Are you a freelance designer, photographer, virtual assistant, social media manager or anyone who has a service based business? Pricing your services can be super overwhelming, and to be honest it requires some trial and error.

I have 5 practical steps to help you price your services:

1. What are your fixed monthly expenses and bills?

Look at your last 2 months of expenses and add up how much you spent per month. This will give you an idea of how much money you need to live your life for 1 month.

Ex) Let’s say that 1 month of expenses costs you $2,000.
(This includes rent, phone bill, internet, utilities, food, eating out, clothes etc.)

2. How much money would you want to make each month?

You’ll want to make at least enough money to pay for your monthly bills and expenses.
But you’ll probably want to earn more than your monthly expenses, so you can save money and put money back into your business.

Ex) Let’s say you want to make $4,000 each month. So $2,000 goes to paying yourself, $1,000 goes back into the business and $1,000 goes to your savings.

3. Do you want to offer packages or hourly work?

Packages:

Packages let you create a bundle of services at a set price. Having a set price helps you know how many packages you need to sell in order to meet your monthly financial goals.
It’s best to have 3 packages at varying prices so you have a low, medium and high price point.

Hourly:

Hourly can work better for smaller projects
When you set an hourly rate you need to think through how long the project will take you to complete. (This can be a bit of a guessing game at first)

A Trick To Find Your Hourly Rate
(this works best if you’re in a similar field of work)

To first find your hourly rate, calculate your hourly rate at your last salary job and multiply it by 2. Ex.) If you were making $20/hr then your new hourly rate would be $40/hr. The reason it’s doubled is because self-employed people have more expenses. You need to buy your laptop, your own software, you might pay an accountant to help you out with expenses and taxes etc.

Package price examples:
(If your monthly goal is $4,000)

1 website costs $4,000 and will take 3-4 weeks. You need to make 1 website sale per month.
1 month of social media management costs $500. You will need to take on 8 clients per month.
Copywriting for 1 website costs $1000. You will need to book 4 clients per month.

Hourly price example:

5 social media graphics for Instagram
- Estimate how much time it will take you (ex. 5hrs)
- Multiply that by your hourly rate ( 5 x $40 = $200)
- Give the client a rough estimate, “It will take 4-6hrs at $40/hr so around $160-$240”.

Beginners note: Everything always takes longer than you think it will take you.

4. How many clients will you have each month?

With your packaged prices, you can estimate how many clients you’ll need to take on to meet your monthly financial goal. Note: You won’t fully know what works and how much time things take until you try it out.
TRACK YOUR TIME
Sign up for a free timer, I use Toggl, and track all the client work you do and see how long it takes you to complete a project. This will give you a better understanding of how many projects you can take on in one month.
BOOK AHEAD
Try not to take on too many projects at the same time, instead book out specific weeks for specific clients. This will ensure that you don’t get burned out or drop the ball on client work. Plus, having work booked weeks in advance will give you some security and keep you on top of client deadlines!

5. When should I raise my prices?

As you take on more projects, you’ll craft your skills, your work ethic and your time management. As you become more advanced it makes sense to increase your prices.
Also, after timing yourself you might learn that you can only take on 2-4 clients at a time, which means the prices of your packages and services need to increase, in order to meet those monthly financial goals.

Instead of seeing how much everyone else is pricing their services, it’s best to just focus on you and your business first. Once you start working in your business you’ll feel more confident to make specific pricing decisions. Becoming an entrepreneur is all about the journey, so any money mistake is just a lesson that will help you shift your prices and do better next time.

xo
Emma