Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Your Charging Way Less Than You're Worth If You're Not Doing This...

23 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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Cameron Herold explains why freelancers charge too little: only one-third of your time is billable. The rest goes to sales, marketing, and admin. To net $100,000 a year, charge $150/hr and bill 13 hours a week, not $50/hr for 40.

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If you're going to move from a company where you're paid 40 hours a week to show up and do work, and you're going to move into this kind of freelance or gig economy where maybe now you're working for multiple companies, you need to charge three times what you think you should be charging. And let me explain why. Let's say that you want to earn $100,000 a year doing work for multiple companies. That effectively is $50 an hour, times 40 hours a week, times 50 weeks a year. $50 an hour translates into $100,000. But a third of the time, you're going to be out there looking for business. A third of the time, you're going to be doing your own sales and marketing, finding clients, meaning no one's paying you for a third of your hours. The other third of the time, you're probably doing unbillable work. You're invoicing people. You're thinking about how to craft that. You're looking and researching for who to be selling to. And then a third of the time is actually billable. So if you want to earn $100,000 a year, you need to charge $150 an hour to bill out 13 hours a week to end up at the 100,000 a year.