The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP063: Pricing & Bidding A Job

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

In this episode of The Offset Podcast we're discussing how to determine your rate(s) and bid on a project.  Pricing, discounts, and proposals are challenging for many people - and lets face it - these topics while are important, are decidedly not the fun part of running a postproduction business.In this show, we'll explore how we go about thinking about setting rates, building proposals, handling discounts and more.  Some of the specific topics we discuss include:How your market, experience, overhead and perceptual goals all influence determining ratesPicking a rate type - hourly, day or flatThe importance of scoping to flat rates + having 'special' rates for evening and weekend workBuilding a rate cardBuilding a project order/proposal & handling discountsConsistency in pricingIf you enjoy the topics and discussion of The Offset Podcast you can join in the conversation with our new Discord communityCheck out offsetpodcast.com for our entire library of episodes. You can also follow us on Instagram & Facebook - just search for The Offset Podcast.Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you found it and be sure to check out our growing library of episodes. If you like the podcast it'd mean the world to us if you'd consider supporting the show by buying us a cup of virtual coffee -https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcastSee you again in about two weeks for a new episode

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Offset Podcast, and this week we're taking a look at the mechanics of pricing a job. Stay tuned. Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and Gaia Collar AutoCal and Analyzer. Accurate calibration and routine verification are critical in our industry, and Gaia Color makes the calibration process both fast and convenient. Available across supported DM, XMP, and XMPC series monitors, Gaia Color allows a wide, range of compatible measurement probes to connect directly to the monitor for automated calibration and objective performance verification without an external computer or calibration software. Learn more at flanderscientific.com.

All right, everybody, welcome back to another installment of the offset podcast. I'm one of your host, Robbie Carmen. And with me is Joey Deanna. Hey, Joey. How are everybody? Hey, everyone. Episode 63, Joey. and this is one that I've been meaning to talk about for a while.

We've skirted around the edges of this in various episodes a little bit. But that is kind of the mechanics of how do you actually price a job, right? Like we've talked about, you know, communication with clients. We've talked about other business topics, but we've never really explored the exact mechanics of figuring out, you know, rate, how you put that rate into a, you know, a digestible document for a client, how you know you do things like discounts all that kind of stuff and so we figure hey we'll take a stab at it now i want to be clear and it's a tough question because like we don't build houses we don't fix

cars we don't have parts we don't have you know input pricing you know we don't i have to buy lumber for this job that has a fixed cost you know there's so many variables that apply to pricing a color job that are really intangible absolutely that there's there's no like commodity it's all service It's, you know, certain degree it's fungible. And we're, yeah, we're going to talk about that. And I want to be honest about something that this is a subject I think we've largely avoided just because we don't really want to like dictate to somebody like, hey, you should be setting your price at this or setting your price at that.

So one of the things that is sort of going to be a theme of this is this is kind of the way that we do it and think about it. But the big overarching thing here is that one size does not fit all. Obviously, anything that we talk about in this episode, the particulars of your situation, your market, your clients, those are all going to come into play. So don't, as you listen or watch this episode, don't feel like this is like a dogmatic approach. We're going to try to make things more, you know, conceptual, higher level about pricing and bidding out a job. Obviously, your particulars are always going to matter, all right?

So before we begin, a couple things, housekeeping things, as always, you can always head over to offsetpodcast.com to check out our complete library of episodes. This is episode number 63. time is flying by you can also follow us on instagram and facebook um just search for the offset podcast and you can follow us there that's where we do uh things like episode announcements and stuff like that as we mentioned in our previous episodes um we have just launched our discord community for the show uh you can find that link right here on screen it's an open discord uh feel free to join us over there uh plenty of fun conversations going on i think we're up to 70 or 80 members so far something like that uh so feel

Feel free to join the Discord. It's always good to have some people, you know, some new faces in the conversation. And then last thing is we'd really love it if you'd consider supporting the show. You can visit this link right here on screen to buy us a cup of virtual coffee. Every dollar donated goes right to supporting the show, helping us with our overhead and all that kind of stuff to get these episodes out every two weeks. All right, Joey, let's dive in, man. I think the first thing, as I said, one size doesn't fit all. And I think when it comes to figuring out your rate, I think one of the, you know,

most important things, probably the most important thing, is the market that you're in, right? You know, if you're in, you know, rural Idaho, that's a different market than, say, Manhattan, right? And that, that market also drives expectation, right? But it's a little, like, the weird thing about market is also, it's a little bit, it's a little bit weird and sort of inverse, right? You would think that, like, hey, L.A., it's the heart of it, post-production. Everybody should be charging $1,000. But then market also plays in with saturation.

Let's talk about that a little bit because market is an interesting thing to build your numbers around because, yes, it matters, but it's also kind of inversely weird sometimes. Yeah. And, you know, the weird thing about looking at your market, whether that be, you know, market doesn't have to only be location, right? Especially now, there's so much remote work out there. market could be your circle of clients, the people you've worked with, right? Industry type or something like that you specialize in. But in reality, it's kind of a combination. It's where you live and work, the clients you work with, the genres and the workflows that

you do, all of those kind of push and pull on each other to make this amorphous blob of what is the market you're in. And then every other factor we're going to talk about, your experience, your overhead costs, your clients budgets, all of those kind of, it's almost your market is almost like a multiplier adjustment to that, right? So like a colorist of huge experience that charges high rates is going to be different in certain markets or in certain sets of clients, et cetera, but it's still going to be proportional. So it's kind of like the market is kind of like a proportional adjustment to every other

factor involved in your pricing. Right. If you are a colorist in a major metropolitan area with lots of overhead, your market rate might be different in, again, a small rural town because guess what, rent's not a thousand dollars a square foot. It's, you know, $20 a square foot. But the ratio between like your rate in Manhattan and then your rate in rural wherever between you and somebody who is junior and less experienced, that ratio is probably going to stay around the same. Yeah, true. And I think one of the ways. of kind of inquiring about market is just to have conversations with people, right? Asking colleagues and peers, okay, what are you charging for this? What's your kind of rate? And people are much more open about that these days.

