Pricing our service

Materacruz

Hey everyone, I first off wanted to say the startup nation forums are filled with genuine insight that have helped my partner and I dramatically in our first few months of moonlighting in our business. Thanks for all your help!Now onto the question... Materacruz Design Limited is our graphic design company that is targeting small to medium-sized businesses. Our goal is to inspire those who don`t have huge budgets to realize how important design is to their operation, and that it can actually be the determining factor in unleashing their companies` full potential. We want to work with creative and dedicated entrepreneurs like ourselves who are taking the risk and we want to help those people achieve their dreams.The only problem comes in when we hit a stumbling block recently trying to come up with innovative pricing strategies to generate interest in our services. We were thinking of creating a menu style pricing which would include all the basics that every company needs including a listing for : logo design, business cards, letterheads, brochures, catalogs, etc... We are trying to get away from the hourly charge that is associated with a service type industry because we feel people get turned off by such pricing structures. However we found it difficult to create these one shot prices (such as $500 for a custom logo design) because for some in our target market this price would be too high, and for others who are bigger companies this price would be too low...Compounding the problem we have recently been in contact with a major retailer who liked our work and wanted to contract us out for a huge project designing some of their training manuals. We surely want to do the project even though this client is not in our target market, but we have no idea how to price our services (which inevitably need to be priced on a per hour basis for this particular project) so that they would be fair across the board for both the small mom & pop shop and the bigger companies.We`d love to hear some thoughts and thanks in advance for your responses!  

steve

CookieMonster recommended a great book on this recent thread
that also dealt with pricing. I just got it used from Amazon and have
started reading it. One of those books that you wish you`d found
earlier but are glad you found it at least when you did. 

Materacruz

Thanks alot for the help Steve & Steve, I`ll be sure to look into the book:
The Strategy & Tactics of Pricing. It sounds like a winner at the very least!

Ps: I checked out the camp steve website some cool flash animations, well
done.