So You Want to Start Your Own Graphic Design Business: Ways to Generate More Income
Do I need to say it out loud? Generating income is the main reason you started your own graphic design business. You need to pay your operating expenses, pay your employees, and, most important of all, pay yourself[md]enough to buy groceries, buy clothes, and pay the mortgage. Beyond covering your basic operating and living expenses, maybe you’d like to go on a cruise once in a while, contribute to the relief efforts in Haiti, build up an emergency fund, or support the fight against cancer. Whatever your reasons, generating more income is a primary concern in any business.
In this five-part series, I’ve been offering advice about how to start your own graphic design business and run it successfully. In this final article, it’s time to look at ways you can generate more income.
Raise Your Prices
One of the quickest and easiest ways to generate more income is to raise your prices. If you’ve been charging the same prices for a year or more, it’s probably time to go up (unless you had your prices set at the top of the range initially). Raising prices can be tricky. You don’t want to raise your prices so high that you lose existing clients, and you don’t want to “price yourself out of the market” when it comes to getting new clients. Before you raise your prices, do a little research to see what others are currently charging for services.
One way to raise prices is to make subtle changes. For example, if you charge $70 an hour, you could raise your hourly rate to $75 but start billing in increments of 20 minutes. So if you do 1 hour and 10 minutes of work for a client, you bill for 1 hour and 20 minutes. Another way to raise your prices subtly is to keep your base prices the same and raise the prices for the bells and whistles. So the base price of a five-page website remains the same, but the price of creating photo galleries goes up.