Undead_Hunter - 4:29 pm on Feb 13, 2003 (gmt 0)

Say, Lisa:

Re-reading your post again this morning, and I have to think problem here is... what are you doing selling *custom* flash sites for $1k in the first place? Even in a "down market"?

I mean, AIGA/Aquent lists the *lowest* average for a senior designer (you two have 14 years experience between you, right? 7 each or so, definitely senior) as $42,000 a year.

With two of you working, that's $84,000 a year - add on a very, very bare minimum of 50% to that to cover expenses, health insurance, and god forbid some small amount of profit - and your company needs to be a minimum of $126,000 a year for you to equal what the two of you could be making elsewhere in the marketplace - let alone growing your business. Again, these are just minimum numbers.

That's about $11,500 a month for 11 months, giving you 4 weeks vacation time. At your above rates, you need to be knocking off 11 - 12 clients per month.

Now remember - with a 2 partner firm, the best you can do in terms of billable hours is have the business development partner with 3 of 8 hours (the other 5 should be for finding work), and the other partner could work as much as 5 of 8 - so a total of about 40 hours billable per week out of a potential 80, *on average* is pretty good.

So that's 160 billable hours per month. With 11 clients per month, you need to be able to do build, test, show off, fix up, and launch EACH SITE in 14 hours or less...including meeting time, driving time, etc. etc.

Are you doing that?
Can you do that?

IF you *didn't* sell custom sites, you'd have half a chance of doing it. Now you see why people work from templates. And why its still difficult for them to earn a decent living.

The whole point of this is to make you realize that if you charged much higher rates, or *never* took those small jobs - having a $4,000 per job minimum, let's say - then you'd only need to 2 or 3 per month. Leaving around 50 hours for each job, which is much more reasonable.

AND here's the kicker: with $4,000 per job, you could come in with a mock-up, and afford to do a redesign.

In any case, what I'd recommend is to do a Photoshop mock-up first, no Flash animation. It still shows your creativity, but is much easier to change and less expensive.

If you're still concerned about whether your designs are "worth it" on the market - please sticky me with some samples, and in turn I'll send you to a few places where I know what the costs of developing were... and I think you'll quickly start looking for bigger clients.