Had a conversation yesterday with someone who was trying to figure out what his rates should be, and it didn’t go the way you’d expect it to go… especially when dealing with a dude.
He’d be out of the game for a little while and was getting back in it. Super excited, already had some new clients lined up, all
that jazz.
It only took a minute for me to realize that his plan was to figure out the current “going rate” and then charging 25% less than that.
But whyyyyyy
So I pushed back a little.
“If you’re so good at what you do that you send one message to one past client and you have 3 gigs lined up within 12 hours, then WHY do you feel like you need to under-charge?”
His answers…
Because I’m a good person.
Because I’m honest.
For customer loyalty.
So I can sleep at night.
And all of those things are true about him… but none of them point to “and therefore I shouldn’t earn as much as everyone else.”
If you do good work…
And you’re honest…
And you aren’t over-charging…
Then you’re going to foster customer loyalty — just by being good.
I’ll say it again…
If your work is better than average and you’re a joy to work with, you need to charge more, not less.
Because lemme tell ya, most freelancers are not a joy to work with.
And that’s worth something to people who have to work with freelancers.
It took me a long time to drop the story that I needed to charge less as I got better.
It wasn’t until that whole “you didn’t pay for the 5 minutes of work, you paid for the 10 years of experience” story made the
rounds…
and then my mentor Julie Chenell shook me by the shoulders and said “If they want to work with YOU, it’s gonna cost ’em!” …
that I started to get it.
People are willing to pay more for better… and better includes the experience of working with you.
People are certainly willing to pay the going rates, if not a little more, for a better experience.
You don’t have to under-charge to compete.
The only person that hurts is YOU.
So to bring back my favorite Bob Newhart sketch…
STOP DOING THAT.
Ok… now that that’s out of the way…
It’s time to make sure you’re charging right.
And for that, I have a handy little guide.
It’ll help you start charging what you ought to be.
It’s called Rates Redux and you can get it for zero dollars and zero cents here:
https://gainer.ink/rates