Than they used to be for sure. I think it's probably a good thing. And I'm not suggesting that anybody do things that are nefarious like, you know, call a major facility and go, hey, I have a fake project. Can you give me a bid so I can pull it? I mean, I mean, that stuff does happen, of course. But I'm just saying asking around and getting an idea of what the general market support is a great first step to figuring out what your rates should be, how people, but more than just

the number, also sort of the mechanics of it. You'll get an idea, okay, most of the facilities are charging hourly rates or most of the facilities are charging, you know, flat project rates. It will give you an idea of what's what, right? The other thing that you just hinted on, I think, is a big determining factor, and it's germane, I think, to a lot of our listeners, is the idea of experience, right? I think that there is certainly people with large bodies of work, lots of experience, just kind of by definition, have a little bit more leeway in charging higher rates. But this one I'm going to push back a little bit on because I think that the newbie colorist, the neophyte colorist or editor or whatever getting to post-production goes, I'm new,

I can't charge as much as I, as somebody, you know, with a lot of experience. I get it. It's a certain logic, but also go back to the market part. Like, if you, if your market is charging, let's just pull a number out of a hat, $200 an hour for something, and you're like, hey, I'm a new colorist, I'm going to charge $100 an hour. You're not serving your market well, right? Because now all you've done is chop the legs out from the market, even though you might be new. Yes, I get that. You don't feel like you can charge as much. Like that is a, it's a very sensitive thing, right? because you don't think you're worth that much, but at the same time, just by charging less,

you might be doing damage to your market too. And as a result, too, as you develop and as you get better and you get higher-in clients and stuff like that, it's going to be harder and harder to kind of raise your rate up to be contemporary with the market. So there is definitely, if you are junior and you don't think you can compete with somebody who's much more senior charging a particular rate, by all means, adjust.

downward, but don't overdo it, right? Don't come in so low that you're just like looked at as the cheap option. You never want to be looked at as the cheap option. You want to be looked at as value to the client. Whatever you bill, whatever you're charging, you want your client to think they're getting value for that money. And if you're underbidding so much to get jobs and get experience, your clients are only ever going to look at you as, well, we don't have a lot of lot of money for this one, so we're going to send it to the cheap guy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Later on where we have more money, we're not going to send it to him because he's the cheap guy.

Right. I mean, I see people on, you know, Reddit and other places going, lamenting the fact that they're not getting, you know, Netflix or Amazon jobs or whatever. And like, you know, then they're like, oh, but I'm charging, you know, $85 an hour. And it's kind of like, well, you know, maybe the reason you're not getting that is because those people, you know, they're not, who are the string pullers at those those productions are going what $85 an hour like no that's too good to be true like it can't happen you know and so that leads me to my next part about this is a perceptual thing and i i think this is something that you cannot underestimate but i will admit it is a slippery slope it's very tricky to get right and that is i think largely rates are

determined by who you want to be in the sort of in the market perception right If you go out and go, hey, I'm charging, it's kind of riffing on what you just said, I'm charging a thousand dollars an hour. Perceptually, that's a much different feel than somebody charging $100 an hour, right? If I'm somebody charging a thousand dollars an hour, like, are they that good? What do I get for that extra thousand dollars? And I think there's a balance in sort of doing that because clearly charging more in that perceptual message that that sends gives you a little bit more gravitized. in the conversation, but it also raises the expectations, right? If you're charging a lot of money per hour, yeah, you sure as hell might not,

you can't be going, hey, what's drop frame time code again? Or I've never heard of SRT files. Like, if you start doing stuff like that and you're charging $1,000 an hour, well, guess what? Like, that perception can fall, you know, smack you back in the face, too. The other part about the setting the rate, too, that I think is complicated, but I'm going to just real quick mention it, is that, I think if you go to a business school

and you talk about margins and all that kind of stuff, you know, one of the things I're going to say is like, well, you have to know your overhead, right? And I think this is one place where a lot of people, us included from time to time, don't do the necessary work to figure out exactly what the overhead is vis-a-vis the margins are, right? if you you know if it cost you $300 an hour to operate right and then you're charging $300 an hour

guess what you're breaking even right right so you have to figure that part out and I don't think it should be the only determining factor but if you have you know um if you have uh relatively healthy margins that's how you make money if you don't have healthy margins you're just kind of Robin Peter to pay Paul kind of thing, right? It's just sort of breaking even. And so one of the other aspects I would really encourage people to do is figure out exactly what that monthly number is and exactly how many hours or days or whatever the demarcation is that you need to break even and then build off of that, right?

Because nobody wants to break even. You want to be making, you know, in this game, the potential is, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50% or more. Work that in wherever you can. Yeah. And, you know, that, that expense ratio is not just your monthly bills, right? It's, I bought X amount of dollars of equipment this year. I bought this much supplies, you know, back in the day, it used to be things like tape.

