hey everybody we are alive super super excited to be here with you for the second part of this series about getting started with freelancing so the other day we did part one which was so successful it already got people so much results I can see in the chat right now Tyreke he is so excited to see that you said you already took action and within one day got a client so happy there were a lot of people who were seeing results by taking action on the stuff on the first part if you didn't see it we'll link to it below this video but today we're gonna talk about what you did after you hustled you got yourself a client and now you need to take it to the next level you need to talk to them about money so that's what we're gonna discuss today we're gonna talk about pricing proposals negotiation there's gonna be so much good stuff on today's stream I'm not looking at the comments right now as I'm you know I'll do the presentation for you but alex is handling the comments if you have questions he's gonna put them out in a doc and at the end we're probably gonna be here for one hour and after I'll do the presentation we'll do some Q&A so you can drop the comments or questions over there and we'll get to some of them at the end so I hope you're excited because I'm gonna drop tons of knowledge on you peeps so make sure you're taking notes there's gonna be a lot of stuff here all right let me jump into my presentation and we'll get started I'm super excited are you excited if you're excited put in the chat like woo yes I'm excited where you're from in the world yeah let me know what's going on with you in the meanwhile let me get started as I said on today's agenda I'm gonna talk pricing I'm gonna talk ago she ation and we're gonna talk proposals now the first question that you'll get when you have somebody interested a lot of times it was gonna be so how much do you charge for whatever it is that you're doing how much for a logo how much for a website so how much is it and this is where most new freelancers get stuck because they're not really sure what to say and at that point you they're ridiculously undercharging themselves and not charging enough and so let's talk about money how to come up with the right price everybody's asking other designers so how much do you charge because they're true or googling or trying to figure out like what's what do other people charge as if it matters it does matter to know these kind of market rates but I want to give you kind of a different framework that's gonna be super practical about how you're gonna think about your prices okay and by the way just remember if you saw the first part you're gonna start small and you're gonna you know you're gonna make moves to increase and grow as you go along you're probably not gonna if this is your first project you're not gonna charge ten thousand dollars now that we got this off let's talk about what price you should start with and how to increase that along the way so the the biggest mistake people make is that they make the assumption that you know a price is a function of how long it took to make something right because you're gonna say a price well this cost like $1,000 and there and you think that the respondent sometimes may be from certain clients the respond can be something like what you charge ten thousand dollars for that like how but you can do that in an hour or something like that to which there are a lot of answers right but I just want to explain why this is kind of a false logic because let's let's assume that you know doing something takes me fifty hours all right designing a logo is gonna take me 15 hours 50 hours all right so as I go along and I do this for a year after a year after a year I get better at it and instead of 50 hours it takes me 30 hours then it takes me 20 hours now the question is should I actually drop my prices as I get better and of course the answer is no you should actually charge more if you can do it faster there's a joke that basically I don't remember it's like Picasso goes to the park he has a woman says hey can you draw my portrait he's like sketching up something in like a second gives it to her and tells her that's $1,000 and he's like what but you only worked on this like 10 seconds it took you 10 seconds to make and he said yes but it took me years to be able to do that in 10 seconds and that's that's basically shows you that the function of time doesn't mean anything and so that's that's the first thing that you need to understand right it's not price is a function of value okay how much people value what they make and there's a lot of aspects to that so how can we like let me give you an example of that so check out this jeans alright so here are two pairs of jeans one of them is diesel one of them is from Essos one cost one hundred and seventy dollars a hundred one cost $14 they're like how long did it take to make them how much did the materials cost the same they're both manufactured in the same Chinese Factory okay there's completely no different in the cost and the materials of making these products so why one of them is worth 10 times more than the other one and the question is pretty obvious because some people value brands and brand is just one example of what people value and they're willing to pay much much more for that another example of something that people value is comfort right why do people take you know how much it costs to fly business class you know it doesn't even cost two times it's like five or ten times more than a regular plane ticket why just because it's a little bit more convenient so but they're still getting to the same place so some people think well it's not worth paying ten times more but some people think it does well this comfort is worth ten times more so for different people they value different things and they're willing to pay for those different things that's where you need to understand that you what you need to focus on is value all right so that's the first thing but the other thing that you need to understand about value and here you can see this is a screenshot I talked to a couple of days ago of the Apple stock all right value goes up and down all right so what you can see here is the stock price which you basically represent the value of the company now nothing changed during the last year in you know the company itself it still manufactures iPhones in MacBooks and you can like it or hate it but let's assume the quality stays the same the company didn't drop dramatically or improve dramatically but how the market values that thing can go up and down and you need to understand because that's also relevant to your work right the value of your work or the skills that you have can change and let me tell you a story to to make that clear so I don't know how many of you are young and how many of you are older in our industry but when I got started flash was a really really cool software to design kind of interactive experiences and websites now that was like the cool thing now it was really there was a very complicated aspect to it you could learn how to code with a specific let me put my camera on with a specific kind of coding language called ActionScript an ActionScript 2 and I was heavily invested I really liked this and I was heavily invested I took courses to learn how to code with ActionScript 2 and I spent a lot of time learning how to be a master in flesh so that I can build websites and for a while there I was like really good building flash websites and I could that that's