There are many reasons that today is the best day to begin your own freelance UX career. Many in my network were laid off at the beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic and rehiring has been slow. Others are just unhappy with their job and have found it difficult to leave just yet. Whatever your reason, its not too soon to start the journey.
My guest today is the perfect guest to get you started. Michael Janda has an extensive background in design as a service including a successful agency with top clients like Fox and Disney. More recently he’s turned Business and Design coach. His newest course “Freelance with Janda” is now available.
In today’s episode, he takes us through some of the secrets to success in those first few months of your freelance career.
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Dillon Winspear [00:00]: If you’re ready to start your freelance career, this episode is for you. Welcome back to another episode of Designed Today. I’m your host, Dillon Winspear. Today’s episode is killer. For those of you who are trying to get into freelance design, my guest today has a ton of helpful information for you to apply. But before we get into it, a quick plug again for the Designed Today offerings. Did you know I’ve got a Slack group and a newsletter and better yet a free course to optimize your UX resume. It’s 100% free. It will take you just a couple of hours to complete. Additionally, I’ve opened up a few more slots for the one on one coaching, which I know many of you are starting to take advantage of and it’s been incredibly fun.
You can read some of those coaching reviews on the website, if you visit designedtoday.com/courses. Now back to my guest, this man really needs no introduction. He’s the author of one of my favorite business and design books called Burn Your Portfolio. He’s the former creative director at Fox and the founder and former CEO of Riser, a digital agency. He’s also got a handful of UX design courses, including his newest course called Freelance with Janda. Here he is; Michael Janda. We should be good. Mr. Michael Janda, welcome to the show.
Michael Janda: Hey, thanks. We’ve been talking about this for months. And finally, it’s happening.
Dillon Winspear: I know, I felt so bad for that. We initially started talking right before quarantine hit. And I was kind of losing some of my mental health at that point in time. And things really fell off the map for me and I appreciate your kindness for still getting back to me and helping me get this together.
Michael Janda: It was good timing for me because when quarantine hit, that’s when it was my catalyst to say all right, no more messing around. I’ve got to get this course that I’ve been working on for a year. I’ve got to get it finished up and start filming it [02:00]. So, I went heads down into that during quarantine. I stopped posting on Instagram mostly after a year of posting probably five or six times a week. I started posting like once a week maybe. And that quarantine was a good catalyst of change in a lot of things, not just in our businesses, but worldwide. I mean, it changes the dynamic of the entire world. It’s pretty crazy to live in this time.
Dillon Winspear: I’ve often I’ve often had to remind myself that, you know, I’ve been not working from home since March. And, you know, it presents different opportunities, unique opportunities that I hadn’t had previously. And so I keep reminding myself, Dylan, it’s hustle season, like this is the opportunity that you have to make things happen that you’ve not had the opportunity to do in the past. So, it’s hustle season and you took advantage of that.
Michael Janda: Yeah, hustle season. Every season is hustle season for me, but this one especially hustle season. I hear you, man.
Dillon Winspear: Yes, that is true.
Michael Janda: I changed my hustle. I hustled so hard on Instagram for a year. And then I was like, okay, I’ve got to stop that hustle and hustle all my energy into this next. It’s hard to hustle on multiple things at the same time.
Dillon Winspear: 100%. And being able to change gears and refocus is important. I do give you credit. You definitely hustle. You’ve done a lot of things for the design community and I want to give you an opportunity to introduce some of those things that you’ve done, some of the things you’re working on. Ultimately, I do want to talk about the course that you have just launched, but lead us up to that point. What brought you from where you began to today?
Michael Janda: All right, well, that’s a 20-year story, but I’ll give you the 2-min version.
Dillon Winspear: Tell me about your father and your mother. I’m just kidding.
Michael Janda: Yeah. So, I was born in 1972. And we’ll go from there. No, you know what, I grew up as the art kid [04:00]. In high school, I took all the art classes, collected comic books, drew comics and just loved that whole art thing. I went to college at Indiana University and decided to study design, and graduated and started in my bottom feeder jobs. Man, after college, I couldn’t get a job. I started working in Alpha Graphics. It was my first job out of college. And Alpha Graphics, for those of you who may be listening to this show, not in the United States, it’s a copy store. You know, Xerox copiers in the in the lobby. It’s that kind of thing. And I was like doing the cheap logos that they would do and cheap business cards for people who came in and didn’t have any investment for their business.
