The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP016: The Race To The Bottom

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

If you're like most people in postproduction (and many other industries), you've probably felt at one point or another that budgets are getting smaller, clients are more demanding & expecting more for the same price, and it's often a battle to get the rates you deserve. The 'Race To The Bottom' is a real thing and in this episode, we'll explore ways to combat it including:- Defining the race to the bottom- Valuing artists, not tools- Different ways to set rates- The challenges of starting low/benefits of starting high with pricing- Diversifying pricing- The slippery slope of discounting- Accuracy in bidding- Understanding not everyone is competition & saying no is sometimes a good thing- Never working for 'free' & always getting something tangible out of a jobThanks for checking out the show. If you like The Offset Podcast please like and subscribe wherever you find it.

You've probably heard about the race to the bottom. Well, it's a real thing. And on this installment of the Offset podcast, we're going to talk about how to fight it. Stay tuned. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another installment of the Offset podcast. I'm Robbie Carmen.

And I'm Joey Deanna. And Joey, today I want to talk about something that has been bothering me. It's been bothering our industry. We talk about it all the time with our peers and our friends on, you know, online groups and in person. And that is the old race to the bottom. To be clear, the race of the bottom is not something that is only affecting the post-production industry. and what we do. The race of the bottom is, I mean, whatever. It's always a fight that people are fighting. But I think we should kind of, you know, begin this conversation,

kind of defining what we mean by the race of the bottom. Because I think it can mean, you know, something slightly different to different people. But I'll give you what my understanding or my feeling about the race of the bottom is. And that is that any time an industry tends to democratize itself and more people are involved in that industry, right? the pie gets bigger, right?

And more people, more operators there are wanting the slice of that pie. What tends to happen is that less people are working consistently. And one way to get more work consistently is by doing it cheaper than the person who is also doing that same work. Right. And so, you know, the days of, you know, the early days of this, you know, in our industry in color, where when, oh, you know, somebody was doing a, you know, $1,500 an hour or whatever, $2,000. an hour for a show or for, you know, a grade. And somebody came around and said, well, I can do it for $900 an hour or $800 an hour.

And now we have this, the race to the bottom part about this means that that snowballs, right? Is that people are adding more and more services. Sometimes they're adding services that are dramatically lower than market rate. They're dramatically lower than anybody's offering in different markets even. And sometimes they're even just tossing things in for free to build very. volume and to build that work. We have seen this universally in post-production. We've seen it universally in production budgets are smaller, less value is applied, and nowadays even people are like, well, we can just get AI to do that. It doesn't matter. And we don't have to pay you, right?

Like, that's all a contributing factor to the race at the bottom. And I have no illusions of grandeur. I alone, you alone, can't fight completely, fight back on the race of the bottom. It's a little bit out of our control to a certain degree. But in this episode, I think I want to talk a little bit about, I do want to talk about things that I think we can do as colorists, as entrepreneurs, as business owners, whatever, to kind of fight this. But first, before we begin, is that more or less line up with kind of your feeling about the race to the bottom and kind of the definition of it?

Yeah, yeah. There's a couple things going on with it that I think are really relevant today. and that is, you know, as things have been democratized, like you said, and we've gone from very expensive tools to very inexpensive tools. And I remember when $1,000 Final Cut Pro came out. Yeah. Post houses were like, it's going to put us out of business. It's not what ended up putting the post house out of business.

What's important to remember is there is going to be opportunity in high quality, creative work and creative talent, no matter what the tools involved to do that are. As the tools dramatically change, I think where we can protect ourselves is by staying competent artists, right? You want to sell the artist, not the paintbrush. And we've seen huge changes in the cost of the paintbrush, right? And we can no longer charge in our hourly rates for the cost of the paintbrush, not nearly as much. anyway. So we need to focus it in on us as the artists to kind of make sure we don't end up

completely broke at the end of the day. I mean, it's really well said. It's something that I think a lot about when I look at a lot of the marketing of post-production companies where they put capabilities in, they frame capabilities in terms of equipment, right? We have this HDR monitor. We have this control surface, we have these GPUs, and half the time I just want to say like, who cares stuff? That stuff changes every single day. It used to matter, right? You need to deliver digy beta. You needed a place with a dig beta suite. Right. Right. Right. The world is a different place now. Yeah. And I think, but in general, I think that that is, that is part of, you know, in the general context, in the overall 50,000 foot view of this conversation, not losing perspective that the