We don't think we don't have to buy tape anymore. But I bought a bunch of hard drives and I sent them out to clients. I only got half of them back. You know, that's a very common loss rate thing that happens is, and you just got to accept it in some cases. you might not ever get that back. You know, I just bought the biggest, baddest computer that's going to last me three, four, five years. So what does that computer's cost

divided over those five years? What does that actually mean? And those ROI calculations are complicated. There's a lot of opinion on the value of some of them, this, you know, one way of looking at it, another way of looking at it. I think you can really get in the accounting and analytical weeds about this.

That's not really my way. You know, you've got to be generally aware. My point is more like elevator pitch level kind of awareness, right? If somebody goes, hey, what is your monthly number? You can just go, oh, it's about X, right? I'm not saying you have to get down to the penny, but knowing that you have to make a certain amount of money to cover your bills and make that profit margin, I think, is a key component of how you go into determining

your rate as well. Yeah, and it's also how you go about determining what we want to talk about next, is how do you actually bill for a job, whether it be hourly, day rate, flat rate. Those all have advantages and disadvantages, both from the client side, your side, all of the different aspects. If you know what and when your expenses are, you can be better informed to decide what you can offer the client in terms of terms. Yeah. And now these types of rate, right? As you said, hourly, daily, you know, flat rate or whatever. I think the first thing you need to know is that this also has a huge market influence,

right? If everybody in your market is going, oh, we just do it for a flat rate and like, you all of a sudden come out of the gate be like, no, I do everything hourly is a little bit of a disruptor, not only to the client pool, but also to your market in general, right? And so I think that's one thing you have to consider about this. But let's talk about each one of them, because I think you're right. They do have pros and cons. And I think if you talk to anybody in this business long and who has been in it long enough. The one thing they'll almost always say is, yeah, hourly's the right way to go. Why is that, Joey?

And what are the, in your opinion, what are the pros and cons of an hourly rate? Because one, it's the most direct correlation to how much work you're putting in. Like we said, we don't have material costs. So your hours are the direct, like, representation of your effort put into this project. in most cases when you bill hourly you're going to make the most money. In some cases, that's not true. But in a lot of cases, if you're billing hourly, you are adding and adding and adding every minute you're working. And that total number just keeps going up.

So if you have enough clients that are happy paying hourly to fill you eight hours a day, wonderful. That's great. where some of these other things come into play is most colorists, unless they're working in a facility, don't have a, I am scheduled every day, eight hours a day on various projects that are billing hourly. The independent colorist doesn't usually have that.

I'm working on maybe two projects today and I got a short form thing that came in while I'm in the middle of this film. And you're juggling and managing your time accordingly. That's where I think the, not so much the day rate, because just to talk about day rates for a moment, day rates are almost always if you are freelancing out of facility, right?

An independent colorist is not often going to charge a day rate because they're never going to dedicate their whole day to a single client. If they are, they could just bill hourly. A day rate is a good way of, one, getting consistent billing if you are working for a facility and knowing exactly what you're, I'm booked two weeks at this. this facility at this day rate. I know at the end of those two weeks exactly how much money I'm going to come out of the door with.

Great. Facility, it's very predictable for them. It's very predictable for you. That's kind of, that's why that works. And also I'd add to that too. It's also kind of like industry subsets kind of specific to like where, you know, I think the the nomenclature is like if you're hiring crew for a production, right, you're hiring a DIT or a, you know, an AC or something. like it's just kind of standard that that's built out as like a day rate right where that's kind of

become the norm i agree with you that day rates in particular are a little weird in post-production facility work but if you are a freelancer and i mean by that like if you're you know what you're charging the client but if you're a freelancer going to be you're going to do overflow or go work at a facility yeah day rates make sense support for this episode comes from conform tools Form Tools converts timelines between Premiere, Media Composer, Resolve, and other NLEs, automatically handling what you'd normally fix by hand, things like speed ramps, keyframes, repositions, and even Sapphire effects. And when it's time to move media, send massive projects to collaborators in minutes instead of hours.

Conform Tools only transfers the media your timeline actually uses without you even needing to trim or consolidate media. Built by post-professionals, Conform Tools helps editors, colorists, and conform artists move faster and finish stronger. Let it handle the tedious stuff so you can focus on the creative. Start a free seven-day trial at conform.tools. I want to mention one thing about the hourly rate that I think is important, is that one, hourly rate, like, it has levels of enforcement to it. And what I mean by that is that, you know, we tend to charge things when we can charge things

hourly, like short form work or whatever, but it's not like we are hard tracking those hours. Like, I mean, you know what I'm saying? Like, at a certain degree, we go, hey, how many hours is that? It was two. It was three, right? The strictest interpretation of an hourly rate is there's a time clock, right? You sit down at your desk in the morning and you are tracking every minute of every day and, you know, whether you decide that that's a quarterly, a quarterly an hour, half an hour,

or you only charge for full hours, whatever it may be, you know, that's a strict interpretation of that. And the downside of that is clients will not like working with you if you're not even if you're remotely slow, right? Because it's like, hey, I brought you a three-second job, you're a 30-second spot. And, you know, this took you seven-hour. hours to do? Like, yeah, that's never going to fly. Like that's never, that's never going to fly. So it is a little hourly, the one thing that you be worried, you know, concerned about is that if you're trying to get a true accurate representation of your hours, it can be difficult to do because there's going to be pushback on speed and efficiency from clients, right? Very rarely you're going to

do the client who goes, whatever it takes, no matter how long it takes. That would be the perfect hourly situation. But more times than not, the hourly situation is fungible, right? Oh, it feels like three hours. It feels like four hours. Because almost nobody is doing that level of, you know, they're not billing like a lawyer, right? I guess what it would be a good analogy where it's like, hey, every five seconds, I pick up the phone or an email, it's billable, it's billable, it's billable, because the clients don't have a tolerance for that. So that goes into what I think you were saying about, yeah, day rate's not really a thing for a lot of post-production, you know, companies. It is more for a freelancer kind of thing, but gets us to the idea of a flat rate, right?

