Your Price Is the Problem
Your portfolio is sharp. Your skills are undeniable. Yet the clients you attract are consistently low-budget, demanding, and draining. It’s a familiar story for thousands of talented creatives, from freelance designers to agency owners. They find themselves stuck in a cycle of haggling, scope creep, and feeling chronically undervalued.
The problem is not your work. The problem is your pricing.
Business coach and The Futur contributor Matt Essam has coached hundreds of creatives out of this exact trap. He observes that nearly all of them are making the same three fundamental mistakes, preventing them from charging what they’re worth and attracting the big-budget projects they deserve. These errors are not just tactical missteps; they are strategic flaws that poison the client relationship from the start.
Escaping this cycle requires a radical shift in thinking. It demands you stop selling your time and start selling transformation. It means abandoning outdated models that punish your expertise and adopting a framework that aligns your price with the value you create.
The First Sin: The Tyranny of the Billable Hour
If you have ever had a client ask you to reduce the number of hours on a proposal, you are a victim of the first and most common pricing mistake: hourly billing.
This single practice is the source of countless frustrations for creative professionals. It is a model that seems logical on the surface but is fundamentally misaligned with the nature of creative work. It puts you and your client on opposite sides of the table before the project even begins.
According to Essam, the symptoms of hourly billing are painfully clear:
- Pressure to work faster. Clients watch the clock, creating a sense of urgency that stifles creativity and deep thinking.
- Micromanagement. When a client is paying for your time, they feel entitled to manage it. Essam recalls his own agency days of “clients constantly breathing down my neck, asking what I was working on in that day.” This extends to demanding you work on-site, not for collaboration, but for surveillance.
- Arguments over scope. When new requests or amendments arise, the conversation becomes an awkward negotiation over additional hours, fostering resentment on both sides.
- A feeling of being undervalued. Creatives often report that their time isn't respected, with clients requesting endless meetings or haggling over every line item. Your time becomes a commodity to be minimized, not an asset to be maximized.
The core dysfunction of hourly billing is that it punishes you for getting better at your job. “The faster you work, the less you get paid,” Essam explains. “The better you get at your skill... the less money you earn.” This perverse incentive means your growing expertise directly leads to diminishing returns.
Furthermore, this model fails to account for the invisible work essential to a successful project. Activities like project management, research, and ideation are difficult to quantify in billable hours. Clients often resist paying for them, forcing you to either absorb the cost or omit crucial steps.
Ultimately, trading time for money creates an unbreakable glass ceiling. There are only so many hours in a day. By tethering your income to a clock, you limit your earning potential to a finite resource. The client’s perception of an hour's worth is arbitrary and subjective, based on their own internal metrics rather than the actual business value you deliver. This is a foundational concept a top expert like Ron Baker details in his work on value pricing masterclass.
Race to the Bottom: The Self-Sabotage of Undercharging
The second critical mistake is one most creatives know they are making, even as they do it. They quote a lower fee, hoping that being cheaper or fitting neatly within a client’s stated budget will give them a better chance of winning the project. This is undercharging.
Essam argues that not only is this logic flawed, but the opposite is true. Chronically undercharging repels good clients and attracts bad ones.
This strategy creates what creatives describe as a “race to the bottom,” where price becomes the only competitive lever. When prospects say, “so and so can do it cheaper,” the undercharging creative feels they have no choice but to adjust their fee. This leads directly to a roster of nightmare clients.
These clients exhibit a consistent pattern of behavior:
- Mismatched expectations. They pay a low price but expect a premium result, leading to constant conflict. Essam mentions a branding client who, after receiving the work, complained about the “lot of money” paid and began demanding extra services. The designer felt the budget was already very low for what was delivered.
- A desire for more than they paid for. They are experts at scope creep, constantly trying to add on tasks and features without additional compensation.
- A stressful and draining working relationship. They are difficult, demanding, and create an environment where you cannot do your best creative work.
Undercharging suffocates your creativity. Essam poses a powerful question: “Imagine what you would do for your clients if your project's budget had an extra zero on the end. What would be possible?” When you are constantly operating on thin margins, you are forced to cut corners. You cannot bring in collaborators, invest in better tools, or dedicate the necessary time to explore truly innovative solutions.
Essam estimates that 80% of the creative industry is chronically undercharging. The fix for this is not about working harder or delivering more; it’s about a fundamental shift in perception. He shares the story of a client, Will, who transformed his business with this insight. “When I met Will... he was doing kind of 1,500 [dollar] logos,” Essam says. “By the time we finished working together, he was doing 15K-plus branding projects.”
Crucially, Will was not doing ten times the work. He was already good at his job. The change was in bridging the gap between the reality of his skill and the client's perception of his value. This is a key principle The Futur has taught for years, explored in-depth in episodes like How I Went From Charging $500 to $100,000 For A Logo.
Undercharging is born from a lack of confidence. It is a defensive posture that ultimately sabotages your business and your craft.
The Vicious Cycle of Discounting
The third pricing mistake is a close cousin to undercharging, but with a distinct and insidious effect. This is the act of discounting your services.
While undercharging happens when you set your price too low from the start, discounting is what happens when you lower an already-stated price in response to client pressure. A prospect says, “Oh, that’s a bit out of our budget,” and you immediately offer a reduction to close the deal.
