#154: What’s the Bare MINIMUM You Should Be Charging Your Clients?

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. You can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com episodework 01:54. Those notes include a summary of our discussion as well as links to resources mentioned during the show. Now, before we get to this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that I have some open slots to personally guide a handful of new freelance writers and copywriters. We're going to work closely together starting this month to get your business off the ground and land your first paying client quickly. And I'll even coach you until you land this first paying client. If you'd like to work with me on this, send an email to ed2b launcher.com put the words first client in the subject line and I'll get you all the details. Now for this week's episode. You know, when it comes to pricing, pricing your work, the most common question I get is, Ed, how should I charge for this? How much should I charge for this particular project? How should I look at pricing this project? But I don't think I've ever had someone ask me something along the lines of what should my bottom be? What should my floor rate be when calculating my fee for this project? So, in other words, the bare minimum you should be charging on any given project to make sure you cover your full cost. As a freelancer now, I'm not a fan of that kind of thinking because that generally tells me that you're looking at the problem the wrong way. You're starting your calculations from the bottom up as opposed to thinking through what the professional level rates are for your target market and working from that reference point. But there is one exception, and that's when you want to know and understand what your all in expenses are. That way you can make better overall pricing decisions. Knowing your all in expenses can bring some serious clarity to your pricing decisions. It can help you negotiate better, and it can help you feel much more confident about quoting higher fees. And to discuss this important topic, I brought in my colleague Robert McGuire back into the show. Robert is president of McGuire Editorial and founder of Nation 1099, which is an online community for solopreneurs, freelance professionals, and solo consultants. No matter where you are in your writing business. I really believe this discussion will help you understand how to calculate that number for yourself. Your own all in number, and why knowing this information will help you run a more profitable business. So please enjoy this conversation with the one and only Robert McGuire. Hey, Robert. Welcome back to the show.

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be a repeat guest. Have you had three before?

I think you're the first one. Man, you're becoming like a regular columnist, you know.

That's a good idea. Yeah, like the Saturday Night Live guests who make it to five. Let's see if I make it to five.

Yeah, that'd be great. Well, you've always added great value here. I just love your approach to this and how you think about it. So it really is a pleasure. And today we're addressing something that. That I know is obviously a very important thing. We're talking about fees. This is a big question, right? It's like, what should I charge? That's the ultimate question because it doesn't have a straight up answer. But I think you're going to be able to give us some good parameters here. But let's set the stage. Tell us for those of you who don't know, you tell us about your business today, what you do, what types of clients you work with.

Okay. Yeah. My primary business for now is McGuire editorial, which is a content marketing production agency. And essentially it's my original freelancing business, taking to a much more entrepreneurial level to use a team of subcontractors while still remaining solo myself. And then I have another side project I've been building for a couple years called Nation 1099. And the mission of that is to create tools for freelancers in any profession, regardless of domain, not just copywriters, to help them close that gap between working independently and achieving financial independence and financial security. So we're focused on very experienced professionals who know the basics and are making an okay living, but are feeling stuck. And they want better clients and they want to earn more, but they aren't sure how to make progress. So we're trying to build up the content that answers that and working on that project. Naturally, I talk to a lot of freelancers and we talk a lot about freelance fees.

So let's dive right in when it comes to fees. What are some of the big mistakes you see? Really? Writers at all levels make new experience. You've seen it all. What do you often see out there?

The big one. I'm curious if this is what you see also the big One, I think is people starting and stopping with the equivalent salary for that kind of work in an employee role. So it might be the salary of the old job that they left to go freelance, or it might be the employee salary that they feel would be fair for someone doing the work that they are doing now as a freelancer. And they'll take that number and they'll divide by 50 weeks and then divide again by 40 hours. And they figure that the result of that math is a fair hourly rate to charge their clients when it's really not even half of what they should be charging. Throughout this, we're going to be talking about experienced copywriters, and I took the time to look it up and the average salary equivalent in that case would be $75,000 a year for an experienced copywriter on staff who has seven to 10 years of experience. If you take that formula I just described, the incomplete method that I just described would get you to an hourly rate of $37.50. And charging that fee when you have that much experience is the first big mistake. And the other big mistake is to charge hourly rates at all. This conversation comes with a really big caveat. The hourly rate we're going to be discussing here is just really a mental reference point for yourself when you really should be developing project fees and retainers and value based pricing models.