And that was my start. And that was really a great catalyst to me to say this is not what I want in my life. I thought that I had something to offer with this design degree and then I had this rude awakening that I wasn’t anywhere, that this was the start not the finish. If I was going to achieve anything in my career, I was going to have to start working my butt off and it was going to take a lot more than a college degree. And that was a real driver to me. I’m competitive, especially self competitive. I want to one up myself from yesterday. Personal bests, you know, was always an important thing for me. So, that drove me and I worked hard. I self-educated. I learned design skills. I learned HTML and CSS and Flash and all the things back in those days that allowed me to offer a broader service offering. And then that launched into — I was at a creative director at Fox Studios in LA, managed a big team of designers and developers, account managers.
And that was a great experience. Then I started my agency while I was in Los Angeles. My first few clients were [06:00] my friends from Fox that started feeding me design work. They were at Disney and Sony and Warner Brothers and they started sending me work. I started with the best clients in the whole world. And then referrals and do good work and be good to work with and referrals will come and more projects will come. And that’s what happened over 13 years of time as I grew my agency for me in my basement, to a team of 20 people. I owned the studio space. I still own it now. I sold my agency in 2015. And then I worked for the agency I sold to for a couple years.
And pretty much I just did the whole agency thing for 15 years, 13 on my own with my team and then two years at the agency. I sold two. And over the course of that time, I had the awakening that what do I really love in this industry and it wasn’t agency work. It wasn’t even doing the work itself. What I really loved was the mentoring, coaching, building a team, helping inspire and motivate other people and help them progress. I love that. I got a lot of satisfaction out of that with my team. And that’s what launched me into what I’m doing now. I love to create content and courses and write books, and create Instagram posts and videos, and be on podcasts like this because I just love educating, mentoring, supporting, inspiring other creatives.
Dillon Winspear: Now you’ve written a couple books. You’ve got a couple of courses. You do your own podcast. I was sharing with you before it was hit the record button that I initially became familiar with your name, when I discovered the book; Burn Your Portfolio. And this has been an incredible resource to me, an inspiration to me. I told you I was a little bit jealous when I first discovered it because you wrote a lot of things that one day I want to write [08:00]. I’m going to say inspiration at this point in time. It’s an incredible book for designers who are trying to get a little bit more into personal development, career development, agency development. I mean, it’s got a lot of great tidbits and advice in that book. Was it your first book that you wrote?
Michael Janda: Yeah, that was my first book. It actually started as my employee handbook. When I started hiring people, I realized, oh, man, I’ve got to replicate myself with these team members. I want them to do things the way that I do them because my clients expect it the way that I do it. That’s why they hired my agency and why they hired me. So, if I’m going to have employees, they need to do the processes the same way I do, so the client has a seamless experience whether they’re working for me or working with one of my employees. So, I started writing down the way I do everything, just the systems and processes of how I did everything, so that I could train my employees. And for four or five years, the content from Burn Your Portfolio was part of my employee training website. It was a little website that I had, an internal website. And then I spoke in a conference in Nashville. And it was a big AIGA conference.
And after the conference where I spoke about the kinds of things that are in the book, the non-design things that you need to succeed as a designer, I had a ton of great feedback. People asking for my deck. They wanted to turn my little chapter titles into posters for their office. I have things like that and I was like, oh, crap, I can’t just gave away my intellectual property. And people want to make posters. I should be the one making posters of my own stuff, not somebody else who heard me say it. So, I still have never made a poster on the content [10:00] but it inspired me to say I’ve got to own my content. I can’t just be going and speaking and sharing this stuff and not have copyright ownership of it. So, I started turning all of that employee handbook into a book-book. And ended up getting it published, which was an exciting moment in my life. 2013.
Dillon Winspear: Well, congratulations on that. You did not get a chance to make your posters but you have released a couple of courses. Give me a 30-sec recap of what your first course that you launched was.
