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Consultancy Fees
Hi everyone,
I’ve not been able to find anything specific to television in my searches regarding consultancy fees. Hopefully someone can offer advice.
Here’s the lowdown; I work for a company that (amongst other things) specialises in the production of a particular niche sport programming. Our programmes broadcast in the US, UK and Europe, and the company has been producing these programmes for getting on for ten years.
The director of the company has recently been asked to offer a consultation service to another production company who want to produce one of these programmes in Dubai. They have no experience in this field.
The question really is, how much should we charge?
The things we’re taking into consideration are;-
– Our company has experience that is second to none, worldwide, in this field of production;
– They will be competing with us if the company in Dubai pull of a good programme, which they should given the consultation our company will offer them!We’ve already suggested to them that we provide key crew members for their production, which they are considering.
Consultation isn’t something we’ve done before, and really don’t know where the begin when quoting prices. What would be a going rate for this sort of thing? We’re UK based, but US prices will give us a good starting point.
Thanks very much,
Alex Elkins -
1 Reply
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We were recently asked to bid on a project for a company in the defense field. It was an unusual request in that they wanted us to consult with them and provide recommendations on how to brand their company and ultimately improve their marketing among agencies that bought their military type product.
We just sat down and figured out best we could how many hours we felt like it would take us to do research, meet with the client and brainstorm, and then develop a set of recommendations (based on a list of goals we had confirmed beforehand with the client).
Then we just multiplied our regular hourly rate by that number of hours. We had no idea if we were in the ballpark and we thought our estimate sounded high. But once submitted, we were the 2nd highest bidder among 4 total. The client loved our proposal but because we had no experience in the defense field and hadn’t really done consultant type work before…we didn’t get the gig. The highest bidder did! Maybe we should’ve estimated higher? Actually…all the winning company did was consult work…so that was the main reason they got the gig.
But like you…we had NO idea how to estimate or bid the job after our initial meetings with the client. But once we sat down and actually starting thinking about what it would take to give them what they were looking for, it actually became fairly easy. I will say, we put at least 20-24 hours into preparing the bid and proposal, from the time we met with the client, to internal meetings, and writing the proposal and figuring the budget.
Hope that helps.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
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