artistry and the personnel matters more than the stuff is one way to fight that. And I think that that is, you know, really well done by some of the biggest companies in our industry, right? If you go to, I'm just using Company Three because they're probably the biggest, right? If you look at Company Three's website, right? There is no mention of what they grade on. There is no mention of what they have in their machine room. There's no mention of how fast their Internet is or what they use for their upload service. I bet you a lot of money that their base hourly rate for most artists did not change when DaVinci Resolve went from half a million dollars to $100,000 to $100,000 to $300. They're charging people because, oh, it's Stefan Sanoffel, it's Dave Hussie, it's even Nakamura,

right? These people who have 30, 40 years of experience, who have worked on the biggest productions, who have seen it, literally seen it all, know how to handle it all. have dealt with, you know, clients from, you know, perfectly nice, happy people to the worst of the worst in terms of attitude. That's why one of the things that they're doing. And I just think that, again, 50,000 foot view, don't lose perspective about that at all in the race to the bottom is that once we start valuing stuff more than we start valuing people, you're going to be participating in the race to the bottom, right? And I think that's a danger is that I always want to put myself, you, other people we work with first, rather than the equipment. But I think part of this,

like the real meat and potatoes of this discussion is rates, right? You know, it used to be, as I mentioned earlier, you know, $1,500, $1,500 an hour was not even all that uncommon, even in medium-sized facilities. You know, now we see people, I mean, I had a client the other day,

straight up tell me that like, well, we're going to this other place because they're charging us X, Y, Z. And I was like, I can't even begin to think about how I could support my company, pay myself, you know, pay Joey, whatever it may be, charging that hourly rate. Like, I would have to do 500 of those type of projects every year to even break even, right? And I think that is a, that's a, it's a hard thing to find your rate.

And I think, I think there's three kind of ways to do this. Because I think finding your rate and sticking to it is the primary method that we have to kind of fight that race to the bottom, right? So number one, I think rates should be, I think there's three ways of looking at this. Number one is the psychology factor of rates, right? If you feel like your skills and your experience are enough to compete at the highest level, pick a number out of a hat and stick to it, right? Like I think what you make your rate says a lot about what value you bring to a production

from a psychological level, right? I don't think there's really anything tangibly different from, you know, one place that charges $300 an hour and a place that charges $800 an hour, other than the fact that the $800 an hour place just had the proverbial cajones to say it's $800 an hour or whatever, right? And I think that the kind of psychological perceptual part about rate setting also really plays into clients that like a client goes, well, these guys must be better. they're charging $800 an hour versus, you know, $200 an hour, right? And I think to not everybody that plays in, but to a lot of people, that plays, right? Two, I think the market rate is important. And I think, you know, we talk a lot to friends about this, about like, hey, what are you charging? Like, it's not to undercut them.

It's to a certain degree you owe it to your market to discuss what other people are doing and try to more or less, you're not going to yell at somebody for, oh, you charge 50 bucks under what I would have charged, but to generally have an idea of guys, to keep this market intact where we're all doing something, then better for all, we need to hold this rate. So market rates are an important one.

And then third one is that ROI kind of rate setting, right? What is it going to really cost you to service your debts, make some money, pay yourself, all those kind of stuff, and figure out what your rate should be from there. I don't know. I mean, I think that to me, figuring out that number is important, and it's not so much the number.

It's the more about sticking to that number and presenting that number. And Joey, I don't mean to throw you under the bus here and put you in an awkward space, but we talk about this a lot, right? I'm awful at it. Well, we talk about it in the sense of like the nervousness about presenting numbers to people. but what I see contributing to the race to the bottom is people who are like yourself

nervous to have these discussions and fearful that there is some sort of value judgment as you as a person operator, etc. If you put out a number that might be perceived as high, right? Yes. I have, I will admit, a weird anxiety about talking about rates with clients and it's been a struggle over many years because I've always scared to ask for the higher rate. I'm always worried that they're going to just say no, we're never working with you again. I worry that this job, the most recent job, is always going to be the last job, right?