Michael Janda: My first course is called UX with Janda and uxwithjanda.com. And that came out of some trips to Russia. My book Burn Your Portfolio is in Russian language and that opened up the door to go speak at a couple of events in Russia. During those events, I made good friends. I love to make friends everywhere I go, and I really connected with some of these people in the design community in Russia. And then they wanted to do some kind of collaboration with me. And one of them was a partner in what is now Russia’s biggest e-learning website for creatives. It’s called Skill Box. And it’s kind of like, you know, a Udemy for creative content, but it’s all in Russian. And they had a UX course and they approached me and said, hey, well, let’s do something. We have this UX course. Why don’t we make an English version of it and you teach it? And I thought, okay, great, that sounds great. And then they sent me the content.
And I was like, oh, man, I can’t just do their content. It wasn’t as good as what I would have wanted to do for myself. So, after trying to finagle their content into something that I would be proud of, I ended up just saying, you know what, let me just make my own UX course. And we’ll still do this partnership [12:00] but it’ll be my content and we’ll just have co-ownership on it. And that’s what we did. I spent three weeks in Russia in early December in 2018 filming that course. And it was like, straight out of the movies, man. I mean, the snow, slush everywhere, all the Russians in their big coats and their heads down and their big Russian hats. I mean, that was what was everywhere. But it was a great, great, great experience to go and film that course. So, that was my first course. And that’s been out for about a little over a year now. And then I just finished my second course, which is Freelance with Janda, which is the business fundamentals that any freelancer needs to have. It’s a six-course suite and just a ton of content. The first four courses I launched a month ago or about three weeks ago and just the first four courses is 26 hours of video content and tons of templates and downloadables
Dillon Winspear: It’s a huge course.
Michael Janda: Yeah, it’s huge. The other two courses that I’m working on right now that’ll launch in July will probably make the whole thing over 40 hours of content. It’s just super turnkey. If you’re a freelancer and you’re a good designer, but you don’t know how to turn this into a business, that’s what the course is. It’s from, how do you find your first clients all the way to how do you manage a business, hire people, fire people, everything in between. So, it’s not just for freelancers, although that’s the title, but it could be called How to Make a Creative Business. That’s really what’s at the heart of the course.
Dillon Winspear: Well, I’m going to drop a link for your course in the show notes. But I hope you’re okay starting to talk a little bit of high level about that course because ultimately, that’s what we’re here to talk about. I ran a quick poll in the Designed Today Slack community asking what topics people are interested in hearing about [14:00]. And as I mentioned to you, as we were talking, you know, last week, because of COVID, the pandemic, there’s a lot of designers have been recently laid off, freelancers who are now struggling to freelance because people might be a little bit tighter with their money.
From that poll results, people were interested in learning more about freelancing UX, and that’s kind of when I made the connection of like, I really got to get back with Janda because I know he’s just releasing this course. I followed the whole launch and I saw that I go, he’s going to be a great person to talk to. So, again, because of this situation, we’ve got people who have not been freelancing UX before who now are. And this is a new world to them. So, where can you start to shed some light on these first couple of weeks and months of being a freelance UX designer? What is top of mind for those people in that situation?
Michael Janda: You know, I think I’ll start with a little bit of motivational perspective. I started my agency in a downturn economy. It was 2002. It was the post 911 and post dot bomb. The tech bubble had burst. All the.com companies that weren’t making money started to fold. The agencies that supported those businesses started to fold. I mean, we have big agencies that all their clients were.com companies, big agencies in LA where I was living. And then all of a sudden, poof, they were out of business because all their clients were out of business. And so, it was a scary, scary time. And that’s when I started freelancing because I was laid off from our team at Fox. We had sold Fox Kids and Fox Family, those were our divisions, sold those to Disney. And then Disney just went over a year and a half of time and dismantled our 50-person team down to the last six of us that were let go on the last day of the Fox Kids [16:00], Fox family life.
