What should I be charging?

[SmokeAndMirrors]

I'm moonlighting as a lighting engineer. I have a smallish collection of scans (up to 16), lasers (3) and misc other stuff (LED pars / wash, smoke machine,...) that I use to create light shows for bands locally. I am working out my charging structure as I go. Currently, it's this:

 

Plotting: send me a CD or track list and I'll do a bespoke show, learn the cues and so on. Charged at £0.50 per show minute, so a 1hr show is £30. This seems low to me, as it is pretty labour intenstive (many evenings work).

 

Operating: I charge £0.25 per show minute. So a 1hr show is £15.

 

Equipment hire: £14 / hour, a gig is between a 10 and 12 hour day. So around £168.

 

Van hire: usually about £40 / day.

 

Travel: reasonable petrol costs, and accomodation if I need to stay overnight.

 

Expenses: hey, I have to eat on the job, y'know?

 

Typically then, a local bespoke show will cost £250-£300. Is this low? High? I'd be interested to hear.

[johnhuson]

Personally I think you're under valuing your own time. Doubtless you should be able to get work at the sort of prices you're talking about, the reality is many bands on the pub & club circuit can't afford to spend much money on lighting, hence why a lot have their own rigs as it's cheaper in the long term but there is certainly a market out there.

 

The difficulty you will have however is moving your business forward and buying better equipment. Once your in the rut of being 'cheap' it's difficult to start charging more to pay back for your greater investment. You will also probably have a reputation as a cheap supplier and despite how ever good a job you may be doing you'll probably find it hard to shake off the sigma and therefore will find it hard to get the better quality work. At the end of the day by far the best way to get work is word of mouth.

 

You might not find it to by that way, this is just my personal experience of the hire industry. As for how much you should be charging, only you can make this decision based on how much money you want to make out of this, what the market is and most importantly what it actually costs for you to do this. Don't forget to include your own time, it may appear free but if you continue to think this it will turn out to be a mistake. You also need to consider equipment running costs and maintenance, as well as investment to not only further your business but keep your equipment up to date and therefore desirable.

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Personally I think you're under valuing your own time. Doubtless you should be able to get work at the sort of prices you're talking about, the reality is many bands on the pub & club circuit can't afford to spend much money on lighting, hence why a lot have their own rigs as it's cheaper in the long term but there is certainly a market out there.

 

The difficulty you will have however is moving your business forward and buying better equipment. Once your in the rut of being 'cheap' it's difficult to start charging more to pay back for your greater investment. You will also probably have a reputation as a cheap supplier and despite how ever good a job you may be doing you'll probably find it hard to shake off the sigma and therefore will find it hard to get the better quality work. At the end of the day by far the best way to get work is word of mouth.

 

You might not find it to by that way, this is just my personal experience of the hire industry. As for how much you should be charging, only you can make this decision based on how much money you want to make out of this, what the market is and most importantly what it actually costs for you to do this. Don't forget to include your own time, it may appear free but if you continue to think this it will turn out to be a mistake. You also need to consider equipment running costs and maintenance, as well as investment to not only further your business but keep your equipment up to date and therefore desirable.

 

John, you echo my dilemmas exactly. The big problem is the step up from being small (venues up to 300) to being medium-sized (300-600): replacing 100W gear with >250W; 100mW lasers to 1W (with all the attendant legal issues); replacing tripods with trussing; power distributions issues; needing a van; needing helpers... that's a lot of wonga, that simply can't be paid for my a few small gigs here and there. The path is unclear.

[paulears]

I can't quite get my head around the concept of charging by the minute? There seems little point when you're on your own, as going to the loo, having a cuppa should be deducted. If you do it by track time, then you need to keep very accurate records - just seems a bit complicated. A quick ten minute top and tail edit led to an entire day work recently, but6 I'd agreed a price, and had to stick to it - a price 'for the job'. Charging by running time wouldn't have worked for me.

[Hagopm]

dude, you're selling yourself short.

