Freelance Pricing Philosophy III: "Overtime"

Earlier I argued for flat rate pricing, suggesting that it prevents you from drifting into doing your client's dirty laundry when you're there to design their new state-of-the-art cleaning center.

And I mentioned that the flat rate in question varies between clients. Those that are going to be tough to work with get a higher rate than those who are a pleasure to deal with. (In the next post, we'll talk about pricing as an exit tool.)

But just to be clear, there are situations when I have multiple rates with the same client. This is typically a case of "overtime".

Now, as a freelancer, some people argue that there is no such thing as overtime. On the other hand, just because my hours are a little more flexible doesn't mean I have to work all night, or all weekend, or all through the holidays, simply because a client can't get organized enough to do things on a more reasonable schedule.

I recently had a client who had to meet a 'new' requirement of the standards association they belonged to. I say 'new' because the client had known about this requirement for a couple of years!

Six weeks before the requirement went into effect, they decided it was time to start working on it.

The project required producing massive amounts of documentation, lots of interviews, design of standard formats -- it was quite a hunk of work. By the time we agreed on terms, I had about five weeks to pull it off -- as opposed to, say, four months, which would have been a more appropriate project timeline.

I let the client know up front that there would be a higher rate for time beyond a certain number of hours a week. There was also an intervening holiday, and I new I'd have to work straight through that weekend as well.

Now, if the bid had been on a project basis, I would simply have pitched a higher rate for a rush project. But this project was very poorly defined at the outset, and we didn't have time to discuss what we were going to do, I had to just charge in and create a solution. Hourly billing really was the only option that would make the deadline.

In that case, not all hours were created equal!