I see that. I guess I see something else even more frequently, which is the. I'm just so happy to have something, you know, that, that sounds good to me, especially with the newer freelancers, but I even see it with season writers, which, you know. So again, because they, I find with writers, they don't really have too much of a reference point because staff writers are not as common as maybe software developers, for instance. Right. So they don't really know. And those rates are kind of all over the place when you're an employee. So it's really more of like, wow, $300 for that. That sounds great. Because it feels like it's all profit number one. Or if you're given an hourly rate, it's like that's more than they've ever made on an hourly basis before. That's a perception. If and when they got paid by the hour, if that makes sense. So $35 an hour sounds like, oh my gosh, you know, my, my wife's a nurse and she makes 30 and this would be 35. That's amazing.

So your point is, it's not even so much that the way they set their fees is wrong, is that they Just accept what's offered without negotiating it or thinking it through that.

But there's another element to that, which means they have no reference point or because they feel they have no overhead. And we're going to talk more about that. That $300 feels like, well, that's $300 profit. Somebody's going to cut me a $300 check and all I got to do is type some stuff. Right?

Right.

So, yeah, that's a great point. Let's talk about. That's a good segue into my next question, this whole idea of all in expenses. This really brings in reality to the equation. When you talk about all in expenses in a freelance business, what does that mean? And why is it so important for you to know what your all in expenses are?

Well, with this formula I described, I'm trying to capture two principles. One is that your rate, at a minimum, should account for all of the costs that an employer would have had to employ someone for the same work. And the all in costs to the employer is a lot more than just the salary overhead, for example, which you referenced, and several other things. And two, even though not all the costs associated with your freelance business are client facing, your clients should be paying all of those costs. If your clients don't pay it, that means you're paying it. So I try to capture these all in costs, and they really fall in three broad categories. The first is the actual spending that employers have to make in order to carry employees on their payroll, which is now shifted to you once you go freelance. And that includes things like the retirement benefits, health insurance benefits, employment taxes. All of that alone can drive up your costs another 40% above that basic salary equivalent that we started with in the formula. Two, there are costs that would show up as actual spending by an employer, but once you are working for yourself, there's no money spent. So instead you're conducting that activity in what we call in kind, without compensation, without paying yourself, essentially. And one example is let's start with the first day of the year, New Year's Day, in the salaried role, you get paid on that day. The employer has an actual cash outlay to you on New Year's Day. But in that simple hourly rate calculation we started with, you're going to take that day off. Most likely you don't get paid. 3750 an hour times 8 hours is $300. So by moving from employed to freelance, you've essentially given $300 back to your clients. And over one year, the value of all the Paid days off, that employee would get is about $12,000 in this example. So you're 12,000 in the hole if you just start with that 75,000 dol dollar figure. And then there's a third category, what I would call, what businesses really call the profit per employee or the net income per employee, the nipe. And this is the net income that a business has divided by the number of employees. So that's a way of attributing all of the profit across every employee, even if you're not directly involved with sales or bringing in revenue. And so, after all, when you think about the employer bundles your work together with everyone, all your colleagues, not so that they can just charge customers exactly the amount it costs to employ all of you. They charge that plus a profit. So this formula tries to capture that for your freelance business, where there's just the one employee, yourself.

So this explains why so many writers out there feel that, you know what, I went freelance thinking that I would have more time and freedom, and I'm working twice as hard for the same or less than I was making as an employee. And yes, at least I can make my own decisions. But this is exhausting and maybe even unsustainable.

