Well, we've done this a couple of times, and it seemed to work pretty well without much gnashing of teeth...
A couple of years ago we upped the rates in a couple of our suites... quite substantially, in fact.... from $150/hr to $225/hr. That really is a pretty huge increase (a whopping 50%), but it had been at a painfully-too-low rate for painfully-too-long, compared to what the market here will bear and considering the talent/equipment used and quality of the work.
For any brand
new work with brand-new clients, it was easy... we just charged the new rate.
But for
existing clients (which most of ours are), we basically deferred the rate hike for a while. I think this was early fall or so when it happened, and we explained to them individually that while we were being forced to raise our rates to the other clients in general, because
they've been "such a good client," that we weren't going to spring an unexpected rate bump on
them now, and that we would keep working for
them at our old rate through the end of the year. I think it made them feel as though they were getting some kind of favored deal... which they actually were. It's just that
all the existing big clients were getting the same one.
We wanted to give them time to find other production sources, we explained, if their future projects didn't have budgets that meshed with our new rates.
In the end, we didn't have any complaints, and we didn't lose any clients over it.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