that's the actually the first jobs that I did in my freelancing careers but then what happened what happened was in 2007 Steve Jobs decided the new iPhones are not gonna support flash because he thought this was a bad technology and he didn't and it's gonna slow down the iPhone and also it was a kind of a proprietary technology of Apple and of Adobe and so he didn't want to support that and so basically by making Apple or iPhones not support flash basically killed that software because nobody wanted their website to not be supported on iPhone and literally that software and company and technology went to the trash up until the point where like a couple of years ago adobe decided to discontinue this software and now nobody cares about flesh anymore why am I telling you this because the fact that I was really good at flash and I spent a lot of time learning that and and you know I had a very valuable skill that valuable skill right now is not so valuable okay so you need to know what you're selling either the quality and the value of what you're doing Mike change so you need to be smart you need to understand what's valuable right now and learning I'm talking a lot about web flow because I think web flow right now is something that's really really high value it might change in five 10 years but you need to understand what's valuable right now all right let's continue all right so now let's get practical and talk about okay so we know price is a function of value we know a change is like how do we how do we set this price okay how do we find out what's the actual price now and the truth is the price is always set is always set up by the to two sides because every transaction you know we're in a marketplace and somebody wants to sell something and somebody wants to buy something and the price is set by you know you can call it supply and demand but how much the person that's selling is willing to sell it for and the how much the person buying it there's basically a combination of those two factors so let me draw that to you to to make it clear so let's let's assume there is kind of a price range right from a very very low price to a very very high price now for you there's actually a big range of prices that would be good for you right of course you would love to make a lot of money for your work but there's somewhere that is I would say kind of your minimum point we're below that you're gonna say you know what I don't want to do this now it's it's different for different people now for example for you might say like for this project if they're gonna pay me less than whatever $100 I'm not gonna do this because I have better things to do with my time but anything above that of course I'd love to get $10,000 but anything actually about above $100 is actually good for me so you understand there's actually a range of prices and that's defined by your your minimum price that you're willing to work with up until you know infinity a lot of money now the client has also arranged but that's that range is actually upside down right so the client actually have a maximum price that they're willing to pay but of course of course they'd like to pay less than that because they're our business and like everybody else they're trying to reduce their expenses and that's a completely normal logic by the way when you are buying stuff you're trying to pay less because we're all trying to save money so basically the price the client has kind of a maximum price point that they're not willing to pay more than that I mean if it cost more than that they'll go and they'll find an alternative or they're not going to do it at all because you know it's too expensive but everything below that is an acceptable range for them so now you can see that actually there is a gap there is not a gap there is kind of a place where and actually a big range where both of you are going to be happy ok and that's what's called deal range ok so any price within this deal range would make both of you happy ok anything outside of that deal range actually it's not gonna happen alright because if you you know if your minimum price for a certain project let's say it's $1000 below $1,000 you're just not gonna do it but the client is not willing to pay more than $100 in this case they're just no deal there's not going to be any deal here possible it's actually negotiating here is a waste of time because there's no possible deal he's not gonna pay or they're not gonna pay more than $100 you're not gonna work for less than $1000 there's just no deal here ok but in case there is a gap and usually in most cases there's again not a gap a parallel they say that word when they're overlapping overlap right so we if there is an overlap then we can negotiate in in that negotiation now that here's the thing here nobody it's kind of like a poker nobody is really gonna tell the client I'm not gonna tell my clients my minimum price range cuz I want more my clients are not gonna tell me their maximum range or their maximum point because they want a better deal than that everybody knows that we're gonna play this game and so not no side is actually revealing the cards and what actually the the role of negotiation in this phase is to actually try to maximum you're gonna try to push to the higher end of the deal range they're gonna try to push it down to the lower side of the deal right and that's where the dance of negotiation happens okay but again anything in between is gonna make both of you happy and it's gonna make a deal happen so this is kind of the framework okay so now let's let's think about what the practical ways are from you know being asked you know so how much do you charge for this how much does it cost to actually closing a deal so the first step is you need to understand your your acceptable range okay if you how can you negotiate how can you even talk about the price if you don't know what price will make you happy and what price won't make you happy so you the first thing is and we're going to talk about this in a second about how to do this but you need to do your homework and you need to decide on what's your minimum point that below it you're not even going to do the the project okay now the second thing that you need to do is because we're playing poker here you need to try to figure out what's the client acceptable range and you need to assume what's their maximum point okay why because you don't want to ask for something that's above that okay because then there is no deal and that's where most designers fail because they negotiate themselves down because they think no they're not gonna pay $1,000 there's not gonna be a deal maybe 500 now they're not gonna go for that so you see you negotiate with yourself before the client even get to negotiate with you you negotiate with yourself and you lower your price you end up with $100 because you think that's what's within their acceptable range but if you'll do your homework properly and we'll talk in a second about how to do this you might realize that it's it's higher than where you think it is and it usually is higher so the second part of this process is you actually have to do your homework and assume or guess where where their range is and the third part is you negotiate okay if you're both within the range each is trying to pull to its own direction and whoever is best wins but to be very honest you both wins you both win because anything that's within the acceptable range you know is is a win for both of you right you're you're both basically happy