And I think that flat rates are an interesting thing for certain types of work in our industry. I think where flat really works is for projects who need to control costs or have tightly controlled limited budgets, right? You know, client says, I have six grand for this film or whatever it is, you know, and you can say, sure, I can work within that six grand. But the thing that's, I think, a dirty little secret about flat rates is that they're not really any different than an hourly rates. You're just estimating how many hours you're going to put into that job. And so when you put out a flat rate, unlike the streaming clock of an hourly, flat rate's a really tricky thing if you don't have the experience on estimating what a project is going to take in a ballpark hourly rate. You estimate something, you're like, oh, yeah, sure, it's two hours. it's really 20 hours, well, you just flat bid that way under and now you're screwed.

Yeah. And what I think is really important, no matter how you're billing, at the end of the day, you've got to think about the hourly rate that it's resulting from, right? If you are bidding a film, like an hour long, like an hour long dock and you're saying it's going to be X number of dollars, you need to, whether you know, show this to the client or not, you know, you need to know exactly how much at what you want your hourly rate to be that equates to. That way, you have some general concept as to how much effort and time is going to go into this project before you get started.

So you can manage your expectations and manage your time correctly. Now, it's great from the client's perspective because it means they're not going to get surprises at the end. Sometimes for us, the flat rate works great because maybe we get through something quicker than we thought. And it ends up, we make more money for the net amount of hours we put into it. Sometimes it goes the other way. Sometimes to get it to the level we need it to be, we need to put in a few extra hours beyond what we told them it would be. At that point, you're still within the ballpark of where you wanted to be price-wise,

but you have a very happy client because they got a great product and they didn't have any budget surprises. Yeah, I agree. And I think that one of the things that you have to understand about flat rates, and I think where a lot of new people in the post-production get themselves in trouble is that they don't have the experience of one asking a full set of scoping questions, right? So they don't, they get surprised when,

what do you mean? You told me you can do this for five grand. Oh, I'm pretty sure we mentioned that there would be 300 blurs you have to do in this show. And you're like, Oh, yeah, and the DCP. And a doggy-fission version. All of it.

So, like, part of it is the experience in asking the right questions when you deliver the bid. So you know sort of the whole. wholeness of the project, right? The other problem of that is that even if you're flat bidding, that doesn't necessarily mean that there are costs that you have to eat, right?

For example, if you need to send a drive to a client, right? You shouldn't be required to eat the cost of that drive, eat the cost of shipping. And we'll talk about this in a minute when we talk about actually building out, you know, sort of a proper proposal or project order. But that's one thing where I see a lot of people getting screwed on is that, wait a minute,

Why did you just charge me for, you know, 30 bucks for shipping? Well, because I had to send you back to drive, right? Like, those things should be known, quantified ahead of time, and considered sort of extras to the flat bid, because plenty of people will go, oh, I didn't expect this cost. Well, you know, you got to pay for it somehow from the client's side of the things. One more thing I want to say about hourly versus flat, especially for our side of things, for the color things.

I tend to find, I think you would agree with this, that hourly rates are much more doable, consumable by clients on short formwork, right? Yes. When you're doing a spot or a promo, hey, it's three hours to do this promo or whatever, or it's, you know, an hour to do this spot. Whereas long form work, like a series or even a movie, you know, they're working with, we have X amount of money. We have to keep within this budget.

This can't change. That's much more, I think, where we find. flat bids on projects happening. And that goes hand in hand with the other major, what I think is the other major component in determining a flat bid cost, which is deadlines and timetables. Hourly rate, the deadline and the timetable

doesn't really impact your rate because you're doing the hours at the time it needs to be done. Again, mostly short form. Got a spot today? Here's your spot. We're done. In, out, build the hours. It's simple. We've got a series coming up. with 10 episodes. We want you a flat bid for every episode. How many days do I have to do that

episode? How far in advance are you going to give me materials? How far between approval steps between when I send you a screener, are you going to get me notes? What is the deadline that I need to deliver this by? All of those can dramatically impact how flexible you can be bidding out that flat rate, which is a, you know, once you kind of get the art of scheduling in your head down a little bit where you be like, oh, I can do a little bit of extra work on the weekend to move things ahead. So I can have an easy week because I'm billing this flat and I have two weeks to do it. You can kind of manage your time internally in a way that what might be a slightly lower flat bid is still very profitable and very ideal for you.

