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How to charge for your services: set fair prices

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osamamalik

What are you worth?

By moving away from employee-based pay structures, it can be very difficult to set a fair price for clients and still cover your expenses and growth strategies.

In short, you are taking all the years of hands-on experience you have, then adding all of your qualifications and packing into a service package that a customer can unpack with little knowledge to fix a business problem.

In fact, this is very similar to the price of software design.

Treat your service as a bundle of products

Think of all the research and design that would go into creating a software program that could do what you offer. How much would it cost then to divide that cost among all the 'packages' that are likely to be sold in the next 2-3 years and price each package accordingly to return your investment?

Complex but very close to the actual cost structure, especially when you add 'industry updates' patches for 平價到會.

The most common way to set your service fees

Most service providers use the industry's three-pronged approach to paying subcontractors. Find out what the average hourly rate is in your industry, and then triple it to account for overhead and small profit margins.

I would only use this method for standard service providers as the market range will keep customers shopping in this area and they will see your rates as too high if you try to get out of range.

Cost-based profit pricing strategy

This is the easiest fee to establish the service method. Calculate all of your operating expenses, desired wages, and a profit margin for the entire year.

Once you have this total, divide it by the number of hours you are available to provide your service. Remember that some days will not be available as, for example, you are running your business or doing administration tasks. This is known as billable hours and is helpful in ensuring that all costs are covered, but it does not allow you to add value to all of your current experiences and qualifications.

Value-based pricing is a better strategy

Once you've calculated your cost-based pricing, you can now add an additional fee amount based on the value gained from your service. Cost-based becomes the minimum service fee you can charge to stay in business, while value-based is what the customer is willing to pay to access your skills and knowledge.

Analyze the service you will provide and detail all the benefits that your client will receive.
Once you have detailed all the benefits, estimate the value of each benefit to the customer.
Add up the value of all benefits and this becomes the maximum fee point for your service.
What this means is that you need to find out which elements of your service are valued by your customer and how much each is worth to them.

In general, business owners like to see at least a return on their investment within 12 months and prefer to get more than double the returns spent on their services within the first 12 months.

Information provided by Paul Baker

Over twenty years of business development and change management strategies used successfully in Australian national organizations. The focus is on continually improving business systems to stimulate growth through our Start, Inspire, Innovate principles.

Customer-centric approach using our extensive experience in consumer behavior and business process operations to find ways to help business owners manage their organizations.

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