Why you should charge for initial design consultations
I often talk about how I strongly believe in charging for your initial design consultations and I get lots questions about why this is the case and the logistics around how I suggest this is done (e.g. should you get payment before the consultation? should you ever do any free consultations? - all sorts of questions).
So in this post I’m going to share as much as I can about why I so strongly believe in getting paid for your first meeting with a design client and how you should go about doing this.
Why you should charge for your initial design consultation
I have lots of reasons for why you should charge for an initial design consultation - let me share them with you in the hope I can convince you to start charging for your consultations from now on. :)
You’re running a business, not a charity
The first thing I want you to remember is that you are running a business, not a charity. If you want to build a sustainable and successful design business then you need to be paid for your time. If you don’t value your time and freely give it away without any payment then you can’t expect potential clients to value your time either.
Think about when you call a plumber to get some advice on a leaking toilet. He/she doesn’t come and give you that advice for free. They come, they assess the toilet, they probably do something on the spot that will help reduce the leaking for now and then they give you a price to get the toilet properly fixed and give you a date for when they can get this done. And then they charge you a call out fee for this help!
And you need to think about your business in exactly the same way. If someone wants you to come around and take a look at their home and give you some ideas for what they could do with it and “pick your brain” about the costs involved and how the process will work then this needs to be paid for.
If you don’t value your time then clients won’t either
If you spend hours and hours driving around your city taking free meetings or talking on the phone for hours with potential clients without being paid then you’re not valuing your time and you’re taking away from time you could be spending on projects that clients have actually paid you for (or on working on tasks that will help to bring revenue into your business).
Remember that a free consultation is not just giving away an hour or so of your time - if you are doing a consultation in person then this can take almost half a day to complete once you factor in some preparation time, driving to and from the consultation and then running the consultation as well. Are you willing to waste half of one of your 5 working days a week and not get paid anything for it??
But lots of designers do this all the time and they often tell me that they worry that if they charge for their initial design consultation then they will lose work to designers who are willing to go to initial design meetings for free.
This simply isn’t true - and the reason is that clients who want stuff for free are rarely clients who will book you for more work. So let other designers take the clients who want the free stuff - and who will probably just be time wasters - and let’s get you charging for your design consultation so you can work with higher quality clients who have real projects they need help with.
If someone isn’t willing to pay you for your time and respect your time, knowledge and expertise then they probably aren’t the right client for you.
Less chance for cancellations
Getting a client to pay in advance for your initial meeting means they are less likely to cancel on you at the last minute and waste your time. I always told a client that I would pencil in their consultation time but it would not be locked in until the payment had been made. This normally helped them make the payment quite promptly.
Also - clients who are willing to pay a small fee for an initial design consultation are signalling to you that they have a real project that they need help with and that they are probably ready and committed to get moving with this project. They are much less likely to be time wasters or just be fishing for free advice.
I used to convert about 90% of my paid initial design consultations to larger designer projects because I already had this initial paid step in my sales funnel and would only meet with clients who paid me for this consultation.
No icky money conversations
I would always get payment for my consultations before the consultation. I did this to avoid awkward conversations about money during the consultation that I felt weren’t a great client experience. For example you may have just had a great meeting with the client and now you need to have an awkward conversation about the payment for the meeting.
In my opinion this isn’t a great way to end a consultation. I would much prefer to end the consultation making sure the client was excited about what we had discussed and knowing that a fee proposal was coming their way in the next day or so.
For more on how to run a design consultation you may find this article helpful
If you collect payment at the end then your client is left thinking about the payment they have just made and starting to analyse whether they felt that was good value for money or other thoughts like that, which you definitely don’t want!
When I put this argument forward to some designers they say “OK, well I’ll send an invoice after the consultation” - but I strongly advise against that method as well. I’ve had a lot of designers try this approach and many have found it hard to get the payment once the consultation is over as the client has either moved on or felt they now don’t want to pay for the consultation.
So trust me and make sure you get the payment up front! (more on the logistics of this below)
It’s good for your personal safety
I also think getting the payment before you go to the consultation is so important for personal safety reasons. Many interior designers are women (not all of course - and this point is just as important for men as well quite honestly). Most of us are also working on our own and will go and visit new clients on our own - often in their houses in areas we don’t know well.
I don’t think enough designers consider the personal safety issues associated with what this means. You are entering a house, normally without anyone knowing where you are and this puts you in quite a vulnerable position.
Although almost everyone in the world is friendly and safe - there are some dangerous people as well. So the payment I took in advance for the consultation was one of the measures I put in place to ensure my personal safety. I figure serial killers probably don’t pay in advance to murder their victims (if only it were funny haha)…I guess I could be wrong about that but I felt like it was a good safety precaution nonetheless.
There’s nothing like earning money while you’re making money
The final reason why getting paid in advance for your consultations is so good is that there is nothing like the feeling of being out visiting another client and getting a new consultation booked in and paid for all automatically via your website. Having an automatic system set up (see more below on this) is how you can start to create some automation in your business and help you start to generate revenue without having to put in any work. Trust me that there’s nothing like the feeling of getting the notification on your phone that a new client has just booked in and you haven’t had to do anything at all to make that happen!
The logistics of getting your payment
OK so that’s some of the reasons why I strongly believe in charging for your initial design consultation. I hope I’ve convinced you as to why I think this is so important!
Next I want to just share the answers to some common questions I get about this payment and the logistics of how this all works.
Have an opener you always use
I suggest you develop an “opener” you always use when a new client calls you out of nowhere or emails you about working together.