And it was super scary for me because I didn’t have a crystal ball. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I couldn’t get a job because nobody was hiring, just like now. I mean, it’s hard. If you don’t have a job right now, it’s scary because hiring is slowed down because people are in this wait and see what happens with COVID-19 phase. Now, the flip side to that, and what I learned is that business still goes on. Just because things slow down doesn’t mean that people will never hire again. They change their strategies to meet the new world ahead. And the strategy change that happened in 2002 for me, is that internal teams were no longer a thing. I’ll give you an example, abc.com were one of my best buddies worked, had a team of 50 people doing abc.com. When I started freelancing for abc.com, they had three people. It was a team of like three people.
And it was the head of the site, and then like two account manager, project manager people, marketing managers that were just executing on this stuff. They didn’t have this team of 50 people, but they still needed to build the site. They still needed to get the work done. And instead of doing it internally, they started looking to outsource this stuff. So, the bright future for freelancers right now is that you need to know that business is going to keep going. People are going to still have new ideas. They’re going to have a new app idea that emerges out of their fear that makes them think harder, and makes them ideate what they’re going to do for their business, and then that will perpetuate opportunities for freelancers [18:00] because all these new ideas that come out of the fear that we’re in now will need to be executed by somebody.
And when people don’t have internal teams, and other agencies and businesses are struggling, they start to look around who’s going to do this for me. So, I think from my perspective, there is a huge opportunity for freelancers in the next one to five years, that we’re seeing a change in the way that the design economy is done. There’s a huge opportunity for people to grow and build design businesses out of this downturn. That’s where I wanted to start on just a perspective shift hopefully to help people feel like, okay, I get it. There are opportunities here that are going to come out of this. It’s not just going to be me scared about how I’m going to pay my bills for the rest of my life. It’s not going to be that.
Dillon Winspear: Well, I like what you said; business goes on. Obviously, it’s important to remember. And I think again, these changes in climate help us experience just new ideas and new changes, puts us into new roles that we may not have been previously comfortable with. And so out of that comes new ideas that people want to start working on.
Michael Janda: What’s the quote? It’s something like something is the mother of invention. What’s the thing that’s the mother of invention?
Dillon Winspear: I know what you’re talking about, too, and I can’t remember –
Michael Janda: Absence or something. Anyway, while you’re talking, I’m going to look up this quote because I know I’ve –
Dillon Winspear: It’s on your mind. So, you’ve got to fill it now.
Michael Janda: The mother of invention quote, and this is what we’re living right now. Necessity. Necessity is the mother of invention and so many people are in that right now. They’re in this fear mode. Oh my gosh, how am I going to feed my family? I just got let go [20:00] from my job. I had this happen. Somebody bought my course a couple of days ago, and they messaged me and they said, I’m so excited. I just found out I was getting let go from my job two days ago. And now I decided it’s time for me to jump into freelance. I’ve got to make this work. And I’m so excited about your course because it’s the turnkey approach that I need. Necessity. There is no job anymore. This person has a need to pay the bills, to put food on the table, to cover their personal overhead. That necessity is going to drive them to invent. Necessity is the mother of invention. You’re going to see so much of that come out of this downturn. It’s going to be pretty amazing. You watch the next couple of years, the things that are invented, because people finally have time to think because of this downturn and then they have the necessity which causes fear to make them act? It’s an exciting future ahead as a result of this.
Dillon Winspear: I agree. So, I have freelanced part time for the better part of the last eight, nine years. And I’ve always been a little bit too nervous to make it the full time thing. And the reason why is I’ve been able to narrow it down to finding, pricing, and repeating. That’s always been my biggest fears is that I know I can do UX, and I know I can do a good job once I get into the project, but I was always scared of the sales part of freelancing, finding price, and repeating that over and over and over again. What advice do you have for designers who are going to start to face that? I know I can find my first client but finding the second one is now difficult. And how do I repeat these results?
Michael Janda: Well, okay, so the first client — Let me break this down in a nutshell, actionable thing for people [22:00]. Your first client is probably somebody who you already know right now, who likes you, who trusts you, who’s working at some company, and they are willing to share your name with whoever the decision maker is to outsource work to you. That’s who your first customer most likely is. It’s not somebody who’s going to find you on Dribble or Instagram, and just drop out of the sky and say you’re the one for me. That is hardly likely. Likely is that it’s somebody you know, right now. So, step number one is talk to everybody who you freaking know, and tell them that you’re a freelancer doing UX design, and you’re trying to build your client base. And if they don’t know what UX design is, then don’t phrase it that way. Say, hey, I’m a freelancer.
