264. 2026 Pricing Strategy To Make More Money As A Photographer & Filmmaker - Creativ Rise Podcast

Build a Strong Foundation for Your 2026 Pricing Strategy The first thing about a good pricing strategy is that you need a floor. I cannot charge below this 'cause if I charge anything below this, I'm actually losing money. If your pricing sucks, it doesn't matter how hard you pitch, you might not get the job. So pricing is very, very important. I'm not doing that. That's called charging for your time. That's the worst way to charge. Speaker 2 What's up guys? Welcome back to the podcast. Happy new Year. This is episode 1 of 2026. Speaker 3 2026. Speaker 2 Start it off with a bang. Speaker 3 Yeah, we're so excited you're here. Welcome to 2026. It's crazy that we're already in 2026. I feel like 2025. Speaker 1 Flew. Speaker 3 By maybe you felt the same, but we are in 2026 and we're super excited for this episode because we thought we should start with a pricing episode. The easiest way for you to grow your business in 2026 is not by working harder is actually just by changing your pricing strategy, pricing your work in a more effective way, a more strategic way. And a lot of people don't understand how to actually price their work. They're just throwing out random numbers, hoping that the client's not going to say no if. Speaker 2 You also haven't updated your pricing at all in 25. This is going to be a great kick in the pants for you to do it because again, as Joey said, it's one of the easiest ways to grow your business and it's something that should be constantly changing. And so this is going to be really helpful. Speaker 3 The new year often comes with a lot of people feeling like it's a good time to raise their prices, just with a lot of things in the new year just tend to go up in price because it's a new year, so you should do the same. So this episode's gonna breakdown exactly how Christie and I price our work as photographers, film makers. If you're a social media manager or content creator, it's also gonna work for you. So this is gonna break it down. If you're a math person, you're gonna love this episode. If you're not a math person, stick with us in this episode. It's really gonna make sure that your 2026 is more profitable than last year, which we're super excited about. Join Us in the One Day Campaign to Feed Kids And before we jump into the episode, we've got something to kind of get you up on from last week. Last week we had actually talked about something that we're doing for the first time. This year was actually last year, now 2025, we are raising money to feed 100 kids as a community for the whole year of 2026. So that's feeding a kid every single day, Monday through Friday for the entire year of 2026 with a partnership through Convoy of Hope's children's feeding program. Now Convoy of Hope is one of our favorite charities. They are a really, really great. Speaker 2 Charity based here in the US. They're actually legit. Speaker 3 They're one of our favorite charities, not just because of their programs. They've got an awesome women's empowerment programs, disaster relief programs, children's feeding programs, but they're also one of our favorite charities because they are incredibly above board. They win awards for how they treat their finances and how they really split everything up and just the way they manage the the money that they're really given in order to do good in the world. And we really appreciate that. So we've come to love Convoy and we decided a couple weeks ago we should partner with Convoy Hope and try and get our creative community here at Creative Rise to try and feed an entire village of kids, 100 kids for every single day of 2026. And how we're doing that is we're encouraging you to get involved with us in the one day campaign. Now the one day campaign looks like, yes, you take everything you made last year, all of your revenue for 2025 last year, and then you divide that by 365 and that is going to give you one day's worth of your income from last year. All you got to do is just donate that one day worth of your wages from 2025 to feed kids alongside of Christy and I and the rest of our community. We're really encouraging you guys to get involved and we're going to raise $12,000 and feed 100 kids for every single day of 2026. Now at the time we're recording this, we are about 7 thousand $7500 in and we're really excited for where we are going to be in the next week or two as you guys continue to jump on in. So just thank you for getting involved we're. Speaker 1 Super. Speaker 3 Excited for the people have already donated and joined us in this. Speaker 2 It's going to be awesome. And Joe and I really do believe like your business is meant for good. Like if you have a business, if you have the opportunity and privilege to own a business and make money, this is such a cool opportunity for you to not only make an impact in your own life with your own business, but to take that income and actually do something around the world that actually effects other people other than just yourself, which is a huge privilege. So we just get so excited about doing stuff like this and if you want to partner with us, we'd absolutely love that. So if you want to figure out your number, get your one day's wage. And then Joey, how can they donate if they want? Speaker 3 Yeah, if you go to Instagram