with it okay okay so let's talk about how to find your price range let me drink some water and you can tell me how much fun you're having while I'm drinking water in the in the chat all right so how do you come up with your price range so the first thing is you need to ask yourself how long would this take you to complete now yes we just said earlier that the value is not a function of how long it takes you to complete however on your end you are basically giving or investing your time right some people you know to manufacture clothes you need to invest money to buy the materials but the materials or the stuff that you invest is your time so you need to understand how big is the investment that you're going to do here now if you're just starting out as a freelancer you might not really know this and it's okay but make an assumption and track that down and you'll improve as you go along you will assume I guess this is going to take me 10 hours and then you track it oh no it actually took me 30 or it actually took me seven and as you'll go along if you keep track of the number and the time you'll you'll get better at estimating how long this would take now the second thing is you need to understand what's actually the value of your time okay now this is this is something that you need to think and it's very individual to where you are based in the world and what's your alternatives right I mean if I can make for example right if I can make more money or let's say whatever let's say the minimum wage I don't know what the minimum wage is in the US but let's say the minimum wage is I don't know what twelve thirteen fourteen dollars I don't know and you can make fourteen dollars at McDonald's for sure okay you might want to say well I'm not gonna do this for less than fourteen dollars an hour because otherwise why would I work so hard I can go to McDonald's and get the money for sure now I'm just giving you kind of a logic that you might think of course you might not think like I will go to McDonald's oh maybe you don't have that alternative but everybody has some kind of a value for their time you might do kind of a more elaborate calculation that says well if I want to pay my rent that that means I need that much money and if I can work on this for so many hours basically and do this calculation come up with I have to make $30 per hour so if this is gonna take you know 10 hours I have to at least make $300 because otherwise I'm not gonna be able to pay to pay my rent and again this is something that you need to be really really honest with yourself because the thing is a lot of designers will say well I want $1,000 for the project and then let's say the client says well I'm only willing to pay 500 and then the designer will say well okay I'll take 500 and then they'll complain and then they'll hate on their client and so forth and so forth but the truth is the truth of the matter is the fact that they accepted this project at $500 means that it's worth their while at $500 and if they would admit it to themselves earlier before going into the negotiation they wouldn't be frustrated they'll say well I wish I could get more but I'm happy with 500 because 500 is worth my time so yeah that's just kind of general life advice advice don't be whiny like think about this before and realize that maybe it's valuable for you at $500 as well all right so another kind of brain you know forgot how to call this but kind of like mental mental exercise you can do is ask yourself just if the price was $500 would I do it and you can say yes or no you know what sometimes you might realize that even if the project was no money involved even if it was for free you would do it right because there are other things beside money there's portfolio there's you know experience there's having them in your app there's other things so if the truth is you would do this work for free okay you can try asked for one thousand two thousand but if they say you know if they bring it down to zero again don't complain because admitted to yourself that it's still a good deal if you work for free and sometimes it is a good deal when you work for free so don't complain you need to think what's your alternative right and I am I've gave the example of going to work for McDonald's for example but you know as a family man I do know that I also value time that I'm not working because I want to be with my family I don't want to work 24/7 I don't want to work my weekends and so I need to make the evaluation of alright if I take this project that I'm gonna work on on the weekend alright I'm not gonna do I'm not gonna lose my Macdonald job right but I'm not I'm gonna lose my time with my family so how much is that worth to me how much do I need to get to be happy about missing time with my family so ask yourselves the tough questions and again be honest with yourself and as I've mentioned there are other things that are valuable besides money experience portfolio testimonials referrals all of these things are also worthwhile okay I know there's a cliche which is somewhat true where you know sleazy clients would say you can work for it for exposure which is usually you know a lie but if you're honest if you honestly think that there's something for you in there you can do this and you don't have to feel sorry for yourself so now that you understand what's your price point it's time to do start doing the investigative work of trying to do the research and come up with you know understanding of the clients price range now this is done both by you doing research as in on the internet but also by talking to the clients so a lot of the first conversation with the clients when they're telling you about the project you'll be asking them question with the goal of really uncovering the real truth true value for them okay so the first thing that you want to really understand is what are they looking to gain this project okay we need a new logo why do you need a new logo why are you why is it your priority right now instead of whatever going and doing sales call why are you talking to me right now why are you investing time and effort and perhaps money on this project because you're looking to gain something let's try and understand what it is you're trying to gain you're trying to improve your sales you're trying to improve your customer experience what is that worth to you okay you can start asking those questions to really understand why are they looking because of course they're looking to gain something otherwise they wouldn't waste their time so what is it that they're trying to gain now what is their alternative what happens if they don't do this project or if they don't do this project with you okay so in some cases if they don't work with you they work with somebody else if they don't work with you they work with a different company if they don't do work with you they won't do the project at all what happens if they work with somebody else are they gonna charge them more are they gonna charge them less are they gonna do crap here at work or they're gonna do better work and again I suggest that you really you can actually ask that you know what other alternatives are you considering at the moment because the assumption the false assumption that most designers have is that well if I don't get this they can go to somebody else who can do this for cheaper or something like this but it's a lot of times this is not the case and if you remember what we talked about in the previous the part one here is the people