Five Things to Help You Raise Your Design Rates

For Designers

4 Mar

Getting Your Mindset in Check

The first step might not be exactly what you think because surely it’s more about your services and your business than anything to do with mindset? But mindset is the main thing that can hold us back from charging appropriately for our services and also feeling confident in our prices when quoting and talking to clients.

Some common mindset blocks that can come up with money are:

No one will pay me higher prices
I’m not good enough to charge that much
I can’t charge as much as ____
Self-employed people are supposed to struggle

Before you start trying to put things in place (like putting up your prices) which don’t make you feel completely comfortable, try thinking about why you don’t feel comfortable and what you can do to change the way you think. This isn’t necessarily a quick fix as changing your mindset is something that can take years or even months! But even figuring out what your blocks are is a great starting point.

This Might Help: Join my Facebook group for designers to watch this free workshop about mindset blocks!

Working Out Your Income Goals

A tricky thing to figure out when you know you want to raise your rates is - how much should I charge? This is often where we get overwhelmed and instead of working out our rates in a way that is logical, we just have a guess at how much we think people will pay or we just bump up our existing prices a little bit.

Working out your pricing is actually a lot easier if you base it instead on logic and on your income goals as this means you know your pricing is going to support you in reaching those goals, paying your bills and saving as much as you want. To do this, work out how much you need to earn to cover your personal expenses, business expenses, personal spending, savings and tax.

Once you have your income goal, you can base your prices on this instead of plucking prices out of the air and knowing that your prices have logical reasoning behind them can help you feel much more confident quoting them to clients and having them on your website.

This Might Help: My E-Book, How to Get Design Clients goes step by step through a pricing method based on your income goals!

Stopping Comparison in Its Tracks

One thing I see a lot from designers is - “I’m not sure how to price my services because a lot of people don’t share their prices so I can’t get an idea for my prices” But comparing yourself to other designers is not going to help you find the right prices for you and your business - it’s only going to mean that whenever you want to make a decision in your business, you look to others to help.

If you struggle with comparison and feel like you need to look to others to be guided on your decisions, try muting or hiding these people online and instead look at your own big picture goals and where you are in your business. Everyone’s journey is different and most people are probably at a completely different point to you so you really want to be trusting your own instinct and decision making moving forward.

This Might Help: The Daring Designers Club Podcast - What IS Your Version of Success?

Finding Your Dream Clients

Identifying the people you really want to work with is valuable for your design business in so many ways but one of them is helping you put your prices up! If you are aware of who you are targeting, you can make sure they are people who will pay higher prices and you can also gear your prices to fit them.

If you’re worried that your dream clients won’t pay higher prices, the simple answer is - they’re not your dream clients! You don’t want to be working with people who are reluctant to make an investment with you so make sure the people you are attracting are excited to work with you and have a budget that matches what you want to charge.

This Might Help: In my Facebook group for designers, we also did a workshop on finding your dream clients!

Getting a Professional Process

You might feel that raising your prices means that the service you offer isn’t in line with what you’re hoping to charge (and I’m sure this isn’t the case - we mostly undervalue what we offer!). But something that might boost your confidence to make you feel better like you’re offering a higher level of service which matches with higher prices is creating an amazing, professional client experience.

Having a great process not only makes you look a lot more professional and streamlined but it also really helps save your clients time AND it saves you so much time too. All of these things combined really help you push to move from freelancer to business owner which is another thing that can help you feel better about charging more.

To get started with setting up a great client process, think about the steps that will really help your clients, any emails you can send to help your clients along the way, anything you can send to help clients and also deadlines and timings for each part of your service. You may also want to add some systems or tools into the mix to streamline and automate even more!

This Might Help: The Daring Designers Club Podcast - Creating an Organised Client Process