How to Price Work for a Post-Production Project

Video Transcript

"TRAVIS JOHNS: Hi. I'm Travis Johns for Expert Village, and I'm going to talk to you about pricing work time in your home video post-production studio. As I said before, time is money, which is true of any business anywhere. When you're a freelancer or a subcontractor, obviously because you're not clocking in and clocking out of an office, there's really no way of gauging how much time you're working on a project if you weren't writing it down or keeping detailed records. A lot of times, a client will ask you at the outset, "How much is this going to cost me for, say, a three-minute video?" Well, you need to take a very long look at past projects, things you've done for other clients, so you can give them a reasonable expectation as to how long it's going to take. It's very important not to undersell the amount of time it's going to take on a project because then you might end up cutting your rate in half. When you price a project out, you want to make sure that if you say you're going to have to spend one hour on this piece of graphic or this piece of video that you're not spending two hours on it because that means you're getting half the money. This kind of a trap is very easy to fall into, especially for beginners, and you can learn a lot of expensive lessons along the way. My advice would be to make sure that once you've agreed to a price on a project, you do the work that is expected of you, you deliver what you can, but you don't overextend yourself when it comes to time, when it comes to effort and energy because if that same client asks you to do another project, they're going to expect the same amount of work at the same price; and if you put in double the time that you originally promised, you're going to have to do double the time again for the same price. So just make sure that you're safeguarding yourself against excess deadlines, excess client expectation so that in the end, it's a mutually equitable partnership for everyone involved."