I design apps and websites and I’m looking to build my client base, and then let all this batch of people you know start to be your salesforce. You just have to make sure that you tell them what the heck you’re doing and so many freelancers just stink at this. They’re just in their basement just cranking away behind their computer hoping their clients drop from the sky and that is not going to happen. You’ve got to tell at least the people closest to you what you’re doing. And, man, start with your mom. Your mom will be the greatest salesman you ever had, for your first client. She’ll be at the hair salon and she’ll be talking to the hair person, you know. I don’t know much about hair because I’m bald, but she’ll be talking to the hair person, and she’ll tell them, hey, my son or my daughter designs websites and do you have a website. It’s the people closest to you. That’s where you’re going to probably find your first client.
So, start there. Now, how do you get them [24:00] to repeat and grow. You know, they see the cliché quote; “Do good work. Be good to work with.” It’s cliché, but I built my entire business on this mindset. And it’s a slow growth model because one client that you start with, the hair salon that your mom goes to, is your first client. You design their website, and then you design something else for them later that year. This one client cannot sustain your business. This is where a lot of part time freelancers exist. They have this one, two-client thing. They work a full time job. They have a couple of side clients. But all of a sudden in year two, they get client number two, and then in year three, the two clients if they make them happy and they are good to work with, those two clients turn into four more clients. And then in year four, those four clients turn into 16 clients. There is this compound interest style thing.
It’s exponential returns and it happens with client lists. It happens in social media. It happens with podcasts. You know, for you to go from your very first podcast to your first 1,000 listener a month took a year. I don’t know how long it took you, probably faster than that. But let’s say that took a year. But to go from 1,000 listeners to 10,000 listeners was a year. That’s exponential growth. And that’s what happens with clients too. You have to start with this one or two. You’ve got to bend over backwards to make those people happy, deliver great results, build a strong relationship, and then those people become your referral chain for new opportunities. And this is the way it is in the early [26:00] phases of freelancing. It’s relationship based, very heavy relationship based like this, referrals and repeating customers. But over time, you get to hit the moment when your reputation precedes you. And now people have heard about your business.
They’ve heard about you as a great UX designer inside of some certain industry. You’ve built enough of a name for yourself, that people start to come to you because of reputation. The big agencies do this on a big scale. When you think of one of the agencies that’s built a reputation over the last few years is Red Antler. They’re based in Brooklyn. And I started hearing about Red Antler about a year ago, and then all of a sudden I start seeing them pop up on ad age, agency of the year. You know, they’re one of the small agencies to watch or something. They start popping up on things. And then all of a sudden, they start to build a reputation. They build a reputation in my mind, and in the mind of a lot of other designers around.
And now here I am on your podcast, talking about Red Antler and I’ve never met anybody at Red Antler ever in my life, but I’m talking about them because they have a reputation. When you hit that threshold, that’s when projects just start dropping out of the sky to find you. You don’t have to chase them down as much. But in the early years, where you are today, as a freelancer who just started this week, it’s the people you know that are you’re going to be your first batch of clients. And then it’s the people that they know, that are going to be your second batch of clients. And then over a few years, you’ll start to get that reputation, referral happening where people have heard of you, like we all have now of Red Antler.
Dillon Winspear: And I like that process. I like that timeline that you’re laying out there as well [28:00]. Let me ask you, when you’ve started to attract your first, you know, dozen clients, what type of public resources do you need to make available so to start attracting new clients? What do people need to put together?
Michael Janda: So, I’m a big believer in, you need a website, and it needs to be a custom URL. It should not be squarespace.com/dillon. That’s not going to do you justice. Make it dillon.com. So, start there. You’ve got to have a website and with a custom URL because that says to the window shoppers of the world, that you’re actually serious about this business, that you’re putting real effort behind it. You’re willing to spend the $9 a month to host a website somewhere and you’re willing to spend at least the $15 a year to re-register your custom domain. So, start there. You’ve got to have that as the bottom, and then pick one social media and go all in on that social media. And for designers, the best choices are either Instagram, or Dribble or Behance. Pick one of those social media channels and start sharing your work. Get your work out there, so that people can see it, so you can start building that reputation.