anywhere on Instagram, either respond to our stories, comment on our post or DM to us as DM us the word convoy. Or if you go to the link in the description of this YouTube video, spot cast Spotify episode or Apple podcast episode, you'll also see the link there. And thank you in advance for partnering with us and that we can't wait to feed 100 kids and make sure that none of those hundred kids for the entire year of 2026 have any issues with going hungry, having a a starving little belly, or, you know, any of the other health effects that come from malnutrition. So thank you in advance. Hope you love this episode. Here we go. What's up everybody, Welcome back to another episode. Joey here. So glad you're here Today we are talking pricing. Super stoked to break down our pricing model to you show you guys how we price out projects. Speaker 1 Literally the flow, the step by step flow and how we do it and how you can do it as well. And this is a really hot topic. This is a very, very important topic that we get asked all the time. Out of the six years we've been running this podcast and running Creative Rise, this is one of the biggest things that we get taught that we get asked to talk about all the time. So I'm really glad you're here today and then we're gonna jam on this. I hope that this episode is the most impactful 15 to 20 minutes that you spend all week, all month, and potentially all year in terms of actually building your business. Pricing is the foundation to which everything else gets built off of. If your pricing sucks, doesn't matter how hard, how hard you work, your business isn't going to grow the way you want it to grow, right? If your pricing sucks, doesn't matter how hard you pitch, you might not get the job. So pricing is very, very important. And so I'm excited to chat about today. Now, real quick disclaimer, a lot of people, if you're new here, you might be wondering who's this guy? Who's Joey? Who's Christy? Well, I'm Joey, my wife is Christy. We won Creative Rise together. We started it back in 2019. And your next question should probably be, will do you actually own a business? Like where are you getting all this stuff from that you're teaching on this podcast? Yes, we own a business. Christy started her wedding photography business back in 2015. Ended up traveling all over the world shooting destination weddings and then ended up shooting brands. I started my content agency back in 2014 and that came to today, back a couple years ago, three or four years ago now, we actually merged both those businesses into one. It's called Spears Collective and that's the business that we run now. We had our biggest month ever back in the beginning of 2025. We had 100,000 or $108,000 a month and last year actually went on to be a really, really great year in our business. And so we learned things as we do it and we share it on the podcast with you guys. We share it in different avenues of creative rise. And creative rise is just an Ave. that we love because we really believe that there's never been a better time to be a creative and we really believe in creatives getting paid to do what they love. And you do that by focusing on the business side of the business. So enough said about that was jump on into pricing. Stop Guessing: Discover Your True Pricing Floor So let's let's disprove a couple things real quick about pricing. OK. One of the things that I believed in earlier on in my career, like I said when I started my business back in 2014 that a lot of you guys might be subscribing to are a couple things right here. Number one, you're basing your pricing off of what other photographers or other social media managers on the other side of town, what other film makers and designers are pricing their work on. You really don't have any merit to it. It's just like, yeah, that's what I heard or I got that quote from that person. I'm going to just, you know, kind of do the same thing. I'm just going to just undercut them a little bit, right? Maybe you're pricing on what feels reasonable. Maybe you're pricing on what you feel is the kind of the maximum which you can see the client saying yes to before they laugh at you, right? These are not good ways to price your work. And for a lot of people, myself included when I got started, we don't really have anything else to to sink our teeth in. We just start running with these things, assuming that it's going to help us figure out how to price our work. And there's a way better way to do it. And I'm going need to be breaking it down for you today. So the first thing about a good pricing strategy is that you need a floor. You need a floor, you need a minimum. And what a floor is, is basically you need a price where, you know, I cannot charge below this because if I charge anything below this, I'm actually losing money. And you say, well, Joey, how could you be losing money when you're making money if you're not making enough money to cover the money you've already spent in order to operate your business, you were actually losing money. So every business needs a pricing floor. Your, your floor is going to come from two things. Your pricing floor is going to come from your cost to operate, your CTO cost to operate, meaning all the things in the business that are non expenses that are non billable to a client, their expenses that you just have to take on as the business owner