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TRAVIS JOHNS: Hi. I'm Travis Johns for Expert Village, and I'm going to talk to you about
pricing work time in your home video post-production studio. As I said before, time is money, which
is true of any business anywhere. When you're a freelancer or a subcontractor, obviously
because you're not clocking in and clocking out of an office, there's really no way of
gauging how much time you're working on a project if you weren't writing it down or
keeping detailed records. A lot of times, a client will ask you at the outset, "How
much is this going to cost me for, say, a three-minute video?" Well, you need to take
a very long look at past projects, things you've done for other clients, so you can
give them a reasonable expectation as to how long it's going to take. It's very important
not to undersell the amount of time it's going to take on a project because then you might
end up cutting your rate in half. When you price a project out, you want to make sure
that if you say you're going to have to spend one hour on this piece of graphic or this
piece of video that you're not spending two hours on it because that means you're getting
half the money. This kind of a trap is very easy to fall into, especially for beginners,
and you can learn a lot of expensive lessons along the way. My advice would be to make
sure that once you've agreed to a price on a project, you do the work that is expected
of you, you deliver what you can, but you don't overextend yourself when it comes to
time, when it comes to effort and energy because if that same client asks you to do another
project, they're going to expect the same amount of work at the same price; and if you
put in double the time that you originally promised, you're going to have to do double
the time again for the same price. So just make sure that you're safeguarding yourself
against excess deadlines, excess client expectation so that in the end, it's a mutually equitable
partnership for everyone involved.