 your WordPress projects for profit. I'm not gonna say that more than one time cause it'll get me all tongue twisted. I have three of my favorite people up here. Featured guests, we have Judy Knight, Victor Ramirez, all the way from New York, and Danny Peavey, who's here too. They are all different levels of doing what we do. Well first off, I would imagine most of you are either working as a freelancer or work with an agency. Is that, is anybody not doing that here? Okay. Why are you here? Okay, that's perfect. This whole thing is for you. Okay, so we have a bunch of questions that I put up. All of our featured guests have seen these questions. I wanna try to get them quickly enough so that we have some time at the end for Q&A cause I'm confident you guys have some questions of your own. The big thing here though is like, I know being a freelancer, it's such a challenge to really do the math to make sure that you've got all these unknowns. How are you going to say the price is gonna be X and be able to do it for that much money, not lose profit on your own and not have to do what Judy would call the $3 an hour, what was it, late night project? Yeah, three AM, $3 an hour project because our time is worth much more than that. You may as well give it away for free otherwise. Hey, this is me. So I started my own WordPress development company in 2009, courtesy of Judy Knight. Tried to get hired as a developer and she pretty much stopped the interview halfway through and said, you're not the guy. Start your own thing. There's a longer story to that, but it was... Basically, she was like, I don't need somebody talking about marketing. I don't need somebody talking about all this other stuff. I just need somebody to write code. Sounds like that, sounds great. So it encouraged me to start my own business, which went from being a website development design, SEO, social media, gamut of stuff that I didn't really know to being a WordPress development company very specifically because that's the stuff that I did know. A year and a half ago I merged with Sideways 8. You may have seen us around. We've got a booth. If you haven't got a shirt yet, go grab a shirt. Co-organizer the Atlanta WordPress Meetup, which hasn't happened yet this year, but now that this is over, we'll be back in the game. And then one of the co-organizers of this event helped kind of select the speakers and do the schedule. So hopefully the schedule was good for everybody. You had a good time. And then I'm... Hey, yeah, whoa! Also on a committee for a project called 4848, where we do 48 websites and 48 hours for 48 nonprofits in a specific area. Atlanta is happening in the fall. And if you're interested, we have one of our team members over here you can talk to, you can talk to me or go to 4848.org. You can volunteer. We need your help. It's a really great cause. It's all volunteer based from the top down. So come hang out. Ms. Judy Knight, she founded Nutrix in 2008. 2008, 2009 was the year for WordPress businesses, by the way. So if you missed it, you still have a chance, but that was the one. Worked with over 250 clients price points from 5K to 75K. That's a pretty big range. 250 sites is a lot. So there's some good experience there. And then she was one of the original organizers of the WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Atlanta. So definitely in the game and has some great advice. Victor Ramirez, who I know through an organization called WP Elevation. If you guys are agency or freelance people, I encourage you to check it out. I'm not gonna get anything out of that, but you could get a lot out of that. It's a really great community of people. It's all based around doing this stuff. Pricing is something they talk about in there. It's founded an abstract agency. I don't know what year, but I'm imagining it wasn't 2008 or nine, 2014. Still working. And he has a specific experience in a higher level, working with more enterprise level clients. So I thought it would be great to have him come in here and tell us how he handles that. And you can check out his website there. And all these slides will be available, obviously. So if you wanna go back and check anything out, you can get that. And then Danny Peavey, who I thought started his company longer ago, has been in the mix for, what'd you say, nine months? Nine months started his company. Started because he went through a website process that was extremely tedious, not necessarily customer centric. And because of his challenges there, thought it would be a great idea to start a company. So somebody that doesn't do design or development coming into this space to really try to make a difference, which I think is cool. But he does have almost a decade of experience in sales for IT companies. So he's got a unique perspective on this type of stuff that we're trying to talk about here today. And his business is called One Week Website. All right, so we're gonna get started. Any sleeper yet? Okay. And we'll just go down the line, we can pop around too, but this is my most favorite question. So let's start with you. Who's got the mic? Victor, I come to you and I say, I need a website. How much does that cost? How would you respond to that? Websites can cost anywhere from a dollar to five million dollars, depending on who they're built for, but it's what kind of website you need. So tell me what you're trying to do with it. I am, I'm gonna dig just a little bit deeper. I'm a solopreneur and I don't have a website and my sister made my logo and she is a horseback rider. So I would have qualified them through a form and they're not the client for me, but I would invite them to a meetup to come meet some potential other developers or freelancers. So. They come to a meetup? Yeah, I invite so anyone, any lead that I can't work that I just don't, solo printers are not for me, small business owners, they're too, it's ride or die mentality for them and every dollar is too valuable. I prefer to work with like CMOs and companies that are a little more mature, but I still think those people need