Right, right. If you're making less than what we're going to arrive at in this formula, essentially you're trading lifestyle issues for less pay. You're saying I get to make my own decisions, spend more time with my kids, travel more, set my own schedule, have my afternoons free to do the run to soccer practice and all that. And in exchange for that, I'm giving value back to my clients that they would have had to pay for if I was on the payroll as an employee.

Instead, what you see out there most of the time is people are having to work extra hard just to make up the difference that they fail to account for.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. So they need to charge more. And this formula shows how to do it.

All right, so let's talk about this formula. This is a great formula you've got. Why don't you give us a little bit of background how you arrived at this and some of the assumptions that are in place.

Trial and error. Talking to a lot of freelancers, researching a lot myself about rates and how to set them, having a budget myself, trying to design a budget for my own freelancing business and thinking through everything that was accounted in it with Nation 1099. Really what it comes from is trying to take this advice that we all get all the time, which is to treat our freelancing like a business and then to take that seriously. Because beyond that reminder, treat it like a business. There's not really a lot of really good strategic advice, especially to be entrepreneurial and to be strategic. And you may not use those terms yourself entrepreneurial and street strategic, but I would say, you know, that's the part of the value you're providing in your courses and your coaching sessions is trying to get people to really be more business minded about their freelance work. So as I was trying to do this for myself for my own business, and then in developing content for Nation 1099, I started to piece together all the lines that would go in a budget. And I realized that what I was really doing is figuring out all the expenses that are involved in living this way as opposed to being on the payroll.

Gotcha. That makes perfect sense. Let's talk about the formula and maybe how people can build this up and try it for themselves.

All right, well, first we start with the salary equivalent, like we already discussed. You can find these on places like Glassdoor and PayScale and so on. $75,000 captures that salary equivalent for an experienced copywriter. Average, middle of the country, seven to ten years of experience. And you can think of that as the value of the direct client service, the time that you spend directly working for the client. And I call that part the owner's sal salary. And this is a really important distinction we begin to make because you really have multiple Personas in your business. You are both the labor and the owner in your business. So you need to pay yourself for being the laborer, and you need to pay yourself for being the owner.

That is so key. That is so key. I want to underscore that because most of us don't think of it that way. It's like, well, I'm doing the same as the employee. You're doing more than that.

Yeah. And if we can just pause here a moment, I got another idea that's in a different article entirely. I didn't get a chance to share with you, Ed, where I talk about this distinction in more detail. And the way I decided to pay myself is I kind of pay myself the starvation wage on a regular basis as the labor in my business, as the owner's salary portion. So that's just what I need to get by. And it's what I kind of promise to give myself on a regular basis, no matter what the cash flow is. So in a sense, it's what my cash flow can always support, even in the worst of times. And then periodically, in my case, at the end of the year, you might do it quarterly. And then at the end of the year, pay myself the owner's profit and we'll get to the owner's profit later in this.

Gotcha. But one quick interruption, Robert, is this number we're using a 75k, guys. This is really just to use some numbers that we can work with to make this a lot easier and practical. You can plug in another number. Some of you guys are not copywriters. You might be a content writer. You might be a marketing strategist. Whatever it is, don't get hung up on the number. You could look it up. I agree. Glassdoor is a great source for that kind of information.

Yeah. And I've got some tools that your listeners can use to help them plug them in themselves. Shall I describe those?

Yeah, that'd be great.

First of all, there's a calculator to sort, an automated calculator on our site. You can find that in the sidebar on Nation 1099. And then for your listeners, I put together the spreadsheet, the Excel sheet, especially with all of these variables, so you can get in there and play with them yourself. And I have that on a page at nation1099.com GandiaPodcast and Gandia Podcast is one word.

Awesome. Thanks for making that available. We'll put that in the show notes for sure as well.

