Being a WordPress Agency.
A small 7% increase in charges to maintain our peerless level of service.
A heady cocktail of rising staff cost, poor FX rates and some excellent productivity improvements and automation has kept our 2017 price review in the “reasonable” category
Of course, the fall-out from Brexit has been one of the big drivers this year – The GBP/USD and GBP/EUR rates are hosed, down 11% and 14% respectively. We buy-in a lot of services directly from the EU and the US as well as UK suppliers increasing costs being passed on. Staff costs have also risen, countered largely by improvements in efficiency and automation.
Here’s our new rate card for 2017
- WordPress support from £106ph (7% rise)
- WordPress development from £123ph (7% rise)
- Advanced WordPress development from £177ph (7% rise)
- Project Management from £152ph (7% rise)
- Operational Marketing from £106ph (7% rise)
- Strategic Marketing from £177ph (7% rise)
- Senior/Partner Strategy from £204ph (3% rise)
Effective Jan 1st, 2017 for existing clients, from Oct 1st for new contracts.
Foreign Exchange
Today’s USD/GBP rate is 1.30 vs 1.47 in Jan – US services are now 12% more expensive to buy. EU/GBP was 1.35 on Jan 1st and is now 1.16 – this equates to being 14% more expensive.
Skills scarcity continues
We are not an organisation that skimps on skills or experience – sadly many companies regard front-line support as an overhead and many seem happy to employ trainees and interns. Yuk!
Support is key to who we are, and a cornerstone of our peerless WordPress support service. As a result, we’re very fussy with staffers, we only take on experienced WordPress folks – a minimum of 5 years commercial experience is what we expect.
We’ll let the trainees and interns cut their teeth and make bloopers elsewhere.
With deep skills and experience comes fewer mistakes, faster delivery, peerless quality and a far better service. As is often quoted “the bitterness of poor service service lasts long after the taste of a low price”.
High quality WordPress skills are in demand and the gross staff costs are 21% higher per worked hour than this time last year. Usefully, we’ve made huge productivity gains in efficiency and automation but it still leaves overall staff costs 8.3% higher than last year.
Where’s the good news?
The RPI (all index) has climbed less than 2%, the cost of money is close to zero, taxation is lightly lower. The price rise doesn’t effect our Peerless Support Service, we’re committed to holding these charges through 2017 at the same level as a function of increased productivity and automation.
And, the revised pricing won’t come into effect until 1st January – You have plenty of time to plan for the rises.
If you have any queries then feel free to contact us.
