No way in hell I’m going back now

As people have been submitting their survey results, I’ve been poking around to see how the new questions are being answered and how the trends from last year are changing.

One of the new things I asked this year was how much agency owners are paying themselves (this replaced the “profit margin” question last year).

Personally, I’m not that interesting in knowing exactly what everyone pays themselves, but I am interested in seeing what other metrics in our survey correlate with high or low salaries.

The first one I noticed, and what I wanted to talk about today is paid discovery.

From the preliminary data, it’s clear there’s a divide: 19% of respondents always charge for discovery, in contrast to 81% who never do.

Interestingly, among those not charging for discovery, 43% earn less than $20,000 annually. Meanwhile, only 16% of those who always charge fall into this lower income bracket.

That means you’re nearly 3 times as likely to earn less than $20,000 a year if you’re not charging for discovery than if you are.

Of course, discovery alone isn’t 100% responsible for these numbers, but there’s a big enough gap here that I think it would be a mistake to ignore it. Especially considering how easy it is to start charging for discovery if you’re not doing it now.

I was a late adopter of the paid discovery process myself… Mostly because I didn’t have a formalized process that felt worthy of charging for. Not only did this mean I was leaving money on the table, but my projects were a lot less organized than they could have been.

Since moving to a paid discovery model, my average invoice has increased, my clients have become more invested & willing to listen to my advice, and I’ve spent less time going back-and-froth because we have a clear picture on how we’re moving forward.

Like you, I was nervous to make this switch — worried that clients would push back and I would lose what business I had… But in reality it’s helped me more quickly identify which prospects are serious about doing things right, and which ones are just looking for something quick and pretty.

There’s no way in hell I would go back now.

I’ve found most of my clients “get it” when I put it like this:

Without proper planning, most projects go through multiple rounds of scope changes — which increases costs. We end up redoing work (sometimes multiple times) due to misunderstandings — which extends the timeline. And we end up with a less cohesive result — which is less likely to help you achieve your goals.

You probably have more questions, so feel free to hit reply or toss them in the group — and here are a few of my favorite resources on the topic:

• The Agency Guide to Executing Discovery by Clifford Almeida
• Charging for Discovery S.O.P. by Hans Skillrud
• How to Explain Paid Sales Discovery to Your Web Design Clients by UGurus