Okay here’s the thing. You’re not charging enough for your service.
You may think that you are, or that there’s no money in the country. So your price should be low. Well I’m here to burst that myth. Walk with me.
Every year for the past 5 years or so, I’ve consciously and constantly increased the prices of our basic WordPress brochure style website @AmaniArtStudio pushing the boundary of what customers are willing to pay.
Here’s how i did it.
1: Packages — Just like every other agency or freelancer has packages we also have packages. But this is where we differ from everyone else.
We have 4 packages for e-commerce websites. Each with limited features and the first 3 are templates we built couple years back with WhatsApp, Paystack and flutterwave already integrated. If you don’t like them, you can pay more money for us to design something unique for your brand.
Why does this work? It’s simple customers don’t care about the tool, as long as it delivers value to them. In this case, they just want a website that works. Plus we’ve sold this packages to hundreds of other customers. They’ve seen their friends using it, and it worked for them.
The takeaway here is — If you’re a photographer for instance, split your wedding packages into multiple packages. Not just one package. Have up to 4 packages each one with limited items.
If done correctly you’ll have more customers at different price points, big companies like Apple and Samsung do this. They even sell old iPhones cheaper after the new ones have been announced. Be like Apple, so instead of lowering your price, you have different packages for different types individuals wallet.
2: Whenever you do a free service for an old customer send an invoice with a 100% discount. So they know the worth of value you’ve just provided to them. Here’s an example say you’re designer and your old customers asked you to add their logo into some photo or another design. After you deliver to them, attach an invoice with the amount you would’ve done it for. But with a 100% discount. Trust me on this. They’ll respect your time more.
One last thing if you’re going to give a discount to a client put it on the invoice. Let’s say a client priced you and since your business isn’t a supermarket you decides to give them a discount. Put your full price and then minus the discount from the total.
3: Specialize and Kill off unprofitable services you offer. So back in 2012, when I started @AmaniArtStudio, i was a one man band. I was into all sorts of things from animation, videography, logo design, web and app development. Yeah! 😅
I didn’t really have a focus, different people saved my number as “Austine Website”, “Austine Logo”, “Austine Video Director”, etc. I wasn’t known for one thing, i was always busy with things that didn’t improve my income.
So one day I decided to go through this excel sheet that i used to record all my income, and previous customer’s balance. I noticed I was making more money on web design and it was more consistent too. That was when I decided to kill off everything else and just focused on web design. I would say, that was the beginning of everything that happened afterwards.
4: Keep records — For you to move forward and make better decisions about your business, you need to first, look at the past, and then learn from it. I’m not talking about giving your customers a flashy invoice you designed with your design skills. No, I’m talking about a proper business ledger with all your income month by month.
You can use an excel spreadsheet or @UsePaperCloud. Your records should include the service the client is paying for, the date, amount, deposit, balance if any, and their contact details. Doing this will put things into perspective for you.
5: Give invoice — See, let me just tell you. If you’re not giving your clients invoices they won’t regard you. And if they don’t regard you. They won’t respect your time. And that’s why they can call you anytime and shout at you for little things. Brand yourself, an invoice with your logo, contact and account details does that for you already without spending money on ads. You can create your own unique design or you can @UsePaperCloud to create one easily and share as a PDF or link on WhatsApp/IG/Twitter DM. When updating payment on an invoice, make sure you add payment history to avoid arguing what their balance is, at a later date.
6: Dress sharp — Stop going to meet with your clients wearing slippers. Don’t do it. Buy some nice sneakers or loafers. Buy plain T-shirts and some jeans. Get some body spray and smell good when you go for meetings. First impressions matters.
Okay this is getting longer than I initially planned. I’ll end here. If you enjoyed this, kindly retweet for others and also checkout @UsePaperCloud I built it to help run my agency business @AmaniArtStudio, it later turned into a SaaS app for small business owners and freelancer to help run and manage their business. Everything I talked about in this thread can be done with @UsePaperCloud
Once again thank you for reading to the end.