Four years of invoices, and what they actually say.

01Why I looked

I had a feeling, the way you do, that things were going well but I could not have told you why. I knew the names of the big projects. I could not have told you what proportion of the money they were.

So I exported everything and worked through it properly. What follows is genuinely my own numbers. I am publishing them because when I was starting out I could not find anybody willing to say what this work actually pays, and that made every decision harder than it needed to be.

02The number that surprised me

The median invoice is about fifty-one pounds.

Not the average, which is dragged upwards by a handful of builds. The median, meaning half of every invoice I have ever raised is smaller than that. An hour here, a change there, a month of looking after something.

In four years exactly one invoice has gone above nine hundred and fifty pounds. One. Every mental picture I had of this business was built around projects that, it turns out, are the rare exception rather than the engine.

03Where the money actually comes from

Twenty-three clients bill monthly. Those small recurring amounts make up fifty-six per cent of everything, at an average of eighty-three pounds a month each.

Eighty-three pounds a month sounds like nothing. Twenty-three of them is most of a living, and it arrives whether or not I win anything new that month. That is the difference between a business and a series of lucky jobs.

The longest running is at thirty-nine months and just shy of five thousand pounds lifetime. Nobody sold that. It accumulated, eighty pounds at a time, by being useful and not being annoying.

04What this changed

It changed what I chase. I used to treat a small monthly client as something to tolerate while waiting for a build. They are the business. The build is the introduction.

It changed what I charge for. If most invoices are small, the admin around them has to be light, or you spend your life raising paperwork for fifty pounds. That is a large part of why I now publish prices and write scope down: it removes a negotiation from every small job.

It also changed what I say to people. When somebody asks whether they need a retainer, I can say honestly that plenty of clients take nothing and manage perfectly well, because I am not depending on that one conversation.

05The uncomfortable bit

A business that depends on twenty-three small recurring relationships is a business with a specific fragility. Any one of them leaving barely registers. Several leaving at once because I have got complacent would be serious.

The protection is not a contract. None of mine have a minimum term and none of them ever will, because a client who stays only because leaving is awkward is a client who has already gone.

The protection is that the work has to be visibly worth eighty pounds every single month, which is a healthier discipline than any notice period.

06If you are starting out

Take the small work. A fifty pound job from somebody who becomes a four year client is worth more than a nine hundred pound one from somebody you never hear from again, and you cannot tell which is which at the start.

Make the small work cheap to administer. Published prices, written scope, quick invoices. The overhead is what kills small jobs, not the price.

And look at your own numbers rather than your impressions of them. I was wrong about mine for four years, and I am the one who raised every invoice.