TheSnowman
New Member
About 9-10 months ago I locked my front doors because I couldn't keep up with the work that was coming in via email, and I'm not ever wanting to have employees. Best way to handle this was to just not have the life sucking walk ins that only wanted to spend $25 and needed it in 15 mins, and never panned out anyway.
Since that time, I bet I haven't had a single client contact me that didn't understand the value of what I do, where as every person off the street wanted me to prove myself to them before they'd consider letting me do their cousins Happy Birthday banner.
Seems like the phone is now that new medium. Had a guy call yesterday and at the beginning of his speech he said "I've got it all planned out how it'll look in my head". Right there that's a red flag, cause that means they just want helvetica and they have zero desire to let us create something nice, which means they want to do about 5 revisions, and it'll look like poo when it's done.
He just wanted his tailgate done, cut vinyl, text only. I told him I'd realistically be $200-$250 by the time we laid it all out, and got it installed. I figured A) this is now a smaller job for me, so I need to make it worth my while since I'm going to not be working on easier better paying jobs with clients that trust me already, and B) I know this guy's going to want to stop in 5X to talk about his job before we even do it, and waste a ton of my time, so this will weed him out if he's serious or not.
The response on the other end was great. "WHAT DID YOU SAY?" I told him again the pricing and I heard "Ok....click." There was a day this would have bothered me for weeks, because I was taught that you need every job that walks in the door, and you need to just work all night long and be away from your kids, and make yourself miserable with little jobs.
I guess I'm posting this to tell people that were where I was, that if you've got enough work that it makes you happy, with good customers, don't worry about every job coming through. You charge more for being good at what you do, and doing solid layouts, than just doing enough to get by. You work half as much and make the same money. You'll lose some jobs for sure, but you'll be way less stressed out, less tired, have more time with your family, and should be real close to what you were making before.
I never believed it, even though man...10-12 years ago all the old timers on here were telling me. Took me a long time to finally believe them, but it's changed my life, how I do business, and made me look forward to coming to work again everyday.
I know not everyone is lucky enough to have an inbox that just fills up with jobs, and that took years of work and developing relationships, but I'm telling you, that's worth the work it took to cultivate those business relationships, because it's lead to an incredibly loyal customer base, and made for a great small business model for me.
Since that time, I bet I haven't had a single client contact me that didn't understand the value of what I do, where as every person off the street wanted me to prove myself to them before they'd consider letting me do their cousins Happy Birthday banner.
Seems like the phone is now that new medium. Had a guy call yesterday and at the beginning of his speech he said "I've got it all planned out how it'll look in my head". Right there that's a red flag, cause that means they just want helvetica and they have zero desire to let us create something nice, which means they want to do about 5 revisions, and it'll look like poo when it's done.
He just wanted his tailgate done, cut vinyl, text only. I told him I'd realistically be $200-$250 by the time we laid it all out, and got it installed. I figured A) this is now a smaller job for me, so I need to make it worth my while since I'm going to not be working on easier better paying jobs with clients that trust me already, and B) I know this guy's going to want to stop in 5X to talk about his job before we even do it, and waste a ton of my time, so this will weed him out if he's serious or not.
The response on the other end was great. "WHAT DID YOU SAY?" I told him again the pricing and I heard "Ok....click." There was a day this would have bothered me for weeks, because I was taught that you need every job that walks in the door, and you need to just work all night long and be away from your kids, and make yourself miserable with little jobs.
I guess I'm posting this to tell people that were where I was, that if you've got enough work that it makes you happy, with good customers, don't worry about every job coming through. You charge more for being good at what you do, and doing solid layouts, than just doing enough to get by. You work half as much and make the same money. You'll lose some jobs for sure, but you'll be way less stressed out, less tired, have more time with your family, and should be real close to what you were making before.
I never believed it, even though man...10-12 years ago all the old timers on here were telling me. Took me a long time to finally believe them, but it's changed my life, how I do business, and made me look forward to coming to work again everyday.
I know not everyone is lucky enough to have an inbox that just fills up with jobs, and that took years of work and developing relationships, but I'm telling you, that's worth the work it took to cultivate those business relationships, because it's lead to an incredibly loyal customer base, and made for a great small business model for me.
