How to sell your time as a creative consultant.
What if you could make $10k for 4-6 hours work as a designer?
One thing about branding, and creative work, projects take A LONG TIME.
They’re fun but when you’re tied to a project for months and have no capacity for anything else, they can start to feel more like a burden than a passion (esp if you undercharged.
One of my great clients came to me this week - he’d been making amazing content for months and he has 2-3 prospects say - we don’t actually think we need a new brand yet, or a new website, but can you give us advice, coach or consult with us on what we have?.
My man said - hey, I love the project work so maybe this is a problem?
It was actually the opposite of a problem.
I told him - dude tell them you can make it work, I’ll teach you how I do it.
As a consultant - like you, I get paid for my ideas, my advice, my direction, the thinking I give my clients makes them money.
Brand and web designers are the same, they just also get paid for implementation which is the big time sucker.
The difference between the two, is that more business owners ‘get’ consulting, business coaching and fractional experts who help them as a concept than do branding.
And that can mean they place a higher value on that service.
You’re already delivering that high value service - you’re just framing it as strategy, or research and it gets chucked into your package as a ‘need to have’ in your mind and a ‘don’t really wanna have it’ in your clients mind.
What if you just chopped off the implementation piece all together for some clients.
Charged the same rate.
And only had to work a tenth of the time?
The irony is you’d actually get more branding projects if you sold consulting first - but then you’d decide - do I want $10,000 for 8 hours work or for 40 hours work?
And the process to set it up is actually quite straight forward.
Keep making content that is solution, problem and outcome focused for your niche market - talk business more than you talk practically about design.
Make a list of 5/10 problems your clients face after they finish working with you - brand solved one problem, so did web, so what problem does that then open up?
Make a list of 3-5 existing clients
Decide what a one hour and half day consulting session would look like.
Give it a name
Give it a price.
Promote it.
Deliver your first at a lower case study rate for 1-3 people.
Scale it.
And if you want me to help you do that - just flick me an email or contact me via the contact form.
