How to Quote Projects for Work You’ve Never Done
Posted December 13, 2010 in Getting Started, How-To
Even when we list out our services on our portfolios, you’ll always get quote requests for something you’ve never done before. You can always refuse to do the project or hand these requests off to another freelancer. But, what if you’re actually interested in doing the work?
I was recently contacted about doing some work in Expression Engine. Although I’ve never worked with Expression Engine before, I like to check out other CMS’s to see how they compare to WordPress, so I thought the project could be a fun one. The problem was that I’d never even looked at EE’s code, so how was I supposed to know how long it would take?
There are several ways of dealing with a project you’ve never worked on before. Let’s take a look at how we could approach unknown projects.
First, Decide If You Really Want to Mess With It
Learning new stuff can be fun, but it’s also really time consuming. You need to stop before you do anything and decide if you really want to do it. Is it going to be something you learn just for fun, or is it going to be something you can use all the time and add it to your current list of clients? How big do you think the learning curve is going to be? If it’s a new development language, it’s possible it could take months or even years before you really understand it enough to use for clients. Is your client willing to wait that long?
If you don’t want to do it, that’s ok too. Inform the client it’s not a service you offer and it’s very helpful (and looks good on you) to refer the client to someone who can do it. I’ve actually had clients come back to me for other work after I’ve referred them to someone else. They never come back if I simply tell them I can’t or won’t do it.
Ask Your Friends in Social Media for Help
The first thing I did when I decided to try out the project, was send out a tweet and a FB update, asking if anyone had ever worked with Expression Engine and how difficult was it to code it versus WordPress. I knew that I might get some biased answers back (there really are some weird developers who won’t admit how easy WP is as a CMS), but felt that I could gauge the difficulty of EE on the answers. Luckily, a lot of people work in the CMS and informed me that it was quite easy to learn and work in.
The point of using and have social media is to share expertise and knowledge. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and send feelers out for potential work. Especially because, if you decide not to work on the project afterwards, it becomes easy to refer the client to someone who can.
Quote for Learning Time
One technique you can use, is to go ahead and price out learning time. I’ve heard of freelancers successfully doing this, but for it to work, you have to be upfront and honest to the client. You can’t just tell the client I can do this site for $xxx,xxx.xx and expect the client not to freak out about the high price. Instead, you should inform the client that you’ve never done this service before, and if they still want to work with you but don’t want to change the service, let them know that $xxx.xx of the quote is for learning the new service.
I’ve been told clients are actually willing to pay for learning, especially if it’s for a freelancer they’ve worked with before and don’t want to go somewhere else. This is another great reason why you should always treat your clients well and make sure you’re the go-to person for them.
Do a Bit of Research
The best way to get a feel for the new service, is to actually do a bit of research on it. Skim through a few books and tutorials. Download the necessary software or framework and poke around in it. This can be as short as five minutes or as long as you want to spend on it, but will allow you to truly see how easy or tough it’s going to be to learn.
Of course, if it requires a paid service (like Expression Engine) you may not have the luxury of ’poking around’ and you may have to rely on what others tell you. If the client is truly serious about having you work on this project, you may be able to convince them to pay for the service ahead of time to allow you to look through it.
Quote Normally
Based on the feedback you get from others or the research you’ve done, you may decide to prepare a quote like you normally would for any service. For example, after everyone told me about how easy Expression Engine was, I decided that I would quote it like I would a normal WordPress site. If I went over in hours, I would just go ahead and eat the time and consider it learning and dabbling. It sounded like fun anyways.
Only do this if you’re really interested in the project, if you’re not, you’re going to resent having to work extra hours on it for no pay. If this is the cause, you can tell the client that you believe it would take X amount of hours and cost X, but that since you’ve never done the project before, it could possibly take longer and would cost more. This way, it saves you from having to work a lot more on a project you really aren’t excited about.
How Do You Do It?
How do you quote projects that require unknown services? Please share your tips!
Image by kristiand
Related posts:
- Why You Must Quote a Ballpark Figure
- A Guide to Creating Your Own Projects
- How to Land More Projects with Smarter Follow-Up Steps
- How To Avoid Monumental Screw Ups When Working On Projects
- How Do You Manage Your Projects?
About the author: Amber is a freelancer with over 10 years of experience and specializes in clean, semantic and valid HTML5, CSS3 and Wordpress development. She also writes a web development blog at www.amberweinberg.com and just launched a web app for developers at www.codesnipp.it.
