How to constantly increase in price

If, from the first days of freelancing, I had carefully analyzed everything that was happening, instead of floundering, closing my eyes and trying to stay afloat, I would have immediately noticed several patterns.

Whenever the work ended and new clients were not visible on the horizon, I began to urgently search for them. The charge of motivation was enormous: if you don’t find orders, you’ll be left without food and sink even deeper into debt. I used all available channels, got nervous, fussed, and as a result found new customers. This search did not take much time, but since it was very exhausting, it seemed that I had been sitting without work for an eternity.

Typically, in this mode, I needed three to five days to find a new client, get down to work and calm down. And taking into account the fact that I completed projects on average within two to three weeks, a new surge of uncertainty and a search for customers occurred every month.

Over time, I acquired regular clients, which allowed me to find myself in such situations less often. And then I completely relaxed, as there were enough orders, and sometimes a little more. In such conditions, I was no longer nervous and did not rush into sudden searches... but the cost of my services stopped growing! More precisely, it grew, but very slowly, along with inflation.

If I could give any advice to my past self, the first would be this:you need to ensure demand significantly exceeds supply (make sure that more clients come than you can hire). How to ensure this? Do sales not at those moments when it starts to “smell fried,” but constantly. Despite the workload, do not refuse to evaluate new projects, form a queue of clients and, most importantly, devote a significant part of your working time not to providing services, but to sales.

Many people around object when they hear such reasoning.

“If you focus more on sales, you will have to line up clients, and many of them will fall off in such a situation.”. It's not a problem. These are wonderful circumstances. It is much better to worry about where to squeeze in the next new client in the future, and constantly raise prices in order to somehow cope with the incoming flow of applications, than to sit without clients and without work after the next completed project.

“If you spend a lot of time on sales, then when should you work?”. Moreover, I usually hear this from people who do nothing but work and engage in sales when there is nothing else left to do. Work in the allotted time!

If you are selling so well that you have nowhere to turn your clients, then you can:

• Become a professional salesperson. This skill pays well and is in demand at all times;
• Transfer excess orders to colleagues and partners for a percentage (for commissions).

I know guys who “throw away” projects that are, by their standards, uninteresting. Most often, these are studios or freelancers who come to clients with insufficiently large budgets or low-margin tasks (when there is a lot of work, but you can’t sell it at a high price; in a word, orders with a low hourly rate).

The second recommendation is:need to get out of financial dependence. Every time my breakfast, lunch and dinner depended on a new incoming client, I did everything possible so that he would not refuse to work with me. My mind was clouded, and I quoted low prices, gave additional discounts, priced the work in bulk where it was necessary to break it down into stages, and in general was ready to adapt in every possible way. Obviously, this way I earned significantly less than if I did not depend on the client’s money and had a stronger negotiating position.

The way out of financial dependence in my case looked like this: the absence of any debts or loans, plus the presence of an amount of money in the account that would be enough to live without work for six months. In such conditions, you look at the client not as a lifeline, but as... a client. You voice prices and working conditions that are acceptable to both parties, and you are not afraid that the customer will “fall off”. After all, even in such an unpleasant scenario, nothing terrible will happen.

The third recommendation is the exact opposite of the second:become financially dependent. I began this chapter by talking about how I quickly found new clients while in dire financial straits. There was a time in my life when I owed money to several people and also to the bank. Then I bought myself a car on credit, and the amount of my debts at that time exceeded a million rubles. I was well aware that no one but me would return this money. And also that every month I spent exactly as much as I earned. This understanding put me in such uncomfortable conditions that I began to engage in sales even in those moments when I was overloaded with work. Just to get out of this financial horror.

The recommendation to be in such conditions is not suitable for everyone. Only a person with strong nerves and health will get out of such a situation without significant losses. I am by nature a lazy and freedom-loving person, and if I had not acted this way at the age of 25, I would now be in a completely different situation.

Fourth recommendation:learn and master missing skills. If you do the same thing today as yesterday, the result will be the same. New methods are needed to achieve new goals. I studied the art of business communication, business correspondence, working with documents, design, layout, programming, monitored the market, mastered new tools, and improved existing skills. He continued to improve foreign languages, improve the quality of his services, and so on.

