# Complete Guide to Pricing Automation Services

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Nick Saraev
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQWWnu7vzI
- **Дата:** 06.03.2024
- **Длительность:** 37:08
- **Просмотры:** 13,962

## Описание

In my time selling automation services (and now operations consulting), I’ve come across five general ways you can price your services. I talk about them in this video!

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## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQWWnu7vzI) Intro

hey everyone Nick here with a quick video on how to price your Automation Services the next few minutes I'm going to cover everything from the various models that I've seen work really well in the automation industry so specifically how to structure your package or your service in such a way that makes sense for the client and then you and I'm also going to cover the various price points that we might want to start looking at uh depending on whether you're a beginner maybe somebody with a little bit more experience and may you're professional so that sounds like something you're interested in stay tuned and let's get into the video

### [0:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQWWnu7vzI&t=33s) Disclaimer

okay as per usual I have a notion doc that I'm going to link at the bottom of the video this is just so that people that are more textual Learners just have something to refer to uh you don't just need to listen to me blab on and on in order to get the value inherent in this video so uh first and foremost there are a bunch of different ways that you can price Automation Services and I have luckily maybe unluckily experimented with every single kind to try and find one that worked for me what I'm about to tell you is not meant to be the end all be all in so far that you need to follow this word for word um I'm going to try and make a nuan show you how different types of pricing probably work better at different stages in your career um so you know take everything I'm going to say with a grain of salt there are also slightly different markets that I know the people that are watching my videos are in I mean for instance I usually do a lot of CRM builds I like lead generation make. com stuff but if you're designing or building something slightly different from me um whether it's on a different platform or maybe you're offering slightly different Services keep in mind that may vary regardless I think this is going to a very educational and beneficial video for you all so without

### [1:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQWWnu7vzI&t=92s) Hourly Pricing

further Ado the first way to price is hourly now what is hourly pricing I think it's pretty damn simple it is where you charge per hour that you spend providing a service as you will see I have put a thumbs down emoji immediately next to the title and that's because hourly billing is widely referred to and well understood and known at this point as like the worst way to price it's also in many instances unavoidable so a quick example of this is you might be on one of these platforms maybe upwork like I mentioned in one of my previous videos is a good place to start and your profile says $50 an hour for make. com and zapier automation there are some upsides of this pricing method the first is that your upfront cost is going to seem pretty low for the client um so the proceed friction is low and that's obviously very important if you are new in the industry you don't really have a good track record behind you know you don't have too many case studies to look at uh you know an upfront cost of $50 per hour let's say just seems a lot lower than a client than a project price of $10,000 excuse me for instance so that's something to keep in mind the second is um it's pretty simple you'll set a rate with a client the client's just going to ask you how long do you think it'll take and then you just give them a rough outline with the scope and then you Bill after the project is done and so the reason I'm bring that up is it's just it's very simple it's well understood you don't need to do any explaining of like the mechanism of your pricing like you do with a few of the other models I'm going to show you below and most people understand hourly pricing um it's also really built into the variety of online platforms that i' like to mention so upwork for example if it's your first project will take care of hourly pay for you and then you'll also get it automatically added into your account in a weekly schedule um I know Fiverr doesn't do this anymore but there are a bunch of these other like requests for proposal platforms that um allow you to set up your hourly scheduling in such a way that you just make sure uh you never really have to worry about like a client not paying you or that sort of thing so that's pretty beneficial that said there are also a number of downsides and notice how the uh size of the downside section is about twice that of The Upside section that's because these downsides are very big deals if you are doing hourly billing off platform and again it's understandable that you are because you almost always just get a better rate when you work off platform than you do on platform you have to deal with a fair amount of risk now this risk is difficult to conceptualize for people that haven't run agencies or maybe big freelance outfits before um but there are a couple so let me just run through them all the first big risk is