All right, so we start with the salary equivalent at the top line, and then we start working through the cash costs. Those include the retirement. Saving estimates might be high on this. I think 15% is important to save for retirement, but whatever percentage you decide you need to be saving for retirement, you can't save it if your clients don't pay it to you. So you need to add that. I'm using 15% on top of that $75,000 that we started with. Health insurance expense is another one. It's really hard to get good estimates for this. I used $10,000 as kind of the mean, with a very broad range of estimates that I found the cost of marketing and selling your services. Now, this might seem counterintuitive that you're going to charge one client for the expense to you of finding the next client. But when you think about it, that's what every business does. When you call up the plumber and they show up with their name on the side of the van and you found them because they came up first in Yelp or first in some kind of online yellow pages service or they're actually open up the yellow pages. All of that was an expense to them. And the check that you write the plumber when they leave is going to account for that expense. So you need to make sure your marketing expenses, the cost, the actual cash cost of what it takes for you to find more business is built into the fee that you charge your current business.

Well, not only that, but the client has to do that too if they are hiring an employee. Part of that, what the employee is supposed to do is indirectly, many times generate more business for the, for that company.

Right? Yeah. And even if you're not, like, even if you are, if you left another job where your job was mopping the floors, the amount of money you got paid is going to account for the cost the business has to market itself to its clients and customers.

Exactly.

Yeah. So I did some research on this. It seems like the general advice is that small businesses should budget about 8% of their total budget for marketing. So that's what's in this formula. Then there's all the other overhead other than marketing the software and so on that you might have. I use 20% in this formula. And then finally there's the dreaded self employment taxes. I'm putting that last because all those ones I just mentioned are going to be tax deductible. So you subtract that off of your income and then you're going to tax the rest of this and the self employment taxes. I live in Connecticut, so I used 18% to combine the federal and state burden. That does not include your total tax payment. Remember you've got your personal income tax share of it, but that would have come out of your salary anyway. So I don't include it in the formula. I'm just including the self employment tax share of that in this formula and used 18%. So that's all the actual cash costs. Then that takes us to the unpaid part, which is a little bit more difficult of a concept.

So tell us about what is the unpaid part. What does that entail?

All right, let's start with paid time off. We talked about the New Year's Day example earlier and this one again is hard to wrap your head around. It may seem counterintuitive to charge your clients for the time you aren't working. But think of it this way, you need time off. If it's not paid time off, then you're working for less than the employer would pay an employee for that same work. And in the US for salaried positions by people with several years of Experience. The paid time off adds up to this to about 40 days. That's 10 holidays, 10 sick days or personal days, and about four weeks of vacation at five days a week is 20 days of vacation. So that's 40 days. 40 days is about 15% of all the business working days in a year. So you need to add. If you want to take days off and you don't want to decrease in income from that $75,000, then you need to add 15% on top of the $75,000.

I think that's a good way to start because you might be thinking to yourself, well, I don't take that much time off, but I think it's. If you're going to plug in some numbers, why don't you start with kind of the ideal scenario? And then you can always pare that down.

Yeah. And if you might say you're not taking that time off, but that just means you're giving the value back to the clients.

True. Good point.

And then there's the value of the time you're putting in working on the business. So if you were employed at a company, the employer is paying business development people and managers and so on, and that may or may not be you, but that's an expense the company has. Now that you're running your own business, you are the business development person. You are the manager, you're the guy who can fix the printer jam, you're the guy who sweeps the floors. You're everything in the business. Right. So the value of all that time that you're putting in, it's unpaid, needs to be accounted for. Somebody's got to pay for it, or you're just giving it back to the client. So it's the same idea I use, 20%. So I'm going to ask you about this, Ed. So 20%, another way of looking at is fully booked equals 80% of your working time, leaving the rest of your time to spend on business development. Does that sound right to you?

I think so. I think that's a great starting point at least. Yeah, absolutely. It feels right.

Yeah. So in other words, it's saying to make $75,000, I'm going to have about 80% of my time client facing. And those clients are going to support the other 20% of my time I'm spending on business development, where I'm not really getting paid directly by really just increasing the hourly rate. 20% on my clients.

