How much should I charge for a Training Video?

Nemesis_Enforcer

Nemesis_Enforcer

Member
I have a possible client who wants to make a training video for their kennel. It's to train dogs. How much do you thing I should charge for it? I'm guessing it will have a runtime of about an hour.

I have seven years of video production experience if that helps. I've never made anything this large and me and my team will be doing everything but pressing and distributing the dvds.
 
What's their budget? IMO you could write this for a $10,000 or you could write it for $100,000. Just depends on how much they want to sink into it. Questions like - VO talent, on camera talent, how many segments, how many locations, how many shooting days, will there be music, any effects work, how big of a crew will you need, is there any specialized equipment necessary (eg teleprompter), along with quite a few others come to mind.

I'd schedule a meeting with the client ASAP to discuss what they really want out of this video and what they can really afford. Might want to loosely put together a couple of different estimates for them, one high and one low, and outline the specifics of each. The low budget might only use thier facility as the sole location where the large budget might be in a studio and outside in a park.
 
Charge what you can sell it for. Ever notice an Ipod at Best Buy is a different price at other appliance stores? Its because they look at the market, their competition, and what they are selling and price it accordingly.

As Anderson said above, go in with a good, better & best, and let them qualify.

However, one important note as we work on these all the time. Clients will say they have little money, then bust your balls on ridiculous frivolous issues. Just yesterday, I had a client tell me my math was off on a Metric conversion. He had 3.76 L, instead of the 3.75 I had. Simple to him, re-doing a nested effect for me. Point being, dont just say in your quote 'a 1 hour video'. Say a 1 hour video which will take 30 hours to edit, 2 days to shoot, etc. after that we charge $xyz dollars per hour extra. Qualify the work you will perform up front, then you and your client are on the same page.
 
I did an 18 minute training video on food services for a company for about $12,000. I considered that at the absolute low end of what I'd do, and it was because it was my first training video so I wanted the experience. I put 10 days of work into the project at about 8-10 hours per day average let's say, and I got paid about $200/day as co-writer / director / producer. That was not the kind of pay I'd accept to do a project like that again. I would want at least $300/day, and even that's generous of me, probably $400/day.

Also, the company had another production company bid this project and they said it would cost them $30,000. So I save them $18,000 on the video, but gained a relationship for future training videos they have planned, and they understand those will cost slightly more.

So I guess it depends on how you work, what you consider your basic professional standards for work delivered, what you want to make, etc. But for an hour-long training video? I mean I would think you'd be quite justified in charging $40,000.
 
I'd definitely meet with them to get some of the expectations for the video (how many segments, how wide the distribution, what priority is the video for their company, production quality, etc.) and based on that or by asking them, try to figure out what they're willing/hoping to spend on the video. And then based on that write up a proposal with a detailed, estimated budget. And remember you can always come down on price, but raising the price after the first estimate will be very hard to do.

Also, if they are going to be selling alot of these DVDs, I'd figure out their hard cost profit margin (cost of physical disc, case, etc. against what they'd be selling it for) and estimate how much money they could make off of the DVDs. Whenever possible I try to pitch my services as an investment that will make them money. If you can show them what kind of money they can make, they'll probably be more willing to spend more on production and justify it as paying for the video with their expected sales money.
 
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Nemesis_Enforcer said:
Thanks for the replies. I want to definitely do my homework before diving into this.
Click to expand...

Good for you. If it's a "what you see is what you get" informal as-is (in camera editing) instructional video with a limited audience and distribution, you might only charge $50/hour.

On the other hand, if it's a high-end production with a large target audience that requires tons of editing, you'll certainly want to work under a "time and materials" budget with a project milestones, work breakdown, deliverables, process descriptions, ownership responsibilities, ... (you get the idea).

Enjoy, Michael
 
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