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 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!
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!
Here’s why:
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.
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!
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.
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!!
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.
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!
You can totally figure our your pricing and processes on your own if you want to… it’s just that figuring it out as you go is a long, hard, expensive road! Or, you can let us help you, starting with my free Pricing Mindset Workshop!
It’s a totally free training where we dive a little bit deeper into some of the places where people’s web design businesses break down and what to do instead!
After watching you’ll:
- Know exactly how much you need to charge to make a full-time living as a web designer.
- Understand how to apply the Rule of 10 to figure out the true value of a website to your clients.
- Have an upgraded belief system around all the reasons you think you can’t charge that much, you know… things like “I need more experience… I’m self-taught… my clients can’t afford to pay more…”
- Be aware of the 3 most common places web design businesses break down and leak time and money (and what to do to prevent or fix it).
In the Pricing Mindset Workshop, we talk about all of the mindset stuff that keeps you undercharging, overdelivering, not doing outreach, not booking clients, working for free, working for way too little, and fix that…
….because you don’t even know how valuable you are. You don’t even know how many clients out there need you to be charging sustainably so that you can serve them at the level that they deserve to be served.
Go sign up for that free training now!
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.
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.
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?
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.
If this sounds like you, please sign up to watch the replay of our Web Designer Pricing Mindset Workshop!
We are going to help you figure out exactly what you need to charge specifically to have a sustainable & profitable web design business. We are going to cover some of the mindset stuff that keeps you from actually charging that number.
Once I help you figure out that number and then you have massive sticker shock, we’re going to help you fix the mindset so that you believe that you can charge that. And then we’re going to talk about all the places where your web design business breaks down and you end up leaking money and leaving money on the table and not being as profitable and efficient and sustainable as you could be if you had all of those things fixed.
If you don’t fix this busted belief, you’ll never get to the point where you finally decide that you’re good enough to charge as much as you should be charging!
