Setting your value, and sticking to it

I have a side business, where I'm contracted out to do technical writing and drawing for people wishing to file patents or start development projects. I set my price at $150USD an hour and do a preliminary review of the project, write up a list of requirements and needs for doing the work all before the clock starts. This way the customer knows up front what it will likely cost them and allows them to know if they shop around what to expect from others to know if they are being over or under sold on a project. The prices I charge isn't cheap but is far lower than what most law firms will contract out.

The other day I was propositioned by an acquaintance to do some web services and SEO work. It would be an on going project and while I haven't been doing this type of work for that long, the things I have worked on made it very obvious what they needed was a part time person working for a good 15 hours a week. That is $2250USD at my current rate. And that assumes I have the time to do it. Week or month long projects are fine but what they needed was an actual employee. After talking to them a little while about their needs and their past experience with contracting companies to do this work, I realized that what this person was seeking was someone to do the job at as little cost as possible. They tried doing the work themselves, watched a few YouTube videos and read a tutorial somewhere. But in the end they couldn't do it themselves because "it was a full day's work for [them] but would probably be easy for [me]". They told me how much the company charged and it came out only slightly higher than what I would charge.

After this conversation I thought to myself, they recognized that it was a need for their business, and that the skills required were outside of their ability. They had worked with a company in the past who charged a lot and they didn't feel that the cost was worth the benefit to the business. This was a business that specialized in the work needing to be done, in a market full of competition so they were going to be able to provide a better product at a competitive price where I would probably not.All signs pointed to the business owner just not getting that this costs money due to the amount of work and expertise required. They knew the expertise was required, but just did not value the person doing the work for the work it required. Instead their view was purely on what they think should be the amount they are willing to spend for the end benefit.

Sadly, being in a niche market, wanting very small, regional views to their website, the cost of the work wasn't worth it for them. It probably would have been better to ditch the custom site, printed up a few hundred refrigerator magnets to hand out at local events and use some SaaS ordering site to handle everything else. With how digital, and remote, all our lives have become I get the feeling that most people think it just happens by magic, and that anyone can do the work making its costs super low. All these big tech companies popped up by college drop outs and people working in their garage so the work you as a developer must be easily attainable. And by that measure must also be low cost. When I was fresh out of college I probably would have taken on the job and taken a low ball offer, just chalking it up to "resume building." I know I did that a lot in my day job, taking on work that never had a return on my progression but ended up eating up nights and weekends.

In the end I directed them to a friend who does the type of work the company needed and since they only do it part time they might be able to negotiate a better price and amount of work being done making both parties happy.

$ published: 2022-10-01 09:30 $

-- CC-BY-4.0 jecxjo 2022-10-01

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