Taxes went out last week, which meant an evening at the kitchen table with a year of invoices in one column and, in another column I made myself write, what each project actually took out of me. The two columns did not agree. They were not even close to agreeing.
The best-paid project was a positioning system that took nine weeks and produced eleven slides. The worst-paid was a brand architecture rebuild that produced sixty-four slides and a workshop deck, and I priced it high because of the sixty-four.
I had charged for volume on the one where the thinking was hardest. I had gotten it exactly backwards, on purpose, using a method I could defend out loud.
When you price strategy by the artifact, you teach the client that the artifact is the product, and then you both spend the engagement optimizing the wrong thing.
Watch what happens once that lesson lands. The client starts asking for more slides, because slides are what they are buying. You start making more slides, because that is what you invoiced. Somebody suggests an appendix. The real decision, the one sentence that would actually redirect the business, gets made in week two and then buried on page forty-one so it does not look lonely.
Then the deck goes into a shared drive and nothing happens. Again.
I've watched this from inside agency pitch rooms, where the proposal template had a line for deliverables and no line for judgment. Deliverables are countable. Judgment is not. So the countable thing became the priced thing, and an entire craft learned to sell itself by the pound.
What I am doing differently now, in three parts. One, paid discovery, always, priced as its own engagement. If the thinking is the product then the first two weeks are not free reconnaissance to win the real work, they are the real work. Two, a fixed fee tied to the decision the client needs to make, not to the format it arrives in. Three, I say the format out loud in the proposal and I keep it small. Eleven slides. A memo. Whatever fits the decision.
The strange part is that clients do not fight this nearly as hard as I expected. What they fight is ambiguity. They will pay well for a clear answer to a question that has been stuck for a year. They will not pay well for eighty pages that hedge.
So the countable thing became the priced thing, and an entire craft learned to sell itself by the pound.
Karaoke on Thursday, the sticky-floored place in Southeast, the host who calls everyone baby. I did four minutes of Fleetwood Mac and it was not good. But it was the whole song, committed, with no appendix. There is a lesson in there and I am charging myself for it.