in order to run the business. I'm going to break that down in a second. And then the other part of the equation here to figure out your pricing floor is the actual income that you want to earn that year from your business. So here's an equation, OK? Your cost to operate plus your target income equals your annual revenue goal. This is how you should be thinking about what are the expenses that are hard cost. These are the hard cost to operate my business that I cannot bill out to a client. And then what is the actual income I want to make from my business this year? Add those two things together and that gives you your, your, your, your actual annual revenue goal, which is awesome. So your project floor price then comes from your annual revenue goal divided by the amount of billable hours you have in a year. And that equals your hourly 4. So how do you figure out how many hours you want to work in a year? Well, the average person working 40 hours a week full time is probably working around roughly 2000 hours in a year. Gives you a couple weeks off 2000 hours in a year. Now here's the here's the dilemma, though, that often us creatives run into. We think about that and we go great, well, if we just charge by the hour, we can kind of, you know, Hosh posh away there and that's going to make sense. But the problem is, is that we don't actually get paid for all 2000 hours, right. If you think about your calendar, you're probably only shooting or, you know, working and producing for a client, whether it's filming, whether it's designing, whether it's photographing a wedding, you're only probably producing, actually delivering on your services for roughly like 20 to 40 at the very high end, like 40% of your working time, right? And So what we need to do is we need to actually take our annual workable hours. And then we need to figure out what are our actual billable hours, meaning how many hours of those, let's say 2000 hours per year. Are we actually like working in a way where it's billable hours? So here's what we're going to stick with me for a second. You're going to find your cost to operate. I'm going to teach you about that in a second, which is all the hard costs, the expenses of what it costs to actually operate your business. Then you're going to find how many billable hours you have in a year. You're going to add your cost to operate with the amount of money you want to make for your target income. And then you are going to divide that by your billable hours in a year. And that's going to give you your project hourly floor. That's going to give you an hourly floor. Now how do you, how do you then take that hourly floor and then get a project price? We're going to talk about that in a second, but stick with me. Differentiate Cost to Operate from Project-Specific Expenses I want to break down what a CTO is, right? What a cost to operate is. I'm going to talk about what it is and what it is not. So going to read a couple things right here. Your CTO, meaning the cost to operate your business. These are costs you cannot change. You cannot bill it out to a client for an individual job. These are costs like insurance. These are costs like software and subscriptions, accounting and bookkeeping, studio or Home Office expenses, healthcare, marketing and advertising, business systems and admin tools, and the list goes on. These are all things you can't bill to a client, right? These are things that you just have to absorb as the business owner. They're the cost of doing business. These are things that are not the cost of doing business, OK. These are things that are hard cost. You can bill to a client things like travel, rental equipment, if you're renting gear. I had to do that this week for a shoot. We need an extra lens. I had to rent that. I build that to the to the client that builds into the project. That's not something that's a that's a hard cost. That's the cost of doing our cost of running the business, cost of actually operating, right. That is a hard cost that I can build directly to the client. Another one would be location fees, contractors, editors, assistance, prop stylist, right, Anybody that that is contributing to a project that's specific to an individual project, we would say that is not a cost to operate. That is just a project expense, OK. So those are the differences right there. You need to be able to figure out your cost to operate in order to really figure out your pricing. So what I want you to do is I want you to think about this, take 1015 minutes, pause the podcast, recover it some time later today. And I want you to figure out the beginning of this formula. If you use something like QuickBooks, like we do, you can go into QuickBooks, download your profit and loss statements, throw it in the ChatGPT, say, hey, take these categories, insurance software and subscriptions, accounting and bookkeeping, studio and Home Office expenses, healthcare, marketing, advertising, business systems and admin tools. Tell me exactly what I spent on that, right? That is going to give you, your CTO, your cost to operate on an annualized perspective. OK, If you don't have something like QuickBooks, I need you to just estimate it, OK, Estimate what it's going to be in order to run your business every year based on what you spend on an annual, on an annual run rate. OK, now here's what you do. Once you get your