Waiting to Raise Your Prices for Web Design? Read This First.
If you are a web designer who has ever thought, “I'm gonna wait until I've worked with enough web design clients and everything's perfect and my process is dialed in and I've got all of this experience to raise my prices…”
That belief is the exact opposite of how I want you to be thinking.
It’s a belief that is hurting you and causing you to leave so much money on the table!
I’m so, so passionate about this topic, which is why I made this video and wrote this blog post for you!
Why New Designers Default to Undercharging
Right around the time I went live on this topic and wrote this blog post, I literally had four people either email me, DM me or comment on a Facebook post and say,
- “I'm going to do some low-priced work to start off my business and then once I've built up a portfolio, I’ll raise my prices.”
- “I’m going to do some low-priced work to start off my business and then once I have my processes down, I’ll raise my prices.”
- “Once I finally feel more confident, then I will raise my prices.”
The belief that you have to wait until some magical day in the future when you have everything perfect and YOU are perfect before you can raise your prices is what’s keeping you hustling and broke!
The Truth About What You’re Really Charging For
You're making your price all about you, your experience, your perception of the value of your skills – and that is not what the value of a website is!
The value of a website is how valuable it is to your client to actually have, and what kind of results and how much money and what kind of outcomes the client is able to get from using the website that you built for them.
You are doing yourself a disservice when you undercharge simply because you haven’t done it for a paying client before, or you don’t have a process figured out, or you think you don’t know all there is to know yet.
Yes, You Need Skills — But Not Perfection
Now, if you have never built a website before, if you have no web design skills, you absolutely have to go learn that, right? You have to know how to actually build a website. I’m not advocating that you market yourself as a web designer when you’ve literally never done it before.
However, if you know how to build a website, and you know how to build the kind of website that your client needs in order to get results in their business, then it does not matter if it's the first time you did it, or the hundredth time you did it, in the end, it's still worth the same amount to your client!
Your Price Should Reflect Client Results
Think about it:
As a web designer, it’s your job to know how to build a website that empowers your ideal client to create whatever result they want in their business.
As a client, it’s their job to understand their business model and explain it to you so that you can deliver a website that allows them to create their own results.
The value of the website to the client is the exact same whether your process sucks or not, whether it took you 3 weeks or 3 months, whether it’s the first time you’ve built this kind of a website or the 15th time.
Better Processes Help You Work Less, Not Charge Less
Of course, we also want solid processes so that we can take care of our clients. We want them to have a good experience. But that good experience isn’t just for them, it’s for you too! So you can start on time, get paid on time, close the project on time and you can take another client on time.
The problem that I see is that web designers (especially new ones) make their price all about them and how many times that they've done it before… and they think that because their process isn't smooth enough, or that they don't know how to manage clients, that the value of the website to the client is less.
And it's not!!
Stop Waiting to Be “Good Enough”
Please, please, please stop waiting until you think you’re perfect to raise your prices for web design!
Yes, it’s true that the more dialed in your processes are and the more skilled you are at managing your clients that your projects will go faster and smoother and that just means that you can make even MORE money because you can take on more premium clients (or you can just work less and make more money, which is awesome too)!
The opportunity here is not to undercharge until you think you’re good enough, it’s to charge sustainably, based on the value of the website to your client, and then GET PAID as you work on your processes so that from the very first moment you work on your very first client.
Client Problems Are Business Problems — Not Personal Failures
Now, your web design business does get exponentially easier and more profitable when you have a process that's going to prevent clients from not getting you their content on time, prevent scope creep, and that'll prepare you for the uncomfortable conversations that you'll inevitably have with every client and make them result in a win-win.
So let me ask you this:
Do you really want to waste time going through the trial and error of every weird web design client situation that's ever going to go wrong and fix it after it happens?
Because I don't care how talented you are at web design, when you throw a client into the mix, that changes everything!
What If You Had a System That Actually Worked?
What if you had a tried-and-true process to move your web design clients from consultation all the way to closing the sale?
What we do in our program is give you the whole entire process for all the points where we know the web design business breaks down because of your client. We give you the process to head off the breakdowns, and we give you the process to fix it and pull things back on track if they’ve gotten off track.
You Deserve to Charge for the *Whole* Experience
One of the things that breaks my heart is when I see web designers thinking that because they're new the value of what they create is less just because they’re not skilled in managing projects and clients.
It makes no sense to me because it doesn't matter if someone who's done it 50 times before is doing it, or you're doing it for the first time, it does not mean it's worth any less to the client.
When you hold yourself back from charging sustainably just because you’re new or you don’t have solid processes, you also hold yourself back from investing in help and mentorship and training and all of the things that could help you go so much farther, so much faster.
Stop Playing Whack-a-Mole With Your Clients
I don't know why we all think that we have to reinvent the wheel every single time!!
We think, “Oh, it's my business. I must create all of these processes from scratch. I must go through all the pain myself. I must have every bad experience happen to me so that for the next client I can fix it and prevent it from happening….”
It's like whack-a-mole – you get one client that does something sideways so you try to fix that for the next time, but then the next client does something completely different sideways.
What if you knew ahead of time all the things that could go wrong AND had a plan to fix them before they even went wrong?
The Real Cost of Undercharging
Otherwise, you find yourself in this position where you undercharged for a site, you don't have a good process in place, the project drags out forever and now something that was going to take you one month ends up taking six.
And for those six months, you haven't booked your next client. Or if you do book another client, you undercharge because you still feel like your process isn’t good enough, and the same thing happens over and over.
Before you know it, a year has gone by and you're making 10 times less than you could have made had you just not undercharged and fixed the process problem.
It's a process problem. It's NOT a YOU problem. And that’s why waiting to raise your prices is a mistake. You deserve to get paid for the work that you do. You deserve to get paid for the outcome that you deliver to the client. You deserve to get paid for dealing with the whole process, beginning to end, of dealing with them. If they're not cooperating, you deserve to get paid for the work that you do to babysit them and get them cooperating again. Those things are part of your price and don't undervalue yourself just because you haven't done it before.
Join the Free Profitable Web Design Business Roadmap Training
If this sounds like you, your next step is to sign up for our Profitable Web Design Business Roadmap Training.
We’ll help you figure out exactly what you need to charge to build a sustainable and profitable web design business — and more importantly, how to actually believe that you can charge it.
We’ll also walk you through all the places where most web design businesses break down and show you how to stop leaving money (and time) on the table.
