 Today we're going to talk about how to create freelance quotes and proposals here on the journey. So I used to volunteer a lot for SCORE, which is have you ever heard of SCORE? I haven't. Okay, well, it's just another thing like a Chamber of Commerce or a place you can go as a business to seek advice or they could just check out the journey. But anyways, when I was there, I noticed a lot of businesses that were going to SCORE for help were businesses that hadn't started yet, like they're brand new. And what was coming up a lot was actually what I want to talk with you about today is why? Like why would you have a quote or a proposal in the first place? Yeah, and there's a couple of things around why you really need to create a proposal and that quote and to start off, it really comes down to keeping everyone accountable for what the agreed upon costs are. Your proposal is going to house all the information on the project, at least high level overviews. So keeping everyone accountable on who does what, when, why, where, how, all those questions, right? It's all going to be baked right into that proposal. And that makes a ton of sense, the whole accountability thing. It reminds me of when I was in like college studying psychology and there's a whole bystander effect, which a lot of times you think of like bystander effect. You're on the street and there's 40 people and someone gets injured, but because there's 40 people, no one's jumping to the scene to help the injured person. Well, it actually happens in the workplace too. It's a whole phenomenon. It's like, well, there's a bunch of people in this group. So like, I don't have to follow through with these tasks. Yeah, someone else has got it. Someone else has got it. But with a proposal, I know I struggle a lot when I first started out freelancing is that scope creep. So keeping that, that proposal in there. Wait, what is it called? Scope creep. So essentially it's not some creep. Sounds like a dance move. All right. Cool, what's a dance move? Right on the spot. I can't do it. I can't do it. Scope creep is coming soon. I already embarrassed myself enough with karaoke. Scope creep is basically so you agree with a client on a project, whatever that is, you complete the project, but then they keep adding on tasks and they go, oh, cool, one more thing. Oh, cool, one more thing. Oh, cool, one more thing. Nothing cool about that. Right. So they creep on that scope and they go way over it. They cross the line sometimes. I love this term. So that proposal helps you really keep everyone in line of cool. This is what we've agreed upon and keeping it within there. And then you can add any proposal. Like, hey, if any tasks are beyond this, I have set quote or set hourly rate that you can make sure sticks because it's not fun when you have a client that you didn't set those expectations with. And now they just assume that you're there to do all the things for the price. And it's not any fun. All right, Neely. So I imagine, which this is really similar to social media, like there's not a one size fits all approach to this. Exactly. No one size fits all with your proposals. You can't have just a one template, basically, and just send it off to every single client. Every client is going to have different expectations and different project needs, whatever that looks like. So that one size doesn't fit all. And if every client was the perfect client, we really wouldn't need a proposal or these agreements. But super important to have something in place to make sure everybody wins at the end of the day. So Neely, I'm getting the sense that you've done this before. Once or twice. You've written up a proposal. So what's next? I know we talked a little bit about estimates. What's behind that? What's it about? Yeah. So estimates are basically an estimate of whether you can complete the job assigned to you or given to you by that business owner in the timeframe allotted. I'm actually working with a client right now. They migrated their Drupal site to WordPress, having some responsive issues. They're like, hey, cool. We've got quoted three month timeframe. But we really need it done in eight months at this cost. So I had to basically understand the project and give an estimate of, cool, I can get this whole project done by X-Date for this amount. So it's a general loose timeframe, like it's an estimate. Like you're not actually guessing, but it's like an educated guess based on all the information that you have. You don't want that timeframe to change, but at least you have an estimate and there is maybe a flexibility there as well. But you got to have a lot of clear communication, too. Absolutely. You know, with your client, I imagine that. Does it always go over well? Right. As we all know, you're watching this. I'm sure you've had some sort of experience with a client that didn't go the right way. But within that proposal, too, you do want to make sure you have a quote that's written down in stone for this project. So you and the client know that the cost associated with it, whether it's your services or extra plugins or design cost or whatever it looks like, have that in there. And then we're going to go through how to actually quote, like create your own custom quotes later on in this video. But you definitely need to have that within this proposal. All right, Nealey. So we've talked a lot about time and time constraints. Right. Now, and I'm sure you're asking this at home, what about cost? Can we get into that? All right. So going into the proposal, we got to figure out what the costs are associated with this and really price out our freelance rates. Now, I know I struggled with this, especially when I first got started. I didn't want to look like I was too expensive, right? I wanted to get work. Or too cheap. I ended up being too cheap to try to get business because I wanted business, which a lot of us just starting out, we want to make sure we don't scare clients away. Now it worked. I was getting a bunch of clients, but I wasn't getting a lot out of it. And I felt like I was constantly working on projects and not getting a lot in return. That's for sure. Yeah, it was not good. Draining. It basically did it for a long time. And then I had a mentor that was working with me for a little while. She basically sat me down and said, I'm going to kick your butt if you keep doing these prices this low. You're worth more than this. I'm worth it. I'm worth it. But no, we had a great conversation about how she charged the clients on that perceived value. So I decided to try it. The next client I got, I jacked the prices up to what we talked about. The client agreed. And that extra cost increased just the perceived value that I was given. Told her. And the client was super happy at the end of it. Like I was able to justify the cost. I nailed it. And then I was able to do that with the rest of my clients across the board and increase those prices. And I found I was actually working less and making more. So then I could focus on those clients and over deliver while still giving that great cost. And it ended up increasing my side hustle and has today. So I've seen you do some math before on other episodes of the journey. And I imagine to find out how much you're worth. There's got to be some sort of equation here. Can you tell us a little bit about that or what that equation would be to figure out