And again, you leave with a happy client. Right. But as they always say, you can have good, fast, fast, or cheap. You get to pick two. And in my world, and I think in any colorist world, not good should already be off the table. You don't want to do jobs badly. You know, you don't want to, client doesn't have enough money, so I'm going to do a shitty job on this one. We don't ever want to be in that role. So your variables are expense, cost, and time. And it's very hard to manipulate time on a day rate or an hourly rate. But you can, you can, can definitely manipulate time and use it to your advantage on a flat rate on a longer form, longer term project. Now, you said something, and it's an important thing that I think in the

flat rate discussion is, and I'll just use the word fungibility. You said flexibility of time, whatever, but like it really is a fungible thing. However, however, part of the problem is that if you find yourself funging things too much, that is an indication that you have not done the proper work to initially properly scope and flat bid that project, right? And the problem with that is that you come to resent the work, resent the client, resent the gigs because of a mistake that you made. And one place that is so perfectly clear to me is when it comes to evening and weekend work, right?

Like we are so hungry, especially in the day, like the current, you know, environment of the post industry so hungry for work that we tend to go the extra mile for people just because I get that and it's an important it's an important thing to recognize but at the same time I think there are other rates to consider that will make you if you can factor in right so you could do a flat rate but say hey if something in your project demands weekend work right that is a special case scenario and will be billed above and beyond and separately at this rate, right? Because if you just flat rate things, there's a certain subset of people, and we all probably know them or have worked with them, that goes, cool, you gave me a flat number.

I am going to destroy you now with work and requests, right? And so you just need to set up some guardrails of that. And one of that things, one of the one things that I'm protective of is, no, I need that evening time. I need that weekend time. So if you really need that, Mr. Client, guess what? You're going to pay for the privilege and that's not included in what I'm estimating normal, you know, nine to five, nine to six kind of workday. I'm not talking about, you know, having to do a deliverable on a Sunday, right? And so. And that's not to say you can't move your schedule around internally to best fit you. Yeah, if it makes you feel better, if it makes you feel like you're getting a hell, you know, hey, my family is doing

something running some errands on this Saturday afternoon, I got an extra two or three hours, and you, you know, push the ball forward, doing a conform or whatever, fine. That's just your sort of own sensibility of wanting to get ahead of it. What I'm talking about is doing things on demand and off hours for clients because they're asking for it. That's where your flag should go up and go, no, this is not the normal part of my flat rate or whatever. Or if it's hourly, it's a special type of hourly. And I think you need to spell that out. So one thing I'm often surprised about Joey, and, you know, this is like over the years, this has kind of become a little bit of a meme in its own self is the idea of building like a rate card, right?

And I think if you go to like large facilities, you know, the modus operandi there is like, hey, revenue streams, right? We need to, you know, hey, you're uploading revenue stream. Downloading, revenue stream. lunch revenue stream whatever it may be right and those re cards can get really long and thick and detailed i think for the average operator in our industry they have not spent enough time looking at that menu for their own work right and this is a it's a hard thing to judge because at the one hand you don't want a nickel and dime people but there's it's likely that you're also doing things for free or are putting it under the umbrella of your of your rate that you probably could be charging

for, right? And I think that that's, it's some work that I think, us included, need to do some re-evaluation probably of on a, you know, on a yearly basis go, hey, what does our rate card look like? Not only in the actual numbers, but what we are actually charging for, right? And, you know, our rate card internally is rather simple. arguably it could get a little bit more complicated, but you know what I'm saying? Like I think there's a lot of services that just because we're nice guys and we want to, you know, get clients to, you know,

be repeat customers and like us. You know, we do the extra mile sometimes. And I think we're leaving some money on the table potentially. Yeah, I mean, but it becomes a balance because it does. Like we said before, kind of figuring out that net hourly rate is so important. It might serve you better in your market with your clients to, incorporate all of those little things that you could bill separately into just an overall

higher hourly rate. And if the client can make because the client doesn't want to see a million different things on an invoice, they just want one number. You know, that's one of those things you just got to be aware of as you. And that might change client to client too. Yeah. It's true. I mean, and the other thing too, I think that is a good task for market for this is

that like if you're doing things like, okay fine you do a spot you upload it to frame i or whatever like it kind of seems petty to be like hey i'm charging you you know five dollars for that upload or whatever right but if you're doing something where you're like oh i'm moving 50 terabytes to an s3 server for a network well that's a different that's a different set of calculus altogether right like that's a real service real time suck and more importantly it's you know occupying your bandwidth you know mentally physically, but also your internet bandwidth, like that feels like a service you probably should charge for, right? And so I think it's, you're right, it is a little bit of a case by case

basis, but my point, overall point being, I think there's a lot of things that could be on a rate card. And even just the idea of documenting them helps you out later on when you're scoping things. You can make the decision. Am I going to put that thing on this proposal? Or am I going to just, you know, add another hour of regular time? At least you have that flexibility at that point. Yeah, because if you're bidding out a flat rate, if you don't know all the little details that go into that project, you know, it's harder to do that flat rate. If you look at the last one and you say, oh, well, I had to spend two days uploading or organizing files or setting up deliveries on a client portal where you have to fill in a thousand different metadata fields by hand. You know, all of those impact your overall time. That should go into the scope of your flat bid. Yeah, and it's one of those things that every time you do those kind of things, you need to make some sort of mental note or a physical note of like, oh, this type of project has this kind of requirement usually, and I haven't been charging for this and I need to next time this happens, I need to make a case that I charge for, right? Because again, it's more about ending up resenting the things that you're not charging for and you feel like you're losing money on a table. Now, all of that to me, Joey, culminates in the idea of putting together an actual document that you put in front of a client.