someone to work with them. So the best way is I invite them to a WordPress meetup in New York City, WPMYC, we have 7,000 members and there's always someone who can help them out. I love that. Judy. Under that scenario? Or do you have a new scenario? No, I don't have a new scenario. Mine would be very similar because I would first, first thing I do is a free 10 minute phone call because I absolutely need to qualify the person before I spend one more minute before I make an appointment and go to their office and oh by the way, I don't do that, they come to me, but that first 10 minute phone call, if it is a client, that if it does sound like, you know, Brett said that, but it may be that it's somebody with champagne taste and wants it like they want it. And if I sense that, yeah, I can do a website for them. So then the next step is to talk to them and get a sense of what their business is and so that they, so they say well then what do we do? I said now you, the first step in working with us is a paid consultation. So then they come to my office and do a talk it out session. And during that talk it out session, I find out about their business. It's kind of a discovery as quick, and this is not for our enterprise wide clients that I do go to their office if it's gonna be a 50,000 or more kind of client, but these are for the most of them. So they do a talk it out session. I listen to their whole, you know, really understand their business, tell them about usability factors and educate them, let them know what I see that where their website could be effective if they don't have one, you know, talk about, just kind of letting them know that I'm there for them and that I'm empathetic and have the authority to get the job done. By that time they're like well how much will it cost? And then- Well by that time you know. I kind of know that they're my client, but at that time if once they say how much does it cost, they're ready to work with me. And so I whip out the website cost estimator. And it's an automatic gravity forms thing that I created for some, I do a website WordPress web designers mastery course and I developed this tool for the mastery course. It was so much fun. I now do it with my own clients who love it because we go through each thing, including what kind of client they are, whether they have champagne taste, whether they're gonna be reluctant and I have to pull the content out of them and each one has a different cost to it. And they know and they admit it. And if they don't admit it, we have something to fall back on later when they said they weren't champagne taste, but they start to want you to change the font in the email sign up box. You know, I'm like okay, remember you didn't buy that package. But by the time we go through together all of the parts of the website cost estimator and come to the end, then we can adjust it if it's too much. Well, then what do you wanna leave out? And then, you know, or some of them have said go back and add champagne taste which adds $2,000 to the contract. So by that time, they've already, they're already talking about like when we're gonna work together, all I have to do is write it up in a proposal and I've sealed the deal. So I do have a free version of our five steps to pricing websites like a pro that if you type in 888688... I don't have that on the slides. 88688 and to a text and then you put in WP Mastery, then you'll get the website cost estimator, the PDF version, but 88688... Oh, it's wrong, wrong. It's 666866. So what we've gotten so far, 666... One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. So what I've gathered so far is we still don't know how much a website cost is but we have to qualify them and then if we can, let's charge them something to help them figure out what they need and then we can say what the cost is. So, Danny. Yeah, no, what they said's great, not too much to add and I think the point is whether this question comes from your website form or in person, you have to have some sort of qualification, right? Some people do that with a longer form, some people do that with a second form but whether it's a 10 minute in person or an extra 10 minutes on a form, having some sort of methodology to qualify is super important. It's important for you but to Judy's point, we are here to help people, right? It's really important for those folks to know who you are and who you're not. So yeah, I mean, that's a similar process, right? If I meet somebody in person, it's really having an empathetic ear and saying what are you trying to accomplish and if they are a $1,000 budget type of person, most people don't know about Squarespace. They don't know about Wix. Introduce them. No, you don't need to take it first. It can still be helpful even if you don't do the website. Totally. I like that. All right, so I think it's on here. No, nope. Let's say I've got just a typical marketing website, five to seven pages. Give me your price range. Squarespace. Squarespace. It could be... I'm giving you my logo and my colors and my fonts. Our typical average price is about 6,000. Best for five page website. Five, six. No, please. That's because it comes with a lot of strategy. If they don't want the strategy, then maybe 3,500, but it's usually people that want more. They're showing up with their strategy? No, they're not showing up with their strategy. If they're not showing up with their strategy and they're not paying for the strategy, then they get... Send them to somebody else. Well, if they just want us to spend 15 hours working on their website, they pick a theme or we show them a theme. I can do that too, but they're not getting strategy. They're getting that theme with their content and their photos. So we do those in between our bigger projects and because I'm a softy and I like the little business. I'm not a softy. I would be like, bye. Yeah, I mean, roughly five to six grand as well. I mean, the name of our company is one a week website, so we are targeting that middle market play, which I really don't think exists. So we will help