And even if it’s only a handful of followers, you know, if I say 1000 followers or 5000 followers, that sounds like a lot to a lot of people, but it’s feasible for anybody to build an audience of 5000 followers on Instagram. If you share content and interact with your community, you will grow on Instagram. So, you have this 5000-follower base [30:00] on the one channel you chose. Now that is validation to anybody shopping you. If they look at your website and they see your work, and then they think, okay, who is this person, and they go to Instagram because you promote it on your site and force them there, they will see that you have 5000 followers. It’s a legitimizer. So, for your first social media, pick something and build an audience there, so that you can have it legitimize your position in the market in the eyes of your customer.
Dillon Winspear: Do you have any insight on what point a freelancer should start considering developing through their LLC as opposed to independent contractor?
Michael Janda: As soon as you’ve decided that this is long term, that I’m going to freelance, then you can start either an LLC and have it be a partnership LLC with you and your spouse, or you can do a sole owner LLC, which I have for one of my businesses. I have a lot of little business entities inside of what I do in my life right now. And one of them I have a sole owner LLC, a single owner, LLC, I think is what it’s called. And then you can also just operate as a sole proprietor. And until you start hiring people, there’s really not a downside to being a sole proprietor. But an LLC does give you some risk protection of your personal assets. So, my recommendation after the long winded expDillon Winspeartion is if you’ve decided, okay, I’m going to be doing this. I’m going to be really going after this and I’m going to be freelancing, and I’m going to do this for the next few years. Once you feel like that, then there’s no reason to not spin up [32:00] at least a single member LLC.
Dillon Winspear: Yeah. As I mentioned, you know, when I started doing freelance UX work, it started really small and you’re talking about year over year started to grow. And I remember one of those years it’s probably 2013 or 2014, I made a decent amount of passive income freelancing and then tax season came around and I just remember getting raked over the coals. And I thought I was like, I’m done. Like, I didn’t make any money freelancing. I just paid all of it back in taxes. And I was so just kind of blown away by it. I finally talked to a CPA and set up an LLC, and it was definitely worth it. But I agree with your saying, once you’ve really committed yourself to it, this is what you want to do. And it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to commit yourself full time. It just means that you are going to be doing this consistently. I think it begins to make sense. Another question that people have often is pricing. I don’t know how to begin pricing myself. You know, my first world wide design was $100. Is that right or wrong? People don’t know what to do.
Michael Janda: So, I know that this is such a huge problem. And I wrote another book called The Psychology of Graphic Design Pricing, which is a 200 page symposium on my pricing methodology. And I’ll give you the distilled breakdown of this. And there’s a chapter in Burn Your Portfolio, which you mentioned at the start that is called the Fixed Bid Pricing Dartboard, and it’s like a page and a half, little chapter. And I thought, well, this was two summers ago. I thought, okay, you know, I’ll make a unexpanded blog post version of that chapter. And I started trying to expound on this idea of the fixed bid pricing dartboard and it ended up becoming a 200- page book instead of a, you know, five-page blog post. Because once I started to pull the thread, there was so much to say. So, let me give you the breakdown of my pricing methodology [34:00].
My pricing methodology is based on three different variables that you need to understand when you go into price a project. Variable number one is how much is this project going to cost you to produce. Production cost. Variable number one. And you can figure out your production cost. Let’s say that Dillon charges $100 an hour, and he’s talking with a client and he estimates in his head that this is going to take him 10 hours to produce this work. So, he right there knows that $1,000 is his production cost for this. now, that’s not the price that he charges the client. That’s the only one variable that leads him to the price that he will choose. So, production cost, that’s variable number one. Variable number two is the market value of the work. Now Dillon looks at this and he says, okay, this is going to take me $1,000 of production cost. But what would other people like me charge for this?
