Discovery workshops: charge for strategy + attract better web design clients

All right. Hey everyone. So I'm actually just getting into the office a little bit early and I'm here setting up for day two of a discovery workshop with a client of mine, and I was just thinking about how it's been a while since I've posted a video here and I've been wanting to post a video here. And I thought this would be probably a good opportunity to tell you a little bit about why I do these discovery workshops.

I also have a bunch coming up that I want to share with you. So first of all, I'm set up in here. This is a studio that I have and I often will have clients come in here to do our introductory workshops or other kinds of workshops that I might facilitate.

And today we're doing day two of my discovery workshop where on day one we met with a client and we did a lot of discussion around their audience and who they're looking to serve. And then today we move more into messaging and positioning, and this is one of my favorite things that I do.

I get a lot of questions about why I do it, and so I'd love to talk a little bit more about why I do discovery, both in this video and on this channel. It's a huge part of my work, and it was one of the things I did early on as a designer essentially working on projects with clients. I would offer this discovery workshop as our first engagement together because initially I would do discovery anyway. And what does that mean? It's essentially asking the appropriate questions at the outset of a client engagement, not just so that you can learn about their business and about their customer and what they're looking to achieve and what kind of impact they want to make and all these things, but so that they can actually come to understand it themselves. Because as entrepreneurs, as business owners, we're often this close to our business. And when you're this close, things are fuzzy. It's hard to get a good sense of everything, right? Because your mind is just in a million places. You're wearing a ton of hats.

And so sometimes, as business owners, we don't know with clarity who we're looking to serve and our core message and things like that. So it is extremely valuable on all sides to come together and get a lot of clarity around business and goals. So I would often do that anyway, and I came to understand that clients didn't really understand it.

Why are we doing discovery? Why are you asking me all these questions? Shouldn't you know how to do what you do? Didn't you hear me when I told you about my business? A lot of those clients just didn't value strategic thinking. Like, I'm working with the wrong people. And so once I began to essentially unbundle that work that I already did, sell it as a first step in working together, it actually showed the right clients who valued strategy and helped me understand who the right clients were, who was a good fit for me to work with, because they valued deep thinking around what we were looking to do. And it de-risked the client engagement. So people that were essentially purchasing this discovery offering from me were saying, hey, I'm not committing to a huge project. I'm committing to discovery. But after this, maybe we might not find a good fit to work together. We can go separate ways, but also we're not committing to doing something if it's not the right thing to do. So it's a huge way to de-risk the engagement.

And then third, they got strategic thinking. Then they could potentially go and work with someone else on different aspects of their project now that they had that clarity. So this is something that really shaped my business and helped me be not just seen as a strategist, but helped me think of myself as more of a strategist and value my own experience and creative thinking.

So that's one of the reasons why I do this. I'll talk a lot more about it, but today we're doing day two, and I know I have some stuff to eat for the clients — pastries and danishes and croissants and stuff. And then coffee, just the space to do it. These can be done online. These can be done in person. Since 2020 I've often done these online, but I love the opportunity to do these in person because there's just something about being in the room together. We're not in a rush and we don't have the fatigue of just staring at a camera all day. So I'm excited to share a little bit more about this.

I have to get going and actually facilitate this session, but I'll be back and we'll talk more.

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Plus, you can join me on September 26th at 1:00 PM Eastern for Build, Launch, and Earn — a live stream for web designers on practical ways to use Stripe to streamline your operations, win better projects, and add payment functionality into client projects. You can register for the live stream in the link in the description, and I am really excited to see you there.

All right, so we just finished our discovery workshop. And I always take time to reflect on these because these are my favorite thing I do. If you know me, I like to say I'm a chronic extrovert. I love being around people and I obviously love the topics that we cover in these workshops. And it just blends some of my favorite things together. This one in particular I hosted with a co-facilitator who I invited in. Her name's Krista Jenkins of Spark Content and it was just really fun to be able to tag team the conversation and work with someone else.

I always love collaborating with other people. So this is such a good time and I thought it'd be good for this video to share. If you're interested in beginning to integrate discovery into your own work, how do you do that? What kinds of things can you do to begin really being thought of as an expert in what you do and not just a doer, someone who's clicking around on a keyboard to create magnificent designs, for example.