them for that five to six grand range and we do provide content coaching with that. We'll help them submit their content in a non-technical way. So instead of saying, what's your header? We say, how do you summarize your business in one sentence? And for people that are type A and they wanna be in the process, they can write that pretty easily. So yeah, we'll include that and it actually doesn't take a lot of cycles for us. Cool, all right. So $5,000-ish. Yes? We'll get into some of that in a minute. That's a whole different conversation. So essentially, you can do a website in a week. We can do a website in 48 hours, but there's two months of prep to get everything ready to build a website. We'll talk about the little bit more. One more, but then for the rest of the time, if you guys could just jot them down, we'll get some Q&A at the end. Sure. What is strategy? Well, we do a brand story about, like really to know how to make an effective website, it takes more than just plopping something down. Most clients don't know how to even put their best foot forward. And so we help them really design a strategy for their homepage that will show them as the empathetic person with authority that has exactly the right solution for their client and without saying that, shows it in images and words. So the person by the end is dying to work for them. And if they want that, that's why it costs $6,000. Right, and you can spend 5K on a strategy session just to build that out. And it can mean a lot of different things. It depends on if we're talking about digital marketing as a whole, just the website and all that. So we got quite a few slides to get through. I'm gonna try to blast through some of these and get some good information. This is a, it's hard for me to know where it looked. All right, so in five words or less, how do you get the real budget from a potential client? You can use more than five words, I'm just playing. Yeah, no, so not to like on the Squarespace thing. So if a client just keeps saying to me, I want five to seven pages, one form, I don't work that way, because it's very difficult for me to, if I know nothing about their business and they say to me, I just want forms and I want pages, you know, that Squarespace is easier for them because they're looking for someone to push pixels. They're not looking for a professional to guide them through how to build a website that actually works, right? And so I may ask them, so I'm working with a chain of spas and salons that are in casinos right now, right? And they came to me and said, we just want a simple e-commerce website on Shopify. Simple e-commerce website. Yeah, simple, and of course, yeah, simple. That's gonna have five locations and, you know, whatever. So, but the one thing I said to them too was, I'm not sure if you want e-commerce because I knew their business. I'd worked in that vertical before and I said, look, 50% of your revenue 10 years ago was beauty products, right, and you probably have 100 to 500 skews, but in the last trade magazine I read, your actual profits from product in store is 10 to 20% because Amazon's eating your margins, right? So I said, I think it's probably gonna be better to build some kind of affiliate recommendation system where your stylists can recommend product and you can get revenue through that instead of having to build an expensive e-commerce store. And the minute I kind of gave them that insight that they didn't need to build an e-commerce store and that they were gonna lose the battle against Amazon anyway and here's how to profit from that market change, all of a sudden, like, the price didn't matter. I was their guy, I was the only person who understood their market and understood their problem. That's a great response because their real budget could have been anything, but either way, you were positioning to be the guy. Mike, it's very similar. That's why I don't recommend you qualifying people with a form on your website because you lose that opportunity to do things like Victor just said. When you have that conversation with people from the first moment, you start a connection with them, you get a read on them and that's why I do it in person. And then the same thing with the, either with a Zoom meeting or in my office, but to see them and talk to them and really understand their business so you give them that value added, insight and strategy and then once they, you know, if you ask somebody what their budget is, they're gonna say, well, I don't have one. But if you said, okay, so 10,000, though, oh, no, well, that can't do that. But then if they really feel like you've, that you're the person they wanna work with and they go through that website cost estimator and they see that I'm not just looking at what car they've driven up in to price their website. Sometimes people think that and like Victor said, they all think it's just a simple thing. I just want this simple, they don't understand and when you go through all the parts and pieces that are involved and okay, one form is free, but your second form that you wanna hit the compliant 43 item form, that's not free, that's, oh, okay, I see. That simple site isn't so simple after all and then their budget starts to go up. Yeah, hashtag yeah. Yeah, I think you have to, I was trying to really do the five words or less, that's why I was talking. Find the why and reduce anxiety. First meeting, just find the why. Like forget about websites for a second. Forget about money is indicative of value, right? We all buy things every day and they're all indicative of value. So value needs to exceed the price. So let's, we all feel that little weird feeling on that first four minute phone call, you feel it on the other line, you have it in your heart's bump, beating fast, it's like, oh, when are we gonna get to this? When are we gonna get to this? Your job is to reduce anxiety and find their why. Why are you doing this? Sometimes in the first four seconds or four minutes, I say, how do you make money? Why are you spending money with me? It's not a sales tactic, it's