We went in depth on the techniques we use to estimate and price projects. We also touched base on the sales funnel, communication boundaries, and a few other important topics.
The lack of context makes it hard to summarize what we learned and provide meaninful notes. I think I can at least share some links that I collected from the chat and that were covered in the hangout.
Book (2) gets into some technical stuff but also has a good intro to calibrating your estimation technique and how to think about an estimates confidence interval
These are probably not as useful without proper context but I think they still provide a little nugget of wisdom.
“If you can’t accurately estimate how long something will take, you can’t accurately predict how much to charge for it”
“If your budget is less than 5k and you’re not used to using the term “Ongoing costs”, consider Wix”
“One of the biggest things for estimating, is if you have a large project, try to chop it up in to smaller chunks and estimate them individually. Figure out the hourly after that, then add padding.”
“Pricing an odd amount like £10,125 is 10% more likely to get accepted than £10,000”
“A large part of being able to ‘seduce’ clients is confidence. Not only having good estimates, but you need to be confident in your quote and be able to explain why it’s worth that”
“We’ve found a lot more success in selling a process and deliverables than pure hourly rates”
“We break estimates in to two numbers – the first is a wild guess, the second is something we’re willing to commit to, which is usually a discovery phase and gives more knowledge about how to estimate the first number”
“Almost every project above 5k requires a more in depth discovery phase”
“Always be open to changing the scope, but make sure you have laid down the pricing to go with those changes”
“You can’t price based on the client, you need to price based on how much you’re happy doing the work for”
“To get better at estimating, you need to be tracking everything you do”
If you have related links or resources that you’d like to share or ideas for the next hangout, drop me on note on Slack or Twitter