CTO, again, you're going to take that CTO, you're going to add it to the target income, the amount of money you want to make, the share, the amount of money you want to earn, and that's going to give you your annual revenue goal. You can take your annual revenue goal, divide it by billable hours and that's going to give you your hourly for. Shift from Time-Based to Value-Driven Project Pricing So here's what you do now that you have your hourly floor price. And I'm going to give you guys at the end of this podcast an actual example of this and how it works. Literally for a shoot that we that we rinse and repeat all the time. We did multiple of these this month, two of them this month. But before we get there, I need to say that a project floor price, a floor price is not what you charge. You do not charge and quote your floor price. So you don't take your cost to operate. You don't take your, you know, your income goal. You don't divide that by your billable hours and then be like, Yep, sweet. It's 150 bucks an hour or $200.00 an hour or $75.00 an hour and you build them that way. That's not at you price. If you've been around creative rise for a while, you know that we do not price for our time. We use time in the formula to figure out pricing, but that is not the most important piece of pricing. OK, so here's what you need to do. You need to take your hourly floor price, 50 bucks an hour, 100 bucks an hour, 250 bucks an hour, 450 bucks an hour. You need to then multiply that by the amount of hours you can estimate a project is going to take you in order to complete the project. Now here's what's really important. I'm not giving a client that hourly rate and saying, yeah, I'll bill you at the end. Here's my hourly rate and we'll see how many hours it takes me. I'm not doing that. That's called charging for your time. That's the worst way to charge. I'm charging for the value of what we're doing. So I'm using my hourly rate or our company's floor price as we call it. And I'm figuring out I'm multiplying that floor place by the amount of hours. I think a job is going to take us 101525 hours and that is going to give us a minimum project price, OK. Now we've gone from a floor price to a minimum project price because we've now added in how many hours that project is going to take. Now, like I said, this is not the final price we're getting there. We're about 1/4 of the way through, OK, Now prices go up. This is the most important thing and I want you to get from today's episode. Prices go up when there is more at stake, prices go up when there is more value. This is super, super important. So once your minimum is covered, once your cost to operate and the amount of money you want to make in a year is covered and that equals your annual revenue goal divided by billable hours, which is your hourly flow rate. Then you multiply your hourly flow rate by the amount of hours the projects going to take you. You now have a minimum project price. You now get to the section where you need to figure out how much value am I actually adding into this project, giving to this client, and how can I add that and really have that effect my pricing for this project. This is where it gets really fun. So once your minimum is covered, pricing moves based on value, not based on time. Now this is very, very important to think about. There's so many people, myself included when I first started out who say things like, gosh, like how am I ever going to be able to make $100,000 a year because I'm charging, you know, $100.00 an hour And I'm working so much and I'm, I'm still not getting there. And I can't see clients wanting to pay any more than that. Well, it's because you're stuck charging for your time rather than the charging for your value. And you will always have more value to give a client than you will have time because value is infinite. Time is finite. We all have a certain amount of time per day. You can't make more of it, but you can always increase the value. So it's very important to look for ways to do that. And then we charge based on that value rather than on their time. Christy and I in February of 2025 had $108,000 month. We would have never been able to have $108,000 month as photographers, film makers and brand strategist. If we were charging for our time, it would have never happened, but it did because we're charging for a value. So here's a couple things that I want you to factor in to the equation when you're thinking about how do I figure out the value I'm adding to this project, to this client, OK, to this campaign. Leverage ROI, Speed, Quality, and Risk for Higher Rates First thing is you need to be thinking about the upside. If the upside is big, you can charge more for that and the upside you could translate to ROI. If a client is going to hire me and the client is going to use what we give them and we already know the client's got, you know, big channels, big marketing channels, are they going to be putting a lot of ad spend behind there? So they're really well known brand of the products, just really expensive. And so, you know, let's say they pay me 10 grand, but their products worth $30,000, it's some type of a vehicle, a car or something like that. All they have to do is sell 1/3 of a vehicle to make their money back, right? And so that would be high ROI. They're getting an easy return on investment on what they're