I wasn't undercharging. My workflow was undercutting me.
It always happened pretty much the same. I’d have a discovery call with a potential client. We would feel we were a match to work together and then they would ask my price. I’d typically break out in a sweat right about then and say something like “My tech packs usually range from $X-Y. For this style, given it’s complexity, I would charge $X.” And then I’d hold my breath.
For the most part, they would accept it and we would carry on.
I thought what I was charging seemed fair, even if I always got nervous quoting it. It was market rate value from what I could tell. Clients seemed happy and I was trying to push myself to charge “my worth”.
But then, I did the math. My hourly rate was telling a very different story.
The time it took me to make a tech pack directly affected how much I earned per hour. And the tools I used to make that tech pack directly affected how long it took me to make it.
Even if my rates never changed, my hourly earnings took a hit.
The flat rate tech pack trap
Flat rates for tech pack services is pretty standard in the industry. It’s easier for the clients and seems easier for the freelancer up front. It’s more straightforward. You know what you’re going to make out of this project.
But with that flat rate quote, you’re implicitly betting that the work will only take a certain amount of time. Even if you add some buffer, you never quite know how long it will take you.
If you’re jumping back and forth between Adobe Illustrator and an external platform, such as Excel, to create your tech packs, you’re losing time with each app switch (see how much time in our Context Switching blog!).
If the design changes during the process of setting up the tech pack, there’s a cascade of changes required that usually are not simple and quick to make if you’re stuck in a fragmented workflow.
If your tech pack template gets thrown out of whack when you add an image to a page and you have to spend time resizing the columns and rows, you’re losing time to admin work.
From what I can tell, and from my personal experience, most freelance designers set their price once and don’t really revisit the math regularly. So, they don’t notice how much these things end up eating at that flat rate fee.
The math that changed how I thought about my tech pack workflow
Now, I’m no mathematician, but I can work out that if I charge $200 for a tech pack that takes me 8 hours, I’m earning $25 an hour. Not ideal.
But if that same tech pack only took me 4.5 hours, I’d be earning over $44 an hour. Much better.
And that’s just for one tech pack. If I’m making 10 per month, it’s either 80 hours of work at $25 an hour, or 45 hours of work at $44 an hour. I know which I’d rather!
Once you zoom this out even further to a year or even over a career, you see how much time your workflow is eating into your earnings.
Where the time was actually going
For a long time, I just accepted that this was the way things were. It’s a common workflow in the industry and I assumed everyone else was dealing with it too. But it grated at me enough until I finally decided to do something about it.
I recently put this all to the test and did a comparison. I did one tech pack the old way with Adobe Illustrator and Excel. Then another tech pack using Tech Pack Wizard plugin in Illustrator. Read the whole story here. TLDR: It took me 17 minutes with Tech Pack Wizard and 30 minutes using Illustrator plus Excel.
In this experiment, I was reminded of the overly tedious aspects of my old workflow.
The parts that took way longer than I even remembered and had the biggest impact on my time were as follows:
- Creating POM lines on the sketch and manually formatting each line by adding stroke color, stroke size and adding arrowheads, then adding a textbox with the POM code and positioning it on the line.
- Setting up the Graded Specs formulas in Excel
- Creating the callout lines and again manually formatting each line then taking a screenshot of the annotated sketch and pasting it into Excel where I then had to resize and reposition it on the page
Each of these tasks took at least twice as long using the old workflow than it did with Tech Pack Wizard. Same finished tech pack, double the work time.
What faster tech packs actually mean for your income
If this all sounds doom and gloom and you’re regretting how much time you’ve wasted over the years, there’s hope!
Let’s flip this around and look at it the other way. If you were able to complete a tech pack at least 43% faster but keep your flat rate, think of what that would do to your hourly rate.
You could take on more clients per month with your freed up time and increase your earning potential.
Or use your extra time to do something for yourself, like that lunchtime yoga class you’ve always wanted to make it to but you’re usually glued to your computer at that time of day.
Either way, a faster tech pack workflow means your flat rate starts working for you instead of against you.
Faster Tech packs with Tech Pack Wizard
This is why I made Tech Pack Wizard. To give designers back control of their time.
I worked the old way for years. Wasting away in Excel, fighting page layouts and formulas.
I built Tech Pack Wizard from my own experience. To speed up the tech pack workflow, but also to make sure the time you’re spending on them actually reflects the value you’re delivering to your clients.
Tech Pack Wizard is launching soon. Sign up to our newsletter to be the first to know when we launch!