What’s it Worth?
As a creative, people orientated business our biggest overhead is salaries which takes up over half of our cost-base.
Other overheads such as office rent, IT and licensing etc take up the rest (not to mention the teabag bill). So given the limited amount of physical infrastructure we have in place i.e. we don’t have a big suite of offices; when people come to see us I’m sure it must pass through their minds as to why we charge what we charge for our hourly rate.
Don’t get me wrong here! We know we’re not the most expensive agency in the region; however we also know we’re not the cheapest. We believe it’s a question of balance and we charge what we need to charge to maintain the level of experience and expertise for the range of services we offer without asking you to help fund some swanky state of the art offices in the centre of Leeds or Manchester.
On this point by the way, we recently spoke to a Leeds based law firm who wanted to emphasise the fact that they had an expensive LS1 address as a selling point on their website as they genuinely believed it was a USP for their business. Being a typical Yorkshireman I couldn’t see how this could be true and offered advice to the contrary.
Anyway, the old adage of “you get what you pay for” is very true with most types of services as you may know and is particularly true in the creative sector we feel. We may not offer a physical product in the form of a ‘widget’, but our inputs into a business from a creativity and consultancy point of view can have a measurable benefit onto the bottom line profit.
How valuable is that?
Unfortunately though, our industry is one of those that is often perceived to be of a ‘low value’ in the minds of many clients in what it offers. If you’re in the creative or web development sector yourself, I’m sure you agree. For example, how many times have you heard “I’ll design it myself in Publisher” or “I have a copy of FrontPage/Expression Web/Dreamweaver so I’ll build it myself” and even “I’ll rustle up a logo myself in PowerPoint it won’t take me long.” (cough, spit!)
You just know they’ll be back 6 months down the line wanting it done properly.
So when you talk to us and to be fair, other agencies in our sector and an hourly rate is offered that is above the national minimum wage, take heed from a useful article in this week’s issue of Design Week.
These are the sort of rates agencies need to pay in order to attract talented staff that can deliver work that meets the expectations of you, the client.
Remember, you get what you pay for. Just bear it in mind.
Tags: design job salaries, design week magazine, graphic designer salaries, how do web designers get paid, how much do designers get paid, web design job salaries
