Today I personally worked on over 40 changes for over 30 clients. That may seem like a lot but it really wasn't. This is a typical day for our Valparaiso web design firm. What was interesting is not one of these were any of our maintenance contract customers that receive unlimited web site updates. This means I should have be billing out 10 hours of time for today. The fact is I only billed 2 hours of time. Let's look at this and see what makes our web design customer service in Valparaiso Indiana different from that of everyone else.
The first part is that we do bill in 15-minute increments and we do not round up to those 15-minutes. This means if you have 11-minutes of work we only bill you for 11-minutes of work. You won't be billed until you reach that 15-minute threshold; even if it's months, even years, down the road.
Many companies will either choose a lower number for their billing, bill on a per minute basis, or have a mandatory minimum they bill to maintain their billable hours. When I was working with a Microsoft Gold Partner we billed 100% of every minute. This was the company standard and I did it without question. This was great for billable hours as we were paid based on what we billed. This though meant our clients weren't being met as often as they should have been as no one likes being nickeled and dimed for every small change.
This is where the JM2 Webdesigners philosophy started to come about. After leaving that consulting provider I worked at a company where we didn't bill to outside clients. We billed internally and it needed to always be padded in a way to make the government happy. This also didn't seem fair to us and why we established "Rule #1" of "No ".
We wanted to help businesses grow while being fair to the client but to ourselves as well. We knew that most companies charged 30% or more for services. We felt to grow faster and provide more value to more companies we needed to disrupt that business model. We have a modest 5% markup model over our true costs. Stating what our markup is shows an openness to our clients and lets them know of our being upfront with them. We know from a business standpoint that this gives an inside knowledge to our competition. As you begin to learn more about us you'll learn that doesn't bother us.
We knew some of our clients would have quick 5 or 10-minute changes. By sticking to this model of not over charging or having minimums clients are contacting us more frequently for updates and their information is kept updated at a faster interval.
We didn't stop there though on being fair on billing. Every client is contacted monthly to see if they need anything. We check every client's site each month whether on a maintenance plan or not. If we notice any issues and you're on a maintenance plan we fix it immediately and let them know. If a client is not, we let them know and offer to fix it for them (there is a charge for that) or being they now know about it they can fix it for themselves (for no charge -- just their time). This value-add we are confident most companies wouldn't do. For us it's not going the extra mile. It's doing what is "right" for them to grow.
If you would like to work with a company that is centered around the growth of your company and wants to be a core part of your organization then please give us a call at @BUSINESSPHONETOLLFREE@, email at @BUSINESSEMAILADDRESS@, or through our online contact form here. Whether you are in Valparaiso Indiana, across the United States, or around the world our dedicated team of industry experts is ready and willing to help your business grow.