Your Estimates Should Quantify All Deliverables
by Andy Strote, photo by Susan Holt Simpson
In your estimates, include:
How many words
How many layout versions of how many pages
How many rough options
How many revisions
When you quote a job, do your clients know precisely what you’ll deliver? They should know ahead of time.
When I was freelancing and in both of my agencies, I made sure we quantified our deliverables.
If You’re a Writer, How Many Words?
For any project, you should know how many words you’ll deliver. Sometimes, the client will tell you what they expect—1,000 words—but if they don’t, you should tell them what you’ll deliver.
Depending on the type of project, a range might be appropriate. So, you might say 950 to 1,000 words.
In any case, make sure you and the client agree beforehand. No surprises.
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For Designers How Many Creative Options, How Many Pages?
This can vary, depending on the type of job, but for us, the magic number was often three.
For example, if we were doing a bigger website, we would propose to show three different concepts, each showing three distinct pages. So, for an ecommerce site, it might be three versions of a home page, product page, and about us page.
We felt this gave the client enough options without overwhelming them.
I wrote about the power of three for successful concept presentations here.
If it was a one-page site, we’d show three layout options for that page.
Again, we made sure it was clear in our estimates.
Designing Logos? How Many Rough Options Do You Show?
We loved designing logos, especially once our studio included a few designers. This was a chance for everyone to get creative within a limited space.
But before we got into how many rough options we would show, we made sure that the estimate included a competitive research phase. In that phase, we would gather all the logos of directly competitive brands and brands that are not competitive but in the same industry.
We reviewed those brands for color, style, and shape. It was important that we stood out from the competitors and avoided any confusion.
We might also look at comparative brands. These are brands in other industries that appeal to our target market. So, while our project might be an identity for a new mobile phone, we would also look at categories such as cars, clothing, and food that are aimed at our target market.
Here’s an in-depth look at competitive and comparative communications overviews.
Internally, we might brief three designers to develop rough concepts. These would be directions, ideas for graphic elements, type treatments, etc. Everyone would have a day or two before we got together and started sorting through the ideas.
At that point, we’d likely have 15 or more scribbles to consider.
How many did we refine to show the client? No more than five. From those five, the idea was to zero in on one and provide options for how that one might be rendered and fine-tuned.
So we made sure that our estimate said we’d deliver five options for consideration that we would then work together and narrow down to one.
How Many Revisions After Final?
Revisions should be part of your Terms and Conditions. How many revisions are you including?
But first, it’s essential to be clear that if you’re proposing several steps in your presentation, for example, showing concepts before going to finals, these aren’t revisions. They’re simply part of the process.
Revisions start after you’ve presented a solution that you consider final, but the client wants changes made. This often happens because other stakeholders at the client are allowed to have input after the “final” version.
Typically, we included up to two rounds of revisions in an estimate. However, a client once asked us to include five rounds, knowing how her company worked. Not a problem. We simply adjusted our estimate.
Have a look at this for more on Terms & Conditions and scope creep. Especially, see point three, addressing poor Terms and Conditions.
Testimonial: Recommended to Other Creative Friends
“Hi Andy, just finished reading your book. Loved the sections on estimates, billable hours, and timesheets. Recommended to some other creative friends who are running their own biz. Thank you for writing the book :)”
Kasun Pathirage, Freelance B2B Writer, DM Twitter
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