paying us, right? So if the upside is big for the client, there's a lot of potential ROI. You can charge more for that because that also means there's more at risk if the project goes wrong and all that ROI and that upside is not realized, it's not capitalized on. OK, so the first thing is if the upside is big, you can charge more for that. It's the first piece of value you have to figure out with the client, and that is individual to every client. That's why I would charge Nike more money to shoot, you know, a clothing line of new T-shirts they dropped. I charge more for that than some random Mon Paw shop in my town that just opened their business and they're selling like 15 shirts a week, right? I could charge Nike much more money than I could charge them. And not because it's like old Nike has more money to spend. No, it's because there's more upside for Nike. They are going to make millions of dollars off of this. If it goes well, there's a lot bigger upside than this small Mon Paw shop. So if the upside is bigger, the ROI is bigger. You can charge more for that. There's more value there. Number 2. Second part of understanding the value, how quick is the turn around? What's the timeline look like? OK, so we had a shoot a couple weeks ago and we flew down to San Diego in the morning. We flew back from San Diego in the evening and we delivered all the images and six reels that next day, 24 hour turn around. That's an incredibly fast timeline and the client paid for it. The client needed a really quick turn around and so the client paid for it. So it's very important you understand that when things get squeezed, when timelines get squeezed, there's an opportunity there to charge more for it. That is immense value, right? That's why so many of us vote with our dollars and we buy things off Amazon because we love that Amazon's winning because we love that they can get things to us quickly, right. People really value speed and efficiency. Therefore they will pay for the value goes up #3 the third part about recognizing value and making sure you charge for it is if you just if it's just good quality. If you've been doing this for a while or maybe you haven't even been doing it for a while, but you're very, very good at it. Your skills are super proficient. You're very highly skilled. Well, people are going to pay more for that, right? If you're a phenomenal strategist. So every time you shoot content, photos, videos for business, you're getting them tons of exposure, views, attention online because of how you think about the strategy and, and the content before you even produce it. That's great quality. You can charge more for that. If you're a wedding photographer who's been shooting for years or even you've just been shooting for like 2 seasons, but you're really, really good. You've got your own individual style, you're sought after because of the quality of work. You can charge more for that, right? That is the third one. Number four. This is the one that's most important. It's all about risk. Value goes really high, skyrockets when risk is diminishing. So if a client hires us and we can say, hey, here's the six of the clients we've done this exact same style of project for in the last four months, here's exactly how we're going to do it. Step one, Step 2. Step three, here's the date we're going to deliver on and here's all the ways we're going to communicate with you up until that happens. There is limited risk in that they know we have a proven track record, we've got clear communication channels and we have a plan to execute with a guaranteed delivery time versus hiring some random creative down the road who's like, Oh yeah, yeah, I could probably do that. Just send me some money, you know, I'll bill you for 50% and I'll let you know what I can get those that stuff on over to you. Who are they going to feel like has more risk? The other creative, right? They're going to be like, that feels way riskier than working with Joey and Christy. We're going to go work with Joey and Christy. Well, anytime you decrease risk and people are more guaranteed of an outcome or they're more likely to get an outcome, well, value goes up. So when you Add all these together, the upside and the ROI is high, the timeline is tight, the quantity and quality of your work is really solid and the client needs certainty that things are actually going to get delivered. The risk is diminishing. Those are all indicators for immense amounts of value you're adding to a project. So that is what you need to take. See the Pricing Framework Applied to a Brand Photoshoot Take your floor price. We talked about earlier, you now have a project floor price and then you need to look to increase that project floor price, increase that project price by multiplying it based off of some of these value factors. I'm going to show you an example of that at the end of this episode. But that is super important. Now once you do that, you add in some value. Let's say you add, let's say you add 25% for the ROI thing. You add another 15% for the tight timeline. You add 10% for the quality being so good and then you are so good at DE risking situations and making sure the clients are going to get the exact outcomes they want to add another 25%, right. Let's say that gives you a number. Then you actually get to the hard cost, the hard expenses that are project