One quick and easy way to increase profits on any job.

Welcome to issue 1!

Scrap the fixed rate.

Conventional wisdom has studios charge clients a fixed rate for a role when we price creative production, e.g. developer £1200 or producer £800, which doesn’t account for the higher cost of freelancers when you need them.

A developer on staff might cost £200, vs a freelancer that costs £400 a day or more. That’s 50% of your profit on that role, per day, lost. Now x that by the number of freelancers on the project. Ouch.

Instead:

1. assume every role on your project will be freelance and calculate the cost of the project based on those numbers
2. add 60%, 70% whatever you want to make on top of that to get to your price to the client

That way, if you need to staff a project with freelancers unexpectedly, you won’t lose a chunk of your profits.

Oh, and if the client ever asks for a breakdown of your costs [politely], just say no.

Hey, thanks for following us. Stay tuned for more #producer life.

Since you’re here…

Our training company, Art of Production, is officially open for business. We are now recruiting to fill nine spaces on our first open-enrolment course, Selling Creativity (yes, the title is a blatant nod to Blair Enns’ masterpiece, Pricing Creativity).

The training is a distillation of 3 years’ intense study on how to sell creative agency services and what happened after I (Emma) applied all that theory IRL.

Suitable for experienced, senior producers/EPs and up.

For more info and to book a place, check out Eventbrite →