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31 Comments
Chris
December 13th, 2010 at 9:25 amAmber, great post like usual! I sometimes get different requests for services that I don’t usually offer. Depending on what it is, more often than not, I send over the proposal for the project. The nice thing about the web now is that you can essentially learn anything that you need to within a short amount of time. If you don’t want to learn something, or can’t, there are a ton of people out there that can do that type of work. There are some obvious risks with bringing new people into your business, but it goes with the territory. If you are stuck on a price, tell your client/potential client it will be a few days to work up a proposal. Immediately jump on a site like freelancer.com, guru.com, scriptlance.com, etc and post details about that work specifically. Within a day or two you will have a large range of prices and descriptions that will give you a better idea on where to price the work and possibly some good leads on where to get the work done.
Bogdan Pop
December 13th, 2010 at 10:03 am“First, Decide If You Really Want to Mess With It”
Of course. Challenging projects are always good for improving your skills. Learning new technologies, coping with additional stress, planning for the unexpected.
“Ask Your Friends in Social Media for Help”
This doesn’t necessarily go well, because the people that usually answer know the technologies you ask about pretty well, and they can’t make a quote for you!
I’d do some research and include some basic learning time within my quote.
I guess that’s the right way to do it. The question is wether you tell your prospect that you haven’t done this before or not… There can be cases when the prospect think you’ve done it all.
Bastian Heist
December 13th, 2010 at 10:50 amCharging for learning is something I’d be very careful about. If you’re working with a client who you’ve worked with before and where you’re sure that he’ll accept it, then great, do it.
However if it’s a new client, I’d think twice before charging for the learning time. If the topic is something that I’ve wanted to learn anyway, I’d also consider to take the opportunity and learn it by doing an actual project, but without charging for the learning time, increasing my chances to actually land the project. At least that’s what I did when I did my first Joomla! project.
I’d be interested on other opinions here.
Greetings!
Bastian
Bastian Heist
December 13th, 2010 at 10:51 amHuh, that’s one hell of lengthy sentence there. Excuse my English, I’m not a natural speaker :-)
Eduardo Portillo
December 13th, 2010 at 11:24 amWe must always be careful with this proposals for doing something new for us, I had just a yaer ago a request to do a site in Joomla, in my country all the government sites change and was required to be done in Joomla and one of my client is a gevernment agency and ask me to do the site and this is why we must be careful thay ask me to do it in 15 days and it must complain with some guidelines, and I must train some IT folks from the agency take the charge.
First I talk to a fellow local freelancer that happens to be involved in the making of another agency’s site and gave me his rate and tell the difficulties he was having and also he has a 2 month deadline (4 times mine) and I must say I had also asked to Amber and she told me that Joomla was a bit complicated in her words she said “Joonla is terrible. I hates it”, so first I politely tell my client that the work can’t be done in the time required since I first must learn and I think it can take long, but knowing that if they have more refusals they will change the requirements I tried Joomla and after fighting 2 days to install it and having troubles dealing with it trying to put a photo gallery I gave up, in comparison WordPress takes seconds to install in my server and in the frst night I undestand the basic on themes and start to do changes on it.
In my opinion is the time and the requirements of the client that will decide if we can take the job and the insight of the fellow freelancers will help us to know how much to charge.
By the way this government sites takes almost 6 months to be done and all the contracts must had a fixed price so it was a very bad deal, thanks to Amber’s “Joonla is terrible. I hates it” I had not fallen on that trap.
Damian Herrington
December 13th, 2010 at 11:47 amWhen I first started learning x-cart I quoted based on what I thought how long it would take me and as you said any time over would be learning. Now I know the product I can quote pretty accordingly. I think this is more suitable for the developer and the client, the client is getting a quoted job and the developer is expanding their skill set and getting paid for an alloted period of time that they wouldn’t of got if they hadn’t of taken on the project with potentially more based on said skill set.
Holli
December 13th, 2010 at 12:51 pmGreat post! I’ve been developing websites for over 10 years, but I’m new to the freelance world, so I’m learning how the business side of all this works. I think you need to be upfront with the client. Honesty is the best policy. I see how a client that has worked for you in the past and really likes you would be willing to pay for some “learning time” although I’m not sure new clients would? In that case, I might decide if it’s something I wanted to learn that might benefit my business in the future and eat some of the time it takes to learn it. I would however still be upfront with the client and let them know that this is something new I was learning, and that it might take me longer than expected to finish and that I reserve the right to subcontract the work to someone who has experience in it if turns out to be something more than I want to deal with. Thoughts?
Vivek Parmar
December 13th, 2010 at 6:30 pmgreat post, messing up with new things, helps you to learn new things and increases your area of expertise. so always quote for projects that you have never done but don’t go to abroad just focus on your area of expertise only
Stephanie
December 13th, 2010 at 7:12 pmYup, honesty is the first thing you gotta keep in mind when quoting for work that you’ve never done before. It would suck if you told the client you could do the work but the output doesn’t reflect that at all.
