Featured on this episode:

• Join The Designers Edge and my May 5th workshop.
• Grab Your Free Script Guide here
• Access the full video interview with Elana Steele of Steele Appliance here

What you will learn from this episode:

• Why a solid fee still falls apart, and the two specific places it happens

• How the story you tell yourself before a proposal presentation shows up in the room

• The three things you must do consistently to protect your fee once a project is underway

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Before I get into it, I want to say something clearly: this episode is for everyone, regardless of where you are in your pricing right now.

That means whether you’re still figuring out what to charge on construction projects, whether you’ve been doing this for years and have a system that mostly works but suspect there are gaps, or whether you’re somewhere in the middle. Today is about the specific moments where pricing breaks down. And they are the same moments whether you’re in year two or year twenty.

Once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

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The Number Isn’t Always the Problem

When you finish a construction project feeling underpaid, when a client pushes back on your fee, or when scope has crept so far from where it started that you can barely remember what you originally agreed to, the instinct is almost always the same.

The number was wrong. Too low. Underestimated. Not enough.

And sometimes that’s true. But not always for the reason you think.

The number can be wrong because of how it was built. A scope of work that was too loose to support good math. A contractor you’d never worked with before, whose rhythm and communication style you hadn’t yet learned. A client whose communication style required significantly more hand-holding than your initial conversations suggested. A project that looked straightforward on paper but revealed complexity once the walls came down.

All of those variables are accountable for, and they should be accounted for every single time. That’s exactly what buffer time is for.

Building buffer time into your fee is not padding. I want to be clear about that. It is an honest accounting for how construction actually unfolds week after week. Construction has more moving pieces, more people, and more decisions that happen in real time than you can fully anticipate. Your pricing has to be built to absorb that reality, not to assume everything will go according to plan, because it won’t. The designers who price as if it will are the ones who finish projects feeling like they worked for free.

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Even When the Number Is Right, Pricing Can Still Fall Apart

Here’s what I know from years of doing this and from talking to designers at every experience level.

Even when the number is solid — even when the scope of work is tight, the math is right, and you’ve accounted for the variables — pricing still breaks down. And it breaks down in two very specific places that have less to do with your math and more to do with what happens before and after the number lands.

Those two places are: the way the fee gets presented, and the way it gets protected once the project starts.

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The First Place: How You Present It

You’ve put together your fee. You’ve thought through the scope of work. You’ve estimated what the project will require. You’ve landed on a number you believe is right.

Now you have to sit down with the client and present it.

Here’s what happens more often than not. Somewhere between finishing that number and sitting across from the client, a voice starts whispering. It sounds something like: I know what their budget is, but that doesn’t mean they want to spend all of it. What if they think it’s too high? What if they’ve talked to another designer and my number is double what that person quoted? Maybe I should walk through every line item in detail so they understand where it’s coming from before they have a chance to react. Maybe I should soften it somehow before I even get there.

Does any of that sound familiar?

That used to be my internal voice. And here’s what I want you to understand about it: that voice is not intuition. It’s not useful preparation either. It is a story you’re telling yourself about a conversation that hasn’t happened yet, one in which the client is already skeptical, already pushing back, already unconvinced. And you are preemptively responding to imaginary resistance before the client has said a single word.

When you walk into that conversation carrying that story, it shows up. Not always in obvious ways, but it shows up.

It shows up in the hedge: I think this reflects the scope, but of course we can talk about it. It shows up in over-explanation, walking through every line item defensively before anyone has asked a question. It shows up in the almost-apology: Mrs. Smith, I know this is a significant investment. That signals to the client, before they’ve even reacted, that you yourself think the number might be too high. And sometimes it shows up in the offer to be flexible before flexibility has ever been requested.

What does the client hear when all of that happens? They hear uncertainty. They hear a designer who isn’t fully sure her number is right. And clients respond to that, not always consciously, not always unkindly, but the energy of someone who built a fee carefully and stands behind it is completely different from the energy of someone who built the same fee and then talked herself out of it on the car ride over.

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The Mechanics of Presentation Matter

The logistics of how you present your proposal are directly connected to the confidence piece, so I’m not going to skip past this.

You cannot email a proposal and expect it to do the work of an in-person conversation. I still hear from designers who send the PDF and then wait. If you change only one thing after reading this, make it this: present your proposals live. In person if possible. On Zoom if distance requires it. But live, with you delivering the message in your own words, with the ability to read the room and respond in real time.

And every decision maker needs to be in that meeting. Not just the person you’ve been working with most closely, every person who has a say in whether the project moves forward.

Present it live. Get everyone there. Walk in knowing your fee is right, not because you’re hoping it is, but because you thought it through and you know what it reflects.

The story you tell yourself in that room is the story the client will believe.

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The Second Place: How You Protect It

Pricing doesn’t just break down when you’re presenting it. It can also fall apart once the project is underway. And that second place happens more quietly, because it doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in increments, in moments that each feel too small to address directly.