I have to just say it. I am, and this is a strong language for this, but I'm disgusted by how many people get taken advantage of by not documenting and putting things on paper. I thought we or didn't we, you know, those are not places that you want to be when you're talking about scopable. work and money. And I'm the worst at it. Like, yeah, sure, we can do that. Cool. I love getting clients and work. I'm going to be a nice guy. I'm so bad at it. Sometimes you need to be the bad guy and put it all on paper. Yeah. And it's hard. It is, it is admittedly a hard thing to to be firm with this stuff when you're a solo operator because, you know, it's a weird conversation, right? You're doing something awesomely creative and artistic or whatever. And then you're turning to that same person a minute

later and go, hey, about that past invoice or about that, you know, that new project that you want to discount on, right? It's a little weird. You know, in our dynamic, you know, we both do this for each other a little bit. It's like the idea of good cop, bad cop, right? And I think that that is an important thing to have as you grow is sort of understanding like, no, when Joey's on a big project on a film, I'm happy to play bad cop because I want him to be focused solely on the artistic and creative portions of this.

I'll play bad cop. He'll do the same for me in the reverse that scenario, and that's one thing to think about. But more to the point is building a proper proposal or project order, I think is key. Because not only does it spell out things like, hey, here's the specifications of the project. This is what we're doing for you, right? It spells out things like an agreed upon schedule, obviously agreed upon costs. But it also covers things like, you know, the terms and the things that you're allowed to. Like, hey, am I allowed to use this footage for my?

Instagram or not, right? If I am, how long do I have to wait? So like, there's sort of, I think, two things that kind of I'm lumping together, but I think they're important to kind of differentiate to, sort of the project order or project proposal and then kind of like terms of services, right? And like those two things can often be in one document. Some people separate them out, but they're both things that I think that people should think about. And I'm just, I'm not ready to fully roll this out, but I will just sort of self-servingly say, I think about this all the time. And I've actually built a piece of software to allow people to do this that I'll talk about in a future episode. But it is a service that I'm about ready to roll out exactly for this, for scoping. Because I think

it's something that I see the industry not doing enough of, especially at the lower levels, and it can come back and bite you. It can bite it hard too. And it's one of those things where it's like, yes, it can be a hassle. It's extra work to do all. all these documents and figure it all out and write it all down when you sometimes you just want to you know get the job in front of you start impressing your client right uh it's worth taking the time and like i said i i was always the worst at this and it it bit me multiple times uh yeah i mean the thing that the fact of the matter is that if it's not documented it didn't happen right it's a he said she said thing it's a it's just a word of mouth like it can get written like

the way that I think about proposals, terms of service, that kind of stuff is not for when things are going swimmingly with you and the client. It's when, and it happens, it's just a fact of life, when things are not going well and you need something to point back to and go, wait a second, you agreed to this, whether that agreement be schedule, cost, deliverables, whatever it be, that you have something to point back to and go, no, no, no, no, no, you agreed to this. This is the truth of what our working relationship and this is what happened. And I think that, you know, the other part about that, you mentioned like the time part of about doing it.

But there's also this perceptual part of things, right? Think about it if you were hiring a contractor to come to your house, right? One of the things that you would probably be put off by if a guy's like, yeah, man, I work on air conditioners. Okay. Like, that's, I'm just going to take your word for it. No, you want to see like, hey, here's a, breakdown of parts and services. This is our rates. This is our refund policy. This is our warranty,

right? You're probably not going to hire that home contractor with just some dude, you know, who's just like, yeah, I can do it. Right. You want, so there's a perceptual part about this. When you do this work, you're taking a little bit more seriously about valuing your time, your business, your contractor contractual obligations, right? Now, one of the things that does happen from time to time is that you'll get client feedback on proposals and project. Let's put it that way, right? People go, are you crazy? You're going to charge this much?

What happens at that point? Like, is a proposal the final word, you know, I don't think so. But like, how do we, how do we go about handling that when a client goes, hey, this costs too much or this schedule is not fast enough for me? Like, to me, a proposal is a living, breathing document. It's like it's like a rough cut, right? Here's my initial proposal. Let's talk about it, right?

It doesn't have to be a take it or leave it kind of thing. Yeah. Now, the dangerous part of that is, you know, you might come in and say, well, if everybody's going to ask for a discount, I'm just going to bid everything higher, right? I don't think that's the answer. I think you should do an honest first bid and then see what the client says. And then if the client's like, hey, we don't have the budget for this, that's when, you you start looking for, like we said earlier, those fungible things.

A little bit of give and take. Hey, we can do a discount if maybe you let us use this for our social media promotion for the facility. That's one way to get a little bit more out of a lower bid. If you let us have an extra week of time to juggle this with some other projects. That's another way you can fungibalize it a little bit. But one other thing to think about is workflow, right? So if a client is coming to you and saying, okay, we need to do 10 short form things, right, short form pieces.

We want you to do a full conform round trip workflow, send it back with handles to our editor so he can then go make all of our social versions without it being complicated. Well, they might come back and say, well, your bid is too high. You could say, well, hey, if we get rid of that round trip part of this process, that's going to bring my hours down. Yes, it might make your back end work on making the social versions have a little bit more time for your editor, but that's a lot less expensive on your end than it is having an outside contractor do that stuff. So if you look at the overall workflow and say, hey, this client needs a lower rate because they just don't have the budget. You know, you'll never get the job if the client doesn't have the budget, right? If the client can't pay what you're asking, you get no job. So if you can use some of these other fungible things, one that I just don't think it's thought about enough is workflow.