Because that's always a possibility, right? So I would just add this to the entire rate discussion. You do need to have some consciousness of what your clients are willing to pay, right? Because if you just say, I'm going to make my rate this much, even if you really really do believe you're that valuable. If you're in a market where clients just aren't ever going to pay that, you'll make zero. Right. But you don't want to be at such a low rate that you're undercutting, like you said, that market rate.

No, I agree with that. I guess what I'm trying to say is that, you know, there's nothing, like, I have never, in 25 years, I've never experienced the situation that you worry about, right? I've never experienced this situation where I say to somebody, this is how much it costs for us, and they go, well, we're never working with you again. Now, it's true, they might not work with us on that project. But the idea of being totally, you know, blackballed or whatever because of your value, I actually find it to be the opposite. I actually find it when you say and you hold that line to people, it's like, oh, man, well, one day I wish I could afford those guys to do that work. Like holding to a rate actually sets up a, like a wall of like perceived value to the client.

Like they value their time and effort and their experience so much that they're not going to come down to what we want to pay because it's they're holding that line. Now, I agree that if you hold that line into perpetuity and you're not working, like not working is not a good thing either. but I would also make the argument that the clients that tend to balk at rate are also tend to be the clients that give you the most difficulty in the process in general, right? I don't know what it is, but I have always found that clients that are like, cool, that sounds great. Like, you know, again, that's not saying that we might not work something out here or finagle a little bit, but, you know, they don't have this visceral, like, how dare you charge me that month? Like, they're at, cool, that's your rate. Like, let me see what I can do with my budget and come up with it. Those clients, great, easy.

They respect your work, whatever. The clients that I find that are trying to force you to the rates of the bottom and discount this and discount this, you give them an inch, they're going to take a mile, right? And they're also going to be those kind of clients and those kind of projects that you end up resenting a little bit, that you're like, why do they say yes to this? I'm not making any money on this. And like, you're stabbing yourself in the foot. So I just say, whatever, how, whatever. methodology you find to stick to that rate, I think is is, is fine, but just stick to it.

Now, related to this is, I think we had, this was probably about five or six years ago, we had this discussion. And it was at the time where it was kind of like, we were using one or two rates kind of as like a catch-all for everything, right? I think another way to kind of combat the sticker shock sometimes or the idea of, you know, the straight to the bottom is to diversify your services as line items and what the cost of those are, right? So let's say you have a client that comes in and goes, well, I need to grade this spot. And you go, well, cool.

It's going to be four hours to grade this spot. And they balk. And they go, well, I really only have three hours or two hours of time to grade the spot at your grading rate. Cool. Well, here's two hours of grading rate. Here's my hour of conform. Here's my hour of packaging and deliverables or whatever. However you want to frame it to get back up to the bottom line number that you weren't has a surprising psychological effect for clients.

Because they go, oh, okay, I get it. Like, you know, you're, this is that, this is that, you're doing this. And for whatever reason, it's not just one big catch-all number. I think has paid a lot of dividends for us. and I think clients are more apropos to understand that, the more that you can break down. Now, the danger with that, of course, is you don't want a line item people to death.

Somebody shared a quote with me the other day that I just thought was like literally one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen. And it was a, not even a gigabyte, it was a per megabyte charge for downloading files, right? Like, I get it. Digital deliveries, you can spend a lot of time bringing files down and up or whatever. Some people charge for it. Some people don't.

That's not what I'm talking about. about. But nickel and dimeing people to the sense that their invoice is going to have 47 items, I don't suggest. Any of these things, there's a balance to strike, right? You want to have enough detail for the client to understand this is where my money's going. This is why it's adding up to this total. But yeah, we have seen some invoices and some bids from some facilities where it's like the sweet vacuuming fee. And like, I mean, who knows? Those people might be geniuses and we might just be doing it wrong the entire time. But I think that nickel and dimming and that line-diting people to death is a balance

out because it can have the opposite effect and contribute actually to the race to the bottom because somebody goes, well, I'm just going to go to the guy that doesn't nickel and die me to death and do that. So it is a fine line about that. But I guess my point about it is is that there are sometimes there are other ways to think about diversification of what your services that don't add up to necessarily the one big ticket item, right? Like, oh, well, you're spending 15 hours at $500 an hour. It's a lot better to go, well, we're spending five hours at $500 an hour, but we're spending seven hours at, you know, whatever, $150 or $200 now.

