What 16 Years in Business Taught Me About the Value of a Dollar

When I got into web design, the pricing baffled me.

Five thousand dollars for a simple site that takes about ten hours to build. Run that math. That’s five hundred dollars an hour. I couldn’t make it make sense, and I still can’t.

Not because designers should be poor. Because that number has almost nothing to do with the work. It’s covering an office nobody needed, an account manager who forwards emails, and an ad budget to find the next person willing to pay five thousand dollars.

You weren’t paying for your website. You were paying for their overhead.

A dollar saved really is a dollar earned

This sounds like something stitched on a pillow, but run it as arithmetic and it gets serious.

To put an extra dollar of profit in your pocket, you have to sell enough to clear a dollar after costs. Depending on your margins, that might mean three or four dollars of new revenue. Finding that revenue takes marketing, time, and luck.

Cutting a dollar of waste puts that dollar in your pocket today. No selling. No luck. Just a decision.

That’s why we run lean and always will. Not because we’re cheap, but because every dollar we don’t spend on nonsense is a dollar that either lowers your price or raises our quality. Usually both.

Where small businesses quietly bleed money

After sixteen years of looking at how small companies operate, the leaks are almost always in the same places.

• Subscriptions nobody cancelled. Go read your bank statement line by line. Everybody finds something. Usually three somethings.
• Rented websites. That “$199 special” with a monthly fee forever, where you never own the thing. We wrote a whole breakdown of what a website should cost because this one makes me genuinely angry.
• Paying for clicks you should get free. Ads have their place, but if you’re buying them to rank for your own business name, something upstream is broken. That’s what organic search is for.
• Your own time, unpriced. The biggest one. Four hours a week fighting your own website isn’t free. It’s the most expensive thing on this list.

How to price your own work without starving

This is the question I get most from other owners around Birmingham, usually at the point where they suspect they’ve been undercharging for years. They usually have.

Start from what it’s worth to them, not what it costs you. If a website brings a contractor two extra jobs a year at three thousand dollars each, that website isn’t an eight-hundred-dollar expense. It’s a six-thousand-dollar asset. Price the outcome.

But don’t use that as a license to gouge. The same logic that justifies a fair price justifies a ridiculous one if you let it run unchecked. That’s exactly how you get to five hundred dollars an hour. The check is simple: could you say your price out loud, to the customer’s face, and explain every part of it without flinching?

Publish it. Our prices are on the website. Eight hundred, eighteen hundred, thirty-three hundred. No form, no discovery call, no “it depends.” If your pricing only works when the customer can’t compare it to anything, that’s not pricing. That’s a negotiation tactic.

Raise it before you’re desperate. Everybody waits too long, then raises prices resentfully, and the resentment leaks into the work. Small, regular, unemotional.

Cheap and inexpensive are different things

Worth separating, because people mix them up constantly.

Cheap means the value isn’t there. Thin materials, corners cut, something that fails in a year and costs you double to redo.

Inexpensive means the value is there and the waste isn’t. Same result, less money, because somebody upstream refused to pad the bill.

We’re trying very hard to be the second one. An eight-hundred-dollar site from us isn’t a worse site. It’s the same care with none of the fat.

Money is supposed to do something

I’ve been through a stretch where money was genuinely tight, and it permanently changed how I think about it. Money sitting in a pile isn’t doing anything. Money is only useful when it’s moving toward something that matters.

That’s why ten percent of our profits go to families in need in the Birmingham area, and why it goes out the door whether or not it was a great year. If you wait until you’ve made it to start giving, you’ll never start. There’s always a reason to wait.

Price your work honestly. Cut what doesn’t serve the customer. Then make sure what’s left over is pointed at something worth pointing at.

Tired of the runaround? Let’s talk real numbers. Call (205) 236-2239 or email [email protected]. No twenty-part forms, we promise.