What do your clients want? Why are they willing to part their hard earned money on freelancers like you? How can you truly understand what your clients need, and the value of your clients’ projects?
Here’s something to ask yourself…“Why do some freelancers charge thousands a week, and others $30 an hour?”
The most successful freelancers out there have 3 qualities in common:
You’re probably thinking it’s because they’re well known. They’ve worked with the biggest brands, speak at all the right conferences, and have an incredible portfolio.
You’d think that someone who charges 10x what you do is 10x better than you — right?
Not so fast.
What’s different is that they know how to sell.
I don’t mean that they’re flashy, alpha-types who know how to wine and dine their clients into submission.
Instead, I mean that they’re acutely aware of what their clients want, what (and why) their clients value their projects, and they know how to put together a pitch that their clients can’t resist.
Their clients actually want them to charge them more. And it’s because they give their clients a better product and better results.
“HA! I told you. They’re 10x better than me, that’s why they can do that!”
That’s probably what you’re thinking now, right? I used to think that too.
What took me 3 years and $1,000,000+ in lost revenue to figure out:
Most freelancers don’t have any formal sales training.
If you’re like me, you studied how to be amazing at a craft — you learned how to be a great designer, coder, writer, marketer, or photographer.
But when you decided to go out on your own and work with clients, it hit you like a ton of bricks that success requires more than just mastering a craft.
I’m Brennan Dunn, and I’m a freelancer turned agency owner. I’ve been on my own for a little over a decade.
A few years into my solo freelancing business I decided to grow a team. I knew that if I wanted to do this, I had to take control over how I sold. There was no other alternative. If I was going to add tens of thousands of dollars a month to my payroll I had to bring in more money and bring it in more reliably.
I had to learn how to sell myself and my team.
But as a nerdy introvert, this wasn’t really my thing. I wanted people to work with me because I was good, not because I knew how to schmooze.
And that’s when I started to focus on value.
Because if I could prove to somebody that I was an investment in their business, I’d have no problem selling — and no qualms in charging more.
I started trying to see how I could learn why my clients wanted to spend money. Why did they spend tons of cash on code and design that they could be spending elsewhere? What made them tick?
Starting down this path required me to learn as much as I could about business, sales, and the psychology around why people buy as possible. I joined a number of business courses, hired a business coach, and started talking to anyone who I felt could help me really learn this stuff.
I ended up screwing up a lot of things along the way.
Running the numbers, I calculated that undercharging and having a haphazard sales process resulted in my agency losing out on well over $1 million in revenue.
But once I had everything in order — how to qualify leads, how to systematically learn about the pain behind their project, how to quantify the value of projects, and how to write proposals — everything changed for me and my business:
My team grew to 11 employees.
Annual revenue topped over $2 million a year.
Rome wasn’t built in a day…
Getting to the point where my agency was flourishing and we had consistent deal flow, a solid system for selling, and were able to charge a premium took months of trial & error.
And after I exited my agency to start blogging at Double Your Freelancing, readers kept asking me to go into even more detail about how to sell and price the right way.
This led to a short ebook, Double Your Freelancing Rate, in 2012.
And now, more than half a decade later, that ebook has evolved into a full blown online course that’s been bought by over 8,000 freelancers and small agencies.
Thousands of small companies (and the lives of their owners) have been transformed by this course. And I’d love to see you become our next student and our next success story.
Here’s everything you need to know about Double Your Freelancing Rate…
January was my best month bringing in about $6,900. Doing proposals made a huge difference (which I got the verbiage for through the Double Your Freelancing Rate course). I learned how to explain value, rather than just sharing cost.
Inside this course you’ll find all the know-how, scripts, documents, templates, case studies, and more you need to radically reframe the way you sell yourself to clients.
What do your clients want? Why are they willing to part their hard earned money on freelancers like you? How can you truly understand what your clients need, and the value of your clients’ projects?
Why do most freelancers charge so little, and few charge a lot? In this module, we’ll dive into pricing theory and the science behind money as it relates to consulting.
This module covers everything you need to know about pitching a client. We’ll look into how you should write your proposals, how to package your services, and what to do when clients push back.
What’s next now that you’re charging premium prices? We’ll look into how you can start productizing your consulting, raising your rates on your existing clients, and building your brand.
Case studies with students who have successfully implemented the DYFRate framework.
Here you’ll find scripts, swipe material, and all the contracts and templates you need to apply the DYFRate framework to your business.
As a direct result of Brennan challenging my thinking about value creation, we’re now able to charge a much higher rate, but we also deliver 10x the results than we have in the past.
I'm Brennan Dunn, and for the last decade I've been working with clients. I started out as a freelancer, and after 3 years my business grew to an agency of 11 employees and a $2 million in annual revenue.
I love freelance consulting, but I'm hell-bent on helping other freelancers learn how to master the BUSINESS of freelancing. A lot of us (myself included) started freelancing because we're technically solid... but end up learning the hard way being successful is much more than just being good at what we do.
In addition to this course, I also write and podcast weekly for my audience of over 50k+ freelancers. I also host two worldwide conferences for freelancers.
When I ran into Brennan’s material, I doubted my competency and expertise in my industry. Looking back at it now, it was the main reason I talked myself out of increasing my rates or taking risks that needed to be taken.
I’m not sure what your goals are with your freelancing business.
Maybe you want to spend more time with your friends and family? (Just think: If you 2x’ed your prices you could work half the time with no income change.)
Or maybe you just want to make money without having to work more? (There’s nothing wrong with that.) Travel the world, upgrade your house, pay off your debt, start (or grow) a family, or do whatever having more money and more predictability could do for you.
Honestly, I don’t care what you want to do after you’ve raised your rates. I just want to help you increase your freelancing income.
Right now you have two paths you could go down:
What would being able to raise your prices by just 10% on your next client project mean for you?
And what if you were 2x more likely to close your next project lead?
The choice is yours.