reality. And if they say, it's a Judy and Victor's point, some of them will have fear and have anxiety even when you ask that question. So man, I just wanna get online, man. That's a great answer, that's fine. But no matter what they say, if you have good processes, if you give them that five minute, that 10 minute, you know that no matter what they say, you're gonna be able to help them out. Hey, you need to go check out Squarespace, you need to call one week website, they're awesome, just kidding, but you know. So what we've learned so far is we still don't know how much a website costs and we don't know how to get the real budget. I'm just kidding. No, so far for real, what we're doing here is really, like the budget, we can figure that part out later. We're trying to figure out how much it's, like what do we need to do in the first place so that we can figure out how much of our time it's gonna cost to make this happen and then we can figure out a price to give them. If they've got a budget that matches or doesn't match that, that's a whole other conversation. You can figure out if you wanna do, I can do a $500 website and profit. I don't, but I could do it for the right project. We'll talk about more higher price stuff though. All right, so hourly versus flat rate pricing. This one could be real easy. Do you use both? Do you use one or the other? And why? I've done both and it depends completely on the project, something where it's easy to scope. So a WordPress website. And the way that I can give a budget where I tell people, look, the lowest price we can do in today's modern day, a website is $5,000. And explain why. Because you need an SSL. No, you cannot set it up because you don't know how to fix all the HTTP, HTTPS errors and I'm gonna have to fix them for you anyway so I have to set it up for you. No, you can't go pick the theme because you don't know what theme to pick. So that's why it's like $5,000. So that is easy to do flat rate because I know all those things they have to set up. Anything that's kind of is variable needs to be hourly. So anything where they have like a custom API, they think that they wanna tie it in with some kind of special application. It's always better to do that hourly because it can very easily get out of control if the client doesn't know where it's going and it's hard to scope without putting a lot of time into that. That's good. Ditto. I mean, I think we do packages. I mean, we'll price it on the, I mean, a flat rate package price based on going through everything scoping it very carefully but if they want some sort of custom map with locations globally around the world and so forth, then we would say that would be hourly because we're working with an architectural firm in Atlanta and oh, by the way, that champagne taste, a bunch of 350 architects think they know everything about what they want. But so we gave them a flat rate price and then there's specific things that they said they wanted that are outside kind of what we scoped and we just are charging those by the hour. The flat rate per hour. Depends on the task. Yeah, it really does because we have some things we can do with our lower cost people and some things, it varies, but it's definitely profitable. We actually have a whole slide on kind of going rates for agencies and freelancers around that. Yeah, we're completely flat rate. Makes it easy. Yeah, flat rate. So we do a little bit of both and our flat rates are kind of based on our hourly estimations of certain things and then some math on top of that that gives us our flat rate. But our hourly rate is 150 unless you're a VIP client which means you're on hosting and maintenance with us and then it's 100. It's a nice discount. All right, have you tried value-based pricing? Yeah, first up. Does anybody not know what value-based pricing is? There's a couple, everybody's like. Don't be shy. Anybody want to explain anything you want me to try? Go ahead. The gist would be, the best way I heard it put was, how much money would you lose if this website is not a success? Let's say it's $100,000. Okay, so $100,000, if we can do a project at $50,000, does that sound like a good idea? That's way less than you would lose. Maybe that project only cost us $1,000 cost to get out but it's saving them another $50,000 so that $50,000 they pay is no big deal. That's kind of the value-based pricing system. Have you used it? Yeah, so like one of my favorite examples to give to clients and I've used this for positioning for every product I sell now. We charge $1,000 a month for either a bi-weekly or a monthly newsletter that just has 10 links and clients will say, how do you charge $1,000 for that? You just go and get 10 links and put an email and send it out. But we're not selling an email newsletter. What that newsletter does is when you send that newsletter out to your existing audience and they don't click a link or do anything within 30 days of that email, they get a goodbye email and it removes them from your email list so that list gets really qualified. It's only people who are engaging and actually, they like what you're putting out there, right? And then now you have a list of qualified leads who you know are engaged with articles that you've shared with them. Oh, and by the way, you can sync MailChimp or sync HubSpot with Facebook advertising. So now instead of spending, you know, let's say, lucky maybe $1 per click or $5 per click depending on the niche, instead of targeting 30,000 wasted emails of people who don't engage with you and they signed up 10 years ago and they don't care about your product and burning $30,000 a day in advertising, you can target a list of maybe 100 to 200 really qualified leads. So instead of thinking of it as a $1,000 a month newsletter, would you like, would you pay $1,000 for a really qualified list of leads a month? And the client says, that's it, and like, yes. And they're more than willing to pay for that. Feel pretty good. Can I go to the next one? You got a good. No. Well, I do have an example. I have a client that has a