Took me 3 years to realize my friend was right about charging a rush fee

My buddy Dave who does web dev kept telling me to add a 50% rush fee for any project under a week. I thought he was being greedy and figured I'd just lose work. Last month a client asked me to turn around a 40 page editing job in 3 days. I said sure for my normal rate, pulled two all nighters, and then they asked for revisions. I was exhausted and underpaid. Finally tried Dave's advice on the next rush project and the client didn't even blink. Now I kick myself for all those late nights I could have charged double for. Anyone else have advice they ignored forever?

3 comments

3 Comments

webb.hannah5d ago

My buddy Marcus did the same thing for his landscaping gig, lost a year of sleep over it.

alext525d agoMost Upvoted

Marcus did it for landscaping which is mostly seasonal work. Doing this for a B2B service business that runs year round is a different animal entirely. The sleep loss scales with the nonstop demand.

angela7285d ago

Oh you're totally right that B2B is a different beast (year round demand is no joke). But here's the thing - I've seen a few service businesses pull it off by frontloading the pain. They automate the boring client communication stuff early on so when things get busy they're not drowning in emails at 2am. Maybe the sleep loss is more about how you set up your systems than when you do the work, you know?