Specificity in detail is good. Pedantiness and pedantry is not good. Absolutely. And I think, you know, related to that and the rate thing and line items and stuff like that is, and we, I mean, honestly, I just full transparency, I've been guilty of this from time to time just in the desire to get work is the application of discounting, I think is a really big problem in our industry. And what I mean by that is that you go to a lot of these large facilities and they have, you know, pick a number out of the air. Let's say, let's just say it's a thousand dollars an

hour rate for coloring or something, right? But there's a. a difference between the advertised rate card rate and then the functional rate of like discounting. And I think that our industry has kind of come to expect discount on services no matter what, right? It's like, okay, you can charge $1,000 an hour, but really the functional rate comes down to $500 an hour after you're done with all the discounts or whatever. And I think that's another way of fighting this race to the bottom is by being very careful and very selective about how you apply and use discounts. So great, you know, case in point. You have a five-minute, you know, corporate promo to do.

It's a one-off, you know, corporate promo. In my head, I'm not discounting that. I'm charging you the time that it takes to do that work because this is a one-off thing. There's no volume involved. And honestly, this is what I'm worth and this is what it's going to take. Conversely, hey, we have a, you know, 13-part series, and we're going to give you guys all of the work,

all of the packaging work, all of that kind of stuff. Can you cut us a little deal for giving you, you know, committing to all of that work? Sure. That's a different use case in applying discount. I might give you an overall series discount

or something like that for, you know, the commitment of that work. But I'm not going to do it for, you know, if you're going to like, well, we'll bring me one episode

and see how it goes. No, no, no, no, like you're not getting, you're not getting a discount from that. And I think the other part about discounts to me is that there are certain things that are easier to discount than others, right?

So, like, you and I can be a little more flexible on our discounting because it's our time as partners in the business. We hire a freelancer or whatever to do, you know, to fill in some work. Like, I can't just automatically assume that the freelancer is going to be cool with discounting, right? Or if I have hard, if I have hard counts, like I have to buy stuff, you know, let's say a cruise sled and an SSD or whatever for a DCP, right? Like, I can't discount, I can't lose money on hard cost items that we're going to hire, right? So some of these things are easier to discount than others. And I would say, in general, when I think about discounting, I try to discount not on rate, but try to become more efficient on time, right? Because I, if I'm charging somebody $500 an hour, like, I don't want that 500 number to move.

what I can flex a little bit is yeah okay well I've thought about it you know we can we can just we don't have to do X Y Z to the shot we can forego that part of it and just get it done and be doing that I'd rather discount a little a little bit on time versus dollar amount because the second I start discounting a dollar amount

I feel like I'm our rate rather I'm running to the bottom yeah and a lot of times when talking to client that goes a long way to be like You know, we'll say, I'll keep it to X number of hours, right? We'll limit this to X number of hours. That doesn't mean we're going to have you sit here with a stopwatch, but it does mean that they have a fixed cost in their mind for the project now. They're not like, well, how many hours is this going to take at this rate?

You know, so I think that helps when you're, again, specificity helps when you're talking to the clients about these things. Yeah, and related to that, I think the only way that you can get a better feel for what you just said. You're right. We do that all time. We say, hey, we'll limit this to five hours because we feel confident

that within that five hours at our regular rate, we can get this done. It might mean we have to hustle a little bit, but it's not something so out of bounds that we're like, we're going to be losing money to do this. But related to that is we have the experience, and I think one thing that can help people fight this race to the bottom, is being as knowledgeable and as accurate as possible

on their estimates about what something really will actually take. And I see so many people going, well, I thought it was going to take five hours and it took 15 hours. And it's like, I want to say to them, how could you possibly let that happen to you? Right. Like so the number one, they point out with like, well, the show wasn't what I expected. Like there was a lot more situations. Your fault.