If they’re going to design the interface for a new app, how much are people charging for the 10 screens that need to be designed for the UX of this application? And you’ve got to understand that market value. Number water, other people like you charging, how do you find that number? Well, start asking your friends what they charge for this same kind of stuff. If you’re a UX designer, you usually have other UX designer friends. Say to them, hey, how much are you charging these days for app design? Say you’ve got a 10-screen app, what do you usually charge your client? So, you start asking that. You can also get information from things like the graphic artists guild handbook that comes out every few years with surveys of a variety of different types of projects and where agencies and freelancers have surveyed in their responses and it breaks them down into [36:00] tables for you to see what the market value is of these different types of projects that you do.
So, that’s variable number two. Market value. Production cost. Market value. Variable number three is the client’s budget. How much is the client willing to spend on this project? You’ve got to know that because budget is a variable that is subjective from one client to the next. To one person, $1,000 is a lot of money. To another person, it is nothing. But it’s still $1,000. It’s just the perception of the value of $1,000. And you’re going to find with your clients a wide variety of perception of what the value of $1,000 is. So, you have to ask the client, their budget threshold, and start talking about the numbers, the dollars of this engagement right at out of the first lead qualification phone call that you have. So, you ask the client things like, okay, well you ask them a whole bunch of questions about their project. You get all the details and then you say, okay, one final question, how much are you hoping to do this for? What budget do you have allocated to execute on this work?
And a lot of clients will tell you and some will make it play hard to get. And I won’t go through all the ways to extract the budget, but I have several videos on that that are posted on my Instagram and my YouTube channel on how to extract the client’s budget. But you’ve got to know that variable. So, now you take this and you say, okay, Dillon knows that $1,000 is his production cost. He asked his designer friends, and knows that everybody’s charging roughly two to three grand for this type of work. That’s the market value. And then he asked the client their budget, and the client said, well, we’re really hoping to get this done for 1,800 dollars [38:00]. Now Dillon can take these three variables and say, okay, market value, let’s say is $3,000. The client’s budget is $1,800. And my production cost is $1,000. That gives me my range $1,000 to $3,000. And the client’s budget is $1,800.
Now, if I’m super busy, and I can’t really fit anything else in, then I’m probably going to say, okay, well, you know what, I’ll do this project for two grand. I know the client is going to have to up their budget by 200 bucks, but I don’t care if they go away. I don’t care because I’m super busy. I’m going to have to work all weekend to do this, if they say yes. So, I better make it worth my while. But other times you might be like, I have no projects. I have no leads. I have not done a project in the last three months. I’ve got to land this. So, in that situation, you can say, okay, well, my production cost is $1,000. Now, I’m going to bid this at $1,400 because I’m going to come in under budget. That way, if anybody else, the client has having bid on this comes in below their budget, I’m far enough below their budget, that I’m going to be the price friendly option and increase the likelihood of me landing the work. So, where are you choose to price it depends on the situation you’re in. And I have a whole bunch of different situations and scenarios that are in that book. But the point is, there’s no cookie cutter method that lets you know this is exactly where I’m going to price it. It’s different every time. But you always will benefit from knowing those three pricing variables.
Dillon Winspear: Yeah. I love that you’ve obviously been doing this for quite some time, because that’s a great way of breaking it down. And I love seeing how UX designers evolve those numbers as they develop and their skill set in their career. You know, their first logo may have been $100. And a couple years later, maybe a $1,000 [40:00]. And a couple years later, maybe a five grand, full branding package that advances their services that they’re offering. So, be comfortable with evolving it as you’re going on. I think that’s a great advice.
Michael Janda: I did. My first logo was $200 or something like that. And I did a website. This is what like right after I graduated college. I did a website and it was like 300 bucks or something that I charged this person to hand-code and design this big website for him. And at my agency, 15 years later, we were doing $500,000-websites. So, just because you’re starting in these lower price points does not mean you will always be there. You can up your prices over time, evolve your pricing strategy, increase your reputation, and then clients will naturally pay you more money because they want you to do this work.
