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If you take nothing else from this, just take the bonus advice, which Thomas and Patrick have been flogging here for years. It really is just true. If you bill hourly, people will attempt to attain an intimate knowledge of the comings and goings of what you do in order to get more out of you for less money, and this will be irritating, and they will also demand that you produce itemised invoices, which will, in itself, be time-consuming and even more irritating. Tell them that your minimum billable unit of time to complete a task (any task) is a day - tell them that it's a resourcing requirement, or just tell them nothing (if you're not brave, then half a day just about works too - but nothing more granular than that, ever). If you're working with any decently sized kind of enterprise, almost any reasonable rate you can imagine will be absolutely fine - worrying about $800 vs $1000 vs $1200 per day is utterly pointless; pick the highest number you dare and if they want to work with you it will be fine, and if they didn't want to work with you, the rate wasn't the problem anyway. I once charged a client ~$15,000 for a week's work, because they needed it in a hurry; I thought I was being outrageous (because the work was very easy and very repetitive), but they went for it. Later they accidentally sent me the pitch deck they had sent to their client, which included their costs, and I found they were charging ~$25,000 for the technical side of a $90,000 project - they made $10,000 on the bit my consultancy did, and a hell of a lot more on the rest. So yeah, raise your rates. |