that you're in the position right now to talk to perhaps they know you they like you they trust you they want to work with you and maybe they don't know and like and trust somebody else right now so the alternative of going to look somebody who they don't know who they don't have a recommendation on that's that's expensive because that's taking risk and they might not want to do this so don't kind of underestimate what is the actual cost of them not working with you remember they're they're actually they're spending time talking to you that means they want to make this work to assume nobody wants to waste their time so assume good intentions and they want to make this work of course it's okay if they negotiate it's okay if they value different things than you but assume that you know they want to make this work so trying to understand what is the cost of the alternative and again cost is not only money it's comfort it's you know time it's a lot of different things now another factor which might help you understand is how much money do they have as a company and how much they're going to spend so if they are on a company that has ten employees for example you know they already have a budget and they're doing sales otherwise they won't be able to pay salary for these employees so they have money maybe they already have a marketing budget or something like that if on the other hand this is kind of your uncle entrepreneur who has a dream of starting a business but he doesn't have any money or any proof that he can happen and he's just doing it by getting other people you know to hustle for them then maybe they don't even have money and so you need to consider you know whether you want to work with them but you can understand by the fact that by looking at the operation they're running you can try to understand their budget and you can also ask so what is your budget for the project or how much would you like to spend however remember they have a different goal than you they're trying to you know decrease their spending so even if they have a budget of $10,000 they might say well we're looking to spend $5,000 because there's checking they don't know maybe they can get it for $5,000 so why do I say initially that they are willing to go up to you know ten thousand dollars the other thing around this is that even if they say they have ten thousand dollars and they are and they you know they are saying the truth they are they have budgeted $10,000 for the project remember that when people fall in love with things they are tending to spend more than the initially budget for it and you know this from you know looking for a place to live or even go into the supermarket you go in trying to you know having a budget or a list of things that you need but now you just saw something oh I must have this take this and I'll take that but because we as people we tend to offer overspend on things that we really want so if you present your offer in a very sexy way you can get them to spend actually more than what they initially thought they're going to spend okay so at this point right you've done all these calculations right and so you know what's your price and you have an assumption about what's their price so at this point in your talking somebody is going to say the price first and it's probably going to be something like this either they're gonna ask you so how much do you charge for this and you're going to reply with a number or maybe you're going to ask them so what is your budget for the project and they're gonna say a number in any case then the minute that a number was said that's actually when the negotiation starts because again assume that nobody's really exposing their minimum or maximum points so now the kind of the dance actually begins okay so let's talk about this dance of negotiation so first of all I've mentioned this before but it's very important to keep in mind remember that the goal of everybody here is to close the deal and everybody wants to be happy and otherwise we wouldn't be wasting our time so nobody's trying to screw you or nobody's trying to you know take advantage of you otherwise you know you know assume that they are good people and they do want to you know they don't want you to go out of business they want you to be able to keep supporting them if they need you and everybody understand that everybody needs to make money however you know everybody has limitation they're trying to pull but assume good intentions now remember this is kind of a poker so it is a little bit of kind of like who's gonna show their cards first are you going to be the one who says the number first or the other person who's gonna say and you're gonna ask questions to uncover you know what their alternative when what their cost is and they're gonna do the same to you because that's how the game is played now the is each side or at least it's kind of a best practice is trying to get the other side to say the price first okay and that's why they're always asking you probably on the first call so how much do you charge for this because what they hope would happen and does happen most of the times is that you're going to negotiate against yourself because you're gonna say oh I don't want to say a price that's too high because then they might reject me right and there's not gonna be a deal so let me lower the price and lower the price and lower the price and you start off with a low price which is good for them what's gonna happen if you are going to ask them to state the price first they're gonna do the same thing they're gonna go to negotiate themselves they're gonna say well obviously I don't want to play a lot but I can't say like a too low of a number because otherwise he's gonna walk away he's not gonna be interested in doing the project so I maybe I'll offer this number maybe a little bit higher and so if you get them to say first maybe they're actually going to say a number that's much higher than what you are planning to ask for and so there's there's kind of an advantage for the person who gets the other one to state the price first okay so it's it's not nothing is wrong is going to happen and just want you to remember that they're trying to get you to say the price first because they expect that you to negotiate with yourself and lower that price okay so that's here's a key point which took me years and years to learn which is I wish there was this this live stream when I was starting out which is never to start with your minimum price now pay never started because everybody's going to assume that there's gonna be this negotiation game okay and so here's what happened when I was getting started when I was getting started somebody asked me how much do you want for the project and I would say my minimum price and by minimum price I mean I would do the calculation I would say okay so this is worth $1,000 for me okay however I'm not gonna ask for more because it's not fair okay it's not fair and I want what's fair cuz I'm a good person right so I told them $1000 what happened they assumed okay you know just like any business negotiation he said a number and now we're going to do the negotiation game so they were like no not a thousand eight hundred and I would get very pissed because I would assume they're disrespecting me disrespecting my work and they and I was like you know it I'm not I'm just not gonna do this right they disrespect me I don't want to work for them it's not I made my calculation and it's worth $1,000 so if they want 800 it's not worth my