The Best Way to Answer “How Much Do You Charge?” (Without Undervaluing Yourself or Scaring Clients Off)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 373

Welcome to the Six Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. How much do you charge? This is kind of a scary question. We get this in our inboxes all the time, whether it's a DM, whether it's a text, whether it's an email, whether it's in person, even worse. And because of there being so much money junk in our heads as creatives, so much self-doubt as creatives, when we get this question, that's when the insecurity starts to creep in. That's where the desperation sets in. That's where the fear of missing out takes over our logical brains, and we start doing stupid things. Stupid things like answering the question on the spot without any context. Stupid things like throwing out a number without understanding any of the scope of the project. Stupid things like undervaluing yourself and pricing too low because you're scared of scaring the client away. So you undercharge because of FOMO. Stupid things like rambling or sounding unsure, which is very common in in-person scenarios where someone asks your rates or asks how much you charge because you're insecure, you're scared, you have self-doubt. This one question has killed so many deals for freelancers. It's triggered so many panic discounts. It's exposed more unprepared freelancers than almost anything else, and you end up underpricing yourself, and you end up resenting yourself and your clients because you underpriced and you're in this project for weeks and you're stuck and you don't know how to get out and you hate doing this. And you question, why am I even freelancing? I could probably make more money getting a job somewhere. And that's if you win the project. A lot of times you end up confusing the client so you lose the sale altogether, or because you lost authority in the client's eyes, they went with another freelancer who was more confident, who understood how business is done. Or worst of all, if you f**k this up, your client ends up hating you because you had to charge them more because you quoted them a price, actually the wrong price, because you didn't have enough info about the project when you started. And then you realize, oh, I have to charge more, and now your client hates you because now the price is up from what you told them at the beginning. Obviously, this is all bad. Obviously, we want to avoid all of this, and we can avoid all of this. If we stop treating the how much do you charge question like it's a yes or no, numbers only kind of question where you have to give a number, you have to give a price, you have to give something. You can treat this question just like a conversation starter. It's a chance to lead the way to show that you're a professional, a chance to build a relationship, and it will walk you through exactly how to do that without feeling salesy, without feeling awkward, without feeling sleazy, without losing the deal, without scaring people off, or at least not scaring the right people off. You want to scare the wrong people off. And if you do it all the right way, you stay in control of the conversation. You can project confidence and professionalism to the client, meaning now they respect you more. You give yourself room to price based on value and not time. You avoid giving the wrong numbers that led to the underpayment and over promise, which is what we don't want to happen. And you build trust by showing your clients that you take their needs seriously. That's what we're covering today. If you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, feeling a little under the weather today, so I'm going to be a little lower energy than usual, my bad. But I'm trying to get ahead for the summer because I'm going, as the time this episode comes out, I'm actually probably just coming home from Europe. But this podcast is for creative freelancers who want to make more money without selling their souls. And to me, the ultimate soul selling thing you can do is underprice yourself, over promise, under deliver, hate yourself, your client hates you, you wonder why you're even doing this, you go get a real job somewhere. That's the ultimate soul selling. And the whole point of this podcast is to bring outside influencers from lots of different people, from lots of different industries, lots of different perspectives, not just my own, in order to help you make more money. And today we're discussing how to just answer this seemingly stupid, simple question, how much do you charge? What are your rates? Now, before I get into some different ways you can answer this, depending on the context, because this is very contextual. Before I get into that, I want to talk about a couple of things. First I want to talk about the butt and seat spectrum. This matters in this conversation. And then I also want to talk about the mindset shifts around this question, because you need to shift your mindset around this before I can even tell you what to say, because you won't say it if you don't shift your mindset around this. So first, the butt and seat spectrum. Basically, the more butt and seat you are, meaning the more I can go on Fiverr and find someone who offers the exact same thing that you do, and I can put their butt in the seat, and the outcome's gonna be roughly the same as what you do. The more butt and seat you are, the more quickly you need to be willing to get to a price relatively quickly. So if you butt and seat freelancers where you are just a butt and a seat, I'm not saying draw out this process, make them go through a bunch of hoops. Chances are you'll have to get to a price pretty quickly, but that does not mean that you're going to