In the past 18 months, I’ve worked directly with over 50 agency owners, and my Selling Creative Services course has helped many more. And in this sample of agency owners, there hasn’t been one so far who is overcharging for their work. Not one.
On the contrary, one of the first challenges I set for them is to raise their prices.
With one client, this has helped us move from £26k monthly revenue to consistently over £50k over the past 6 months. Another went from £32k to £42k per month. Same amount of work, but paid the value they’re worth.
If you’re ready to stop underpricing and start turning your agency into a profit-driven business, this is for you. I’m going to share my own journey, the mistakes I made, and exactly how I went from settling for low fees to earning incredible profits.
But getting paid more for your work isn’t just about raising your prices – it’s about understanding your value. Your design skills should translate into proper income, and today I’ll share the exact strategies that helped me scale monthly revenues to £220k.
By the end of this article, you’ll know how to charge higher fees with confidence and attract more of the right type of clients.
The Pricing Strategy Shift That Will Change Your Agency
Let’s start with a critical understanding of pricing strategies. When you’re starting out, maybe you divided your salary by the number of hours you wanted to work and got your hourly rate.
Or you asked someone else what they charge and thought “yep, that sounds about right.”
Essentially, you picked a figure out of the air.
I get it – you’re eager to win clients, and being the value option makes this easier.
I remember when I first started; low prices felt like my golden ticket. It had the desired effect and we had tons of clients, but our team was stretched so thin that the work suffered.
Many of you fall into the trap of hourly pricing. A flyer takes 2 hours to design, so we charge for 2 hours. But then there’s scope creep, revisions, and that 2-hour project becomes 4 hours or more. And we still only charge for 2 hours.
Introducing Value-Based Pricing
Fast forward a few years, and I discovered value-based pricing. Imagine sitting down with a client and instead of negotiating on how cheap you can do a project, you talk about the real results your design will bring them.
When I made this shift, I started thinking about the clients’ business instead of my own.
What does this creative piece really represent for their business? To us, it’s a brand, a colour palette, or a tone of voice. To them, it represents new business, increased profits, staff retention, and thousands of other business opportunities.
Many agency owners are still trapped in the low-cost mindset. I say this with confidence because I see many of you holding onto historic pricing models for existing clients, hoping you won’t upset them by raising prices, or being unsure how to identify the true value of a project to your clients.
There’s no perfect formula for pricing, but when you ask me how much you should charge for X, Y, or Z, the answer will always be: more.
With value-based pricing, you learn to understand the impact your design will have and price accordingly. Never taking the piss, but pricing appropriately.
If you’re designing a flyer, this takes a few hours to do right. The easy way to price this is hourly rate multiplied by time taken: £100 per hour × 2 hours = £200.
But what if, due to your experience, you can complete the project in 30 minutes? You’re penalised for your experience and the efficiencies you’ve gained. The value of this project is unchanged, so price accordingly.
This is a basic example at the lower end, but think about higher-value projects like brand or web development.
When we first started designing logos, we charged £150 – 3 hours × £50 an hour. When I left my agency, my final projects were each five figures, with some brand projects topping the £20,000 mark.
The brand projects were far removed from the £150 logo days. Our experience was infinitely greater, the service was different, and so was our creative output.
This didn’t happen overnight, but here’s exactly how we did it.
Understanding Value Creation
If you’re working with a corner shop, the brand you create likely has an upper limit on the value it can bring. But if you’re working for an international manufacturer, this is potentially much higher.
This determines two things: who we should be working with, and how we need to understand their business and how our work will support their commercial success.
In client meetings, I determine this value by asking business questions:
- What’s your revenue?
- What are your plans for the next 12 months?
- How will the brand help achieve this?
The focus is understanding the current position of the business and the growth plan the client is working towards. Your purpose is to understand this and relate it back to the work you’re completing.
If this manufacturer is turning over £30 million and the brand represents growth in international markets that could add £5 million to revenue, then this is a strategic decision. The brand is critical to success, and a £10k or £20k investment to ensure this is implemented correctly is not out of the question.
Finding and Understanding Your Ideal Clients
The first thing we need to do is understand where the money is. To achieve maximum value for your work, you need clients who can see its value and are willing to pay for it.
This reminds me of a tough lesson from one of my early projects. I worked with a restaurateur whose only brief was “cheap.” We needed the business and matched their limited budget.
After 4 rounds of revisions, additional unquoted designs, and massive scope creep, we clocked up over 60 extra hours designing something they barely appreciated in the end.
Today, I would run a mile from this type of work at any value, because they’re not my ideal client.