 

I don't know what part of the uk you're in but it sounds very cheap to me

 

I VJ and do lights at a london venue every saturday. the only gear I bring is my PC. I charge £250 per night (90 minutes of rigging, 6 hours vj & lighting ). even this I consider cheap - the majority of the visuals I have made myself over the last 5 years.

[Bobbsy]

Moderation: I've moved this to the office since it has the makings of a useful discussion on how to determine a charging structure--this could apply to any discipline, not just lighting!

[JamieR]

I'm also going to say that you're selling yourself cheap mate. I'm more in the IT industry at the minute than the entertainment industry, but even so the point is the same - if you're going to want to be noticed professionally and you're taking your time to do something which you have a talent for then you have to charge proper prices. Also, what was the idea behind charging by the minute? Seems odd to me.

 

If you want to advance your business forward and pick up more clients and pick up more professional grade gear then you'll have to revise your pricing strategy methinks.

 

I notice you're in the IT industry as well - you're "moonlighting", but do you want to get into doing more of this work professionally, or just remain doing local band work etc? Doing LX work etc for local bands is a good way of getting experience if you want to move onto higher level work.

 

Just my 2p...

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Charging by the minute seems logical to me! Shouldn't a 2-hour show more than a 1-hour show?! Twice as much preparation, twice as much execution, etc. People understand what charge-by-the-minute means. When I just pluck a price out of nowhere, they might wonder "what that price?"; and indeed, how do I arrive at such a price in the first place?

[Ike]

Charging by the minute seems logical to me! Shouldn't a 2-hour show more than a 1-hour show?! Twice as much preparation, twice as much execution, etc.

Not necessarily, the time it takes you is a reflection of the complexity of the job not the length of performance. I've board opped for a two hour show that had three very basic lighting states and a 40 min one that had hundreds. It doesn't take much to work out which the LD should have charged more for.

 

People understand what charge-by-the-minute means. When I just pluck a price out of nowhere, they might wonder "what that price?"; and indeed, how do I arrive at such a price in the first place?

While I understand what it means I don't understand why anyone would do it. To be honest if someone charged me by the show minute I'd have serious doubts as to the quality of the design I'd end up with. Not that I employ LDs mind...

[paulears]

Sorry, perhaps I didn't explain that very well. The concept of charging by the minute makes sense when you are working with maximum times that maybe don't go much over an hour or two, but once you start to calculate work days by the minute, the whole thing gets very complicated - and once your invoice amounts go up, it will be very difficult to validate 1032 minutes @£X to management. The point I made about cups of tea could best be explained by something I 'fell across' this week. A venue saving money decided that their hourly paid staff would have an hour deducted from their pay claim because they MUST have had lunch/breaks/dinner at some point in the long day. They had, of course, so there was little they could do about it. I charge by the day, so despite having the same breaks, I still got paid for a day. Breaking down your work into small amounts that have a price ticket on them means that at some point, a ten minute chat with the management could get 10 minutes removed from the invoice, as you weren't working. I know it's rarely going to happen - but it also has another knock on implication. Let's say we charge by the hour. We do 3 and a half hours work, I charge for four. You charge for 190 minutes - you lose out!

 

The only way I can see an advantage in working by the minute is when working on projects that might have PRS/MCPS content, where fees are calculated by running time - this is about the only time I ever make notes of time at this level of accuracy.

 

One other thing I have noticed is that some clients don't actually like varying amounts. For one of mine, I am gradually removing some of the detail about what was done, replacing it with a general description of "Technical Production Services". This seems to be generating less queries and seems to be more accounts dept friendly. When more detail was present, some items would appear to be one managers responsibility, while others would come under someone else - meaning my invoices circulated the office a lot longer, while people internally agreed which bit went to which budget area.