just spit out a price on command. You're not just a dancing monkey, spitting out numbers the second they ask for it. But again, butt and seat is a spectrum. So you have the extreme butt and seat, that's the basic video editor, I can get on Fiverr or Upwork, where I have three dozen to choose from, and there's not much of a difference between them, other than a few small differences. That's very butt and seat. The other end of the spectrum is truly bespoke, very transformational, and there's everything in between. So the more high end you are, the more transformational you are, the more bespoke you are, the more you need to guard your price. And when I say guard your price, that just means there's more hoops to jump through to get to a price. Now we'll talk about this a little bit as I get to the actual context and some of the things you can say in these scenarios, but that's just a blanket statement, a benchmark you can give yourself. Where on the spectrum do I live when it comes to button seat, commoditized freelancing, or truly bespoke transformational freelancing? The second thing I want to talk about before we get into the actual things to say is the mindset shifts around this question. The first mindset shift is this. The pricing conversation is part of your positioning, is part of your overall positioning, this entire conversation, this song and dance. And when I say positioning, it means it signals how professional you are, how organized you will be when you work with someone, what kind of clients you are for. If you don't know what I mean, you can just visualize the positioning of a specific car. The Ford Focus versus the Ferrari whatever, those two cars are positioned for completely different types of customers. Just like that, freelancers position themselves for different types of customers. And this is one of many things in positioning that will set you up for signaling yourself as a low level freelancer or a high value freelancer. So, if you have a low price and a bad conversation around pricing, that means low budget, beginner, commoditized freelancing. You don't want to be there. Now, on the higher price and the well ran pricing conversation, those two things together equals high value expert strategic partner, especially if you're B2B. If you're in some other niche that's not B2B, you understand what I'm saying. Now, you could technically be low price and run a really good pricing conversation. You could also be, again, there's so much contact with business, I'm sorry, it's not black or white. You also could be high price, wonderful pricing conversation. But the rest of your positioning in your business is an utter mess. Therefore, they're confused. They don't know really where you sit. It's like putting the Ford Focus engine into a Ferrari. Now, what do you have? I don't really know. How much do you charge for that? What kind of buyer is for that? I don't know. But the goal for right now, the only thing we can focus on in this episode, in this video, in this audio, however you're consuming this, the only thing we can focus on is, how do you approach this conversation around pricing? Because this is part of your positioning, and it's an important part of it. The second mindset shift around this conversation is, this question is not a demand. How much do you charge? It's not a demand from your clients. It is an invitation to lead. And when you take it as an invitation to lead, you are putting them through your process. And I've talked about this on the podcast before. Every freelancer should have a process. It's how you do things. And even on the most button seat freelance position, you can have a process that you lead your client through, that they have to trust you on. Because at a certain point, unless they're the worst micromanagers in the world in which they should just be doing the service anyways, at a certain point, you are in a box working by yourself, and you have your process there, and you dictate the process. The more bespoke you are, the more high end you are, the better you are at your job, the bigger that box becomes of your process. I will always, forever and ever, this podcast is for premium freelancers. This is not for button seat freelancers. I do not target beginners in ads. I do not target beginners in these episode topics. I do not target beginners in anything I do. I target people who are already established in their careers. Two-third of our audience is full-time. A third are like over six figures. So it's a really, really good audience that consume the show of the thousands and thousands of listeners that listen to the show weekly. And so if that's our audience, or you are maybe on the beginner end and you aspire to be the more premium, the higher end, the person who's the expert, if that's you, you have to lead the show in these situations. And the more you rely on your client to lead the show, the more you're screwing yourself over. Because remember, they're coming to you for a specific outcome. They're coming to you because you're good at what you do. If you're not good at what you do, go fix that first. They're coming to you because you're good at what you do. And when you're good at what you do, they have to trust you that you know what you are doing. And when you do know what you're doing, and you're good at what you do, you create the boundaries for everything in the process. They give you the raw materials, they give you what you need in order to do your thing, and you have your process for how you lead them through it. And your pricing conversation is part of that. This is an invitation to start that leadership as a freelancer. And it could be very, very difficult. You're a B2B freelancer. You were working with bigger and bigger businesses.