I noticed that the people around me were divided into two categories. Those who, when faced with something completely new to themselves, gave up and looked for workarounds using familiar methods. For example, I asked: “Have you thought about trying to create publications about your professional activities and thus attract more clients?” And in response I received: “I don’t know how to write, so I can’t do this.”

The second category is those who, in the same situation, began to look for information, examples, consultants and mentors and did not believe that the lack of skill or knowledge should prevent them from achieving the goal. When asked to start a blog, such people within a month could freely communicate with me about hosting, domain names, publishing platforms and other things about which they had not yet known anything. I myself belong to the category of people who know for sure that all our skills today are the result of learning, and not a gift from birth. And that education is one of the few things in life that is almost impossible to lose.

Fifth recommendation:communicate with someone who earns more than you by doing something similar. One day, one of my partners, the general director of a St. Petersburg web studio, was not afraid to reveal the cost of the design that I did for their client. The agency paid me 250,000 rubles, and I considered it a worthy payment. But the customer had to fork out 500,000 rubles. I, of course, understood that the studio included in the price the attraction of a client, the work of a manager, rent, taxes, its profit and much more. But I also saw with my own eyes a customer who is capable and willing to pay twice what I thought was a worthy payment.

To ask how much a person earns, you need to have the audacity to ask such impolite questions. The closed interlocutor will refuse to answer, and this, perhaps, will be the only consequence. He will not stop communicating with me. And the open one will share this information. And if so, then there is a high probability that he will also answer questions about how he succeeds. In addition, many people are pleased to share their achievements, even though “big money loves silence.”

Every time a person appears in my environment who earns significantly more than me, I receive social proof that, firstly, this is possible in principle, and, secondly, does not require any superpowers or magic. And the next time you name the price for your work, you involuntarily remember that someone is able to sell their services several times more expensive than you. This makes it much easier to quote a price ten to twenty percent higher.

Sixth recommendation:work as a legal entity or individual entrepreneur. And for a long time, on the basis of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, the legal capacity of an individual entrepreneur is equal to the legal capacity of legal entities - commercial organizations. It became easier for me to communicate with clients when I faced the same problems and challenges as them. Preparation of documents, issuing invoices, working with banks... Being a legal entity, you automatically begin to distinguish a banking day from a working day, you understand that an employee’s salary of one hundred thousand rubles costs his employer a much larger amount (this knowledge will help justify why ordering a service from you is more profitable than hiring and training an employee), and so on and so forth.

It is easier to conclude an agreement with a legal entity. There is more trust in him. Its activities are transparent and regulated. And, most importantly, when price tags begin to exceed several hundred thousand rubles, clients will prefer to work with a legal entity simply because their processes are poorly adapted to working with individual contractors.

Seventh recommendation:act as a customer for your own service. This is sobering. When I started ordering designs from other guys myself, I realized that many of the nuances and features that seemed important to me as a contractor were actually not very important to the customer. The client doesn't need much. The main thing is that the work is delivered on time and with acceptable quality. And so that it is not very difficult to understand the conditions and make payment. A non-professional client, for example, is often unable to evaluate the quality of a service. But anyone will appreciate the level of service. But more on that in one of the next chapters.

Acting as a client (fortunately, this happened quite early in my freelance journey) allowed me to see a more complete picture. I encountered a number of inconveniences and realized that some of them were present in my processes. I stopped demanding clear technical specifications from clients, helped them with organizational issues, answered questions even before they asked them - and this increased the number of sales. And the more sales, the easier it is to increase the cost of services.

Bottom line: to grow in value as a freelancer, you need to do much, much more and more frequent sales to ensure demand significantly exceeds supply. Get out of debt and accumulate a financial cushion. Constantly study, acquire a legal entity (or become self-employed), act as a customer for your own service. Replenish your environment with living examples of people who are able to earn more than you. Learn from them and make sure that they do not have superpowers (and if they can do it, then so can I). If all these recommendations are followed, I do not see a scenario where time passes and the price does not rise.