Bonus Money: Design Services

If you’re not doing this already …. Please start immediately! 🙂 Seriously though, your clients are used to paying for design services and they will pay for your design services too!

If you’re putting a system together for them and especially if you provide any documentation like prints, layouts, input / output lists… you are designing it and your clients (many of them) will value it. And as with anything, you have the discretion to discount or remove it if necessary. 

This is similar to our Miscellaneous Line article where it’s a task, a part, or a service that you’re already pro

viding. You are designing and engineering, or you may have another company (like BlueDog) or an employee, or a team of employees doing this type of work. No matter how it’s getting accomplished, it’s a cost in time and/or services that you already have. This is a way to start getting paid for it.

You could charge a design retainer, it works for many integrators, but it requires getting your salespeople on board with that train of thought which can create additional resistance to implementing it.

Instead, we recommend building in a percentage for design labor on your proposals. Whether you present a full D-Tools and AutoCad 3D rendering, or you just scribble it on a sheet of paper, there is thoughtful planning that goes into creating every proposal (ideally) and that time shouldn’t be for free.

If you happen to quote your projects by system, you can add an appropriate percentage on top of each system. A prewire may have a higher design cost than a Sonos system. Distributed video should have more design involved th

an a one room TV installation. So you can use some of that logic to add an amount that would be reasonable to your clients.

When you do this for every system, you can add on $1000’s for a large system or at the very least, $100’s on smaller ones. Multiply that by the number of systems you sell each year and that adds up quick

Note: If you use software like D-Tools for quoting your projects, you can simply add a modifier on top of your install labor to account for Design Services. It’s typically a percentage on top of your base labor.

For example: If you set your Design Services percentage to 5%, that means for every $100 of tech labor you propose, D-Tools will add an additional 5% on top for Design Time. 

At the end of the day you can configure that number to whatever you feel is best. 5-15% is a great range of percentages to shoot for with Design Services.