To price your services, separate your time into billable delivery hours, investment, and sales. Your break-even rate covers your cost of living plus expenses, using whichever is higher than market value. Add profit on top to stop trading time for money and actually make money.
Figure out your break-even billable rate. The billable rate should be driven by a couple of things. It should be driven first by the number of delivery hours you're going to work in a week. I've talked in other circumstances about splitting your professional time into delivery, investment, and sales, of which only one of those, delivery, is the one that you're billing for on a direct basis. So you're trying to figure out how, what is your return per hour on your delivery time, and that's driven by how many of them there are. And it's ultimately driven by your cost of living, your expenses, and your fair market value. Whichever of those is higher, your cost of living or your fair market value, that kind of determines what your break-even point's going to be. Then the question is how much profit you get on top of that. And that profit is going to be what really elevates you from just doing time for money and into creating profit with your time. Understand your break-even rate, you'll be able to understand where profit is, and then you're going to understand whether you need to sell more, whether you need to invest more, or where the hole is in the bucket.
