How to get clients to pay you $40,000+ per project

Hey, it’s Rick. I’m actually cleaning out my office right now, getting ready to move into a new place. A quick little fun story that I just remembered. I have this document here that I want to go ahead and share with you guys. Let’s go ahead and get into it.

I’m going to be telling you a story here of a client. This was a client that I was working with way back in the day. I’m talking about maybe 2013, early 2014. This was when I was barely starting out my career as an actual software consultant, so this is barely in the early stages. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but it was one of the first clients that I actually got interested into one of my services, so it was really fun to actually go through this entire process with him because I learned a lot.

This was kind of one of the main reasons why I was holding on to this paper here. It is actually an actual requirement that I actually went ahead and wrote up for him. This thing is about 42 pages long, so it’s a pretty big document. It covers a lot of different things, but I just want to go ahead and tell you a little bit about the story as far as what actually did happen.

It pretty much went down like this… I was looking for some client work and I was looking for some extra work to take on some extra responsibility. I went ahead and actually mailed this individual. We actually started talking, and I started to learn more about what he was doing and what he was trying to create. We sat there and we talked about it. I learned more about who he was. I learned more about what he was trying to accomplish. I learned about the application he was trying to build. I learned about what kind of resourced he had. We went back and forth, various meetings we talked about various topics as far as what he saw this company becoming, what he was actually trying to get accomplished, and his vision for the application he wanted to build.

This is like early stages. He doesn’t even have any sort of source code created. He didn’t have anything in place. The only thing he pretty much had was pretty much this idea in his head. My job as an actual consultant was to get this idea out of his head and get it down on paper, to be able to understand what it is that he’s trying to build.

It took me about 2 months of just back and forth email, meeting after meeting, and just talking about what he was trying to actually get done and actually come up with some sort of reasonable thing for him to be able to actually create this application, right? This is why I have this document here. Again, this is like pages and pages of stuff that I went ahead and wrote for him, and it’s pretty much that whole concept of putting all of those ideas into one single document, to be able to understand what the application is, to understand what his company’s trying to do, to understand the problem and the domain specifics of what he was trying to create.

I went ahead and we worked on this. We talked back and forth and this was barely in my early stages of my actual consulting career, so this is barely brand new, and I’m just trying to help him out as much as I could without actually mentioning and bringing up the topic of money. Now, not a lot of people like to talk about money. Money’s a touchy subject, but this is one of the main reasons why a lot of my clients that I currently do have, do hire me because I am open and comfortable talking about money. With this client here, it took me 2 months to bring up the subject of actually how much this thing was going to cost, how much is it going to actually take to make this a reality.

That’s frankly the entire point of this video here. Money does play a big impact on the work that you actually take on, whether you’re working for a company, whether you’re working for yourself, whether you’re doing this on a team group. Money is important, so it’s something that you should bring up as early as possible, to make sure that you guys are both on the same page.

Now, originally, while I was speccing this, I was thinking I was maybe going to charge between $25,000 up to $40,000 depending on how many features he actually went ahead and implemented. It was going to take me about 6 to 8 months to actually complete this. This is a big project. There’s a lot of things going on, a lot of different moving objects, and there’s a lot of different things he has to account for. Again, this is early stages. This is just an idea from somebody who wants to make this a reality, and he was really serious about actually making this a reality. In all honesty, this is somebody that just has this idea, that wants to make this thing.

The moment that I went ahead and brought up the money situation, that’s when I realized that not a lot of people can afford my services. Not a lot of people are going to be able to actually bring me on to their team, or bring me on to their organization, or bring me on to whatever it is they’re trying to do, just because that’s the nature of things. If you are an entrepreneur and you want to hire me to create the next great app, you need to be able to understand that you need to bring some sort of value to the exchange. Whether that be customer acquisition, whether that be market research, whether that be capitol, whatever your expertise might be, you just can’t come in with a simple idea and be like,

Rick, can you go ahead and just build this entire thing for me, and build this multi-million dollar business for me, and I’ll go ahead and pay you nothing.

The entire reason why I wanted to create this blog post here is just to let you know about contracts, or if you’re working with anybody that want’s to create one of this projects a reality, number 1 thing is to bring up the price right away. This way you guys both know you’re on the same page because if you’re not on the same page, no way in hell you’re going to make this a sustainable relationship, or a sustainable partnership. It’s really important that you bring up the pricing as early as possible. Before anything, just let them know, be like.

Okay, so rough estimate, it’s going to take us about 8 months of development, and it’s going to cost you roughly this much.

If you bring that up as early as possible, that way they’re actually aware. They can actually budget out for your service, because if they’re not even … If they’re thinking something like $5,000 or $10,000 dollars, but it’s going to take you a year or 2 years to build this entire thing, then you’ve got to kinda say,

We’re not even in the right ball park.

It’s really important to bring up the price. Bring it up as early as often, so they understand where you’re coming from, so they can have a better idea as far as where you’re actually going.

That will do it here for this blog post. Make sure if you like this blog post, and if you want to know more about entrepreneurship, or you want to know more about sales, or you want to know more about acquiring clients or want to know more about actually closing one of these bigger contracts, go ahead and send me a message.

Go over to codewithintent.com/question. Hit me up there and if you want to go ahead and ask me a specific question about freelancing or consulting, go ahead and send me a message, for example, figuring out your rates, figuring out if there’s an actual market, actually getting a customer, and all of that fun stuff. If you’re interested in that, send me a question. I would love to answer that for you, but I’m going to continue here packing and then hopefully I’ll do the next video in my new office.

Talk to you soon,

Rick H.