How can we work with clients in a way that is creative, fun, transparent and financially realistic?
Bump is a creative agency and consultancy that prioritises creativity, quality and personal relationships above all. We are at our absolute happiest when we are thinking about and making great things with great people.
If you’ve met us or worked with us or even if you follow our content on LinkedIn, you already know this.
But we’re also a small business that needs to make money.
This page is meant to serve as a way to help prospective and current clients understand what to expect from the financial side of our relationship.
You can work with us in one of the following ways:
The Bump Idea Sprint is our tried and tested methodology of bringing people together to co-create. Building ideas, concepts, campaigns, experiences or even full-blown business ventures together with clients is a big part of what we do. Co-creation with clients leads to the best relationships and in turn, to the best end results.
We have also introduced our Bump Media Strategy Sprint to help in-house media leads get internal consensus faster on earned media approaches along with meaningful results.
Our sprints are transparently priced at our minimum level of engagement at €7,500.
With some clients we work with monthly retainers, under which we provide a range of services for a fixed monthly price over a minimum of six months, such as senior counsel, video production, graphic and experiential/event design – just to name a few.
This is the case for two reasons:
So, from that you might think that we just want to scoop up enormous retainers right? Wrong.
Because we value providing senior time to clients and this time is finite, we prefer to keep retainers at €7,000 to guarantee senior attention and to also ensure that the client feels they are truly getting value for money. Also, we’re not here for a cash grab. We don’t need to “make our quarterly numbers” or stay on the good side of a hovering parent company. We want to have long, healthy relationships with you and that means being respectful of your resources. If a 12-month commitment really doesn’t feel right at the moment but you know you need the flexibility and availability of a range of our services beyond a fixed project, we do offer 6-month retainers at €9,000/month.
Clients come to us for a huge range of projects, from conceptualising and designing experiences and exhibitions to building and running innovative campaigns to producing high-impact video.
We try to be as transparent as possible about how project fees are calculated in terms of time and third-party costs but it’s good to remember that clients turn to Bump to make things that have never been made before, so we don’t always know exactly how much a certain third-party cost might be at the start of a project.
That said, we make absolutely every effort to avoid surprising clients with unexpected costs. To be honest, we often just absorb the costs ourselves if we have wildly underestimated something. But in cases with clear unknowns, we communicate that upfront – sometimes that leads to a client needing to pay more than what is budgeted for an unknown, but sometimes also less.
What is a typical fee for a Bump project? Our minimum level of engagement on a project basis is €25,000 but on an annual basis we have critical mass in the €40,000 to €150,000 range.
Policy experiences have two main phases
We currently offer training on three topics based on the exact methodologies we apply to run Bump – 1) budget-friendly high-quality in-house video production, 2) LinkedIn strategy with a focus on thought leadership and video and 3) Podcast Lab, a group training for podcast production. Because training is not our core business, we tend to be priced higher than training agencies with bespoke training sessions for individual organisations from €6,000 – €10,000. This is because from experience we know what it takes to leave participants feeling that the training was excellent (instead of their default “meh”) : multiple senior trainers, hands-on interactivity, a bit of theatre to keep people awake and excited and plenty of small group or even one-on-one follow up after the training.
Our Podcast Lab group training costs €950 per person with discounts for organisations sending three or more people or for attendees working inside existing Bump client organisations.
Our career experience has shown us that spending creative energy without compensation is a losing proposition. It affects our ability to remain a viable business and more importantly, it taxes our mental health.
We are happy to provide ideas, concepts, etc. as part of a paid co-creation workshop (what we call the Bump Idea Sprint). While we do very occasionally agree to compete, this is only when we have an existing relationship with the decision makers, when we can speak to them at length to discuss their needs and when there are no more than two other agencies in competition.
We co-create scores of concepts every year with clients in paid workshops. Unfortunately, only about half of the ideas move to the execution phase. This happens for a variety of reasons including shifting internal priorities, budget constraints or personnel changes.
This stuff can happen and it’s nobody’s fault, but it means we can’t bank on getting paid for the execution phase and still need to cover ourselves by getting paid for the concept phase.
Also, when we develop a concept, we do that in the way that makes the most sense in terms of execution, meaning that Bump may not actually be best placed to execute. We often suggest clients take this on themselves or recommend other parties.
In most cases, yes you can. In fact, we may even encourage you to do so if that makes the most sense. Some clients even expressly ask us to come up with things they can execute internally.
But in other cases, you may not. If we have developed a product or other concept together and explicitly agreed at the outset of the collaboration that Bump will remain the owner of the product, then you may not create it, reproduce it, make a cheaper version of it, etc. without our written approval. Cases like these are the exception to the rule, but they do happen. Again, we don’t surprise people with them – this is communicated from the beginning of the collaboration.
There are many ways to get to know us and the type of work we do. We do our best to share ideas and creativity with our community, often through free events and livestreams on LinkedIn.
We are also always open for a coffee or lunch chat and have no problem covering the check for this – even though by now you may feel we are obsessed with money 😉
We also suggest working with us on a small paid collaboration first to build trust.
In summary: We would love to do this stuff entirely for free, but the simple fact is we would not be able to pay the mortgage on the beautiful creative space where we bring clients to make amazing things.
Good news. So are we.