After a client shares a few initial words with you about their project and what they need help with you need to then close the conversation down quite quickly and push them straight to your paid design consultation. If you start getting too deep in questions or conversation at this point you’ll be on the phone for an hour before you know it.
So I would always say something like the following…(this is just an idea of the information I would want to get across. If I was talking on the phone I would obviously make this more conversational if I was really talking with someone!)…
“That all sounds great and I can definitely help you with that. So my projects always start with an initial paid design consultation. This is an hour long meeting where we will meet in your home and go over everything you’re looking to do. You can show me around and I can get a sense of the scope of work and we can also talk about other things like your budget, functionality needs, aesthetic - all sorts of things. I will also share lots of initial design ideas with you while I’m there as well - so you can get a sense of what is possible for the money you want to spend. I’m just driving at the moment but if that sounds good then the best thing is to go to my website and you’ll find my booking system there that has my next times available and you can book in and pay for a time that works for you”.
Time saving tip: You can also create an email template that has similar sorts of words in it. That way every time a new inquiry comes in via email you have an email template you can quickly copy in to an email that can save you time typing out the same response over and over.
Logistics of getting the payment
And this brings me to another question I get asked quite a bit and that’s about the logistics of getting paid.
Here’s how I suggest you do this:
create an online booking form on your website that is attached to a payment gateway - almost all website providers have an option for how to do this these days so just do some research about how to set it up on your own website platform. This won’t be very hard but it will likely take you a bit of time to set up (but it’s 100% worth it!)
block out times you are available (see my notes below on not being too available!)
encourage clients to book through this system so you don’t have to do anything manually
have your social media links point to your booking system to encourage people to get started with working with you
I strongly encourage you set up a system like this. Not only does it look professional and like you have your act together it also makes it easy for people to do business with you!
The harder and more complicated you make it for a client to book a consultation with you the less bookings you will get (as they will go to the designer that has this process streamlined).
So if you currently have something on your website that says “call me to book in for a consultation'“ or you are encouraging people to contact you to book in for a consultation (and then sending out old fashioned invoices that are hard to pay for) then I can promise you that you are losing work.
Also remember that there’s lots of people don’t want to talk on the phone with people these days and if someone is there and ready to get started with working with you then make it as easy as possible for that transaction to take place or you’ll lose them to a designer who has more professional systems set up on their website.
What if the client won’t pay?
From time to time you’ll come across clients who refuse to pay for the initial design consultation. They will tell you that X designer from down the road is willing to come for free and why won’t you as well?
A few points here:
if a client is shopping around to find 'best deals’ or people who will do things at the cheapest rate - this should be a warning sign about the quality of the client
if a client won’t value your time and pay you for your time in an initial design consultation I would suggest they may not value your time if you go on to work with them on a larger project
it’s your business and you can do what you want - if another designer down the road is willing to waste their precious time on a project that may go nowhere - then let them do that!
you’re running a business not a charity - if they want you to be generous with your time and knowledge at an initial design consultation then they need to pay you for that time
I also feel that if you don’t charge for your time then you’ll likely also not be very generous with the ideas you share with them during the first meeting and this won’t create the best impression for your new client.
If a client refuses to pay - I suggest you just say that’s completely fine, but that’s not how you work and then wish them luck with their project.
Don’t be too available
Another tip about booking in your consultation. Even if you’re just getting started in business and you could potentially meet a client this afternoon if they wanted to - it’s not a good idea to seem too available. This screams to a client that you aren’t busy and they will start to question why that is the case.
So always make sure you leave at least a few weeks before you book in. Use words like “I only do a few consultations each week so my earliest opening to come and see you would be in a few weeks - probably the week of February 10th. I could do Wednesday morning or Friday afternoon that week if that would work for you?”
If you have a booking system online then the same principle applies - make sure your booking system isn’t full of blank spots that they can choose from. It will be very off putting to a client if your diary looks completely empty. So make sure you only have some availability to book in on your booking system each week.
You never want to seem too available and you want to give the illusion of being busy - even if you aren’t yet very busy - as this will give new clients some confidence.
Trust me - all of these little things make a big difference! :)
How much to charge
One final question I get asked a lot is how much you should charge for the initial consultation. This is difficult for me to help you determine as it depends on a whole range of things. But if you need help with how to price in a way that works well for you then my business short course ‘The Pricing System for Designers’ will be helpful for you.
Once you’ve worked out what the right hourly rate is for you (which we do in the course above) I would say that a good estimate for your consultation would be approximately 2 hours of your time.
When I first started out in my business my initial design consultations were $145 for 90 minutes. This was back when I had no value for my time as that’s a crazy amount considering you need to think how long a consultation normally takes once you add in some preparation time, driving to and from the consultation and also running the consultation as well.
But once I started getting busy I raised that price to $197. Soon I found that I was doing around 5-10 consultations a week and so I raised my prices again to $247. And once I was in a position where I was working with higher end clients and had more work on than I needed I raised my price again to $297 for a 60 minute consultation.
Your prices will rise over the years as your reputation grows and you get more clients and more work. My suggestion is to start on the lower side and raise prices - rather than start too high and have to drop them.
So that’s it and I hope this article has helped convince you that charging in advance for your design consultations is the way to go!
Courses and Templates for Designers and Architects
DO YOU WANT TO….
Improve your professionalism?
Find more clients?
Bring in more revenue?
Create better systems and processes?
Then check out my business courses and templates for designers and architects.
These courses and templates leave you with work done - not just a long list of things you need to do next. We have a really strong focus on taking action and getting things created that improve your business.
Enjoy the rest of your day!
Clare x
Dr Clare Le Roy
