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What Should I Charge?

Lesson 7 from: FAST CLASS: How to Make Money

Ramit Sethi

What Should I Charge?

Lesson 7 from: FAST CLASS: How to Make Money

Ramit Sethi

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Lesson Info

7. What Should I Charge?

Lesson Info

What Should I Charge?

How much would you charge huge questions on charging, raising rates and stuff like that? So my suggestion to people is really start out with an hourly rate. Okay, this is controversial stuff, but this is what I found to work for. My students start off with an hourly rate. I like to understand the scope of what my competition charges. So let's am a photographer and I'm or let's say I'm a writer and my competitors, which I've looked around at they charge anywhere between 30 and $45 an hour. Okay, let's just say so. I'd probably try to charge my right in there around $40 an hour. Not at the highest end of it, but pretty high. Why? Because I'm going to be doing valuable work. That's gonna be way more valuable than other people. Other people are gonna be stuck here in the laborious tactics of their craft. Well, my craft is good and getting better, but I'm also gonna be doing all these other things that my editor cares about, like being interesting, like driving page views like blah, blah, b...

lah, blah. So I don't want to charge it the highest. Because if you charge the highest range part of your range than people give him. Why? Why are you charging so much? But over time, you will actually often be able to charge the highest and even higher, like Dean Or like other folks who charged, even astronomically high rates. Does that make sense? Okay, you will have to deliver value. You will be able to raise your rates. But this is a basic framework for how much to charge. All right? And you can find where people how much people are charging online. You can just google that. Okay. Very simple. We'll get back to some of the questions, but I want o work through these quickly. Oh, God, Should you ever work for free? OK, creatives want to kill me right now? Already? And I have even said anything on this slide because they they throw around words like spec. Work is evil. Oh, my God. You're destroyed and keeping the man down bloodmobile. But you don't know what you're talking about, okay? Free work can work strategically. You do not want to go around to everyone and be like, Yeah, I'll work for free because you're gonna devalue yourself. and you're gonna develop. Who cares about devaluing? Feel you're gonna devalue yourself, All right? It's not a political discussion. We're talking about ourselves in our business here, however, free work works when done correctly. I know because I've done it and it has dramatically accelerated my career. And many of the people who work from works for me for free. This is early on, and I ended up hiring them, and they've been paid lots of money. So when do you do free and when do you know you do free? If you can ascertain that the person you're trying to work with has some characteristics like their massively influential like, for example, a New York Times columnist who has connections everywhere, or a blogger with 500,000 readers a month, okay? Or an author? I'm not trying to say come work for me for free. I don't want anybody pitch me right now, but there are a lot of people are like a really famous photographer in your field. But what do you do when you work for them for free? You don't want to just say I'm gonna work for you for free forever. You say Listen, I'm a huge fan of what you're doing. I really like the new magazine that you're building. My normal rate is actually $55 an hour, but I'm such a fan of what you're doing that I'd like to build a portfolio, and I want to help you grow this magazine, especially with your launch in the next one month. So if you're willing, I'll be more than happy to actually do this project for free with the understanding that once we're done, you give me three referrals to other people, you know, or with the understanding that if I do an extraordinary job, we go back to my normal rate. Okay, So what happened there? I told them what my normal rate is. I said I'm willing to work for free under these conditions. There was I'm taking the power. I'm not letting this guy some freeloading guy Tell me. Oh, you're just a writer. You're working for free. Never. I would never do that. But I would take the power in the relationship and say, You know what? I'm willing to work for free because I need X y z. I need a portfolio piece. I need a recommendation from you. I need this. If you're willing to agree to that, I'll be more than happy to do it. Does that make sense? All right. So I believe this is the last one here how to go from one client to many or three clients to make Whatever one thing I like to do is a referral strategy. Uh, right. When When I agree. Notice that I'm I'm taking a lot of concessions from the client because if I'm a top performer, I'm like, All right, fine. I'll work with you. But you have to agree to a couple things to work with me. That's what a top performer does. Now you're not being condescending about it. You're being really polite to say, Listen, one thing I do is I just want to see if this works for you. But whenever I work with a client, I make an agreement that if I do an extraordinary job, they agreed to refer me to three people at the end. That work for you. And of course, they're going to say yes because your first you have to do an extraordinary job actually holding yourself to a higher standard, and then you're getting referrals at the end. The other thing is, remember when we did the ask without selling technique, So I've like, interview 20 moms or 30 people who want personal organizer. I didn't sell them on anything. I stay in touch with them. I have a little template email, stuff like that, And at the end, I might say, Listen, I'm starting actually decided based on what you told me and you recommended I talked to Sue that I think I really want to do this personal organizing thing. So I'm actually launching a service. I'm probably gonna put up a website in a couple of days. But do you know anyone? I should talk to anyone that might be interested in discussing, you know, having a personal organizer. Well, if you do that to 20 people, how many referrals do you think you're gonna get? A lot. So these air easy ways to go from three or four clients to many, many, many more. Dean talked about it in detail. We covered in detail. Earn one K. Basically, if you have clients, you already have a gold mine to go forward with. You can ask him how they found you. What sites do they read? Where did they go? And then you go there and you present yourself.

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3 Negotiation Scripts
5 Negotiation Case Studies
5 Resumes That Win
Freelance Email Proposals
Freelance Income Roadmap
List of Freelancing Ideas
Ramit Sethi Interview
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