You should have watched the show, you should have watched the show, gotten a sample from, it, talk through the client what the needs were, whatever. That's your fault. Never should happen, right? Two, they say things like, well, I just wanted to go the extra mile and do this, right? And so now it took me a lot longer. Yeah, I get it. I feel that compulsive needs sometimes too.

But as we say a lot, not everything is art. And if somebody's already fighting you on budget, time, et cetera, fight that feeling to be, you know, the actual, like, you always want to do your best, of course. I'm not arguing that. But I'm saying, like, I'm not going to get up and start working on a show at 7 a.m. and work until 2 a.m. If a client's battling me on, on fees, right? Yeah.

My time is money. And then third about that is you never want to be in a position where you're trying to have to come back and upcharge for money, right? like it's a really bad thing that is going to force somebody to go to somebody who's cheaper, easier to deal with, et cetera. Like even if your initial estimate is high and you come back at the end and go, listen, we actually didn't end up using these four hours. I'm happy to take that off your, the final bill.

You look like the hero, right? Versus coming back and going, well, I actually need more money for this because I, I misestimated how long it was going to take, right? Like that is a recipe for disaster and it's going to force somebody to go somebody who might be cheaper, faster, or whatever, right? I don't know. I just think that that accuracy of hours and estimating comes through experience, but it's a big part. The race to the bottom, like those people who are charging $25 an hour to do something, they don't, I mean, they're just, they have no idea how long it takes, right? Because they're just like, oh, well, I'll do it for $25 an hour.

the other thing I think is really how should I say this pandemic epidemic I'm still not sure of those words after all these years endemic endemic is the idea of working for free okay

we recorded an episode earlier today about new colorists and things that they should know we should have put this into that episode too because working for free should never be done. People should never expect it. If somebody's asking you to work for free, give them the giant middle finger because they don't value as an artist,

they don't invect you as a business owner, they don't respect you flat out, right? Now, I want to be clear about something. There's different levels of free, right? Yeah. If somebody just says the dreaded E word, right? You know what I'm talking about? exposure right oh yeah run run that is the run run run for the hills there's no such thing as

exposure uh for most of the time right um and so many sob sob stories of people doing hundreds of hours of work for exposure for exposure is a manipulation technique that should be excommunicated from your your vocabulary and things that you do right but with that said there's a different level of free you have to have a return on something regardless of the project. And a great case and point in that is, you know, there are ways to barter for things, right? We've done projects, for example, for hardware companies, right? We've said, yeah, sure, we'll grade your promo for the hardware company. Give us a, we'll do it at a cheaper rate.

Give us a discount on your hardware or whatever. Or sometimes it's, you know, in exchange for the work. Like, I'm fine with that. We got something of value out of the relationship. I see a lot of people, like when we were doing a lot of, you and I have, you know, years past on a lot of tutorials, right? Like, hey, cool, I'll give you a discount grading this if you let me have the rights to use your footage in, you know, lessons and storage.

I'm getting something out of that, right? Same thing like you just did, you, over the past year or so, we'll hopefully record this on a future episode, you just did a multi, I mean, probably actually multiple years that I think about it, but a long project doing some film restoration. and stuff from some classic films from the 40s, 50s, you know, 60s. And you weren't getting paid for it, but guess what? Like, you got something out of it in the sense that you were now have this whole new skill set, right?

Yeah. That you were able to develop to film restoration. You developed new workflows. You developed new techniques. But best of all, it wasn't a timeline-driven pressure thing. So even though it was free in the real sense, you were still getting something out of it that benefited you and benefited you and benefited it. our company as an organization to do.

And so that's- intentionally doing something with the idea of, I'm going to use this for marketing for the company, I'm going to use this to expand into a different thing. That is different than I'm going to do this for exposure. I know that's a fine line. It is. But that is different.

