"Should I charge for a consultation?" is a question I am often asked when speaking to designers. There is a lot of confusion around this topic.
In practice, designers handle consultations in various ways. Some charge, some don't. Some charge if the client hires them, others charge if the client doesn't hire them. Some charge their regular hourly fee, and others charge a fixed price for a prearranged amount of time.
My advice is yes, you should charge for a consultation — but be careful not to confuse a consultation with an interview.
An interview and a consultation are two different things. An interview is where you meet with prospects to see if you are a good match for each other.
You review your portfolio with them, and explain to them the services you provide. I suggest preparing a bulleted list of all the services you offer — including shopping, floral design, bidding with contractors and project management — as prospective clients often are unaware of the range of professional interior design services. If the interview goes well, give the prospects a list of past clients and ask them to call them.
Normally, the meeting is relatively brief. It could even be no more than a phone call. You are not providing any services, making any commitments or giving advice. You discuss their project just enough to determine if it is one you want to take on.
In my opinion, you should not charge for an interview. Consider it a form of one-to-one marketing. It is an opportunity to size up the client and make a sales pitch for your services.
A consultation, on the other hand, involves providing an expert opinion, advice and possibly recommendations of specific products or service providers. Unless you are meeting the client solely for the purpose of a consultation, this usually will be your first business meeting with a new client.
At this point, you have not prepared any sketches, plans, renderings or boards. This may be the first time you walk through the space to be designed, making observations, taking measurements and photographs, and asking questions.
Afterward you can have a conversation with the client and gather the necessary programming information. This is all part of your design process, so naturally you should charge the client for your time.
If the appointment is solely for the purpose of a consultation — i.e., the client is interested in getting your professional opinion and advice, but at present has no plans to hire you to do the work — then, of course, you should charge. What you have to offer has value; otherwise, they would not be talking with you.
Be clear in advance which services are included in a consultation and which are not. I know designers who consider such consultations a waste of their time, but think of it as an opportunity to educate the client and quite possibly "upsell" them to engage more of your services.
For consultations that are the initial step to a larger project, it makes sense to charge your regular hourly fee. For standalone consultations, however, my advice is to charge a premium fee.
You are not just charging for your time, you are also charging for your creativity and experience — both of which you have acquired at no little personal expense and sacrifice. Other professionals do no less.
Where designers sometimes get into trouble is allowing an interview to slip into an unintended consultation. Then they are left with the perplexing problem of whether they should charge the prospect when the initial understanding or assumption was that there would be no charge.
Be clear from the start that you do not provide free advice as part of an interview. If the prospects press you, tell them you will be happy to schedule a consultation for a later date. If they are not interested, then you know they are not serious, and you've not lost anything than a few minutes of your time.