time and I would walk away I would break the deal but that's very that's that's very stupid you know if I would only start off with a higher number if I would say it's $2,000 and they would say no we can only pay 1500 okay or 1000 I would say okay 1000 and I would be happy okay and both sides would be happy they were like yes we got like a major discount we got 50 percent discount I was like yes I got what I wanted and so remember you can't start with your minimum because you'll have no no wiggle room to play this negotiation game which is going to happen do not assume that nobody's going to negotiate okay so however when you do reduce your price which is okay because it's part of this game and you want to find kind of a fair point try to get them to give something in return okay so you're like okay so you want to pay less I respect that okay you have you know it's been a tough year for all of us so let's think about how to make this happen so if we're lowering of the price what can I get in return and you can get a lot of things in return you can get better payment terms they can pay upfront you can have a longer deadline you can have you know fewer iterations or a lot of things you can get asked them to get a testimonial if you're lowering the price you can ask for a lot of things so it's okay to do this barter this negotiation of give-and-take you want to discount sure give me something in return but you assume that you know we want to work through this together we want to solve this and we want to make sure that we have a deal that makes everybody happy now as I said if you do the work and if you really know your your true minimum and your not gonna work below your true minimum because that's really your true minimum then you actually you can't lose because whatever price is going to happen that's within your range it's actually going to be great and if it's outside of your range then it's not you you there's nothing to cry about because it was never a possible deal there was never a possible deal I mean if like I charge like met the minimum price for a project that I do would you be $10,000 when somebody comes to me with a budget of $500 I'm not like oh this this client is such a bad client they're cheap as they don't care about you know design and stuff like that whatever no I'm just telling him look here's Wix go and do it yourself okay this is because you're not even a potential client there was never a possible deal for us and I'm not mad at them that they don't have ten thousand dollars to invest because you know people are different their situation is different their business is different I I don't hate on them all right it's just it was never supposed to be it was never a possible deal okay it's like whatever you know I was going to say if I go to buy you know to ask how much there's a private jet cost and they're telling me like a few millions and I'm like ah well I'm not gonna buy it I can't pay a few mil and they're like oh Ron this cheap ass he doesn't know that our private jets are so good and that how can he not you know how does he value the work that we put in our private jets amazing all right and they might be amazing I just don't have the money for that all right so that's it now you gotta understand that there's no kind of right or wrong answer to the how much should you charge okay and you're probably you're gonna start somewhere low because your confidence is low and because you don't have many alternatives and because maybe the value of your time is low that's the truth situation but if you'll do what I said and every time you'll try to push a little higher and you a better research and you'll ask and you'll maybe sometimes hear answers like imagine that you did your calculation and you decided that it's worth doing it for $500 and then you were talking with your clients you asked them so what's your budget and he said $2,000 amazing you did the project for $2,000 four times what you thought you should or would be willing to do this project now you did this project and you did amazing work and they were so happy and now they're referring me to all their friends now to be true to be honest when they're gonna ask you how much the chart you are comfortably going to say $2,000 because you know you already did it for $2,000 you know that the client was willing to pay $2,000 you know you delivered high quality work and they were happy with it for $2,000 so now $2,000 is kind of like your new standard and that's how you play it because the next time afterward you were gonna say okay little so if tenth if $2,000 is not a problem and I'm not gay even getting rejections let's try $5,000 and that's how you go slowly but you grow and you move up to the next level now this is a game I know that's hard to look at it as a game because sometimes not sometimes most times that's how you pay rent okay and you're it's kind of a poker game that's at some point it's very risky to lose right because you need that money but you need to understand that if you're not gonna change your mindset and understand that this is a game and enjoy the game and learn the rules of the game and practice the game then you're always going to stay stuck at that fear level of oh my god I'm going to not be able to pay my rent and you won't be able to to grow so realize it's a game and try to have fun with the game right water break and then we'll talk about proposals how y'all doing here trying to drink with the thing closed hmmm alright looks like you're having fun here I hope you are I hope you're learning I hope you're taking notes alright let's continue so let's talk about proposals what are proposals what are they for what do we do proposals for so a lot of times after you'll have a discussion with the clients and they're like ok so how much does it cost and you discuss the price and everything you'll want to send a proposal which is basically a paper that states everything that you talked about for them to sign before you get started if you're a junior maybe you're not doing this it's very important to do this to align expectations ok to know that you're both talking about the same thing so the goal of the proposal is to sum up what you've discussed and to help the client make a decision sometimes they need to consult with other people or they need to think about the conversation so having that kind of a document to look at and think about this really really helped them it clarifies all the terms when payment should be when the work is going to be delivered what's included what's not included and it it provides kind of a also a legal framework there's I'll talk a little bit more about the legal aspects of it later on but basically it's mostly to align expectations ok so here's basically the structure of my proposal there's a lot of people that are doing a lot of fancy things where is like decks and stuff like that I try to keep my proposal super simple sometimes even in a in an email but very very simple and just like one page or nobody likes to read big documents legal documents that kind of stuff so here's how I structure it I start off with an introduction that's usually a paragraph or two about the project and what we're doing here and I write it in a way that they that shows that I understood what the project is about and what is the goal and and why they're doing the project okay not just I will build a website for the company that's okay that doesn't show that you understand why they're doing it and you understand their goals and you understand you know