Blog > Ten Minute Magic

26 February 2009

We had a "How Much?" message from a Client this morning. He needed a quote for a small amend to one of our online systems. "How much will it this cost me?", he asked.

My answer. Zero, Zilch, Nada... Zip!

Ten Minute Magic

We like to keep things simple here, so we have a simple principle for quoting.

If a job will take less than ten minutes there's no charge.

Ten minutes isn't long you may think, but it turns out we can handle a huge amount of different things in ten minutes; text changes, menu updates, page uploads, phone conversations, emails, file uploads... the list goes on.In fact most of the requests we get from clients can be handled in less than ten minutes.

Do we end up doing a lot of "free" work over a year? Sure we do, and we have a name for that... we call it "Service".

The £50 agency tax

Contrast this with another agency. We've learned today that they are planning to charge one of our clients £50 to supply a file. £50! A file!
Here's Mike's response when our Client mentioned this to him:

Blimey Jayne*, I wish we could charge you £50 to send you a file you've already paid for!

But actually he doesn't. If we did that then pretty soon our Clients would start to worry about the clock ticking. They'd stop calling to chat things through, and stop sending us those little bits and pieces that are important but not IMPORTANT.

And in the end they might stop calling at all.

Where's your value?

Here's the key question. Where do you add real value for your Clients?

Our ten minute magic jobs are usually pretty simple. We aren't adding much value there. At it's best Semantic is about the bigger projects, the hard deadlines, the creative concepts and the focus on building online businesses. That's where we add our value, that's where we charge.

So we see "free" work as an investment. You can solve a lot of people's problems in ten minutes... and hey, if it turns out to be fifteen minutes, or twenty-five, maybe that's an investment too. It's difficult to be part of someone's team if you are constantly looking at your watch.

End note: Why ten minutes?

Ten minutes isn't an arbitrary figure, it's about the amount of time it takes to create, send and track an invoice. I reckon if a job's quicker to actually do than it is to charge for, it's a gimme. Simple as that.

*name changed to protect the innocent (and the guilty).

Posted by Nick Warren at 11:53 AM