I'm going to say something bold here. I hope it doesn't seem needlessly provocative. But I am a mind reader. And I'm reading your mind right now. And I'm telling you right now, you are not charging enough money for your freelance services. Now, how did I get so smart?

How do I know that it's because it's a universal problem with every Freelancer I meet. They're doing a wrong analysis. They're thinking, wow, when I had my other job, in the past, I got paid $25 an hour. So Wow, I charge $50 an hour. I'm giving myself 100% raise and wow, that's, that seems like a lot of money that's twice as much as I've ever made. So I'm going to charge $50 an hour for my freelance service.

I understand the logic I understand the thought process. But here's where you're wrong. In your old job if you work for a bigger company or other organization They're paying your salary. They're paying your overhead they're paying for the office, they're paying for the marketing. They're paying for someone to collect the bills. They're paying for all these.

They're paying for your benefits. Sometimes they're paying for the electricity, the water, the janitorial services. And they're also paying you sometimes for 20 3040 hours a week. Whether you were that productive or not. So you can't look at it as an apples to apples comparison. If someone wants to hire you for a freelance service for an hour or two.

Well, you've got to factor in the time it took to sell them. Send them a proposal, perhaps or send them a re car, follow up, schedule it, perhaps driving to their office or their hotel or wherever they happen to be. Packing up driving back, thinking about it, invoicing them, collecting them. Doing The bookkeeping, all of a sudden that one hour work for $50 was really six hours. So you didn't give yourself 100% pay cut, you gave yourself about an eight or pay raise, you gave yourself about an 80% pay cut. You've got to look at it that way.

When you are charging as a freelancer, you have to charge enough money to pay for your marketing time. You have to charge enough money to pay for your sales time. You have to charge enough money to pay for your research and development time you have to pay. You have to charge enough money to pay for your websites and your servers and your newsletter. All of these things cost money and you've got to charge a lot of money to pay for that. Fourth of July week or whatever the national holiday week is in your country when no one's working and wants to hire you.

You got to charge him enough money to pay for you to live for that week between Christmas and New Year's or whatever the other week is in your country that people take off Thanksgiving week, there are going to be certain times on the schedule where the phone just isn't going to ring, most likely. And you're not gonna get any money that time. So you've got to charge enough from the existing clients you have. And that's why you've got to charge more. Whatever it is you've been charging, double it or triple it. Here's the rule of thumb, if at least 20 or 30% of your prospects don't have their jaw drop on the floor and say, Oh my god, that sounds way out of my price range.

You're not charging enough. Because here's the thing I know with absolute certainty, there's always going to be someone willing to do what you do or similar to What you do for peanuts, and maybe not in your town, but somewhere in the world, they're willing to do it for far less than minimum wage. And if you're willing to work for less than minimum wage or for minimum wage, go work at McDonald's and you'll get some benefits. There's no reason to be a freelancer, if you want to work for minimum wage, if you're in any kind of Western democracy, where they've got strong minimum wage laws, you got to be making a lot more than that. We've touched on this in earlier segments on your positioning. That's why you have to position yourself as high value as the elite.

This is the best. This is the luxury version of what I do because you got to justify your higher fees. You can't just say well, I'm three times as expensive because I took some course and they told me to charge a lot. No one is going to want to pay for that. You have to sell a superior Service, superior expertise. One author, I would recommend to you Alan Weiss, who wrote the million dollar speaker million dollar consultant.

He's got a lot of great books and he stresses on sell value, don't sell increments of time if you can help it. Yeah, every industry is different. Sometimes people say I want an hour massage, I don't care if you're the best in the world. I only want an hour massage and I want to pay an hourly rate. In some ways My business is like that people think in terms of I want to hire someone for a day long public speaking workshop, or day long media training workshop. Now the way I get around that is I say, Okay, I give you the whole day.

But I also give you all these other bells and whistles and free training and post training and books and follow up for a year. I have all these add on services that justify my higher fee. And you've got to do that because I need The money for that to pay for my research and development and my studios and the benefits and mortgage and all the other expenses and retirement and Sep accounts and things like that. So this takes jumping off a cliff, something feels like it, because what I'm going to ask you to do is to charge dramatically more than you've ever charged before, you can always reduce prices. But once you've given someone a set fee, making them pay a lot more is often impossible. You tell someone that you know, they can have a mouse herati for $500 and it's really worth 100 or 200,000.

And the next week you say you know what? I'll let you have for 2000 a lot of people said Well, no, you told me 500 or one 500 I budgeted 500 I'm gonna feel ripped off if I get that Marathi for 200 thousand dollars. That's the human psychology. And you might as well realize that so charge more, because people are not paying just for your time. They're paying for their expertise. And that's a part of my sales pitch, though.

They'll say, I'll teach you I'm looking at this and it looks like you're charging more than $1,000 an hour. And I tell them, number one, it's not for the hour. As you add up an eight hour day, you're getting a year's worth of experiences with me. And you're getting intellectual content that took me more than 30 years to create an hour. Okay, well, that makes sense. So once someone starts looking at you is just an hourly wage, then they are comparing you to the babysitter or the lawn care person.

So anything above $15 an hour suddenly looks like you're ripping them off. You can't do that. You've got to bundle your services. Really Sell your expertise really focused on the value you create. And then present the I'm a big fan of a flat rate fee, not an hourly service. Every business is different again, they are lawyers who are essentially freelancers.

And they charge $2,000 an hour and they have corporate clients who will pay for it. If you can do that, be my guest. But if you have clients who are trying to quibble with you, oh, you know, $60 an hour seems like a lot you know, I, I only pay my plumber $50 an hour, you're barking up the wrong tree. So I would advise sell based on value. Try to decouple it from an hourly segment sell by the project. Certainly people who, who build websites or create a shopping carts for people are selling it on the basis of a project.

Not on the basis of this cut, this could come back to haunt you. If it's an open ended project and you're working for weeks, and they keep having changes. And you're stuck with one flat fee. So you're going to have to experiment. But my overriding principle I want to share with you is you're not charging enough. charge more because you need more in order to make it all work out.

It here's the thought experience. experiment for you. Answer me this who makes more money, a high priced consultant management consultant who charges $500 an hour or a low level first year kindergarten teacher at a public school down the street from you? That sounds like a crazy question. Obviously, the management consultant who charges $500 an hour makes more money, but what is management consultant Only charges, two hours and a week. And the rest of the time is out hustling and meeting and network and creating content.

You could say, well, TJ, then the person is still making $50,000 a year. That is more than what the kindergarten teachers making if the teachers making $28,000 a year, not so fast. Because the kindergarten teacher is going to have the overhead pay the electricity paid some pension or benefits, health care, often at least part of that. The management consultant has to pay for all of that, plus the internet plus website hosting plus everything else this management consultant is going to be likely to clear 18,000 when you factor in all the different expenses associated. So that's why even charging $500 an hour for a lot of freelancers is not a good idea. If there's a big sales process.

You have to try travel to the person and back and forth. So, start thinking higher, you're not at the right price. Until a good percentage. Ideally at least 30% of your clients are saying, That's crazy. You're way too expensive. You're beyond my budget.