards, well there were more. And so you need to pay for them.

Don’t just suck it up. Don’t just absorb it. Because often when we do a revision, we feel like there’s a little bit of guilt or blame that there’s a problem that needs to be fixed, that it wasn’t quite right. And therefore, is that my fault as the designer? So we take a little bit of blame when most times it’s a directive from the client and needs to be charged for.

Kris: So, that brings us to the end of the seven things that we suspect might be missing from your design costimate. Costimate!

Donna: Costimate. I love that. It’s a nice new word. Yeah!

Kris: So with your costimates, please make sure that you are allocating these things and we have a tool called the Easy Breezy Cost Estimate Calculator.

It truly makes it easy. to price your work. It has all the categories, all the things that magically adds everything up. Even if you have like multiple pages, there’s a version in there. We have three different versions within the estimate calculator. We have one for branding. We have one for websites. We have one that is a multi purpose estimate which is for your multiple page documents and the packaging and the more complex, tricky kind of quotes.

And it is a game changer. And it’s not just us saying this, like we created it with so much intention and desire for it to make lives easier for designers. And Emma, who is part of the Academy and she’s from the concept distillery. She said of our pricing calculator, the cost estimator alone has saved my business.

Donna: So cool.

Kris: It seriously is a very powerful tool and it will give you so much insight into what you should be charging, what you, what you must charge. And when you use a tool like this, it becomes undeniable. It’s like, Oh, okay. This is the price. It’s just matter of fact, this is the price. This is what it has to be. I’ve worked it out. This is the calculation. I can’t cut out any more stuff. Like this is what I do for the client. We actually have this estimating calculator as part of the academy, but we also have it as part of a pricing workshop where you get the calculator as well, which you can access via our shop on our website.
So head to designandprosper.co/shop, and you will find that available for you to access immediately. So get instant access to the training and we run through some complex design projects so that you can see it in action. And it’s just an incredible tool. We would just love you to this in your toolkit.

Donna: Yeah, absolutely. There will be things that you find in the cost estimate calculator that we are pretty certain you probably are not charging for and it’ll be mind blowing for you. And you can adapt it as well. You can add things in if you’ve got a bespoke service or if you’re doing things a certain way or in photography or illustration, you can adapt it and add things in. So it’s a brilliant tool.

Kris: Yes! All right, everybody. So, make sure you’re adding those things to your estimates. Be brave with it. It’s going to take bravery. It will. It will take courage to charge what you really need to be charging. All right. Until next time,

Donna: Until next time, Bye.

Kris: Bye!