How A Service Doc Can Help You Get Past Being Overworked and Underpaid
Every freelancer or agency owner has at one point found themselves in a situation where they would underprice their services and go way over scope on projects, in an attempt to keep clients on the books.
And the truth is, it’s counterproductive for the growth of your business and makes it near impossible to gain any kind of momentum. If you look at the big picture, you’ll realise you’re often essentially working for free.
So you get to a point where you have to ask yourself an honest question: do your current prices reflect the future goals of your business?
And if the answer is no, you’re potentially missing one super essential piece in your business: a service document.
How does it work?
Your service document is basically a menu of all the services you or your business offer, as well as the deliverables, and how long each of these particular services take to fulfil. Once you have an internal hourly rate as well, prices for each task are easily calculated, and there are no longer those grey areas, which will avoid you going over scope.
For example, if you’re offering an email sequence, you’ll want to list out exactly what those deliverables are, how many emails (and revisions) are offered, if this includes integrations, and how long it will take you or your team to complete this. From there, you can easily work out how much (internal hourly rate x projected time to completion) you should be charging.
…And you might be surprised.
In setting up your service document, you might be shocked to find out that you could easily be charging about $1,500 minimum for email sequences, if you work out the actual deliverables and time spent fulfilling this service in a way that doesn’t burn you or your business out.
This is fundamental in gaining clarity with your clients and eliminating that infamous grey area where you inevitably tend to find yourself. Now, when you onboard a client into your business, their contract can specify exactly what deliverables you’re charging for and they’re agreeing to.
So if your client comes back and wants more revisions, extra copy, changes to graphics or additional email sequences, you can identify those as non-included deliverables and charge for those accordingly.
And then there’s business development…
Another thing the service document can do for you, is help you move out of the driver’s seat.
You’re expanding. You’ve got a lead generation system in place and a sales person taking calls, but you’re still constantly across and involved in every aspect of your business. And you shouldn’t have to be.
Your service doc is all your sales person needs to pitch clients accurate prices without your involvement whatsoever. And the rest of the team can take it from there, because they have a clear list of deliverables to get to work on.
This will save you hours of time, eliminate going over scope altogether, and help create the well-oiled machine you want your business to be.
To save over 25 hours time on setting up your service document, we’ve released the exact one we use in our 7-figure agency – so all you have to do is edit it accordingly. You can access it here.
And with that, this marks the end of your journey of being overworked and underpaid.