It is a curious thing that the toughest challenges we face at Stage One are rarely technical. Of course, we spend lots of time developing, prototyping, engineering and manufacturing, and those processes certainly throw up some thorny problems. But before we even set out on that journey, there is a much bigger task at hand in answering this deceptively simple question.

What will my project cost?

It’s a really good question, and getting the answer right is not just critical for our clients, it’s super important for us too. Whilst serving the creative industry sector is always interesting, it does mean that every scheme brought to us for pricing will be novel or unique in some way. There is no catalogue. It isn’t like ordering from Amazon. Besides, what we produce would never fit through your letter box.

So how do you go about pricing projects?

Simply put, the more information provided in your brief, the more accurately we can price your project. But don’t panic if there are gaps, experience tells us that a client will often know what they want to achieve but not how, and that’s where we come in. Our team will work with you to develop designs and clarify details.

Because most briefs are a work in progress, common pricing strategies in business don’t work for us. Value based pricing (hard to determine perceived value of a giant whale shark for example), competitive pricing (impossible in a closed bid situation within a niche marketplace), penetration pricing (clients resist the future price rises). The information gap actually informs how we cost projects.

So, how do we price projects?

We have an excellent costing and analysis department that consists of people with design, engineering, architectural, manufacturing and technical project management experience. It’s a small but perfectly formed team whose sole focus is on getting a price back to you.

This department relies upon our homegrown ERP system that contains pricing information from our suppliers, rates for our workshop and on-site teams, and perhaps most useful of all, an archive of more than six thousand projects that we’ve costed over the last two decades. This combines very powerfully with an internal consulting process that leverages the experience of a wider team of people in the business that have taken many of these projects through to completion.

And here’s the thing. We don’t always get pricing right. Sometimes we over-estimate and lose out to a competitor. Sometimes we underestimate and make a loss on a project. It’s a particularly tricky business, but like Goldilocks, mostly we get it just right. And using the analysis of previous project typologies, we continue to refine our costing model.

But we operate in a dynamic market. Pandemics, tariffs, fluctuating demand, even conflict all play a significant role in influencing how we price. In recent years we’ve seen a sheet of plywood rise to more than £200 and have seen the price of thick steel sheet jump overnight by 700%. Fixing a price for any length of time can be risky.

So what’s real the secret?

It would be really foolish to disclose our exact pricing process in exchange for social media likes. So, you’ll be disappointed if you’re looking for an inside edge. However, take great comfort in the knowledge that we have a broad and deep supply chain which allows us to procure materials at best value. We have an arsenal of high-end machinery to optimise the manufacturing process. And we monitor our labour rates to ensure value for clients and fair reward for our highly skilled and dedicated employees and crew.

And despite pricing oftentimes being seen as a competition or negotiation, we see it as the start of our collaboration. How we can deliver your project together, within your budget. If we’ve sent you a cost, talk to us about it. We’ll help you digest and understand it. We’d be happy to discuss alternative materials or methods of manufacture or find a way through the competing threads of timescales/scope/budget to get to where you need to be. We like the opportunity to talk through how we’ve arrived at a price, and this dialogue often heralds the start of the design development process. Our decades-long experience of pricing creative projects can often help to get to agreement on price and can expedite the overall programme.

Working with us will never be like buying products off-the-shelf and looking back at the clients we’ve worked with and the projects we’ve delivered, we’re really glad it’s not. You can be absolutely sure that whatever you order from us, will be one of a kind, even if we can’t always deliver next day.