really, really, really bad 750 item store. And they have a huge, like eight different restaurants, stores, so forth, consortium. And then they have this e-commerce that's only bringing in 3% of their total revenue that I look at this really bad website and know how much a good website in their industry should, I mean, a good store will work. And so she's just all signed up. She knows that we can do that and there's no questions. So. Very cool. Same stuff. Let's get a quick comment. I was just gonna, I don't want to have as much of a practical example, but just what I try to do in the first, even, again, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, is even recently I've realized this, I don't so much sit in the chair of my customer as I sit in the chair of my customer's customer. And if you use empathy to look at anything that you talk about from the perspective of their customer and work backwards, again, that's how you get rid of the anxiety and the awkwardness because that's that person's, your customer's goal. And to me, that's value-based pricing. That's everything, that's what everything boils down to. It's the customer's customer. Cool. Okay, this is a quick one. So what's the difference between pricing as a freelancer and pricing as an agency? The way I would answer that question is, as a freelancer, you're doing everything. So let's say you're charging $125 an hour as a freelancer, you're the salesperson, you're the project manager, you're the designer, the developer of the quality assurance and you're the support. So all of that money comes to you. If you're an agency, you might have individual people for that. So that $125 then starts to split up to all that extra overhead that you have. So if somebody's coming to you and they're like, I'm a freelancer, I need to work with you on a contract basis, you're making $125 an hour on my one hour of time. I'm only charging you 40, I should be getting more. They may not understand that there's other touchpoints that are having to be paid for by that hour. Does that seem pretty reasonable? Any comments on this one? But they don't care. The client doesn't care, but the contractor might care. This is more for like, if I'm a contractor coming to you, I know you're charging 150 an hour, why don't I get all 150 of that? Because there's overhead, they might not be aware of. Wait, so is the question, do I think freelancers that are coming to me, I mean, if I'm gonna make a profit, I have to pay them less, but then I charge. But are you saying if I was a freelancer or an agency, should I charge differently? Yeah. I would recommend freelancers not charge anything less if they're delivering the same quality of product. Because the agency's job is to figure out how to more efficiently deliver a product, right? Whereas a freelancer, they also are doing the same thing, but I think a lot of people forget that when you're a freelancer, just because you're charging $20 an hour, you also are your own social security, you're your own unemployment, you're your own life insurance, you're your own vacation, all those things. You have the facts, your own taxes, your own equipment, so you have to factor all those, and if you don't factor those things in, you're eventually gonna burn out. So that's, I just think freelancers, they can charge the same price as an agency if they know how to have a really, deliver something really well. Yeah, for sure. All right, I'm gonna keep. That's what I meant by it, it doesn't matter. I'm gonna try to get through these a little quicker. So how much would you recommend a freelance WordPress guru? Somebody's not writing code charged per hour. Just a quick. Again, I don't think it matters as long as the end product is excellent and gets the job done. Okay. I don't think you need to write code, and in fact, most people doing sites, most developers aren't doing it with a lot of code, smaller sites, or they'd lose their shirt. I would say there's probably a difference between paying a coding developer's price versus paying a price of someone that's just working inside the box. The value may be the same in the end, but there's a different hourly rate for that type of work. And so this question is related to how much this freelance WordPress guru should charge a client or an agency to do work for an agency. A client, yeah, what they're saying, they're the salesperson as much as possible. Like the value needs to exceed the price. Right. If it's a freelancer that's looking to work with other salespeople or other agencies to get work, I think that is really dependent upon what makes that person happy. Folks that I sometimes think about working with, and we have a small team, so I don't really use freelancers, but I always joke around like freelancers or developers, hey, do you wanna sit in the dark all day and you hate people and you don't like to sell, right? Like, I mean, it's kinda... My favorite developer. Yeah, so it's really about undercover, figuring out what makes them happy. All right, so I took this from Post Status. There's a couple resource links at the end of this that have how much should a website cost type answers. This one from Post Status is pretty long and it has some really great information, but this is kind of what was kind of the recommended prices there. So beginner freelancer 25 to 40 per hour, all the way up to a specialist being up to $400 per hour, so that really depends, I'll let y'all get that. Go ahead. Web person, so I think the word developer and designer kinda gets skewed sometimes, but if you're building websites. Okay, and this is as a freelancer, so you're the only person working on the project. We'll get to that. No, so the next slide has that. So how much would you recommend a staffed agency charge per hour? So like we looked at a freelancer that's really awesome, could charge $150 per hour. So a good agency can also charge $150 per hour, but like we said before, that money gets divvied up a little bit differently. So this is small market, general agency, 50 to 75, so like you're in a small town. I