expenses. So the hard costs are separate, Christy and I say this, whether it's a wedding, whether we whether this is a brand deal, whether we are flying somewhere to shoot a product brand, whether this is social media management, whether this is branch strategy, whatever you're doing, we always opt that you charge for your expenses for the project at cost and you bill them directly to the client. So here's an example, OK, let's say that you had a photo shoot you're going to charge 5 grand for and then there was another like $3500 worth of expenses. I don't estimate those expenses and go, I think there might be $3500 worth of expenses. So I'm just going to throw them on in there and hopefully I can keep it under that. And I'm just going to try and fit it into my project price. No, I say to the client, hey, here's the things we're expecting to expense on this project. Can you approve these? And we will make sure we can keep costs as low as possible, but we just want to know if these expenses get approved that way, we can go ahead and spend it and we'll bill them to you at cost when we invoice you the final time. That's a way better way to do it. OK, so here's how this all works. Now you take your annual income goal. What you want to make. You take your cost to operate your CTO. You add those two things together. That is going to give you your annual income goal. OK, your annual revenue goal for your business. You then take your revenue goal divided by your billable hours. That is going to give you your floor price. You then take your floor price and you multiply your floor price by how many hours that job is going to take you. That is going to give you a minimum project price. You then take that minimum project price. You then add a bunch of the value stacks on top of that on how you're adding value to this project. You charge for your value by using those multipliers. I'm going to show you in a second and then that is going to give you a price and then you add on all of your hard cost to actually make the project happen. This is models, this is permits, this is flights, right? Hard costs are separate from your project fee. They build into the final price though. And so it's very important you take your project price and your hard cost and that is going to add up into the final price. So here's an example. I told you guys this whole time I was going to give you an example of how this works. This is literally something that we have done multiple times. We do we do tons of these last year in last year in 2025, we probably did 12 to 14 of these shoots pretty much at this exact same price. And I'm going to break down all the numbers for you right here. So let's say that we're doing a brand photo shoot, K. We're shooting product, we're shooting some type of brand. It's a commercial project. Let's say we're on on the hook for 40 images and five or six reels K and we're going to shoot all this in one day. Here's what this can look like. Let's say that this I'm going to take my CTO, I'm going to make up some numbers here. So let's say my cost to operate and my target income for the year is an accumulative $180,000. OK, Now let's say that my annual workable hours in a year, 20 hour or 2000 hours, which is, you know, basically 40 hours a week full time. And let's say that my billable hours, the actual number of hours that I'm going to be shooting and producing for clients in that given year is going to be about roughly 25%, so 500 hours. So here's what I do. I take 180,000, which is my CTO, my cost to operate and you know, part of what I want to make in that year combined. Take my CTO and my, my cost, my cost to operate and my, my annual income goal, which gives me my revenue goal for the business. I then divide that $180,000 by 500, which is the amount of billable hours in a year. And that is going to give me $360.00 an hour, which is my hourly floor price. Now, again, we don't charge our hourly floor price. That is step one in understanding pricing. We then have to take this and then multiply that hourly floor price by the amount of hours the job is going to take us. So let's say this hour, this job is going to take us about 16 hours to get this thing done. OK, so will we go 360? That's where hourly floor price times 16 hours and that is the price of $5760. Now this is the minimum project price. This is at the very least we have to charge this to break even. Now we always then look towards the value and say what's the value we are adding into this client and well, how do we make sure we're charging for our value, not our time. Your minimum floor price is just your time. How do we make sure we're adding in a ton of value equation into this so we can charge for a value? Because you never want to charge for your time. You always want to charge for your value. So let's look at this. We take our minimum project price of $5760. And then I'm going to start asking myself some questions. What is the potential ROI on this? Well, is it a, a, a national brand? Is it a brand that's big in our state? Is it a brand that's that's national? Is it a multinational, international company? And a lot of the companies that we end up working with are big national companies or international multinational companies. So there's a lot of upside for them. There's a lot of ROI. So let's say we add another 30%, OK, 24 hour turnarounds, we do a lot of 24 to 7 