Often with clients who don't understand the context of what you do, they think it is easy and it's just, you know how to do this, so I hired you to do this. But the reality is there's so much more behind the work that we do and there's so much that actual experience informs. The decisions you make and the work you produce are extremely valuable, and it's not just quantified in the number of hours that you put into the project. So if you truly want to uplevel both how you perceive yourself, how your clients perceive you, and help essentially charge what the work you produce is worth for people, then I think discovery is one of the best ways to do that.

So let's talk through a few things. I would say number one, you have to charge for it. Getting started is the hardest part because we're so used to charging for deliverables and for designs and for development and code, right? And discovery shifts our thinking. You're not just charging for the time that you spend with the client. You're charging for the output and the outcomes of that time together. And it's tough to quantify if you're not used to doing it. The first thing you have to do is you have to charge for it.

And it's easier said than done. You have to figure out how to charge for it. The way that I think about this is not all discovery is created equal. Not all clients are the same. And the value of a discovery workshop is different for a small business, individual solopreneur, a small to medium sized business, or an enterprise company. So you have to charge appropriately. I like to keep it in respect to the project that we're about to probably work on together. A rule of thumb is what I charge for discovery tends to be around 10% of what the overall project value might cost. It's just a benchmark and you can play with that number starting out to see what feels right for you and what seems appropriate for the clients you're working with.

That's how I think about pricing it. You don't hear a lot of people talk about how to price discovery. But that's just one way that I begin to think about it. It's not the only way. And also when it comes to discovery and pricing it, the reason I do so is because if you do it for free, in some ways you're just sneaking in discovery. And often I have noticed when discovery is free, it's almost something that the client just allows. Okay, we have to get through this discovery thing, but then we can actually get on to the real work. That's not what we're doing. We're saying discovery is actually the real work itself. And we actually can't produce a strong outcome for you through the project that we work on together unless we have discovery, unless we fully understand who we're trying to serve and what the purpose of this project is. And sometimes when I've facilitated discovery, we come to understand that the thing we thought we were going to do, we're not going to do because there was no real rationale for doing it in the first place.

Quite honestly, sometimes we've just said, oh, let's not work on the project. And sometimes we've thought of other things to work on together. It's kind of wild for the client to understand together in the workshop that hey, we're working on the wrong thing altogether. This doesn't make sense. I've had clients thank me for facilitating the discovery session because it actually helped them clarify their next best step. And often it wasn't building a website. They had a lot more to do beforehand. So first you just have to charge for it. Number two is you really have to have a method. You have to have a process that you walk people through. And the process is important, but it's more important that you just have a process because we can talk through what's the best way to facilitate, what the best conversations to have, what are the best questions to ask. But in the end, if you're facilitating it, you have to believe in it and it has to be your process. Even if you borrow some things from others and begin to implement things that you've seen work, in the end you need to crystallize your own process. And the reason you need to do so is because the client needs to feel confident that you know what you're doing and that you believe in it, or else they're going to have a hard time believing in it and they might feel the need to facilitate it themselves.

So it's really important that you have a process. And that can be one day, two days, one hour, two months. You can do this in different fashions. But at the end of the day, you need to have a process. You need to be able to run your process with your clients. I've switched up my methods over time and every single one, you learn new things that you implement into the next session, and it just helps over time build and become a much stronger process.

Especially thinking about pricing, this should become more valuable over time because you're essentially developing a stronger process, which should have, in theory, a better chance of being successful for your next person or client that you run this through with. Something I feel pretty strongly about is this can't be a form. That's one of my only things about process. Maybe minimally, if you're not doing anything, maybe a form gets you started. But one of the things I've learned about questionnaires and forms: when you ask some of these deeper questions about a client or their business and business model or strategy, someone fills out a form and they fill it out like it's paperwork. If you've ever filled out a passport application or a tax document or a job application or whatever, you just go through the motions and fill it out like paperwork. People fill it out like a tax form. And there's a reason that, for example, if you go to therapy, your therapist doesn't just give you a series of forms and say, hey, it's another week in therapy, go ahead and fill out the form and answer all the questions. Because you can only imagine how you would answer your therapist’s forms, right? There's a reason that therapists don't use forms because the questions they're asking tend to be sensitive. They are deep. And therapists tend to facilitate and guide people through complex topics.

And businesses are complex organisms, right? There's so much involved, especially if you're working with people who truly care about their business or have opinions about their industry. These can be very weighty questions to answer or ask. And in many ways, they haven't been asked these kinds of questions as directly as you're going to ask them.