It starts with scope creep. A client who mentions almost in passing that they’d like to add something. A request that arrives mid-project framed so casually — those while-we’re-at-it questions — that addressing it feels awkward. A conversation that expands the project in real, meaningful ways, more coordination, more decisions, more of your time, that somehow never gets formally acknowledged as a change to the agreement.

Then there are the contractors. On a construction project, contractors will pull you into things that are outside your agreement if you let them. Decisions that need your input on a timeline that wasn’t part of your scope. Coordination that lands in your lap because it’s easier for everyone else that way. Questions that are technically their responsibility but arrive to you because you’re accessible and they know you care.

All of that is time. All of that is work. And none of it was in the fee you built.

And then there’s the one designers are least comfortable talking about.

You’ve been tracking your hours as you should. You’re mid-project. You look at your time log and realize you’ve used what you estimated, or close to it. And there’s still work ahead. The thought of having that conversation — Mrs. Smith, the scope has shifted and I need to revisit my fee — is so uncomfortable that you start making decisions to avoid it. You stop tracking as carefully. You tell yourself the remaining work won’t be that much. You absorb the hours rather than have the conversation. You say things like I used to say: well, it’s just my time.

I know this pattern. I lived this pattern for years.

Here’s what I want you to hear directly: the discomfort of that conversation does not disappear automatically just because you have a better fee structure. What changes is that you now have something to stand behind when you have it. You built the fee from real data. You’ve been tracking honestly. You can point to exactly where the scope shifted and when.

That is a completely different conversation than trying to explain an hourly overage at the end of a project. It’s a clear, professional, mid-course correction between two adults who have an agreement in writing.

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The Three Things That Protect Your Fee

Protecting your fee consistently comes down to three things.

First, track your hours throughout the project. Not to bill for them line by line, but so you always know where you are relative to what you estimated.

Second, address scope changes as they happen. Not at the end, when they’ve accumulated into a number that feels impossible to present. A small, matter-of-fact conversation mid-project, in the moment it comes up, is infinitely easier than a large, uncomfortable one at the end when your client doesn’t fully remember how the scope expanded in the first place. Addressing it also protects the relationship, not just the fee. Clients generally respect a designer who manages the project clearly, including the business side of it.

Third, build buffer time into your fee from the beginning. Contractors will pull you into things. Decisions will need your input on timelines you didn’t plan for. Coordination will land in your lap because you are the most organized person on the project, and everyone will figure that out fast. That’s not a failure of your agreement; it’s the reality of construction. The designers who price for the ideal version of a project are the ones who absorb all of that unpaid work. The designers who price honestly, who build in the buffer that accounts for how construction actually unfolds, are the ones who can show up fully without keeping a running tally of what they should and shouldn’t be doing.

The fee you built is only as valuable as the honesty you built it with.

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The Thread That Runs Through Both

The thread connecting both failure points, the presentation and the protection, is the same.

In both cases, we know what the right thing is to do. We have the fee. We have the agreement. We have the data. We know what the scope includes. But in both cases, what gets in the way is the discomfort of holding that line.

In the presentation, it’s the discomfort of standing behind a number without hedging, without preemptive justification, without offering flexibility before anyone has even asked.

In the protection, it’s the discomfort of naming a scope change directly, of having the mid-project conversation before it becomes a crisis.

That discomfort is real. But it gets smaller every single time you work through it. Every time you present a fee without an apology and the client receives it just fine. Every time you address a scope shift early and the client says, of course, thank you for flagging it. That evidence accumulates. The story you tell yourself about what will happen starts to be replaced by the actual record of what has happened. And that is how confidence is built, not from a mindset shift, but from doing the thing, watching it work, and then doing it again.

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If Any of This Landed

If you recognize yourself in that internal monologue before the proposal presentation, or in those mid-project moments where you looked at your hours and decided not to have the conversation, that recognition is useful information.

It’s not a reason to judge yourself. It’s telling you there are cracks. Not failures — cracks. Places where the structure isn’t fully holding yet, where confidence isn’t fully there yet, and where your business is losing something you worked honestly to earn.

Most designers can feel those cracks. What’s harder is knowing exactly where they are and what to do about them.

Construction management can be one of the most profitable parts of your business. For most designers, it isn’t yet. And it’s not because they lack the talent. It’s because no one has ever actually shown them how to build it that way.

That’s what The Designer’s Edge is built for. Enrollment is open now through May 18th. It’s the structure, the skills, the community, and the direct support that turns what you already know how to do into a business that actually pays you for all of it.

A year from now, you’ll either be walking into proposal conversations with a number you built carefully and stand behind completely, managing scope changes as they happen, leading projects with the kind of clarity that makes contractors want to work with you and clients want to stay with you for life.

Or you’ll still be finishing projects and doing the math and thinking, that was so much more work than I accounted for.

The difference isn’t talent. It isn’t experience. It’s having the right structure and the right people around you while you build it.

Like this Episode?

Be sure to check out Episode #273: The Real Cost of Undercharging: A Q1 Audit for Interior Designers

Be sure to check out Episode #277: The Structural Problem in My Business That Years of Hard Work Couldn’t Fix

Be sure to check out Episode #268: John McClain on Design Business Systems, Pricing & Leading a Profitable Firm