Early on in my agency, the more responsive I was, the less I made.
Took me years to work out why, and it isn’t what you’d think, because it had nothing to do with discounting or bad clients or any of the usual suspects people point at.
I discovered I had a lot of leakage around the work.
Quick changes here and there, extra Zoom calls, small weekend jobs. A lot of it was 10 minutes or less and I’d feel petty charging for it. I’m a big believer in making deposits with clients, but if you keep doing free work it can add up fast.
I’ve been doing weekly calls with community members to hear what they’re dealing with, get to know them, and honestly, because it’s just fun to hang out.
But I ask all of them the same question:
Do you know how much you’re actually earning per hour?
Not the number on the invoice, the real one when you factor in everything going wrong around the work as well.
A lot of them weren’t sure, which is fair enough really, because most of us don’t charge hourly in the first place, but it’s still worth knowing what you’re coming out to at the end of a project.
So I did the math with a few of them right there on the call.
Most were coming in between $7 and $28 an hour. Seriously.
And these are people I know are amazing designers. But as you know, it’s not the work itself that’s hard, it’s everything around the work.
So on those calls I started walking people through some fixes, because none of this needs a new business model or a rate rise to solve.
Tip 1: Count the damage.
You HAVE to know what you’re working with before you can fix it. Go back through your last three projects and add up the hours spent on email, collating revisions, and recreating bugs. Don’t estimate. Actually count. Divide the fee by the real hours and write that number down.
Tip 2: Rethink how you deal with scope creep.
I have a hot take when it comes to scope creep: it’s not a problem at all. In fact, I love it. It means the client is inspired. It’s only bad if you’re not logging it.
Never say “no” to scope creep and crush your client’s spirit. Say “sounds amazing, let’s finish this current phase and come back to it later.” And if the project’s already done, that’s what the care plan is for. This keeps the client happy and gives you a backlog of work for slow months AND protects your margins.
Tip 3: Go looking for the big work instead of waiting for it.
I’ve always built whatever I needed at the time. In 2019 that was WP Feedback, because I couldn’t get a straight answer out of “make it pop.” Now it’s our version 5 to deal with everything around the work.
There’s no shortage of tasks worth charging for. They’re sitting on every client site you manage right now.
The only reason it never turns into money is that finding it, scoping it and writing it up takes an hour per client. So pick one client, give it that hour, walk their site, and send them five things that are broken or slow or five years out of date.
Or you can have Atarim do it. It goes through every site on your books, finds the work, and writes the brief with a price on it.
And when they say yes, you are not the one doing it. The build, the copy, the SEO and the QA all get handled inside the rules you set, and the finished work comes back to you for approval before it ever reaches the client’s site.
Click here to get started. Add your client’s projects and take it for a spin.
I’d love to know what’s been the biggest revenue leaker in your business and what you’ve done to solve it. 🙂