I remember working with a client and it was an executive director who was moving on, and a new executive director was coming in. And the previous executive director said this during one of our meetings: the biggest regret he had was never clarifying in a single sentence why their organization exists. And I remember in the moment just saying, that's wild. That seems like such a priority. So it just shows, a lot of times people aren't being asked these questions. And even if they have thought about these things, it tends not to be very thorough, because they're busy keeping the machine running. And so this opens an opportunity for both them and for you and any other stakeholders that are involved or any collaborators to think through these things in a new way. I like to remind people we're not just throwing out the old perception that you had of your business or your customer or your audience or any of this previous work that you've done. We're only building upon it. And what we build together is going to be a living document, right? This is something that should change over time as you continue to think thoughtfully and critically around these things. So for that reason, a form is just not going to be able to get the kind of responses that you need and work through some of the issues that come up in those questions or conversations.

Frankly, you can't always trust what someone's going to respond off the bat. Having a facilitated, in-person conversation, a Zoom call online, you can see people's reactions to how they answer these questions. You can see when they pause, you can see when they step back and say, oh wait, let me say that again. It helps you facilitate because discovery is a facilitated process. It's not just a one-way dialogue. And it's really important that we keep that at the heart of it — this is a facilitated process and you're going to come alongside them and support them in the discovery process.

I would say lastly that we need to keep discovery practical. I love having a bias toward action. Because a lot of pushback I tend to see when I get pushback is, this is going to slow us down and we are working urgently, or we don't have time to think through all this stuff. And to that, I like to remind people that actually discovery is the vehicle so that we can go faster. Because we work through all these important topics and questions, and we have a lot more clarity walking out of the conversations. We have a lot more buy-in amongst other team members and stakeholders and collaborators, and that allows us to go fast later. We don't, in our culture, like delayed gratification. We don't like delay, period. We want everything to be fast. But actually this process of intentionally slowing down and considering gives us clarity so that we have confidence in our message and who we're trying to reach, who we're looking to serve, the opportunities before us.

In my workshop, we go through a process of identifying all of the opportunities before us, and then I facilitate a process of prioritizing them and filtering out only the best opportunities that we should leverage given our constraints. And then once we move forward with those things, we can do so confidently knowing that we are intentionally working on these things and not other things, because these are the best opportunities before us to work on. And so discovery, I truly feel, is one of those things that has the potential to differentiate you from others that provide similar services. And I don't say that to mean discovery and strategy are just buzzwords that everyone has to do. No, I believe strategy differentiates us because I'm always reminded that in 2025 we're not competing against someone down the block anymore. We're competing with anyone who has access to a computer and lives in your country or anywhere around the world, right? And in a lot of ways, someone could always work with someone potentially better than you, more experienced than you, cheaper than you. You're competing against everyone, right? And if someone, let's say, has meetings with 10 people who do the work that you do, the ones who are going to stick out are the people who ask thought-provoking questions, who trust their instincts, who leverage their experience, and simply ask questions that you would want someone to ask if they were doing the work that you want to do.

Strategy ensures that you're working with clients who value strategy, who value good work and not just the cheapest or the fastest work. And it shows that these clients value someone who is good at their craft, who has put in time and garnered experience. And often those people themselves are working in trades and crafts and industries and have developed skill sets that help them become the best option in their industry. And so it's really just holding a mirror and saying, do you think the work that you do is valuable? Do you believe that the people you serve should be buying from you? And then saying, so do I.

So thanks for watching this video and I hope you found this useful. And like I said earlier, I have a lot coming up. For example, this upcoming Friday we're hosting a live stream for Build, Launch, and Earn. This is our third stream. We have Geoff Roberts joining us from Outseta. He's going to be talking about how to integrate things like payments and use your profiles and login with your website, combined with the other amazing features like CRM and email and customer support and things.

In my mind, this is just a best-kept secret in a lot of ways if you've never heard about it. It's just a phenomenal tool that I've used personally and I've used for client projects. So I'm excited to have Geoff on. If you're interested in joining us for the live stream, you can click the link in the description and register and you can join us live. Next Friday, we're at 1:00 PM Eastern. We're trying to make these very accessible for people, but we're finding Fridays at this time slot is really working for folks. I hope you can join us. It'll of course be available afterwards, but definitely register so you can be entered into things like our Stripe Press Giveaway and some other resources we're putting out.

But thanks again for watching and I'll catch you in the next video. Bye.

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