MBA995 Q&A Wednesday: How much should I spend on my logo?

Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast for busy business builders with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100- MBA-NET. Today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of our listeners. Today's question comes from Peter and Peter asks, how much should I spend on my logo? A very practical question. I love it. I'm going to be sharing with you how much I've spent on my logos in the past. What are some options when it comes to creating your logo and what type of budget you should be looking at here? Logos are actually pretty important. They should be pretty memorable. Simple, yet eye catching. You're gonna be using your logo in a lot of different places, whether it's your packaging, whether it's your website or your business cards. It's a pretty important piece of your branding puzzle. So you want to do it right, but at the same time you don't want to spend a fortune. I'll be answering Peter's question in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is supported by Intercom. Intercom is the business messaging platform that does the manual work for you automatically qualifying leads and scheduling demos. Their chatbot and messenger free you up to focus on the prospects most likely to convert. You can leave your pipeline to chance or you could use Intercom. We switched to Intercom about eight months ago with our software business webinar Ninja and never look back. We absolutely love it. Start for free@intercom.com growth. That's Intercom Growth. So Peter asks, how much should I spend on my logo? A great question and a question I know I had when I first got started. There are different options when it comes to how you can get a logo created. And yes, there are different price points. But I want to start out by saying that what you're paying for is not really the actual work they're doing, the actual time it takes to create the logo. What you're really paying for, what you want is somebody that understands the vision of your company, the message of your brand, what you're trying to represent, taking those ideas and creating a logo that represents those values. That's what you're paying for. Somebody that's taking your concepts your ideas and putting it into an image. Now, you have a few options when it comes to creating your logo. You can create it yourself if you have a design background and you know Photoshop really well, it might be something you want to take a stab at. But if you don't, then you're going to have to hire for it, right? In this case, Peter is hiring for it and he wants to know how much he should pay. In the last few years, there's been a huge boom in crowdsourcing type of services. Services like 99designs and DesignCrowd. They offer services to allow you to create a logo. And basically what happens is that you put the specs, you say, this is what I'm looking for. This is the type logo I'm looking for. These are my branding colors I'm looking at. You basically put up a job post. Then hundreds, if not thousands of different designers submit their version of what they think you want. So you get to choose from hundreds of different logo versions of your logo, and the one you like the most gets paid. Now, a service like this can cost anywhere between a hundred to three hundred dollars. The other option is just hiring a freelance graphic designer. You can go to a site like Upwork and search for graphic designer and look at their portfolio. If you see a portfolio with designs that you really like, you really resonate with their style, and you like the feedback that they've got from past clients, you may want to approach them to see if they're interested in taking on your project. Your logo. Now, depending on the graphic designer's experience and rate, you may want to work out a project deal where you'll pay something similar. Maybe 200, $300. We paid roughly $200 for the logo for our software company, Webinar Ninja. That's the last logo I could think of that we've created. And we went down this route where we hired a graphic designer that we really liked. Now, mind you, there are companies that spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on their logo. But. But that's not necessarily mandatory. Let me share a little story with you to illustrate this. Back in 1971, a guy named Phil Knight, you might have heard of him, he's the founder of Nike. He was looking for somebody to create a logo for him for his new company, Nike. And if you know anything about Nike's history, completely bootstrapped. So he's tight on cash. But he overheard a Portland State University student say they don't have enough money to pay for their painting class. She's an art student. And he approached her and said, hey, I need a new logo for my company. Would you be interested in some freelance work? I'd be happy to pay you $35 for the logo. And that student, who's now well known, Caroline Davidson, said, sure, I'm a graphic arts student and I'll take on that deal. She presented him a handful of designs, different options, and he didn't particularly like any of them, except one of them caught his eye. It's a curvy check mark. And he said, I'm not in love with it, but maybe it'll grow on me. And thus the Nike swoosh was born. $35. I know it's 1971, but hey, it's roughly around what we're talking about here. 100 to 200, $300. Now, you might be thinking, hey, man, Phil Knight got away with murder with that $35 deal. Simmer down. Phil Knight was really generous. In 1983, he threw a party for Davison as the company started to boom and him and its co founders gave her a gold swoosh ring as well as 500 shares in Nike, which is worth now $643,000. Love that story, especially from a company that's now making over $24 billion in sales annually. Started off with a very simple logo worth $35. And again, if you look at all the great logos out there, they're very simple. So simple that we can probably draw them ourselves. If you tried on a piece of paper, whether it's the Nike Swoosh or Apple's Apple or Microsoft's four box windows, you get the point. Simple guys. I got more on today's Q and A Wednesday's episode. But before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Support for today's show comes from Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams is your hub for teamwork in Office365. Here at the $100 MBA, we run a remote team, so we have teammates all across the world. And sometimes communicating can be quite hectic. Organizing everything from chats and emails and files. It can get chaotic. With so much to look after, it would be great just to have everything in one place. And that's what Microsoft Teams does. Teams is a single workplace where you can work, share, and connect with the people in your work life. Teams brings together chat, meetings, files, and apps all in one place. Take Teamwork, where you work with apps for mobile and desktop. So whether you're sprinting towards a deadline or sharing your next big idea, Teams can help you and Your team achieve more. I recently used teams and I found the user experience to be so simple and clean. I found it like stress reducing. So I tip my hat to Microsoft Teams for building such a easy to use app. Microsoft Teams in office to 365. Visit office.comteams to learn more to wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday episode, Peter, if you're looking to spend on your logo, you have a few options with you know the crowdsourcing with something like 99designs or design crowd and you could set the budget there. I think it starts at $99 or you can hire a freelancer but you don't have to spend a fortune. Make sure that if you do hire a freelancer to to do your actual logo, make sure they deliver you a vectorized version so you can change and blow up the size of that logo if you want to do a billboard and make sure they give you different size options especially for the web, for retina displays as well as for your website. Also include the option for multiple revisions. Some people ask for unlimited revisions, but I find that I don't need more than five revisions. But it's your logo, it's your deal. Negotiate what you feel you're comfortable with. All right. I hope that answers your question, Peter, and I hope it helped. All of you who are listening to today's episode, thank you so much for tuning in. If you love the $100 NBA show, let us know in an itunes rating and review. We'd love to hear from you, hear what you love about the show and it helps other people learn about the show and know why they should subscribe and listen. So thank you in advance for that. And of course, when you leave an itunes reading review, you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Every Friday, tune in and you can hear who won the free ride, who won free access to one of our courses. This month we're giving away Easy course, which is a $500 course, to somebody who's left us a rating and review. So all you gotta do is leave us a review and you enter that draw. Alright? Thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. When it comes to your logo, don't spend too much, too much time. Commission somebody to do it, get them on task and move on to other things. Even Phil Knight wasn't totally in love with the Swoosh, but he took it on and said, maybe it'll grow on me because he has other things to work on like his products, his service, his whole business. Right? And if you ever have to modify, change your logo in the future, it's not a problem. Companies do it all the time. Get it done, move on. All right. Thank you so much, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Take care, Sam.