When I started as a solopreneur over 8 years ago, I had 0 idea on how to price myself.

I ended up just guessing what I should charge.

I find now it's much more common for entrepreneurs to take a different approach.

They see some "guru" telling them to charge premium, so they rush to their pricing page and slap on a super high price so they can look like an expert.

I'm here to tell you, that doesn't work.

I absolutely advocate for premium pricing and charging your true worth, but you have to earn the right. You don't get to charge $5,000 a month for 5 hours of work when you're just starting out.

I know that's not the fun, typical advice you see about online business from a content creator, but it's the truth.

That said, how SHOULD you price. What are all the things to consider? After all, you do have to make money while you scale into value-based pricing and a more premium cost.

So here's 5 things to consider when pricing out any project (and more on the image you're seeing later on):

1) Overhead Costs

When it comes to pricing, make sure you account for all of the tools you're using to get the job done. 

This would be items like Adobe Creative Cloud, Calendly, Notion, etc. Any tool or product that has a cost impacting your bottom line.

If you're a larger agency, this would also be a mark up for "corporate costs," meaning the people that never work with clients but still assist the organization.

2) The employees working on the project

This should be a no brainer, but everyone working on the project has a salary. They may also have benefits, bonuses, and other financial considerations.

To determine your profitability, you should be tracking how many hours they're spending on the client and combining that with their salary/hourly rate.

Doing this will also give you great insight into client level profitability as well if you're using a productized service model (a flat rate monthly fee for each of your clients).

3) Origination Fees

Sometimes, onboarding a client has a cost to it as well.

You can either eat this cost, or you can pass it on to your client.

Either way, a simple evaluation should be done to determine if you need to or not.

4) Desired Profit Margin

This is the one number most entrepreneurs start with, but you need to determine a healthy profit % for any project.

Standard profit margins for service-based agencies is 20%. This can (and should) increase over time for any founder-led solopreneur/small business, since you'll be building more and more demand over time for your service (without excessively scaling your employee count)

5) Length of the contract

A 5th thing to consider is how long you'll be working on the project.

If a project is super short-term, you have more flexibility since there's no way to "lose" as much money. Sometimes, if a project is really easy, it's often a great call to make $0 in profit just to build trust with the client.... Note: this is very situational though, and should be reserved for clients who can afford a premium service after the fact (or they are already in a retainer with you and you want to keep them happy).

As for the image above...

I built a custom pricing template complete with video walkthrough instructions for members of the Coffee Shop Nation Community.

This will enable anyone to quickly plug in their ideal salaries, overhead costs, and profit margins to find the perfect price point for any project in under 60 seconds.

It can be used in Google Sheets or Excel, and it follows a similar methodology to the pricing templates I've built for my financial consulting clients — some of which are agencies making over $100 MM per year in net revenue.

If you'd like to join the Coffee Shop Nation Business Membership Community, sign up for the Laptop Lifestyle newsletter below so you can get information on the next wave of sign ups!

P.S. Here's what a downloadable resource post looks like within the community.