day turnarounds and for that we add another 25%. That's pretty much just standard. We bake that into all of our projects we do. It's part of the value we provide as we bake it into the project cost, OK, high quality and strategic bar what we do I think is very high quality. I think we're really, really good at what we do. I'm going to add another 20% for the value we're bringing there now ROI at scale and how do we actually de risk this? How do we make sure there's no risk in this? We've got awesome processes, great communication lifetime, it feels like of a proven track records, tons of testimonials. I know that when clients come to work with us, part of them coming to us is because they want to work with a partner that is going to de risk this, whether it's Christie shooting a wedding or whether it's Christy and I shooting for a brand or a commercial project, in this case a commercial project, there's not a lot of risk working with us. So we've proven track records. We're going to tell you how we're going to do it. We're going to deliver on time or before, OK, so I'm going to add another like 25% there. So total all that value up. Let's say we're adding another 100% to the project. Well, the project was worth 5057 sixty. That was our minimum project price. We just added 100% worth of value equations that we've added into the project. So that's another 5760. So 5760 + 5760 is now $11,520.00. So this means our project price is now just to do this project like 40 photos, like really, really good photos, not duplicates, like real, real photo set of like really good 40 images, OK, they can use them anymore full use on them six reels, it's going to cost $11,520. Now we could round that out to even more even numbers, OK? But now what we do is we then have to look at what are hard cost billable to the project. Are are there flights, are there models, are there props, are there permits, are there location fees, right? We have to figure all of that stuff out. So let's say that we add another 5000. Typically, we get $5000 expense budgets from our clients. It's a very standard that we ask for and we tend to operate at a minimum of a $5000 expense budget for most of the campaigns we shoot. Well, that now brings this final price to 16,520. And anytime Christy and I shoot pretty much when we're working with brands, especially national and multinational brands, we are working in a ballpark of probably 13 to $20,000. So this is landing really in the middle of that and this is how we often have come to these prices and these prices work really well for these clients and they add a lot of value to our business and pay as well, which is really cool. So this is super, super important. Master the Pricing Framework for 2026 Business Growth Why this matters and why I give you that example is I'm trying to show you that your floor price protects you and make sure that you're going to be breaking even on your cost to operate and on the, the income that you want to make in a year. But the value that you're charging for expands the price you're able to charge and then hard cost you bill separately, you bill those at cost to the client for individual projects. If you can learn how to do this, if you can learn how to use this pricing framework. I, I threw out a ton of numbers in this episode. I threw out a lot of different equations, but I'm going to break it down one last time for you. It's much more simple than you might be thinking it would be. Hopefully this podcast has made it very simple. If you can write this down, if you could familiarize yourself with this, if you can play around with it. Heck, we built a calculator that does a bunch of this stuff for you. It's totally free. We're actually coming up with a new version of it in the next couple of months. It's going to be even better. We'd love for you to have that. Go to creativebrows.com/pricing Calculator. You can opt in and get a free account there and start using it today. But this is the simple pricing framework. One more time. I'm going to recap it right here. Number one, figure out what your business needs to make for the year. This is your cost to operate, meaning all of the costs that are just it's associated with running a business on an annualized run rate. Figure out what your cost to operate is plus the amount of income, your target income, the amount of income you want to make in a year. That is going to give you your annual revenue goal. You then take your annual revenue goal and you divide that by the amount of billable hours you have in a year, not the amount of hours you're going to work, the amount of billable hours that you can actually bill to a client where you're actually shooting, you're actually editing, you're actually designing, you're actually on set, you're actually doing pre production, right. It's probably 20 to 40% of your year. 20 to 40% of your actual workable hours are your billable hours. OK. So once you take your what's your business needs, your CTO plus your target income, that's going to give you your annual income, your revenue goal. You then divide that by your actual billable hours, that's going to give you your pricing floor. Once you have your pricing floor, you're going to multiply that by the amount of hours in the project and that is going to give you your minimum project price. After you have that, you look towards all of the value stakes