your worth? Yeah. So the first thing you really want to figure out is what do you want your annual salary to be? Like that's the starting point. Do you need $50,000 to live off? Do you need a million dollars? Whatever that looks like. Six figures. So what salary would you like to earn as a creative freelancer? Six figures. So we'll say $100,000. We're being super ambitious. And we want to take that $100,000 and divide it by $1,000. Why? You asked. Thanks for asking. So there's roughly $2,000. How many kids am I going to have? Right. There's roughly $2,000 working hours in a year. It's a little bit over. But to keep math simple, we'll go $2,000. You want to basically spend half of that getting new business, focusing on the admin stuff, all the not so fun things that you have to do to keep your business going. The other $1,000 hours, that's going to be you working on the business. Whatever you're doing, whether it's building websites, creating logos, videos, whatever that is, you're spending that $1,000 hours. So $100,000 annually. That's what you want to make for your salary. Divide it by that $1,000. What does that equal out to? $100,000. Yeah. So that's exactly right. $100,000. This is only our seventh take. It's fine. So $100 an hour is your hourly rate for you to essentially earn that $100,000. Wait, question. Yep. Does that have to be hourly? Like what if it's I'm working from monthly? Yeah. Do people do that or? You absolutely can do that. But this is just something that you want to kind of keep in the back of your mind as your hourly rate. So that when you do give your estimates and your projects and things of that nature, you kind of equate your hourly rate into that. Cool. So it's going to take me a week. I'm going to be spending 20 hours on that this week. What that looks like. Then you'll estimate the project by, cool, it's going to be $2,000 for this project. You know it's 20 hours, but you're not going. Cool is going to be an hour later for $100. It's going to be cool. This project is $2,000, but you know I'm spending 20 hours. I basically $100 an hour. Maths and stuff equal that. Maths and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's an official term. And now with your quote, like you have all these things there, you do want to stay away from your hourly rate within your proposal. Why? It scares people because they can think that maybe you're just going to kind of slack off and like hang out and stretch this out to a million hours. Who knows? There's no real definite stop and start points. They're like, well, you're going to keep just working and working. What is this actually going to cost me? But you do your estimates, do your maths and stuff, and then you'll have your project estimate of, cool, it's going to take me two weeks, 20 hours, $2,000. So the project proposal is going to be for $2,000. I've talked about this a lot when I first joined GoDaddy Social because we offer social media service for businesses like yours. And a lot of the time when people would ask, well, how much do you charge to do all the social media? All the things. A lot of all the things. They generally, like people assume, businesses assume, like this must be an hourly thing. And what we actually, when it comes to social media services, we do monthly pricing, which makes a ton of sense to me. And I actually always tell businesses, if someone's trying to try to hourly, be careful with that. Like we have a set price and give like what we're going to do each month. And I just, to me as a business owner, if I were looking for social media help, I would want that, a monthly flat price. But I could see how in different circumstances hourly would make more sense. Yeah. And I love how you brought up that you include what you're going to do. Yes. We talked about the scope creep earlier in the episode. That scope creep is super real. So make sure you include exactly the services you're going to provide in that proposal, whether it's bulleted lists or paragraphs, whatever makes most sense for you to really describe what the client is going to get out of it. Yeah. And also I found too, when I was selling social media as services, businesses really wanted to know, yeah, what's in it for me? What are you going to do? But also providing example of it. That was a big thing too. It's like, OK, you're going to manage my Yelp. What does that mean? Like, what does that look like? Well, talking to a dentist, show them a dentist on Yelp that we're managing and a review that they received and how we responded on behalf of the dentist. And then they can see, like, oh, that's actually a really good response. And you're going to do that for me? Cool. I don't have to think about how to respond to these happy and maybe unhappy patients. All right. So as I was mentioning, really important, and we're talking about explaining, hey, this is what you're going to get. And this is what we're going to do for you. That's really great accountability. But imagine there's a fine line, too, with how much you say. Like, you don't want to give away your secrets. Yeah. You don't want to sell your secrets. You don't want to lay out exactly bit by bit of what you're going to do. Because, one, that document's going to be incredibly long. And no one's going to want to read that. Yeah. Nobody got time for that. No one has time for that. But then you don't want to give them basically the foundation of what you do because it might sell you short or they might go, cool, I'm just going to do that myself. Thanks for all the information. Have a great day. Great day. That was free 99. Yeah. Thanks for all the tips. Right. Focus on the benefits of what they're getting out of your services, not necessarily the strategies, tactics, and all the features. All right. The moment you've all been waiting for. What's that? How do you get paid? How do you get paid? How do you get paid? So in your proposal, you need to spell out how you get paid and the terms of which you get paid. I know what's super popular is. Cash money. 50% also cash money. You're not wrong. But 50% deposit down and then 50% upon completion. That way you at least get something in case things go sideways. But then upon completion, release map out what that looks like. Are there revisions to your process? Are there extra steps that need to happen as they're a set time of like, cool, it's finished. I need to get paid in seven days. Otherwise, there's late. Are there late fees for not paying on time? Oh, that's a good one too. Whatever that looks like, have that included in there. I'll add up. You also want to make sure that you include ways, like just different ways of getting paid. Not everyone likes to use PayPal, not everyone likes to use a credit card. Have different options in there. Venmo. Venmo. I know I use that religiously. I'll accept your payment via Venmo. And hey, being a freelancer is tough. You're constantly chasing out money, sending out invoices, doing the work. Lots of work. Doing literally all of the things. So it's good to have this proposal and quote system in place to keep your longevity and your work protected. Your sanity. Right. All right. That's how you create a quote and proposal and all the things you need in it. Make sure you like this video, comment and subscribe to our channel. And be sure to ring that bell so you're the first to know when our next episode comes out. This is The Journey.