what what they're trying to do here that you're actually a partner in joining them on their mission to try to solve this big problem okay so that's introduction the second paragraph I would write why should you work with me and that that sometimes is bullet points and sometimes it's a paragraph and basically I try to think about this specific use the specific client that I'm talking with and I'm trying to think what skillset or experiences do I have that are relevant to him that it's going to make me stand out so I'll just give you an example I was working with a client in the classical music industry so I just wrote you know as as a as a child I used to play multiple music in instruments and I really loved and passionate about music and so it would be an honor for me to work on this project with you now it's got nothing to do with my design skill or my professional experience but it's important for them on an emotional level to know that you are the right person if I am interested in music and I understand this world because I used to play a musical instrument and so forth and I'm passionate about this this puts me this kind of gives me an edge over everybody else who's just a professional it doesn't really care about their mission remember those are people who are living that's their they've started this company because they're super passionate about this and you want to show them that you're together with them of course that you can also state you know professional things like I have worked with a similar company or I did something similar in the past or something like that the next thing in the proposal is basically stating the process and the deliverables which meaning what's going to happen how are we going to work so the first stage we're going to do this and then we're going to do this and what we're going to do this and basically how long each stage of the process is going to look why and what you're gonna get at each stage of the you know of the project and then you're gonna talk about price sometimes I put the price at the end and sometimes I price each stage of the process depending on what we do I'll show you an example proposal in a second and then we're going to talk about the next steps no next steps think about this as calls to action right if you know something about web design or designs in general you need to design a call to action which basically tells the user what should they do next all right and this is basically something like bullet points it says when you finish reading this what you should do is you should sign this document and then you should send me the money and then we should set a date for the kickoff day it just literally tells them in a very very simple and non confusing way what to do because people need for you to tell them what to do otherwise they're going to be let me think about this or something right there they have a lot of things to do so they you need to clearly tell them what to do next the last thing is terms and this is kind of basic legal terms let me show you a proposal example and then we can work through this all right so I'm showing you a real proposal this was for a client that's called Lucia that I worked with in 2017 all right so this was for a marketing website and also kind of like a design system so let's see how its structured so this I do this this is two pages I designed this on like you know InDesign which is just basic layout so they can print this and this is how it states so here overview Lucia is looking to upgrade its marketing website tol a brand visibility to look bigger and better create more trust and confidence with its customer increased signups while adding new product offering messaging needs to be clear and straightforward to keep high conversion rate so that's pretty clear all right and again we're not talking about the website we're talking about the goals what they're trying to do here now here I do not have a why me but because I know the founder of the company from previous project so they already like me so here I'm breaking down the phases all right so phase one marketing website and brand well I'm describing what's gonna happen we'll strategize the content and architecture for the mark website in parallel will explore different visual languages illustration 3d photos will choose the direction for the visual loop after approving the wireframes and visual direction will design a new website deliverables for this page new responsive web design for all marketing website pages including pages for different markets updated brand assets logo icon colors typography design system assets for further projects working collaboration with developer and web product which is something else that they have scheduled 11 weeks fees 800,000 that's new Israeli shekels plus VA teeth paid from Israel that's by 80,000 80,000 it's three and a half so it's basically $22,000 for this phase and then we have product upgrade that's designing their dashboard and search engine that's basically that was something really small so it's one week five thousand shekels and then for the marketing assets basically that was kind of optional so I broke it down as a table so email templates 1000 because maybe they want multiple banner templates 1000 video depending on style video usually when I do videos you know I outsource this so they need to get a different proposal for the video campaign landing page 7,000 per page in optional development here I said if you wish to decrease workload for your development team and outsource I offered basically to develop this on web flow but they didn't took this and they chose to develop it themselves in this case on WordPress and they were very sorry about that choice but alright terms 50% down payment so this is kind of like the legal terms alright 50 percent down payment before we're starting to work and then 25 percent after design presentation and then 25 percent after final deliveries so this is that's kind of a normal way that I structure my terms prices do not include font licensing or images because sometimes that costs extra that includes three rounds of iteration on each phase and after that it's an hourly rate of 600 nice so this is kind of a high hourly rate and it's basically designed that way to scare them off because I don't like to work on an hourly rate so I try to like scare them off with a higher hourly rate so that they'll bring in or they'll you know push all their iterations within these three rounds all prices do not include v80 payments is due ten days after invoice this is kind of like normal stuff and then this is important intellectual ownership of the design will be fully transferred to lucia upon final payment basically what that means is if they're not paying me the whole money i still owns the intellectual property and they can't use this or if they use this i can sue them but it's basically something that means you only own this work and you can only use it after you've paid the whole money so this is an example of a real proposal how do you do this how do you create those proposals so first of all email is is an option and that's the simplest actually and to be honest you might think well maybe it's not super professional but to be honest I did a lot of proposals or at least price negotiation and stuff like that in email and it's okay as long as you discuss all these things all the details sometimes especially if it's sometimes repeating customers or if they coming back again or if it's super super simple I might do that in an email