4 Keys to Profitably Package Your Branding Services

I once agreed to pay a lawyer $500 an hour to handle a very important situation because he came highly recommended.

And while he may have been very good at lawyering (he was), when I found myself sitting across the desk in his office while he struggled to fill in some forms for me on his computer, I wanted to scream.

Between his Internet Explorer struggling to load each page and his inability to use basic keyboard shortcuts to cut and paste (I finally did it for him), I was pissed.

Not only was I paying $8.33 a minute for something that could have taken 5 minutes and but actually ate up 30, I was also resentful, even though the legal work I hired him for was actually excellent.

Had I just been charge the final fee as a flat fee, it would have felt worth it. Since I was charged based on his hourly work, averaged to the 15 minute mark, I felt a bit cheated.

Charging hourly is never good for the client, and unless you’re a lawyer, it’s probably not good for your business either.

When selling branding services, most people estimate the hours for each part of the project, tally them up, and give a quote at the end of the proposal. Maybe it’s a flat rate, or maybe it’s an estimate of the time they will spend. Either way, this process is a hell of a lot of work, is hard to get right because the wild card is the client, and often encourages clients to pick apart the line items, looking for places to cut costs and wondering aloud if they really need you to write the copy. (They do.)

You may think tying the work to hours is more profitable because if the client has a never-ending wish list of “Can I just see it with…” for the logo, at least you’re getting paid.

But in this scenario, you’re not set up for success, either. Your income is based on your time exclusively, so the more expertly and efficiently you work, the less you get paid. Or you work faster but charge them for the time estimated, which is dishonest. Regardless, you run the risk of your client being frustrated that you can’t seem to get it right based on their feedback—and they have to pay for your slowness, to boot! (They will feel this way only if they are paying hourly. If they aren’t paying hourly, they may feel apologetic, but we want to avoid that scenario altogether.)

Instead, wouldn’t you love to price your services so EVERYONE wins?! You make the money you want to make to have the right balance of hours worked and income earned, and your clients are happy to pay your prices and aren’t worried about the time you spend. You want them focused on what matters most: the outcome.

How do you pull it off? Follow these steps:

Know what “profitable” means for you

It’s not just about price. If I say I’ll pay you $50,000 for a project, is that automatically profitable? If you usually are paid $5,000, you might say hell, yeah! But what if my $50,000 project required you to work 100 hours a week for an entire year? Would you still be excited?

Of course not. That’s like a corporate hellhole without the fancy salary and benefits to back it up.

A profitable service is one where the price you are being paid compared to the time you work translates into you making the money you want without working more (and ideally working less) than you would at a 9-to-5 job. And that doesn’t just mean 40 hours a week for clients. As a business owner, you need to factor in time to market to find clients, as well as time off to recharge. 

I recommend using the 50/25/25 Rule to Profit and Freedom, which you can read more about here.

Sell your services based on the outcome, and don’t talk about time

If you don’t focus on time, neither will the client. Stay focused on the value and outcome of what they are getting, and keep the required hours to yourself—it’s really none of their business. Do you know how long it takes to build a car, or do you just pay for the reliable vehicle that gets you from A to B? Does it matter if it takes a doctor 3 hours or 10 minutes to diagnose your problem and prescribe the correct medication, or do you just pay to be cured of your illness? In fact, wouldn’t you RATHER it takes 10 minutes? Who wants to spend 3 hours at the doctor’s office?

Establish a repeatable, reliable process for one specific group of people

The only way to put a flat-package service price on a project and know it will stay in the profitability zone is if you are confident the time you spend will stay under the profitability line. Some clients can be so difficult it’s hard to imagine keeping their projects in check. That’s why if you have a tight process that you repeat with every client (i.e., even if the creative work itself is different, the process is the same), you can ensure that all projects will stay within the allotted time. It’s part of my No BS agency model, which you can read more about in this blueprint.

But the only way to have a reliable, repeatable process that runs like clockwork is to take on projects that have largely the same scope. If you’re building a 5-page website for a personal brand one day and a large-scale custom e-commerce website the next, you’ll have to customize your approach each time. And if that’s the case, no wonder you’re making proposals with estimated hours. You can’t know how long your projects will take because they’re always different. But if EVERY project you worked on was a jewelry e-commerce website, you would know that project like the back of your hand. You could anticipate the needs ahead of time, you could plan, you would know what to require of clients before they started, and I promise if you did 10 in a row you could ensure they took about the same amount of time—in fact, they would be quicker each time as you got more expert in the space.

Focus on serving your best clients with your best services, and learn how to own a process that can reliably produce results instead of reinventing the wheel each time. Clients will happily pay you more when they are paying for the outcome, rather than the hours you work. This tenet is the foundation of the No BS Agency model my husband and I used to double our sales and more than quadruple our profit in less than a year. You can read the full story here about how we went from working all the time and still falling into debt, to making $500,000 in 12 months—just the two of us, with no employees.

You can do it, too.