think, what does Atlanta, you think medium or large? Large, okay, so reputable agency, $150 to $175 per hour as an agency. So and again, that's getting divvied up. So and again, these are available on that status post. All right, so here's something that I think is pretty cool and I try to apply this to a lot of things in my life. 80-20 rule, anybody heard of this? Feel pretty good about it. So a general way that I'm figuring out the math for the projects we're doing is 20% of the project fees should be cost that leaves 80% for things like overflow that happens, profit, we want 80% profit, we can get it. Commission, if you're paying a sales person, some commission needs to be in there. So and then depending on the size of your staff, there may be a specific number that you need to reach that actually makes you profitable because even though, let's say you've got 80%, let's say 20% is actual cost, there may be some other admin stuff that you weren't paying a developer or a designer for. There's other people on your team that might not actually touch the project itself, but you still have to pay. So all of that comes out of this 80%. All right, and here's just some quick math. So let's say as a individual, you're running a little, let's not say freelance, but you're like a solo agency and you're hiring contractors. Your time and the contractor's time we're both saying is $25 an hour. So onboarding discovery and putting together content for our little five page website probably take you about eight hours total, maybe not in the same day. Filling some time for design and development, 24 hours. You need some project management time. Put that in as a line item in your invoices. That's an important part. Even if you're doing it yourself, people need to know that that takes time and money and then quality assurance you need to do too. So 40 hours, $25 is $1,000. So if you're charging $1,000 for that website, you've made no money. Still feels like it could be a lot. So 20% of that, that's a $5,000 website and that's how a five page website gets to $5,000 really quickly. You're delivering something that's gonna make this business much more than $5,000 over the lifetime of the website. So don't be scared when that bigger number starts to come up. Any comments on that? Yeah, I actually price this way. It's called, I just use, it's called gross margin. Can I, there's an app I actually use. Could I tell the folks about it? If you didn't develop it. Yeah, I did not develop. I'm not a developer designer, I'm not, I'm a dude. Literally a dude. There's an, has anybody watched The Prophet or Shark Tank? Huge fan of Marcus Lomonos, if he was here, I'd cry or whatever. He actually came out with an app. It's called Cost Margin. It's a green icon. There's a lemon on the bottom right of it. See me afterwards if you miss this, but essentially Brett's equation. You just, you have three different ways to do your pricing, but you can put in your price and your target margin. You can put in your cost and your price, and it spits out of gross margin. Or you can put in your cost and your anticipated margin and it gives you a price, which is what Brett did. But super highly recommend this for pricing. And I do think a target gross margin, 70 to 80% should be a great, that's how you can tell if you're pricing a job correctly, right? Is what's that gross margin? And that calculator is super helpful to figure that out. And don't be scared to have 80%, 70% profit. Like that's how you run your business, that's how you feed your family, that's how you continue to grow your team. So you're giving people a valuable thing by building this website for them. They're only giving you a little bit of the money that they make in a year. You're a business too. And if anybody finds that app, if you could throw it in Slack, that would be helpful for everybody too. Yeah. Does anyone here charge less than $25 an hour? Don't be shy, raise your hand. Come on, somebody? No one charges less than, wow, all right, cool. All right, this is a good room. These are professionals. All right, all right. So, right, oh yeah, so sorry, that was one thing. Just because you're not charging hourly doesn't mean you shouldn't track your time. So even right now, like when I go home after this word camp, I'm gonna go into my toggle and put this in as marketing. Because I still had to come here and spend time. Like I like this, this is fun for me. Brett and I got lemon pepper wings last night at a metal bar. But that's still work, right? That's something, I mean it's like, it's still part of my business, right? And I still put that in as hours. So you have to be realistic because that's not time it could be doing things that are not work related. So you really should, because when I wasn't doing that, I would go, I do a meetup. It takes me in New York City because our transportation system is so bad lately. An hour to get there, an hour to get back. And then two hours of being at the meetup and an hour of cleanup and networking. So that's six hours of my day, right? So if I wasn't scoping that as marketing or networking and not realizing that's part of my business, right? And at one point I was like, wow, I'm working 70 hours a week when I include all that time. So include that in your project. When you're charging hourly, not just the 40 hours that you're doing the actual website, how did you get that client, right? Did you do a meetup? Did you do an event? Did you go to a better business bureau talk? That's work. That's part of the project costs. So I think probably knowing you guys that the other direction you could actually, if you started adding those things in, you would be in the hole because that's my $3 an hour, 3 a.m. And I do a lot of teaching web designers to be professional web designers and to get the confidence across seven core competencies. And when everybody starts, say you have to have a niche and they say, my niche are small mom and pop businesses. I said, no, that's a cop out. Because the reason they're saying that that's their niche is they don't have the