In my agency, our ideal clients wanted experience and acute knowledge of the commercial challenges and opportunities they faced. When we began to understand this and look for more of these clients, we got clients who valued our creative input and were willing to pay premium prices for the experience.
Answer this: Do you know who your ideal client is? Most agency owners haven’t defined this in years.
I cover this – setting targets, prospecting, your sales pitch, communication, and getting paid – in my Selling Creative Services course. It’s available at courses.moveatpace.com.
Define your ideal clients, because once we know who they are, we’re going to give ourselves the best opportunity to work with more of them.
Communicating Your Value
The biggest shift you need to make? How you communicate value.
I fully believe in the value I bring to my clients. The first step to communicating value is understanding what your client actually values. Then you use this to demonstrate your past experience in meeting those goals….basically show the results from your work.
Where most creative founders fail is they talk exclusively about the design and creative process. They don’t ask about the business, the numbers, or the opportunities. When you pitch like this, you become exactly the same as everyone else.
When you do this, you can price based on value with confidence. Instead of constant back-and-forth about “how much is this?” I started framing conversations around what my services could achieve for their business.
When speaking to sporting organisations (our ideal client), I demonstrated acute awareness of the opportunities they focused on: revenue, footfall, attendance numbers. And I had cold hard data to back up our work. While there were no guarantees this would work for them, this understanding of their business was critical in our pitch.
When it comes to website design and development, one manufacturing client became a client instantly when I presented a case study showing how a simple design system boosted a comparable site’s lead generation by 50%. This wasn’t about colour palettes anymore – it was about their bottom line.
Building World-Class Proposals
Now we know who to target and how to communicate our value to them. We need to think about presenting this to clients for the greatest opportunity of closing the sale.
One of the best moves I made in business was building proposal templates that clearly outlined outcomes, timelines, and deliverables. No more confusion. Clients knew exactly what they were paying for.
Today, working with clients on their proposals, we track where clients spend their time looking at the information provided. I’ll save you the research! They first go to your pricing page, then filter through the rest of the document.
Don’t underestimate the power of testimonials and case studies. When clients share their success stories tied to your work, it’s social proof on steroids.
How structured is your pricing proposal right now? Pause the video and honestly rate your approach from 1 to 10. How confident would you be that a customer could make an informed decision on your service versus your competition?
Now is the perfect time to refine your proposal and make it better.
Growing a High-Performance Team to Support Higher Fees
There’s a crucial factor some overlook: building a high-performance team.
You can’t scale pricing and quality alone. When we started focusing on the maturation of our studio, I brought in team members who not only had top-level creative skills but shared our commitment to excellence and had experience in some of the best agencies I aspired to be.
An enthusiastic, capable team is the secret sauce that helps you deliver consistently outstanding results.
Your efforts alone will only take you so far. You need those around you to be the leverage that will grow your business, your service levels, and keep your clients happy.
When hiring, never just focus on skills – cultural fit is just as important. I’ve witnessed agencies crumble because team dynamics were off.
One thing we focused on over the years was investment in ongoing training. My businesses name was Kaizen – Japanese for continuous improvement. We focused on small incremental changes for the better and worked daily to keep our team’s knowledge at the highest level.
This helped when it came to putting up our prices, because we had the utmost confidence in our service.
Why Embracing These Strategies Will Transform Your Agency
When you put all these strategies in place, you will see results. Your confidence will grow, your service will evolve, you’ll get more of the right clients who value your expertise, and you’ll generate higher revenue for doing so.
Imagine elevating your agency’s status to the point where you turn down projects that don’t fit your ideal client persona or your new pricing model. That’s an incredible position to be in and that’s where we got to. It won’t happen overnight, but it can be achieved.
Your Action Plan
So here’s your action plan for the next 30 days:
- Review your current pricing and ask, “Am I underpricing for the clients I want?”
- Understand the commercial value you bring to your clients and be able to confidently discuss this
- Start crafting a value-based pricing strategy and build proposal templates that reflect it
- Schedule a team meeting to share these ideas and brainstorm elevating your services together
- Focus on elevating your service to where the fees provide significant client value
- Set a bold goal to increase your fees by a specific percentage next quarter
Remember, valuing your work isn’t arrogance, it’s not shady, and it doesn’t harm your creative integrity. It’s a necessity.
If you follow these tips, you’ll see your revenue grow and more of the right type of clients wanting to work with you.
If this article gave you real insight, hit that like button right now. Don’t forget to subscribe for more strategies on scaling your agency and making your design skills pay off. And drop a comment below telling me which step you’re going to tackle first.
Until next time, keep moving at pace and take care!