Wednesday, July 20, 2011

How much do you charge per hour?

Originally shared by Jim Connolly

How much do you charge per hour?

The reason I ask you this, is that I have a suggestion for you. If you currently quote prospective clients an hourly rate for your services, I would like you to reconsider. In my experience, you will almost certainly do a lot better, if you quote based on the value of the result you deliver, rather than how long it takes you to deliver it.

Here’s why:

People never pay for the hour.
People always pay for the result.

For example:

You pay a gardener for cutting your grass and pulling up your weeds, not the 3 hours they spend doing it. If you were just paying for the hours, it wouldn’t matter whether your grass was cut or not. If using up the gardeners time was your outcome, you would be fine if he or she just spent those 3 hours looking at the garden or reading a book......
http://jimsmarketingblog.com/2011/07/18/are-you-making-this-common-mistake-when-selling-your-services/

1 comment:

Ricky Gurley said...

I just have a question or two.

How do you even give an estimate on a case, without charging by the hour? I mean, we really don't have any idea how long it is going to take to complete an investigation once we start. We go where the investigation takes us, right?

Now when my company is conducting an investigation, often enough we don't know what we are going to run into until we get into it; so to speak. It seems to me that if you charge a "flat rate" and you have given a client that quote and you find out that your investigation is going to take you 20 hours instead of 10, you have kind of "shorted yourself"...

Besides, I want to be paid for the time I spend working for someone.

What if you can not produce a "favorable result" for the client, do you reduce your rate because the product would seem to be of a lesser value to the client?

Just wondering how to make this business model work.

Ricky B. Gurley.