Field Guides / Case studies
A composite of several members' coaching threads, anonymised. No names or identifying details.
Owners at every stage, some with years of quoting behind them, kept stopping before they sent a number to ask whether it was fair. The number came from a feeling, so it went down the moment anyone leaned on it. What replaced the guessing was a method: build the price from what the job costs plus a margin you chose, the same way every time.
The situation was the same moment turning up in thread after thread: a quote ready to send, and a last-minute question before sending it. One owner asked "do you think that's fair?" on quote after quote, and sometimes "I think I may have over-quoted." Another, still building the commercial basics, asked "how should I charge?" again and again.
A third was pricing a staff film for a health-sector client with a grant-funded budget, and put the bind plainly: "I don't want to come in swinging and have it hit at $7K right off the bat, but I also don't want to price under and leave money on the table."
What was going wrong was that no quote had a method underneath it, so fear set the price. The clearest example came from an owner quoting a customer-story film.
He quoted $4,750. The client came back to say they'd set aside $4,000 ex GST. He reworked the job out loud in the thread: a day rate that he treated as covering his travel and gear, two edit days at the same rate, a production fee, and the hire of a second camera. Then he went looking for a number he could hold, offered to come down to $4,350, and gave his own verdict on the reply he'd drafted: "I know it doesn't sound professional."
That one exchange shows the cost. He had no way to show the client how $4,750 was built, so the only lever left to pull was the price. And his day rate was quietly absorbing travel and gear, so part of the work was being given away inside the number before any discount at all.
What changed was the question each owner was asking. Instead of "is this number fair?", every thread got the same answer: a way to build the number from parts you can list, which are your time (all of it, not just the camera days), your gear, your overhead, and your margin as a line rather than a leftover.
The owner pricing to the grant budget used the Pricing Calculator to build the quote up from the job itself (a one or two day local shoot, and whether to add an assistant) rather than down from the client's figure. Another worked through a business audit worksheet to find his real margin per job once his own time was taken out, which is the groundwork in know your numbers.
The owner who had offered $4,350 was coached to present his price with confidence rather than apologise his way into a discount. On a later job, where the budget was lower than the work deserved, he drafted a reply that kept planning and filming intact and reduced the number of social edits instead of cutting his rate (drop the scope, not the price).
The full method, from day rate to a four-section quote with a contingency line, is on the guide this story belongs to: how to price a video project so every quote isn't a guess.
What the coaching record shows after is a change in how the price gets defended, not a revenue figure. Once the parts are on the page, a client who pushes gets a walkthrough of how the number was built.
The threads don't record what any of these quotes went on to win or earn, so this page doesn't claim a figure.
The test is whether you could show a client exactly how your last number was built. Take the last quote you sent: could you explain it line by line, or did you feel for it, send it and hope?
The method behind this story. How to price a video project so every quote isn't a guess: the day-rate worksheet, the quote skeleton, the ballpark script and the pushback walkthrough, all copy and paste.
Related tools and guides. Pricing Calculator, Anatomy of a Profitable Quote, Charging for the invisible work.