You know what I love about that too, is that it exposes it. And now you have something to Focus on from a marketing standpoint, many times we don't really know, well, how much time should I be spending on it? And, and I bet that if anything, you're going to look at that and go, you know, that's a reminder that I need to invest more of my time in marketing. Because if I'm going to apply this formula now, I'm going to feel more comfortable spending and investing that time and those resources.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And then, you know, the more I work on this, I keep tinkering with it and adding more. The calculators that I mentioned, you mentioned this article where I lay all this out and it's hard to keep revising and updating that, but I can keep tinkering with the calculators. So I've got even more fine tuning. I've got a line in there. Apart from the business development time, there's sort of the managing and working in your business time. And that might bring it down to, okay, 70% is fully booked, 20% is biz dev and 10% is management. And that's, I think that's how I have the calculator set up now. But again, you can play with those variables yourself.

Yeah, that's probably a more realistic. Yeah, realistic estimate there. But either way, I mean, the point is you're going to have some time for that and most of us are not accounting for it.

Yeah. And then finally back to that distinction between owner salary and owner's profit. I believe you should compensate yourself for the risk you are taking to start and run this business. This is your return on investment or return on capital or return on effort or. We talked earlier about the net income per employee. There's one employee. So you're going to take your desired net income and divide by the one, and that's going to give you a sense of your net income per employee. So at the very least, I think you should have an aspiration and put that into your budget. And I use 20%. So it's saying at the end of all this, all the expenses I've tallied up, I want to make another 20% owner's profit on top of that.

I think that's a healthy percentage at this level because the numbers, the absolute numbers are not huge for many of us. So the percentage needs to be a little bit higher. I think in businesses that are bigger, 20% is maybe shooting a little high.

Yeah, that's right. Professional services and personal services, you have higher percentages. Then if you manage your cash flow Like I was referencing earlier, you pay yourself starvation wages during the year and you're going to give yourself a bonus at the end of the year in the form of owner's profit. You know, you don't get left. You don't get. You're not, how would I say, if it doesn't work out. So this is like a plan, like if everything goes perfectly and if it doesn't all work out, at least you have been paying yourself regularly during the year.

Yeah. And I like the idea of quarterly bonuses a little better. You scare me. Every time you say at the end of the year, I go, oh, my gosh, I can only starve for so long.

Yeah, well, it depends on, you know, you set starvation wages a little higher, too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. Starvation means something different. Everybody. Right. It could mean, hey, this is going to be just to cover what I need. And, you know, that's good. And we can go out to eat sometimes. But the profit is when you. That's when you take the trip to Hawaii and, you know, do these things that, that you really want to do.

Yeah, yeah. And make. Make yourself whole on all the effort that you put in.

Absolutely.

So you just. Maybe your estimates are going to be different than mine. I hope that you agree that the. Each of the variables do need to be in there. So you plug in your estimates into the calculator and you come up with a grand total. And the grand total. So here's where we ended up. For an experienced copywriter again, someone with seven to 10 years of experience who's doing the equivalent of what, according to Glassdoor Insights like that is a $75,000 job. Remember, we started out, if you make the mistake, you're going to be charging $37.50 with this formula, it comes out to $79 an hour. And that would give you annual receipts of about $164,000, which would allow you to save for retirement, pay your health insurance, pay your taxes, invest some money back into your business so you can keep growing it, and you'd be able to take off about 40 days a year for holidays, vacations, and sick days without a decline in income.

Now, of course, that assumes $79 per hourly rate, roughly. And that assumes that that is total for your work time because of the way you have the formulas. That's not just billable time. That's just for total work time during the week, Correct?

No, that's what we would bill clients. And that's that 80% booked rate that we discussed.

Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. So then it becomes even more helpful because now you're, you could work long hours and you're doing some other things, not just billable work. And, but, but when you've, when you're pricing, that, that could be a benchmark, that could be a gauge.

Yeah.