Dillon Winspear: Yep. I think there’s some people that get a little bit fearful. Well, if another designer I heard, I did a logo for $100, they’re going to think less of me. And, you know, we can go into like, stop comparing yourself to other designers. You know your situation better than anybody else does. I remember when I was, this was four or five years back, it was a great learning experience for me. I typically was doing these websites for you know, $2,000, $2,500 and they would be simple seven-page websites, you know, about to contact services type of dead website. And I got this one opportunity to work for this client who I was going like, I actually don’t want to work with him. And, you know, I don’t think it’s going to be worth my time even if I did get this.
He’s just not a person I want to work with. And so, I literally I doubled what my proposal was. I charged him five grand as this is what the cost would be. They ended up coming back and saying like, great, we’ll do it. And I was like, what? Seriously? And then, I was like, well, if you’re willing to do it for five grand, you know what, I’ll make this work for us then [42:00]. And so, really it changed the thoughts that I put into it. And it worked out for the better. It was actually a really fun website for me to end up working on and ended up turning out fantastic. And it was a win-win for all of us. And it was a great learning experience for me. But again, I’ll go back to you know your situation better than anybody else. And you’ve got to develop that mindset.
Michael Janda: It’s a great story and a great example. And it’s one of the scenarios that I talked about. A difficult client, I would always charge them at the top of market value, or even higher. You know, your price is in is relative to the pain that this client can potentially cause you. And if somebody is going to be massive pain in the butt, then don’t be afraid to jack the price way up to make it worth your while to go through that pain. So, that’s a great story and a great example that you just shared and I love that. You know, that variable, I did it a lot. And then I got burned on when I didn’t do it. I got burned on when the red flags were there and I charged them too low. And then it caused me grief. I lost employees over clients. And so, now the cost is excessive because of the pain and my need to re-staff positions because this client inflicted so much pain on me. Oh man, it’s miserable.
Dillon Winspear: Good learning experiences though.
Michael Janda: Yeah, good learning experience. I think what I wanted to say about this is and you’ve said it like two or three times, Dillon, but it’s know your situation and don’t feel bad about where you price your stuff. But know your production cost. This is why we calculate that one variable. Don’t go below it because then that’s a stupid business. You’re not making any money. Don’t do that. So, calculate that variable first [44:00], and then always bid above it. But don’t feel bad if it’s only a 10% or 20% profit margin. It’s going to cost you $1,000 to do this. You’re gonna make $1,200 on the job and you’re going to have $200 of profit. Man, in certain points of your life that is just fine. Don’t ever feel bad about it. You can always start increasing your prices over time. And you will. If you do good work, and you are good to work with to go back to the cliché, your prices will increase.
Dillon Winspear: Well, Jan, I’ve unfortunately got a call it at time here. It’s crazy.
Michael Janda: It’s sad. I feel like we were just getting started.
Dillon Winspear: I know. And there’s going be people listening to this going like, wait, what? No, don’t. Unfortunately, you’ve not printed any posters yourself. But I’ve got a few good pull quotes that I could turn into posters. There’s a lot of nuggets and gems in this podcast. I really appreciate all the thoughts and the time that you’re taking to answer some of these questions. I’m going to drop some links in the show notes for all the different places that people can find you including your Instagram, your websites, your books. I mean, there’s so many good resources there. I’ll encourage people to reach out and find you. Thank you for your time. If there’s an opportunity in the future, I’d love to do this with you again, maybe do a part two to this.
Michael Janda: Yeah, man. I feel like we just did the introductions. Let’s hit one in the fall after you get through some of your upcoming ones. And let’s do it again for sure.
Dillon Winspear: You know, and I’ll even throw this out to those who are listening. Leave a comment wherever you’re finding this. Let me know, join the Slack community and leave a comment, what questions you have from this that we can even go back and touch on again in the future and we can elaborate and go further on it. So, that’s just a plug for everyone who’s listening. Michael, thank you for your time.
Michael Janda: Oh, man. Thank you. So fun. I’m sad it’s over. It was too fast.
Dillon Winspear: I know. I mean I told you only an hour of your time and we’re hitting it right now. So, thank you very much. We’ll have to do this again [46:00]. That’s been another episode of Designed Today. Thanks everyone for listening.
