FWIW, I charge $300 / hr as a mobile/full stack developer (and I'm based in TX). My clients are mostly startups. I have more work than I know what to do with, and have for quite a while.
Most of my inbound comes through referrals. I've been at this for about 8 years, so my referral network is pretty healthy. First few years were rough though!
In general, the real "trick" to a successful network (as least for me) is just to be friendly and do good work. Lots of coffee meetings, phone calls, and lunches. :)
Not at all. I've been at this for a while, so most of my work comes from previous clients or others in my network. It took a while to build that up, but now that it's in place, it's a pretty steady source of work.
Most people who are referred to me know what I charge, so there's not much haggling. People want results and I have a reputation for delivering them.
Agreed. $400/hr outside of SF Bay, 10 years ago, for CMS and e-commerce websites?? I've hired lots of devs and other agencies in the bay and that does not match my experience at all. For very niche stuff maybe. For freaking WordPress and Shopify, anything more than $175/hr and you are being robbed. For generic custom dev work (iOS, react, backed) $250/hr is near the top for very reputable studios.
People are charging $175/hr for WordPress? This makes me wonder what the hell have I been doing with myself for the past 8 years. My agency charges $50/hr for WordPress devs who know what they're doing. (My email is in my profile!)
As an Art Director we used three large agencies to cover needs, ranging $140-175/hr. Given this was a finance company, they didn't know creative as much. The issue I discovered was these agencies were inflating service hours. One example was the need to modify a four page powerpoint. Invoice came back as $6,800. So the issue wasn't rate, but durations..
Having worked with agencies through a client, I have seen their billing process. They might not have inflated hours.
Assuming you have a creative, a project manager, delivery manager, and a sales manager in the agency, each task/project has to go through each of their hands.
That's an hour each for the managers and how ever many hours for the actual work itself as the base delivery price. Then the internal back and forth between the delivery manager and the creative to insure that everything is "to spec". Then the project manager to report on status each day and the sales manager to take you to lunch and discuss the how amazing everything is with the project, and that the BEST people are working on it.
So 3-4 hours of work can turn into 20 hours of billing (plus expenses).
Thanks for this. It's true. Our main agency had a process of the Account Exec telling the Art Director who delegated to his team of designers. That is at least three people at varied costs.
Trying to nail this down can be a hair-pulling experience. I know estimations are a ridiculously hard thing to do, but that's kinda the reason I'm engaging them as an expert.
I also know they want all the work you can throw at them, but just getting a sense of whether this is a 1 hour or 5 hour gig so I can evaluate the ROI before briefing it in is impossible.
This is one of the things I want to address (my side-gig doing marketing consultancy) - one rate, whether that's strategy or design work, up to the client how to use it (and telling them to use someone else if not good value).