confidence that they can produce the product anymore for anybody more than just some mom and pop shop. And so the answer to that has to start with increasing your skills across seven core competencies, not just finding the best theme or knowing how to price a site. In fact, I saw one question on Troy's thing is how can I charge $4,000 for discovery if I don't know what I'm doing? And it's true. And so the more competent you are, the more your clients are going to see that, the more they're gonna feel more comfortable paying you more and you won't be going into the hole. You can't charge from, if you're only making $3 an hour because you don't know how you to do every piece of it, then you gotta get that competency up. I love this topic specifically, so I'm sorry for nerding out a little bit, but there's also a book I highly recommend called Profit First. Has anybody read that book? Or has heard of it? Yeah. Oh, of course. Of course you've read that book, yeah. Yeah, so the Profit First really just talks about how the traditional accounting equation is revenue minus expenses equals sales, but what he says is revenue minus sales equals expenses. And the thought is that we're all working really hard. You don't sell a job and then hope to see what you get paid at the end of the month. Pay yourself first and force yourself to run your business on the difference in that expense budget. And the best way to do that, especially if you're a freelancer, this may be hard, so not disagreeing with you, Victor, but gross margin is specifically revenue minus cost of goods sold. So the cost of goods sold is whatever it takes to produce the website and then produce the product. So I actually feel like marketing and paying employees that aren't directly related to the production of the website, software, your rent, that's actually in the expense budget or the expense bucket, I should say. Cause if you put your marketing and your travel and all that stuff in your gross margin, you can't get to that 80% gross margin that Brett's talking about, right? So really what should come out of your cost for your gross margin is your revenue. So let's say you sell the site at five, let's say it's used $1,000 for EasyMath. Maybe I should say 10,000 for this panel. 10,000, right? Let's say your cost, let's say you pay, hey, 3% stripe fee, hello, right? 2.9% PayPal, like that's part of your cost of goods sold. Put that $200 in your cost of goods sold and then really the rest of the cost for the development, right? That's your cost and then that's your gross margin. Everything else underneath that, your taxes, your travel, marketing, advertising, that all comes out of a different bucket. Yeah, man, I like it. All right, do you charge a rush fee? Don't answer the second part yet. Yes, yes. No. No rush fee? No, I mean I can either get it done or not. I'm gonna say yes cause of our name, like. I find it's hard to do that and unless it's an existing client, I haven't really found that somebody's like great, I'll pay you that rush fee. Instead they're like, why don't we take a step back a minute so what if we don't do the rush fee, how long does it take? And then you start a different conversation. So you do. And when people ask how long will it take, my response is how long will it take for you to get me what I need? That I can build your website by myself in about, you know, just a few days. So, but it's only in me having to get from you. If you can sell in person, I'll tell a company or a person, then we need to bottle what you do in person and have that same experience reflected on your website because somebody going to your website or somebody who is referred to you is going to look at your website in addition to the other people before they ever call you and how many of you who are trying to do this as a freelancer have a great website? And so that is my biggest takeaway for you. You will never get the big bucks. You will never, unless you put yourself first. So go home from this and do your own website, which is by the way, the hardest thing you'll ever do because you don't see yourself like other people. You don't see your strengths. You don't see, you've really got to evaluate what is it that you bring to the table that will make a certain segment of the universe want to work with you? And for us, it's like, if you went to our website, you might not realize what the niche was, Nutrix web design, but it's people that don't want to work with a large agency because they get sold by the main people and they get punted off to the interns and they're spending twice as much or more, three, four, five times as much. So, you know, we want to work with somebody that wants to work with a small boutique agency where they get me and, you know, we work as a team. So we make that apparent so people understand our clients have been burned before by the guy in the diner in the Starbucks. So you've got to figure out what is it that you do that's going to make somebody want to work with you and you need to put that on the site? Then you need a psychologist to help you. Yeah. I'll answer the second part. If, how do you figure out cost? General thing that we do is 20% of the total extra. May or may not be effective, but again, like I said, there's typically, we don't land a project when there's a rush fee. It turns into a separate conversation. Do you want to talk about cost at all? Yeah, so, similar Brett said, like most times when you even start to increase your cost 20 or 50%, the fact that there is a rush fee, it's a way to get them to slow down. But usually for like rush, if it's a rush project where it's something with unknowns, most of the time for rush projects, what I've tried to do is do them in person, almost like a hackathon, and we charge $250 an hour per team member and a minimum of 40 hours. And only twice has that happened. But we bid it for a Broadway ticketing app and they were more than happy to pay it because they needed it done and they did two weeks with us so it's $1,000 an hour and they were fine with that because they needed it then