Pricing your services correctly will help you stretch your pay check.
According to Wikipedia “price is the quantity of payment or compensation for something.”
In Virtual Assistant terms, I would like to rephrase it to “price is the quantity of payment or compensation a client is willing to pay for the services delivered by a Virtual Assistant.”
Set Your Price Like a Pro and STRECH that pay cheque
Although it is important to determine your hourly rate upfront, I firmly believe that you should evaluate each request for services and each client on merit and set your price accordingly.
The easiest way to evaluate a request is to:
1. Know who your client is and what his needs for the specific request are
Understand the client’s needs and what is expected from you in terms of feedback, reports, deadlines, special software programmes etcetera. Ask your prospective client if this is not clear in the initial request. Remember some clients require more effort, some are riskier, some are repeat clients, some have jobs you are dying for and some you don’t want to work with. And the only way to find out the above is to ask questions.
2. Know what the request involve
Is it an easy, difficult or specialized request? Easy requests such as pure administrative services are usually at the lower end of the pricing scale where specialized requests such as social media marketing involve higher premium prices. Whatever the case might be, you should be able to adjust your price according to the criteria above.
3. Know how long it will take to complete the request
This involves your effort. How many minutes, hours or days are involved? Will it be a once off or continuous service? It is important to know the estimated time required to take the request from the beginning to the end.
4. Know what it will cost you to complete the task
Work out all the costs associated with the request. There might be some once off expenses associated with a particular request such as stamps, envelopes, printing costs etc or there might be on-going expenses such as feedback telephone calls etc. Make sure you don’t oversee expenses because “hidden costs” will eat up your pay check.
Only once you’ve evaluated the above you will be in a position to Set Your Price Like a Pro. Remember to structure your proposal professionally and to address your prospective client’s needs in a way he cannot refuse your proposal.
