The setup fee is fine, and the free support afterward is what eats the year
A scenario worth working through for anyone selling CRM buildouts. Flat $4,200 per buildout, 14 of them in a year. Track hours honestly on the last five and the average comes in at 31 rather than the 20 the price was set against, which puts the consultant around $135 an hour before an assistant's time. That part gets fixed with price. What price does not fix is what happens after handoff. Say nine of the 14 come back inside six months wanting a new pipeline stage or a broken integration fixed, and a dollar of it never gets billed, because in the kickoff call the consultant says "reach out if anything breaks" and apparently that means forever. Two moves on the desk. One is a mandatory $500/month care plan for the first six months, written into the proposal so it is not a separate yes. Two is narrowing from four platforms to one, since three of the four pushed breaking changes to their automation builder in the last year and that is where most of the unpaid hours go. The part that keeps going back and forth: narrowing platforms costs maybe a third of inbound. A lot of calls open with "we already bought X and can't get it working." Those clients are the most annoying and the best margin, because the account and the data already exist and the consultant is charging for judgment instead of clicking. For anyone who has pushed a required care plan onto buyers who are used to purchasing a project, what happened to the close rate?