Okay, so talk to us about. I like that. This is, this is very revealing. Talk to us about rules of thumb. I've heard some rules of thumb out there in terms of, you know, two, two and a half times what you would be making as an employee. How does this compare to some of the other things that you're seeing out there in the market? Is it in line with that?

Yeah, it does. When I was trying to figure out my own rates for consulting services, I was out there searching. People probably come across the same blog posts and articles. This rule of thumb I saw sometimes was to take the salary equivalent, convert it to an hourly rate, and then charge two to three times that amount. So we've taken the long way around to demonstrating the validity of that rule of thumb. The result of $79 an hour is slightly more than 2 times 3750 an hour that we started with. And again, I emphasize this is just your minimum starting point. I think it's not unreasonable to go to two and a half or three times, but this is your minimum starting point for negotiating project fees and retainers, which is a topic for a different day, but really where you ought to be going anyway.

So tell me, tell me if you agree with this. Here's how I would use this. This is extremely helpful because this is not for me to quote clients a certain hourly rate.

Right. It's your own reference point.

It's your own reference point. It's an internal tool. What I like to reference are, okay, what are market fees? Fee ranges for some of the typical projects that I like to work on. And then I use this number to kind of temper or to compare those fee ranges. So, for example, if I know that I can get away with charging, let's say, five to six thousand dollars for white paper, as long as I know typically what it takes me to write a white paper and I'll have a range, then I can use this to see, okay, am I in line with that? Is this a profitable project? And if not, how far off? I think that's one great way to use it.

Yeah, that's right. It's kind of a gut check on if you're in the right line of work or not. I don't want to be Discouraging. I want to encourage people to be copywriters and advance their careers and grow their businesses. But if you're convinced that the market rates don't support what this formula is showing, then you need to rethink if you want to be in that market. I think the example you just gave it probably would support it. I think it depends on how long it takes you to write the white paper. But, yeah, you're right. It kind of gives you this gut check, like, am I in the right business here?

Yeah, and that was just an example. But let me give you another extreme on the other end, which is I've been working with some people lately who. So they're not earning $2,000 a month yet. And so we're coaching them through this process to get to and exceed $2,000 a month because they. They haven't. They've been freelancing for a while. Many, in many cases, but they haven't hit that number consistently. And one of the things that I show them, I haven't fill out this diagnostic questionnaire. One of the things that I show them is, okay, right now, don't hate me, but your internal hourly rate is $7 or 19 or whatever. I mean, they're all. Most of them are very low numbers. And I just want them to see, okay, if you were out there in the workforce force, would this be acceptable to you? And of course, the answer is no. What I'm finding is a lot of them are getting really fired up. First of all, they're upset, they're sad, they can get a little discouraged. But I'm trying to use it as a tool so they could see that, look, you can't. This is not sustainable.

Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. It's not sustainable. Or it just means facing up to the fact that you are. If you're charging less than this rate, you are giving value back. And there may be a good reason. You might decide, I don't need health insurance, I don't need days off. I value the flexibility. I don't think that's necessary. I think you can have the flexibility and also charge the client the full value. And the value. Think of it this way. The value is what they would have to otherwise do if they hired someone. And if they hired someone, they'd have all these other expenses. And because they're not hiring someone, they get all this flexibility. There's variation in their costs to make their fixed costs variable. They should be paying more for that, not less. And if you're charging less than what this formula shows. You're just kind of giving the value back to them in exchange for you having something about your lifestyle or your way you're working that you like. But I just don't think that's necessary.

You know, I think what many writers and copywriters do is they take the client's hot potato. And by that I mean, yeah, you know, they feel, well, the client, you know, they can't afford to pay me more than that or, you know, twice that much, which is what I probably should be charging. So. But they feel that it's their responsibility then to then work with what they've got. And my answer is, you know, your responsibility is not, is not to make it work for them. It's got to work for both of you. So there are other clients out there. You need to figure out how you can position yourself and market yourself to attract and convert higher paying clients. Because otherwise you're just going to have to be struggling with this. But it's not your responsibility to make it work for them.

