Give Me a Ballpark Estimate
2 cool tips for pricing yourself as a creative professional
When you’re a creative professional, you have to think on your feet on occasion. The reasons vary (you have to appear to be more prepared than you are in reality, you want to jump at a wonderful opportunity before you miss it, you can get an A-list client and you want to put their logo on your site, etc.) and when you find yourself in this situation, you will be expected to “throw out a number”.
Here are some cool tips in finding that number AKA pricing yourself as a creative professional.
Before we start, you need to know what you could make if you had a full time job. If you’re already a full time employee—just take your current salary. If you’re a freelancer or an entrepreneur, you need to find out what you could make as an employee based on your location, industry, education, and experience.
Indeed.com/salary is an excellent (and FREE) tool for discovering this. To keep things simple, let’s say you could make $50,000 a year as a full time employee.
Cool tip #1
Just slice off the last 3 zeros. Since you’re making $50,000 a year, you can pitch $50 an hour when a potential client wants a number on the spur of the moment. Thinking on your feet is great when you find yourself in situations in which you have to negotiate.
Cool tip #2
I just said you’re going to have to negotiate, right? This cool tip is going to give you a nice range. Know it, memorize it, love it.
Divide your salary by 2,000. We want to do this because there are 52 weeks per year and it’s a good rule of thumb to give yourself 2 weeks for vacation each year. So, 50 weeks for the year x 40 hours per week = 2,000
Since we’ve established that you’re making $50,000 per year…$50,000 ÷ 2,000 = 25.
To find the low end of your range
Multiply 25 by 2. The lowest you should go is $50 an hour. (Remember that number from cool tip #1?)
To find the high end of your range
Multiply 25 by 2.5. The high end of your range (though you should always try to charge more as time passes) should be $62.50 an hour (but you can round down to $60 if it makes you feel more comfortable).
Keep in mind, these are just cool tips. Nothing is written in stone.
This is simply a gauge. If someone wants to know your rate “on the spot” you can pitch $60 per hour. If they try to negotiate a lower rate, you know that you can go down to $50 an hour and you can still feel good about it (based on a $50,000 annual salary).
Not only can you now pitch a quick hourly rate, you can quickly pitch a day rate by multiplying your hourly rate by 8 (a typical working day consists of 8 hours).
As freelancers and creative professionals, we constantly have to negotiate our price—I hope this helps you tremendously. Remember to have fun with this stuff. This may sound crazy but negotiating can be a blast!
—Nik Parks, Co-Founder of Launching Creative