As for pricing, quoting the same rate like you would with your regular services could work, but what if the client complains and suggests something lower since he knows that you’ve never worked on it before? He might think that because this is your first time working on this kind of project, you’d only produce something average and he won’t pay premium for that. I’ve encountered clients who wouldn’t want to pay my professional fees for work I already know how to do, so what more for work that I’ve never done before.
Quarite
December 13th, 2010 at 11:58 pmThe info is very valuable and we need to try new things from other to achieve something. Hope to see more of your valuable posts in future.
Quarite
Quarite.com
Florian
December 14th, 2010 at 12:15 amSo how did the expressionengine project work out for you ? is it easy? better than WP?
Maicon Sobczak
December 14th, 2010 at 5:47 amReally helpful tips. I love learn (earning for this) and sometimes I encounter difficulties to quote the project. This article will be my reference in future.
Issa @ Ajeva
December 14th, 2010 at 9:24 amI think, there will always be those jobs that are too tempting to take… like tempting fate itself and you might just sign up yourself for it – out of boredom, slow times, curiosity or whatever reason you have. Just make sure that you’ll take full accountability in your decision to take the risk. I guess, this is where many clients rant come from, when some freelancer promises to do a job he or she can’t deliver — and either deliver a poor quality work or go M.I.A. I guess, so long as you believe you can do the job – then, go for it! Still, honesty is the best policy in the book and there’s a truth to it more than meets the eye.
Amber Weinberg
December 14th, 2010 at 10:27 am@Florian I haven’t heard back yet from the proposal, I just got through the quoting phase :)
FinalCutStudio
December 14th, 2010 at 11:48 amI agree that charging for your learning curve could be detrimental. If it’s a client you’ve worked with before and they were so happy with your previous services they insist you do it, perhaps splitting the cost of learning would be in order. Aside from that, having the opportunity to do something you’re interested in and learn while getting paid (without charging more for learning) would be an investment you should be willing to take.
Sandra
December 14th, 2010 at 11:35 pmI look at a piece of work and decide how valuable the new skills and knowledge will be on an ongoing basis – ie will we be more competitive and/or get more work if we can add this to our range of things we can work on? Can we fit in the project with everything else given there will be the learning time involved on top?
I don’t include the cost of learning unless a client specifically says “I know you don’t use xyz system but I really want you to learn it so you can do the work”. In fact when I was on the client side of the fence, if any supplier provided a proposal and included learning time I would reject it unless learning something was part of the requirement for some reason.
We are also upfront with clients and might say “We haven’t done one of these before but are confident our existing skills will translate well because of xyz”
If I don’t know enough to be confident of a quality piece of work, or it is simply not possible cost wise to absorb the cost of learning time, we will refer the client to someone else.
Ben Plopper
December 17th, 2010 at 8:37 amGreat post, and very applicable for my latest effort. I’m in the middle of pitching a quote for a ghostwriting gig for a corporation. I’ve never tackled something of that scale before and the time estimate I’m proposing is total guesswork on my part. Even the per hour rate – taken from the 2011 Writer’s Market – is more of a guess than anything (the range it gives is huge). I’m happy with the hourly rate I’m lobbing at them, but I haven’t the slightest idea if the time is off the mark. The client doesn’t know, either, as this is their first book. Worrying about over or under valuing my services is keeping me up at night.
Kelsey
December 19th, 2010 at 8:17 pmI definitely research and try to find freelancers who offer set prices on their websites.
Waqas
December 20th, 2010 at 1:48 amI think the best thing in such a situation is to work on your current project-time situation. If you think you can get another project in the time you will spend to learn and deploy a situation then its best to pass the opportunity. However, if you think you have a situation where you are a bit free then definitely work to do the learning (even if the client is not paying for it)
David
December 22nd, 2010 at 9:22 amIf I don’t know how to do it I usually shy away from the project unless I can reliably sub contract the work out which I have been successful at doing. I frequently work with a developer who knows code 100 times better then myself and he usually does the heavy lifting for projects that go beyond my HTML/CSS knowledge.
If it’s totally foreign I research what it would take then ask others with experience if they have any estimates. Ultimately though if I can’t subcontract it out in budget I turn it away.
Paul Ouano
January 14th, 2011 at 1:06 amI accept the project, outsource it to an expert, do the management, and get paid still :)
Joy Wilder
August 4th, 2011 at 11:35 amI just ran into this very situation yesterday. A rush job fell into my lap that required me to learn to use a new program. Luckily, I didn’t have any other work so I was able to take my time and figure out what I needed to do.
I didn’t charge the client for my learning time because it’s a program I can use in the future for other projects.
As for resenting working (learning) for an afternoon with no pay? No way! I didn’t have any other paying jobs to do at the time and was happy to provide a rush service to a brand new client!
In the end I learned something new, kept myself out of trouble for the afternoon, my client was happy and hopefully hires me again. Additionally, let’s not forget referrals ;)
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