Yeah, that's right. If we. This calculation, it arms you with facts because this is the actual all in expenses of you being a freelancer. If it were me, this calculation would give me the confidence that more is possible. I mean, it's discouraging if you are making less than a minimum wage and making far less than what someone would in a salaried role. But another way of looking at it is it gives you the confidence that more is possible, that you're not crazy to think I ought to be earning more than I am, then it's a question of whether you believe more is possible for you in particular. And if you're going to develop a program working with folks like you, Ed, to really get yourself in a different position.

Absolutely. And one thing I want to emphasize, guys, I'm only exposing this because if you fall into that category, if you run some numbers right now and you're seeing, oh my gosh, you know, this is depressing, I want you to know that much more is possible. Okay, so this is. You're not necessarily in the wrong profession. I find that in 90% of the cases, it's not your skill set. It's a lot about your confidence and what you're doing right now. Yeah, right. This is not that you're worth less, it's just certain things you're doing that you're worth less. It's just certain things you're doing, not doing that are keeping you in this place.

Yeah, that's right. I Mean, I don't have any easy answers. I've gotten to this over time. I don't think you can sort of run the calculator and just turn to your clients and say, the calculator tells me how to be charging more.

I wish you were that easy.

It's not as simple as that. But what you just said resonated, reminded me of something that I keep coming back to, is that I know over and over and over and over again. I see people with the same skill sets, similar skill sets, similar experience, making very different amounts of money. And you need to ask yourself, why do I have the same skill set and the same experience and I'm making a different amount of money than a peer? And you know, it comes down to many things, starting with having a niche, all that other stuff that you're working with your clients on.

I would boil it down to three kind of big picture categories or items. One is mindset, the other is strategy, and then the next one is execution. Got to have all three, that's got to be firing all together for this to work. So I don't want anyone to feel discouraged. And I just keep emphasizing that because I know when people run through this calculator and I hope you download it, you might get discouraged. But look at it as, you know what, this is the wake up call. Now I know what my all in expenses are and I need to work toward improving those.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, more is possible, like you said.

Absolutely. Before we wrap up, any other ways you think this data can help you, any other insights that you have found that when people run through this or the feedback you've gotten, that has been really helpful to others.

You know, I did do a gut check with some other folks. I'm glad to get your feedback on it. I'm glad to get your listeners feedback. I ran it by at Nation 1099, we've been talking to a lot of these freelance marketplaces, the founders of them and people that run the matching platforms. And I talked to one last week that specializes in really high value consulting. He ran through it and he said, yeah, he told me before, the biggest problem I'm having is the consultants we have coming into the marketplace are all over the place on the price because they get to set their own rates on our platform. They're all over the place. These are very experienced people, like strategy consultants, like refugees from McKinsey and Bain. They said they're all over the place on their hourly rates and most of them are way too low A couple weeks later, I sent them this calculator and asked him to run through it. He said, yeah, this comes up with a number I'm satisfied with. This is what my consultants ought to be using.

I don't think most people understand they're all in expenses. And some of these line items, I know until I saw this, I hadn't accounted for a lot of this. I think I got lucky. I kept pushing my rates or my fees up and up and up until I started getting resistance. So that's another way of doing it. But I feel more comfortable having something like this because at least I know what I'm working with and what the floor should be.

Yeah. And you know what you're foregoing. If you're pricing less than this, then you know you're giving up something, whether it's the profit, whether it's the return on the risk you're taking, or you're giving up health insurance or you're giving up vacation days, you know what it is you're giving up.

Wonderful. So we'll make sure to include again that link where you can download the spreadsheet in the show notes. Make sure to check that out. I think it's going to be really helpful if you have this in front of you. And Robert, thank you so much, man. It's always great to have you. We're going to need to keep this going and go for number four.

Okay, great. Thank you. Looking forward to it. The High Income Business Writing Podcast is.

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