If you can adjust the workflow to a way that is more favorable to you where maybe the client is taking on some of the prep work or the ending work if they wanted it. Like I said, if they wanted a round trip, get rid of the round trip. Or if they have an editor that's capable of prepping a resolve conform, maybe they do the conform and send it to you done. Saves you some hours. You can lower that cost for them. that's the conversation to have. The conversation to have should never be, I just want to charge less,

and the conversation should never be, I'm just going to do a worse job. Yeah, and I think that, I mean, speaking for us, I think that's one of the reasons that we have put so much effort and energy over the years into things like prep documents, handoff documents, all of that kind of stuff, right? Because if we just say, it doesn't matter, just push a pile of media across the table, we'll figure it out, that's obviously going to lead to

significantly higher costs because we're doing considerably more effort to figure out a conform or whatever, that example, right? Versus, hey, we're spending a little time of internal time up front to do high quality preparation documents, conversations with editors, et cetera, so you can do 90% of this work, and they might go, well, that's time we don't have. Okay, but you're saving a significant amount off of our proposal and our bid by doing this kind of work internally. And it's never like one or the other. Oftentimes it's sort of a mix of the two. Right. But like that's an important thing. And I think that more so the point here is that like a client gives you feedback. You need to really understand what is the pain point of that feedback. Okay. Like if it's schedule,

I'm going to propose an alternative schedule or I'm going to do here's how I think we can speed things up. Being a problem solver of that kind of stuff is huge. If it's about number, right, and about the price, I think the first thing that people look at is going to discounting. And I think that's the wrong avenue, right? I think that if your immediate thing is just go, cool, to win the job, we'll do 15% off. Guess what? The next time that client comes back to you, sort of the expectation is, well, you get me 15% off last time. And I kind of remember your rate being low.

Yeah, these all costs this much now, right? Why is it higher now? Well, because last time to win the job, we gave you a discount. So, like, you need to think about other ways of potentially discounting. One thing is, I want to say one thing about discounting. And this is, I see it done, in my opinion, wrong all the time. That when you present a number with a discount, it just becomes the number, right? I think any time that you're going to discount, it needs to be insanely clear that.

this is normal, this is the discount, this is the resulting rate, right? Because if you just go, let's just say your number, your hourly is 400 and you're going to discount it to 300. If you just put 300 on the proposal, that becomes the new normal and you have no way to get back to that 400. So if you do discount, I think it's important that you always show what the actual rate is, not what the resulting rate is, right? Because that can get you in trouble. Yeah, especially if you get into some of these adjustable like we talked about, like, okay, we're going to give you a 15% discount because you moved the schedule and gave us an extra two weeks. Put that on the bid, right? Here's the whole total cost with the full rate. Here's a 15% discount. Here's your your cost. Because the next time, they might not be able to move the schedule, and they're going to have to pay the full rate.

Right. But there's also like really, I don't know, there's like, there's other things around the edges about this. discounting and and that kind of thing is I don't think a lot of people consider I'll just give you one example so not sort of outside of the premise of this episode but the idea of like billables like you know on delivery net 30 whatever you know giving people terms so it's obviously a big issue with terms people like I am waiting for my money right like you can't go in a you know a restaurant and get dinner and be like you know what I'll get you back at 30 baby after but that's the expectation in our industry, right?

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If you pay immediately via ACH or by a credit card or whatever method that's best for you, you pay within a week, I'll give you a 5% discount for paying that week. right and actually a lot of times like big entities like big and you know corporate and things if you offer a discount for early payment they're required internally like that's how they're set up be like no they offer discount we'll have to pay that we like we do work for a major network all the time that does like for the for getting us paid i think they paid within like 72 hours we give them a discount right for the idea of getting our money in hand like so that has value right like and there are that you're not denigrating the work and lowering your actual value of the number,

but going, hey, you pay faster? Sure, that's a win-win. I get my money in hand faster, and you're saving a couple bucks good for everybody, right? So things like that, I think you should consider as well. Now, last thing I think before we wrap this up is just the idea of consistency in pricing. And this goes back to, I think, where we started with like market rate and understanding experience overhead, if you are constantly going back and ping ponging on rate with people, hey, sometimes it's $200 an hour, sometimes it's $400 an hour, sometimes it's whatever, right? That kind of thing gets around, right? And you'd be surprised how often clients, like, happen.

Like a client calls a friend of theirs going, hey, I'm looking for a recommendation on a color facility. The client goes, oh, yeah, yeah, you should talk to these guys over, you know, at this company. and you come back and you go, yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

$500 an hour. And they go, a second, but I talked to Joe Schmoe, and they said it was $300 an hour. Why is it now? Like, you get my point. So consistency,

I think, is the, is the underlying thing here. And it can not just consistency of the number, but application of that number. Discount, like if you're giving one person a 25% discount, and you're giving another person 10% discount for the same type of thing, that word can get around.