[SmokeAndMirrors]

OK let me give an example. The last gig I did, the band sent me a CD of their covers set which I prepped for. There was 80 minutes of music on the disc so I charged £40. They lopped off a few songs before the gig as they'd not gone too well in rehearsal, leaving 60 minutes of music. So I charged them £15 for the performance itself. Total cost for the gig was £250 (of which my helper gets £50). I don't charge for tea-breaks, just my time being an operator whilst they're on stage. Previously I was charging a flat fee for shows, and getting caught up in the very sort of thing that's been mentioned elsewhere - prep for a longer show being less than for a shorter one. I felt I needed some way to charge for my time because it wasn't just what I did "on the night". Neither did I want to hike my prices up unreasonably by charging for things I never used to charge for. So I asked myself what people were actually paying for, and came up with some rates that didn't massively raise my price, but also were transparent - people knew what they were paying for. I don't take Ike's point at all ("To be honest if someone charged me by the show minute I'd have serious doubts as to the quality of the design I'd end up with"). Why wouldn't they expect to pay more for a longer show?

 

I have an upcoming problem. My next show is with a band I work regularly with. They usually play locally, but this time the gig is 120 miles away. Due to increasing amounts of gear, I will have to have a van (my large car can no longer seriously cope). At that distance I will want to have at least a one night stay at a B&B or cheap hotel. So my costs are going to go up significantly. There's no point me doing it if I make a loss. There's no point in asking for more money than the band can reasonably afford. Clearly I need to negotiate, but to do that I need a bottom line, and hence I see the need to break my time down into what the customer is paying for.

[Ike]

I don't take Ike's point at all ("To be honest if someone charged me by the show minute I'd have serious doubts as to the quality of the design I'd end up with"). Why wouldn't they expect to pay more for a longer show?

I'd expect a board opp to base their fees on length of performance although even then I wouldn't expect to see a two hour show being twice as much as a one hour show. If someone was to charge by the performance minute for a lighting design I'd either assume they were only basing their figure on the time it took them on the night (ie they were valuing their own design work as zero) or they didn't appreciate that some designs are bound to be more time consuming than others regardless of the length of performance.

[SmokeAndMirrors]

I don't take Ike's point at all ("To be honest if someone charged me by the show minute I'd have serious doubts as to the quality of the design I'd end up with"). Why wouldn't they expect to pay more for a longer show?

I'd expect a board opp to base their fees on length of performance although even then I wouldn't expect to see a two hour show being twice as much as a one hour show. If someone was to charge by the performance minute for a lighting design I'd either assume they were only basing their figure on the time it took them on the night (ie they were valuing their own design work as zero) or they didn't appreciate that some designs are bound to be more time consuming than others regardless of the length of performance.

 

Ah, I see what you're saying. The cost should reflect the amount of time I put in - in theory at least. The trouble I have with this is that it would be seen to be in my interests to be lazy & cynical: "Oh yeah, that 5-minute show really took 3 months of preparation". I don't want customers to think I'd invoice them for my prep time, including tea-breaks and f**k-ups. It just isn't transparent enough.

[w/robe]

Shouldn't a 2-hour show more than a 1-hour show?!

From a operating point of view probably not as it is still a night that you can not work elsewhere.

 

When I freelance I generally work either on a fixed price for the job, and sometimes I end up working more than I initially thought and have undercharged and sometimes the reverse. Or I charge by the day and as far as I am concerned a day can be from 4 to 18 hours. Some people charge by the 8 hour or 4 hour call which also works but I would hate to have to justify what I had done for every minute of a job.

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Shouldn't a 2-hour show more than a 1-hour show?!

From a operating point of view probably not as it is still a night that you can not work elsewhere.

 

When I freelance I generally work either on a fixed price for the job, and sometimes I end up working more than I initially thought and have undercharged and sometimes the reverse. Or I charge by the day and as far as I am concerned a day can be from 4 to 18 hours. Some people charge by the 8 hour or 4 hour call which also works but I would hate to have to justify what I had done for every minute of a job.

 

I see the sense in that. However I'm not charging for every minute of a gig (this charging scheme only applies to a band performance, for discos or clubs it'll be different but that's not my main thing). I charge for the time I am pressing buttons and moving sliders in time to the band.