the other simple thing is either doing it on google doc or using something like InDesign that I did and then you can use a free service like DocuSign I think I'm using DocuSign and it's free and you can upload the PDF there and send them a link and they're signing it and it it's it's legally binding so that's great another tool that you can use is Prospero if you don't know Prospero was a tool that I actually built it was our company for two or three years ago Prospero calm no go Prospero calm alright yeah so this is a proposal tool that we created we actually sold this company two years ago but it will help you create these online responsive and it's actually built on the template that I just showed you so it's pretty cool if you want to invest a little bit it's really really a cool product and then besides that there are other tools like bonzi or and Co which also have some free plants I never use them but you can check them out they're also legit alright so a word on the legal stuff some people send both proposal and a contract that is kind of like more longer and more exhaustive I don't do this I don't know if to say that it's the smart thing or not but I really am a believer that at the end of the day I am not probably I'm not going to sue my clients it's just too complicated it takes so much time and so much effort and it's probably not worth my time to sue my client so the real reason of sending it is to kind of get them committed and to align expectations and to know that most people who sign a document and know that they are legally obliged the the the chance of them breaking this kind of agreement is much much smaller so I do this to kind of enforce this even though at the end of the day I'm probably not gonna sue them but you know you might think differently or you should consult a lawyer I'm not obviously a lawyer maybe there are terms that I forgot but I've been working with the very short list of terms that I just showed you and I had no I don't know maybe I just worked with good clients but I had no problems with that and with that said I think we can jump into the Q&A now so let's jump into it and we're already I see we're already almost an hour into it I hope you had a good time let me know in the comments did you learn something did you was it useful for you alright I'm gonna jump to Q&A and remember by the way there's gonna be part three and there we're gonna do next week or depending on where you watch it maybe we already did it and you can find the links in the description the next on the next session we're gonna talk about how to deliver a good service how to you know put the system so that you can move your freelance to full-time so that's going to be on the next session and now let's jump into the questions so I'm gonna see here the questions that Alex did for me and let's try them all right see all the rest do you think there's the market that the market is oversaturated it seems to me that everyone is getting into web design and like soon everybody will do it or the price will be so low that you won't be able to so what I think is this I think that a lot of the markets are pyramid based which means there's a lot at the bottom but not a lot at the top and it's also true for the client so there's a lot of low paying clients and not a lot of or less high paying great client but what I will tell you is this the top of the pyramid is not saturated the top of the pyramid is people are craving and looking for good designers they can't find good designers none of the good designers are available I'm like I I will be honest with you I'm we have a group of freelancers that are based here in Tel Aviv where I live we are sending each other kind of like project oh I got this amazing project with this amazing company anybody wants to take it and everybody's like now I can take it now I can take the truth is like all the good designers are busy and there's just so much work and so I'm not sure about how it feels at the bottom because also there's tons of work at the bottom as well but I think that like most things in life most people are gonna stay most people are average and they're not taking the time to work on themselves and improve themselves and try to work up their way to you know improve improve themselves and grow so you're here on this livestream today watching this video so hopefully you're trying to grow and you're trying to improve and take the steps necessary to grow and move into this move into the you know to the higher steps of the pyramid where things are not oversaturated you can always become better and create something you know unique and special by yourself it takes time and effort it's not easy I didn't say it's easy but it's totally possible doo doo doo all right next question from saphenous safa do pricing differ for small companies and individuals and big companies and projects the answer is of course of course do you think Nike or whatever or global huge company is paying they're paying an agency like $1,000,000 to redo their logo and it's a logo it's the same logo that somebody else can do you know for $1,000 so yes the bigger the companies are the bigger the budget and a lot of times the more complicated the projects are but because again to convince Nike the whole board and the whole team to change the logo for example is a very very complicated thing but yeah obviously the the pricing is different people who have budgets and have complicated project problems invest more money as a beginner is it acceptable to have menu list of prices yeah you can have that you can have that the only thing here is that you're missing out on the opportunity to negotiate because unless unless that pricing is high okay because it looks like it's uh you know off off off the shelf kind of a product that it's either take it or leave it that's kind of the thing so in my case as I said I would state that I have a minimum engagement price but I don't say which is let's say $10,000 but I don't state that all projects are $10,000 now you also have to understand that depending on the project some projects are more complicated than others a logo is not always the same complexity to make a website is definitely not some websites are simple one-pagers and one of them is like another website it's 15 pages it's difficult to put a price on a scope that is undetermined you can do it when the you know when you know that you know the complexity a business card design let's say usually it's it's very easy so for those things and like I showed you in the in the proposal example for certain things they're like email template for example I have a fixed price but that's because the the complexity of that is fixed and it's not difficult raaah how can you raise your prices without losing your current and regular clients you can't I mean or you can you can raise your prices to new clients but not to your current customers but otherwise it's it's inconvenient right because you've already set expectations with them and now you're changing the rules of the relationship and it might not be a good fit because maybe they are the type of customers that pay $1,000 and not $2,000 so you might be losing them and part of growing is losing customers that's part of the process you can't you know work for 10 years and grow and increase your prices and still do work for clients that you did 10 years ago you're not the same designer your keep your skills are not the same the work that you're doing is not the same and their needs are you know so that's the the truth