This act creates a cascade of negative consequences. It attracts a specific type of client: the bargain hunter. These are not clients looking for value; they are clients looking for a deal. As Essam warns, “it really attracts a certain type of client who is looking for discounts. They are bargain hunters, these people.”
Once you enter this cycle, it’s hard to escape. Clients who receive a discount will refer you to their friends, who will also expect a discount. You become trapped in a referral network of clients who all believe your real price is the lower one.
The psychological impact is devastating. When you offer a discount, you are sending a clear message: “I told you it was this price, but really I’m actually happy to accept this price.” You are validating their skepticism and confirming that your initial quote was inflated. In the client’s mind, the discounted price becomes the true worth of your service. Essam states it plainly: “Something is worth what someone is willing to pay for it... and so if you allow them to pay that for it, in their mind that is what it’s worth.”
There is no room for error when you discount. You’ve already squeezed your margins, so any unexpected amends or scope creep can push a project from barely profitable to a net loss. You feel like you're giving away too much, regretting the agreement as soon as it's made.
The alternative is to hold firm on price and communicate value. Essam highlights another client, Alessandro, who used this approach to turn a client’s 12K budget into a 25K project in a single conversation. The key was not negotiation tactics, but a reframing of the value being delivered. This is about building a business you love, rather than one where you feel constantly trapped by clients.
The Strategic Shift: Selling Outcomes, Not Services
To escape these three pricing traps, you must fundamentally change what you sell. Stop selling design, branding, illustration, or hours. Start selling results.
The entire strategy hinges on one central idea: focus on the outcome. This requires a three-part foundation before you can even think about price.
First, you must define the Who. Who do you want to work with? “Small businesses” or “brands” is too vague. You need to zero in on your ideal client: a specific type of person or business you care about helping and who has the resources to pay for a real solution.
Second, you must understand Where They Are Now. This is their current state of pain, frustration, or challenge. The critical element here is to define this problem in their language, not yours. It’s not that “their branding is off.” It's that they are struggling to attract top talent, losing sales to competitors, or feeling invisible in a crowded market. How do you find this language? Essam’s advice is simple: “Go and speak to those people.” Have conversations. Research their communities. Listen to what they are actually saying.
Third, you must get clear on Where They Want to Be. This is their desired future state, the pleasure or transformation they are seeking. It's the solution to their pain. This is more than just a new website; it's becoming the market leader, doubling their conversion rate, or finally securing the funding they need.
This A-to-B journey, from pain to pleasure, is the core of your value proposition. As entrepreneur Daniel Priestley teaches, if you want to charge a lot of money, you have to solve a big problem. The bigger the transformation you can facilitate, the more you can charge. This aligns with the principles of attracting better clients, a topic further explored in getting dream clients.
Productize Your Process: From Service to Solution
Once you’ve defined the transformation, the next step is to codify how you deliver it. This is about unpacking your intellectual property and turning your bespoke service into a repeatable product. Instead of selling a service, you are selling an outcome.
To identify this process, Essam offers a powerful prompt: “If you only got paid when you delivered that outcome for your clients, what are all of the things that you would need to do to feel confident that you were going to get paid?”
This question forces you to take responsibility for the result. It shifts your thinking from delivering tasks to guaranteeing a transformation. What steps, from your end and the client’s, are non-negotiable for success? This becomes your signature process.
The final piece of the puzzle is how you present this process. This is where you productize your service by creating packages. Instead of a custom quote with a list of line items, you present tiered options, each corresponding to a different level of outcome.
These packages should be named and framed around the result the client is buying, not the tasks you are performing. They don't care about web design, animation, or illustration in a vacuum. Essam emphasizes, “they care about what that can potentially do for them.”
This approach has a liberating effect. Essam shares the story of another client, Cameron, who had studied advanced storytelling and branding techniques but could never convince clients to pay for them. They didn't see the value. But when she reframed her offerings into outcome-based packages, she was finally able to implement her best work and get paid for it. The new framework gave her permission to be the expert.
By packaging your services, you move the conversation away from hours and deliverables and toward a clear, quantifiable result. This is how you demonstrate and justify a higher price point.
The New Rules of Engagement
Implementing this new strategy means replacing your old, destructive habits with new, empowering ones. It’s a direct response to the three mistakes that keep creatives trapped.
The fix is a simple, three-part system:
- Instead of hourly billing, build based on value. Price your work based on what the outcome is worth to the client, not how much time you spend on it. If you don't know the value, you need to have more conversations and ask better questions about their business goals and challenges.
- Instead of undercharging, price for the outcome. Anchor your fee to the transformation you provide. When a client says your price is too expensive, you now have a powerful response: “I hear you. I’m curious, a lot of money compared to what?” This reframes the comparison away from what Joe down the road charges and toward the value of the outcome they desire.
- Instead of giving discounts, give bonuses. Never take money off the table. Instead, add something on. A bonus should be something of high perceived value to the client but low cost for you to deliver. Essam suggests an example: “One of our clients used a strategy day as a bonus... it was half a day of their time... and it gave the client loads and loads of value.” You give more, but you hold the line on price, preserving the value of your core offering.
These are not just negotiation tactics. They are a new operating system for your creative business.
They are the path to attracting clients who respect your expertise, grant you the budget to do your best work, and happily pay you what you are truly worth.
The choice is yours. Continue trading your time for money, or start selling the future.
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