Methodology for client quotes

Hello, and welcome to the traveling internet. Today I am going to talk about quotations. Quitting for work as a freelancer, I know can be very daunting, and you're not sure how to do it. I'm in a lot of Facebook groups and I see this question all the time, like, how do I price my work? And one of the ways is, you know, you have to give a quote, someone tells you the work that they need doing. And you have to come up with a magical figure. And sometimes you might ask the person for that budget, and most the time the person's like, Well, it depends. Because they might have a budget in mind, or they just might not know because it's not work that they do. If you are not a photographer, and you ask a photographer for a quote, you don't know how much what they do is worth. I mean, you kind of have a rough idea, but you definitely don't know, the facts and the figures and the time that they take and the software and the overheads and all of that sort of a thing. So whenever you get asked about a budget, you Normally kind of freeze me, I don't know how much is gonna cost me, especially when a lot of websites don't have their prices very clearly out there. Which can be frustrating. I highly recommend having you know, minimum cost from X amount that helps people when they are shopping to know whether you're at least within or over their budget. Because otherwise then not only are you wasting their time, but you're wasting your time by sitting down and having this conversation when they cannot afford you. So, one thing I've learned when quoting something and normally I have my prices up on my various websites, but there's some things that I do back in that people, I don't advertise the services, and people asked me for them and so I have to give them a quote. And I want to tell you a little secret that's helped me create quotations where I don't feel that I'm being exploited but I feel I'm giving a fair price to my clients. And that has been because of the way I work. I currently work in a method. It's sort of like the Pomodoro method, which is 25 minutes of work and five minutes of rest. But I work more in a 30 minutes of work and 10 minutes of rest. And because I've been doing it for a certain amount of time, I become better and better at figuring out breaking down my tasks into 30 minutes segments. And so I might have a big overall task of updating my website, but then I have to scale that back into 30 minutes to update the font or change the colors will just update the homepage and then go to the about page and whatever it might be. And so because I've had practice and sort of changed my muscle memory, or not my muscle memory, my memory memory on working in 30 minute blocks, I find it easier to then be able to give a quote because a lot of the work I do I know Well, this and this will take me this amount of time. And so getting into the regular habit of breaking your work down in some way, shape or form will help you Be able to give quotes to clients. So it could be that you find it easy to work in 15 minute increments, or hour increments, or 40 minute increments or 47 minute increments, I don't know, whatever works for you. Try working that way for about a week or two weeks, just where you're solidly working. And from, for my example, 30 minutes on 10 minutes off, 30 minutes on 10 minutes off, I know how long I can do that for. So for me, I know, I can do that for about three hours depending on the work. And then my brain kind of fries. Or I can do it for two hours on one type of work, maybe very analytical work. And then I could do it for two hours on this very creative work. And that way you can do a four hour stretch. And so the idea is to get you used to working in a certain way and then when someone says hey, I want you to copyright under 53 emails, you know that well one email or three emails takes me at these times. times that by however emails needed, plus your overheads and everything else. And that gives you a quote. And it's not a quote that makes you feel that you're not, you know, being compensated for the time that you you're going to put into it. Because there's a lot of times where you, you, you hear about work and then you you give a quote for it and I go, No, it actually it can take me longer, because you didn't actually figure out how long the original thing was going to take you. So if you just get used to working a certain pattern, that will be the key for you to be able to go ahead and give quotes and work in a reasonable manner and know how much time it's going to take you how many weeks months, whatever it might be, and get paid at the right way. I hope that's helpful. Thank you for listening. This is Janice@thecareerintrovert.com helping introverts shine build their brand. Hope you have a great week.