I think all right on and the one done I tried so many times where I gave a lot of sample work only to find out the clients are not serious about the job what do you suggest how much time do I need to spend on simple work I don't really understand what the simple work mean it means that you're working for free for them I do not suggest that you work for free unless you're okay with working for free otherwise I would get the clients to commit now there's different ways to commit the first thing that you want them to commit is time all right you want to see that they're committing time and that's by going on a call with you and talking with you and and all of that kind of stuff the second thing you want them to see commit is money that's why you charge money before you're starting to work you want to see that they're serious if they're not willing to commit either time or money you can say upfront that they're probably not very serious to do mark how did you solve the matter of cookies privacy and other do you talk about it in your course let me just share the service of you I use this service let me share my screen so you can see it I use this service called you bandha who you Bend I don't know how to pronounce this this is a really simple to integrate solution it's really great I think I have a video about this on my youtube channel to do to to to retouch do you have a time limit for the proposal or contract like expiry date so some people do that some people say this contract is expires in two weeks or something like that it really the truth is a it depends on the situation because if I have multiple clients that I'm giving proposals to and I might it might be dangerous that all of them will accept at once and then I'll over commit myself or something like that so it in these cases I might say something look I need to make a decision by next week because you know my my calendar is being booked and I can't if you're not signing this week I can't guarantee you know I can't guarantee availability will have to let me know when you're ready and I'll see what I can do but I can't guarantee availability sometimes I would put kind of in the terms like yeah something like you need to make a decision by this point otherwise I can't guarantee availability or something like this people what is your view of using Divi WordPress as a tool for freelancing that's legit you know I specific I personally like web flow but I know a lot of people who are doing well using Divi and other tools so yeah Nikhil how much could junior designer charge hourly I don't know if you've missed the part where I said it really depends on your situation and your alternatives and you know and and and what your the potential client that you're talking to needs right if they because they will pay for how much the problem is urgent or or based on their alternatives right and you are going to charge based on your alternative so it really changes there is no just fixed fixed fee flow Herron do you have any advice on how to convince client to change to paper value for example for clients that are used to get an invoice to work per hour what I usually tell my clients is I'll tell them look paying per hour is not good for you because we are not aligned okay paying per hour gives me the incentive to work slow so I would take more hours and then you will pay me more money but your incentive is to get a good work fast and so we are at a conflict here and so paying per hour is not the best solution so what would be the best solution is paying for how much this is worth to you and stating when do you need the work at and I will make sure that you get the work by this point with a price that's reasonable for you and it's even better because you know upfront how much you're going to pay with the hourly rate there's always the risk of all this took longer than I thought and now boom you thought you're gonna pay $1,000 now the bill is $5,000 that's that's a risk so basically that's how I explain why it's better for them I don't call it per pair of value okay but I do call it flat rate which basically mean you know the price of the project upfront and it's it's best for all sides to do two to two let's go to another question Leonard as a beginner in web flow how to know if you are up to the project based on complexity of what client needs is it good to have developer for backup or is web flow enough hmm good question so first of all I always think that it's good to be part of a community specifically for web flow there is really great community both you know the free community there's the web flow forums there's the web flow global group on Facebook we have you know for the web flow master class we have our private community so being part of the community and being able to ask people questions about the capabilities or how would they solve something this is something very important and also if you don't feel confident than ya have somebody for for backup but yeah I hope that makes sense Gabrielle as a freelancer is fair to put a price for design and another price for development in WordPress I'm not sure I understand why they're why the word fair is there I understand there's two different tasks here design work and development work you can charge for both of them on the same price or you can say design cost this and development cost this but it's two different tasks and you can you can decide how you want to charge for them but it's got nothing to do with fairness it's just it's like it's like asking does it fair that McDonald's charges for a burger and for coke and then charge us for whatever a meal I don't know I mean it's it's got nothing to do with fairness it's how you charge for your work it's it's completely up to you I think all right Darren Ron Kramer what are your thoughts on outsourcing right now a hundred percent of the job done by myself I feel like it's time-consuming doing everything with the client well that's kind of an advanced question which is you know if you're trying to grow and scale I for a lot of years many years I did everything myself and I didn't outsource well up to six figures on the recent years I started to delegate some things that I realized that there's actually no value in me doing them because somebody else can do them just as fine and I wanted to focus on the things where I bring my unique value which was in my case it was working with the clients themselves and overseeing the project they're not specifically aligning the text on page number three so I mean it's a good idea if that's your goal and if that's basically what you want to do all right last question for today Ken have you ever created an e-commerce site do you charge more for those yes I've created only one which is not a lot do I charge more for those No why would I charge more for those I mean it's the value of the website is determined by the value of the website or the company or whatever it's not like globally or categorically ecommerce is worth more or less than any other website it's it really depends depends on the case all right everybody I was head super fine time I'll catch you on the next one where again we're going to talk about how to build all the systems for your freelance business and take it to full time I'm looking forward to seeing you there thank you for being here on this live stream or watching this later I love you a lot if you didn't if you're not already subscribe of course subscribe of course show some love give some likes do all that cool stuff and I'll see you on the next one