that we have there, ROI timeline, how quickly you're turning things around, the quality of work you do, how are you de risking the situation in the project. Those four things are massive value indicators that can increase your pricing. So you run your price now through that and that's going to spit you out a project price, which you are then going to look at what is it actually going to cost to get this project done in terms of hard expenses that are billed to the client, flights, models, permits, props, all of those things. You Add all that together and that is going to give you your project price and not my friends, is how you price your work as a creative in 2026. And I promise you, if you do this and you do it right, you're going to learn how to build the muscle around pricing. You're going to get so much better at it. It's going to become second nature to where you can just RIP off pricing really, really easily. And that my friends, will be a really fun day. That'll be a good day. So hopefully it's been super helpful for you. If it has, make sure you let us know. Would love to hear some feedback from you on how this helped you today. If you've got a friend that you know is under charging or is always struggling with charging, racking the brain with charging, whether it's in the wedding space, whether it's in the brand and commercial space, the influencer space, the content creator space, make sure you send them this episode. Say, hey, listen to this. You're going to have a better 2026 if you do that. And I'll end with this. The easiest way to grow your business, guys, by 25% in a year, 50% in a year is not working more. It's by shifting your pricing model. You can work the exact same, maybe even less than you did last year, but make more money this year by pricing strategically, pricing properly. And a lot of that's going to come down to how you price for your value, not just your time. I'll leave you that. Hopefully you're having a great day, guys. For me, Christy, and the rest of the team here that makes this podcast happen. Hopefully you're having an awesome day and we'll catch you next week. Elevate Your Business with the Creativ Rise Mastermind All right, well I hope you guys loved. Speaker 2 That episode on pricing and that it got you hyped up for building your business in 2026. There's actually a lot more, as you probably know, to building a business than just pricing. It's a massive piece of the puzzle. But there's actually 6 pillars to building A6 figure creative business. And we know this because Joey and I have built multiple 6 figure creative businesses in our own spheres. And we know that these other things are so important, just as important as pricing, for instance, marketing, sales, all that good stuff. It all cohesive matches together to build a system that operates in the wedding space, in the brand space and social media space that build 6 figure businesses. And so we've actually taken all of that information, those six pillars and have broken it up into a six week program. And what that is, it's the six week mastermind. Maybe you've heard about it. We are running round fifteen of the six week Creative Rise Mastermind coming mid February. Now we only take a Max of 36 businesses every single round because we want it to be intimate. We want to work with you you on your creative business to build it to be a thriving 6 figure creative business in 2026. So if you are interested at all in being a part of that mastermind, If you want to learn more about it, go to creativerise.com. There's a million buttons everywhere for you to join the wait list. And again, it's a wait list because it sells out every single time. Most of the spots do get taken up by the wait list. It's totally free to join. There's no commitment. So jump on over there and you'll get some free stuff as well, which is super exciting. But you guys, this was a really fun episode. As we've talked about at the beginning of the episode, we are doing the one day campaign with Convoy of Hope. So if you want to celebrate the fact that your business did awesome in 2025 or celebrate the fact that you want to go in giving in 2026, join us for for the one day campaign. Take your top line revenue from 2025 / 365 and take that amount and you can donate it towards feeding 100 kids for this entire next year. We have a goal of $12,000 and we are on our way there. So we don't invite you to join us in that. So we are so, so excited. So all you got to do is comment convoy or go to the description in this episode. You can go to the convoy link and go ahead and donate there. But if you're on one of our post on our Instagram, you can comment convoy and we will send you the link directly for that if that's easier for you. So we so appreciate anyone who's going to be a part of that. We are so excited because we've already donated and we're so excited to see those kids get fed this next year. And if this episode was helpful for you, if you've got a friend that maybe needs help with pricing that you're like, hey, you definitely need to raise your prices, go ahead and send it to a friend. Make sure to subscribe to the show. And if you want to post on Instagram and shout us out, tag creative rise and we'd love to repost you and connect to you there. But you guys, we are so excited for 2026. We got another episode coming for you next week, so we'll see you then.