So whatever you play it, just, be consistent in your application of all the terms because I think that's... And monitor how this goes with your clients too. Like we talked about, if you send a bid to a client and they're like, whoa, that's way too high and you end up discounting it down, if that's happening every time you send a bid to any client, you need to think about that and maybe you're asking too much for your market. You know, keep track of all these variables and try to make it so there is less back and forth. The analytics of pricing and proposals is

it's not necessarily the ones that you win. It's the ones that you don't win need the most scrutiny of why you didn't win, right? So if you find that, oh, man, this month, every proposal I did got dismissed and they went with somebody else, you need to figure out what are some of the underlying reasons of that. Sometimes they can be issues out of your control, right? A client had to just, you know, sort of for whatever, for optics reasons, had to go get bids from everybody, but they were always going to go with this one person. It happens, right? But if you're consistently losing gigs, you need to figure out, is that a price thing?

Is it a presentation thing? Is it a communication thing? Like, what is it? And I think one of the things that I focused on in the past year is I just don't want to make this hard for customers, right? If a customer has to download a PDF, then print it, and then send it. And then, sign it and then scan it and then send it back to you, you're never going to get a signed contract at all. People are going to like, uh, can we just, yeah, say we did this job? You know, like, there's a lot of parts of the process that you have to consider it from your client's point of view of making things easy. And that also comes down and I, and I, again, just to, to, to tease my product I'm working on is that choice is an important thing here too, right? I think that, you know,

listening to a client's feedback and going, you know what, we're going to offer this three sets of pricing box here, right? Here is the best, better, good. We're happy to do either one, but we don't want to dictate it has to be this way. We've given you some ways of handling this. You get to decide.

And that, I think that the idea of choice makes clients a lot more comfortable than being spoken to of like, this is the only way of doing it kind of thing. Yeah. And I think you'd be surprised, like we talked about, you know, making workflow adjustments. If you offer a client, hey, we will do a full conform online edit, all of your blurs, all of your paintwork, everything for this price. Or we'll just do the color for this price.

They don't always pick the cheaper one. A lot of times, they might be like, well, hey, one stop. We get everything done. Yes, it's a couple more bucks, but it's worth it for the integrated workflow. and this is going to be a better experience, you'd be surprised how many times they're like, yeah, let me do everything. 100%, because they allows them to then weigh that thing of like,

okay, well, if I get my assistant editor to do these blurs, they do it in about half the speed of Robbie and Joey. So yeah, I'm saving some money, but then the schedule is going to lengthen considerably. You know what? It's just better to spend that money with those guys because they can do it faster, accurate, with less rounds of revision.

Yeah, I'll spend that money. But they would only know that. If you had insisted on the big bid and doing all those blurs, doing all the conform, doing everything, and the client's like, well,

we just don't have the money for this. Yeah. We don't have any other option. This is this or nothing. Well, you just lost the job. And oftentimes the things that you could cut out are things he probably don't really like doing anyway, right?

Like nobody, nobody is like, I love doing. blurs, right? Maybe there's a couple people out there, but you see what I'm saying. So those things are easy to cut, for sure. Okay, let's wrap this one up. I think it's a good, I think it's a good chat.

And I think I'm curious from our, from our audience about how they go about putting together these rates and billables and proposals and stuff. Because as you said at the top, there's not one size that fits all here. I think the overarching things are consistency, documentation, and discussion. right? I think that like the more that you do this in your business consistently, I think the more that you'll find value in it, it seems like the stupid, like you're not a colorist or an editor or a mixer to, you didn't get into that line of work to do proposals. I get it, right? But this is a necessary evil of operating a bona fide, legitimate operation is this is how you make money. You might be the best. best colorists in the world. But if you're not doing this part of things well, it doesn't really matter.

You're not going to get the clients. You're not going to get the jobs. And, you know, it's kind of like we've talked about time and time again with workflow, with all these other aspects of the production process. The last thing a colorist or a client or anybody involved likes to have is a surprise.

And doing all of this work eliminates those surprises. And that's important for everyone. Yes. Yep. And I think the more that you focus on this kind of stuff, again, we said perceptually earlier, it cannot be underestimated, I think, about how when you act like a professional,

people take you as a professional, right? It's just like, think about your favorite, you know, sports star or whatever. I know you're not a big sports guy, but like all the time, you see these guys who are getting paid millions of dollars, acting like children, right? Like, the guys that act like pros and show up every day and do the work,

they're the ones that are respected. The guys acting like children are the ones that people are like, yeah, it's good, but like I don't really want to work with that person because they're not taking the process and the work seriously. And I think that this part of things, while it's a tedious, you know, often, you know, anxiety-inducing part of running the business, it is a vital part. So very good stuff. All right, man, I love this conversation.

Just as a reminder, you can always head over to the offset podcast.com and see our entire library of episodes. This is episode 63. So we're getting up there in our numbers. You can also head over to YouTube. That's where all the video versions of our episode show, as the audio versions are on platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcast. You can check those out there as well.

You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook. Just search for the Offset Podcast. You'll notice our little logo when you find us. And if you like to, we'd love it. if you could consider supporting the show by heading over to this link right here on screen to buy us a couple virtual coffee. Every dollar pledge goes to directly supporting the show.

And then as a last reminder, a couple weeks ago, we started a new Discord community centered around the show. It's open and free to anybody to join. That's right here on this link here on the screen. I would love to have you over on the server. Joey and I are both participating as much as I can answering questions and having some great discussions to people.

So if you are on Discord or want to be sort of interactive with the show. That's the place to do it. So good stuff, Joey. Always enjoyed this conversation about some of these business stuff. And yeah, we'll be back for episode 64 in just about two weeks. Until then, for the old offset podcast. I'm Robbie Carman. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.