As long as you feel that you are getting something valuable out of your effort, I think it's okay to negotiate these kind of things within reason. But the important thing is they actually have to have real value, right just perceived value i don't think is important enough i i think that like if somebody is saying to you like oh well you know well the case of the restoration thing that you did right that that's a really tricky one because i think for the for the average person they look at that and be like well joey you just did it for free but you went into it going no i'm going to do this for free but the value here is that i now have built a whole separate skill set that i did not have

have on something that was real world, also very interesting, also very technically challenging. And I developed this whole tool set to now I've made the investment in that to where this can now pay dividends for years to come, marketing, you know, our repertoire to do it. So like, we actually had a lot, I mean, a lot of discussion about the validity of doing this project, right? because I was very steadfast, like, no, we're not doing something for free. No, you're not getting paid. This is bullshit.

We're being manipulated, all that kind of stuff. And you eventually convinced me, like, you, you, you, uh, defined and presented what the value was. And we looked at it very much in a pro cons list. And the person, you know, the, the, the project and the person that was running the show, um, was respectful of, that kind of that value. Like I don't have money to give you. I'm not just saying this for exposure. I mean, they offered multiple times.

Is there something I can do for you to help this? And our big answer was, yeah, well, you just have to accept that you're not a regular client. That you have to accept that we're not doing things on a schedule. You have to accept that we're doing this when we can. You have to accept that if there's a problem with something, I'm not going to jump on it five minutes after. you write the email and make a fix, right? And so, like, there's flexibility in that that's needed to. But in general, start with never work for free.

And then levels down from that, okay, free can be okay, but have real value for the things that you're doing. And this one thing that we're talking about in specific is probably the only time that we've done anything like this and will be the only time. And it was, I mean, it was, and it was a real, like, I mean, we, I mean, I'm not joking. We debated this probably over hours of Zoom phone calls and Slack and et cetera,

like whether this is something that we should do. And like at certain points, Joey was like disappointed at me because I was being such a hard ass about it. And other times I was like, wow, this is really cool. Like, you know,

so like when you talk about setting rates and figuring these things out, you've got to look at it from both of those perspectives. Right. Because if you always look at it from I want to be nice to everyone and I want to give discounts and I want to, I'm scared to ask for more money. you're never going to get anywhere. And it's good to have someone to be a bad guy.

Even if it's just you and you need to be your own bad guy sometimes, when you're dealing with these issues of rates and hours and schedules and all of those things put together, you've got to think the good guy and the bad guy. You've got to have the angel and the devil together to figure out what the right balance for you and for the project is. Yeah, I agree. And I think another thing that comes to mind about fighting this race to the bottom

is the idea of kind of being just updating your presentation in terms of rates and that kind of stuff. And what I mean by that is I had a client or we had a client that I think I've worked with since 2000, 2001, something like that. And, you know, I eventually got them to a rate that was okay. clearly a very, you know, friendly grandfathered kind of thing, right? And I looked at it the other day and we end up doing probably one to two seasons of this show. You know, it's 10 episode seasons per year, right? And I looked at this and I was like, I have not updated this rate in like three or four years with them, right? And it's getting to the point where like I'm resenting the rate and I'm resenting the shows and that's a problem.

So, like, you know, we talked about finding your rate and sticking to it. Part of that also is being a reality of what the current market economy, et cetera, is doing. Like, it doesn't take a genius to figure out, hey, inflation's high. Everything costs more money these days. Costs are going up. Like, it costs me more money now to buy a piece of gear than it did five years ago. It costs me more money to do marketing and other stuff than it did five years ago, right? So things should flex, you know, you know, in the,

lockstep with that. I mean, we, you know, if we had regular jobs, Joey, we would talk about, like with our employers, we talk about like COLA adjustments, costs of living adjustment, you know, that three or four percent every year, you know, your salary goes up. Well, it's the thing thing, same thing in terms of rates. Like, it's fine to stick, have a rate and stick to it, but sticking to that rate with never changing it as the situation on the ground changes either is equally dangerous. I tend to look at January 1st as kind of like, hey, new calendar year, hey, our rates are going up, which begs the question. do you have a discussion with clients about this or do you just do it right now i've made joey really