and there. So they're very rare projects, right? But so you need to charge a higher fee because you're a crazy person if you think you're gonna get it done in any kind of rush because you should have other work coming in. But if they're willing to accept it, then you can get it done, yeah. That's great. I like it. We've done that a couple of times about just saying, okay, the only way we're gonna get this done is if you're in the room with us. I've found even like it's very with rush projects if you're not in the room and everyone's not there. Oh, sorry. If, and I've been finding that on a recent project we did try working like remote and now I realize clients just they're not reliable, right? Like they're just even though they could be like, you know, a 20 person team and then they're just don't show up, right? And or just not, and again, life gets in the way, right? But that's why I found it so much easier. Like and at that point even like in that 250 an hour you can almost like shoot for the all stars and the people, you know, I'm in New York City and we have like amazing developers available that $100, $200 an hour to them is awesome and they'll show up and the client, you know, you can get that job done but if the client's willing to pay that and it's really valuable to them, right? If you're dealing with like, you know, larger clients that it's like a one or two million dollar, you know, revenue they're willing to make that investment. Yeah, they have the budget. Okay, Danny, how do you avoid in your early business now the good buddy discount? I literally do this. You guys ready? Dude. Great answer. Yeah, I tried to explain to one of my friends that what if I was an accountant? Would she ask me to do her, you know, very involved taxes for two, two weeks or three, you know, in the tax season? No. I don't do it for, I don't do the good buddy discount. You don't have good buddies. I don't have good buddies. No, I guess no one's really asked me because the minute what happens is like the minute someone asks me for work I send them my Calendly link and it requires them to fill some stuff out and they immediately realize that they're getting qualified and they're like, oh shit, you're doing your thing that you do and I know that you're gonna charge me but what I will say is I do do the good buddy discount for projects that I think are gonna pay back in karma. So, you know, if it's like a church or I'm doing 48 and 48, you know, there are projects that, the one thing I recommend to everyone is like, if you need to build a portfolio or you need to like get, you know, you may have some projects with a client just destroyed the project so therefore like it's not great in your portfolio. Find something where you're doing them, they're doing, sorry, you're doing them the favor and you can own the project and really take hold of it. Like I recommend, I work with high school students, I tell them do something for your church, do something for your soccer club, do something for your running club and own it and like make your dream website that you would wanna sell for $10,000 and just make sure that that good buddy or that church says they paid you $10,000, right? And now you have that in your portfolio so that's what I recommend for good buddy stuff. Looks like we've got about five minutes left so let's see if there's anything really in here. Ooh, oh man, ah. The new group of customers is a good idea. Okay, okay, do you need to offer more services to increase your prices? I'll answer this one, you don't. You can increase your price right now here today offering exactly what you offer anyway and I highly encourage you all to do it and everybody, what do they say? Just double it, just double it. If you're in here, you're doing more work than most of your competitors so your value is higher, double your price. All right, avoid low blind stuff, I think this whole conversation's about that. How do you manage referrals from those? That was a really good one from the internet. This is the one you're talking about? Yeah, that one's a good one because, I mean, it looks like, is Melanie Adcock in here? Yeah, I mean, Melanie started doing churches and all of a sudden she's a church lady and she can charge a friggin' fortune for her church websites. You know, so you start working, we all of a sudden have gotten into the task force for global health because we did one website and they have a whole bunch of other places that were not so good and so now all of them are calling us and it's just, you know, you do a really great job in a niche that has a good referral system. Yeah, I mean, this is always, yeah, I think, I mean, you know, a lot of this comes down to even what Judy said, like what's your website look like and what's the name of your company? Like, is it Jane Smith websites? Honestly, like I'm, you know, not trying to hate on it anything there but if that's the name, you're gonna be capped. Like Candidly, one week website has a capped market. I purposely did that because I have a specific target I'm going after. If I want to tap into a new group of customers which has already happened, I'm actually, I have to have another, sorry, I'm getting crazy out of here. I heard church, I felt the Holy Ghost. So won't he do it? But yeah, I have to start a new brand, right? Like I have to, you have to have a new name, right? It's comedy hour up here, sorry. Okay, so we'll close it at that. I'm sorry we don't have a Q&A but we're all here. Please come talk to us afterwards. These resources are the ones that I pulled some of these questions from, some of the other stuff from. This will be available probably not today but this week we'll make sure you get it. Make sure you join the Slack channel. It's available year round. We're all a part of this thing. You can private message, you can ask in the channel. I think it'd be really helpful. Since you guys are taking a picture of us, I would like to take a picture of you if you can give me like one more second of your time. Oh, and by the way, thank you. We really appreciate you guys.