Gaining Profit: Web Maintenance
March 13th, 2008 | Posted in Profit.
This post is going to contradict my previous post regarding the pitfalls of website maintenance. One may ask, how can you gain profit by providing website maintenance? The answer relates to my other previous pitfall post regarding hourly billing. When you charge by the hour, you are basically earning based on the time you spend to do something. Instead of dropping maintenance clients, consider doing it yourself.
SET LIMITS…
Allocate a certain amount of time each month to devote to maintenance. Estimate the time needed each month on maintenance for a client. Next multiply this by your current maintenance rate (if hourly). Subtract a portion of the cost as a discount. Charge the client each month this number.
Example:
- Client ABC will use about 3 hours a month for maintenance.
- My hourly rate is $70. Times three that’s $210.
- Let’s take off $10 and make it an even $200 (Around $66 per hour).
- I sign a one year maintenance contract at $200 per month with ABC.
The client is aware that they are limited to three hours of maintenance time a month at this rate and anything after three hours will be billed at $70 per hour. The client also understands that this time cannot be rolled over to the next month and cannot be refunded if not used.
DID YOU SAY PROFIT?
In the above example, let’s say that we promptly complete the client’s change requests and keep them happy. Let’s also say that the client used 24 out of the allocated 36 hours for the year. That’s 12 hours of time resulting in a profit of around $800!
BUT I DON’T WANT TO DO WEB MAINTENANCE…
That’s okay! But there are starving contractors out there that would love to have some work. Let’s say you hire a contractor to handle the changes for ABC. The contractor works for $35 per hour. You pay them $840 for the year and earn a profit of around $1,500!
CONCLUSION
I hated website maintenance. Each time I had to do it, I felt that it was draining me dry. By using the above example, I made website maintenance worth my time. I no longer dread the thought of doing it anymore.