nervous in the past by just doing it right and going oh they're going to hate us they're never going to work with us again like if things come back and they say well you know it was x last year now you're charging y why why is that hey everything costs everything goes up it's not i'm not i'm not you know and i'm not i'm not i'm not talking about increasing things 100 percent right you know if you're at $300 an hour going to $315 or $325, like figuring out an increase, but like that the reality is that everything does cost

more than it did a few years ago and you have to flex your business. If you stay at that rate for perpetuity, that's, you're contributing to the race of the bottom because, you know, everything is getting more expensive. If you're not kind of matching pace, you're going to be losing money as well. Yeah, where

that bottom is is shifting. Now, what I'm about to say, I am hesitant to say, out loud because I sometimes think about this in my head and it sounds like I'm a little bit of a snob like I'm a you know elitist I have like believe in class systems or whatever right I think there is an inkling by small companies freelancers for sure right is that like if times are tight you're just going to go after the thing that presents itself right so you know if you haven't worked in two weeks right and somebody comes by and says well I got $100 for this job

you're going to go take the job for $100 because it's been two weeks since you've had any work. Think before you do that, right? Chasing that thing just because it's the shiny object in front of you can have long and far-reaching ramifications to your perceived value, right? And what I mean is that if you do that $100 job for somebody today, you have literally no ability at a later point in time to come back to them for a similar framed job and go, well, guess what? It's now $1,000 to do that job. So I know this is hard for a lot of people to stomach in here. And again, it sounds like I'm in a little elitist, but sometimes no is, in fact, the most powerful language that you have as a business operator and as a freelancer or whatever, not committing to things that are below you, air quotes here,

right? Because the second that you do, you're going to be painted in that. And I have never, ever experienced a situation where I've done something for cheap and then being able to work it back up to an acceptable rate, right? It's always been a fight to do so. It's always tended to sour the client on that, et cetera. The fact is you can always go down if you need to, which we're not suggesting, but you can do that. It's next to impossible to go the other way if you started already at a lower rate, right? So when I think about things like accuracy of bids, accuracy of stuff like that, I mean, every single time, like to me, I'm doing it wrong if somebody comes back and goes, oh yeah, that's great. I'm totally on that, right? I want, I need, like I feel like I'm in the right space when somebody comes, oh, okay, it's 20 grand. It's a little more than we thought it was. And now that empowers me to be like, okay, my real number on this is 14 grand. I put 20 on. on the proposal because I have that wiggle room.

I can, they don't have to know that, but I can play in my, I can play within that range, right? Versus I start at 10 thinking the show is really worth 14 and I put it at 10 just to get it. That's dangerous. Yeah, you'll never get that money back. You'll never going to get it and you're going to set the precedent that it's never going to get back as well. So the danger there too is also, you know, just take us to its crazy conclusion is if you take on every cheap job just to get the jobs in, when a job comes that will pay full rate and will be a full quality, good job that could lead

on to more, bigger, better things, you've already got other obligations that you're going to resent. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's funny. It's like I think about this in my head sometimes, too, as like, because I like to play golf, right? I'm pretty good at golf most of the time. But I'm not a professional, you know, PGA tour level golfer, right?

And I think about it in this kind of context. It was like, am I competition to the PGA tour golfer? Of course not. I'm not competition to that because I'm so below their skill level and experience that like, like it would be fun to play with them, sure, but they're never, you know, they're never going to look at me as competition to their game. And I tend to think that there's a, you know, there's a feeling that a lot of people have in our industry that everybody is competition.

And that's really not true, right? that like I am not competing with the I don't want to compete with the guy charging $25 an hour working out of his bedroom. That's not who I want to compete with at all. At the same time, I know that I can't compete with, you know, a company doing, you know, Netflix, gold level stuff because we're just not that facility, right? So knowing your lane, too, I think is an important part about this and not in realizing that not everybody is competition and you don't, in other words, you don't actually. have to compete in the race to the bottom if you don't want to. Yeah. Very cool.

Well, this has been a fun one. Hopefully got people thinking a little bit about how, you know, to kind of fight this race. And it's a real thing. And I'm not saying that, you know, we're not guilty of it. Sometimes everybody is a little guilty of it sometimes. But kind of being aware of the race to the bottom, I think is the first step to kind of, you know, to battle it.

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