### [3:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQWWnu7vzI&t=234s) Overages

um you go over and so I don't know if anybody here has ever had anything done like a home improvement side of things but like I don't know maybe somebody quotes you at $5,000 to do your floors and your stairs and everything like that what will almost inevitably happen in these situations is about 60 to 70% of the way through the project the contractor will knock on your door and be like hey man just wanted to give you a progress update now in order to finish this we're actually going to need another $2,000 what I mean by this is it's very difficult to scope some automation projects there are tons of problems that might come up and as a result like when a client asks you for an estimate and all clients will because they want to like at least a rough idea of what the budget's going to look like um that estimate that you deliver may not actually be true or realistic in practice and in situations where that happens especially if you're new to the business and you're not very good at setting expectations and managing you know the client relationship set of things that can be a real bummer and it can lead to terrible experience for you and a terrible experience for the client as well so you got uh the risk of overages right that's a very big risk and something worth considering uh a lot of the time clients will ask you to Bill on some sort of hourly schedule so um you know you kind have two options here you can either Bill them you know do the entire project log the number of hours that you've spent doing the project and then send them a bill at the end um or you know what a lot of people would probably prefer is to get some type of payment regularly up until that project is completed um both of these have issues the first issue is if you don't get paid until the very end of the project like a lot of novice Freelancers or agencies will probably choose to do so to minimize friction um now you're risking the client just not paying you for a long time in my experience you know as long as you do what you say you're going to do $90 99. 9% of clients are going to pay you so that's not a problem uh the big question mark is when are they going to pay you and that means a lot when you're first starting out because you know $1,000 or something like that might make or break uh maybe some personal budget situation that you got going on or your ability to invest rapidly in finding new clients with alternative marketing methods um this is called the accounts receivable problem it's one is the biggest issues in any service business and all of the models that I'm going to show you next are basically going to solve this problem or mostly solve this problem uh but it's something you have to consider and then if you're doing like some type of hourly schedule or whatever it just adds a bunch of sales admin time which is a big pain in the ass um speaking of sales admin the amount of time that a client will sort of force you to do if you are engaging with them on an hourly basis is usually pretty chunky it's usually pretty big I mentioned how clients want you to scope pretty religiously um and that scoping can be so unnecessarily granular especially for like poorer clients that you end up spending literally just the same amount of time talking about you're going to do than actually doing it and that's definitely a recipe of disaster and then the biggest downside of hourly pricing and this is the one that you know if you just take one thing away from this whole video take this away is that it is a total misalignment of values your value as an automation

### [6:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQWWnu7vzI&t=405s) Value Misalignment

engineer or a specialist or an agency is not in how long it takes you to do a one particular project realistically we just being logical about it your value was built over the months and years and decades leading up to the moment where you have this contract because that was what enabled you to know what process to pitch what system to develop or you know the various skills necessary to do this sort of thing why would you let's assume you're really good at this you build systems really fast why would you be punished for being really good at that just makes no sense you shouldn't be punished uh hourly wise you know if you finish a 10-hour project in 5 hours you should be punished by getting half of the pay you should obviously be rewarded for getting two or three times the pay maybe an equivalent amount of time an hourly billing does not let you do that so total value misalignment it's a massive downside to hourly billing and despite that pragmatically a lot of you guys are probably going to have to start off with hourly billing and that's okay just make sure that you understand the upsides and the downsides inherent right um You don't have to just like go all the way to the bottom of this list and just start your very first project if you guys are pretty new in your career or whatever with the most optimal type of billing of course as you progress through your career experiment with a couple of these on your own uh but use this as generally like a guide map and just know what you're getting yourself into when you choose hourly or you know any one of the other models that I'm going to mention okay so the second way to price your services as an automation engineer or somebody in Myspace is through one-time Project based pricing this is quite different to hourly billing it has a bunch more upsides it has significantly fewer downsides but they're still worth mentioning what a one-time project might look like is you are pitching a client on the call and the client asks you how much this is going to cost them and you just whip out the super specific number I don't know why I wrote this so specifically $3,192 for this clickup implementation um it's a major upgrade over the hourly pricing model that we before that we had before because you're no longer saying hey I'm going to do $50 an hour for some vague scope instead you still have a scope of course it's usually a lot uh simpler and more straightforward uh because you know the client isn't pestering you being like how long is this going to take how long is it this going to take um but within that scope you just give a flat project price you say you're not going to pay more than one cent over whatever is in this project proposal um the benefit to that is that part there where it's like you're not going to we're not going to do any overages because I really trust in my ability to do this that's a ton of confidence and clients really like that they like having um set project pricing where they just know how much money is something that's going to cost so it's sort of reduces friction on that end that said you are also just pitching them on a way higher amount up front like $33,000 for instance is a lot more scary than $50 an hour so you are going to have more friction with this method than with the hourly method just keep that in mind um obviously it's value aligned now so you're no longer punished for dragging and dropping modules faster than somebody else or by knowing exactly what the hell to do with this thing um the better and faster you are at building and the more knowhow you have and like the better way you can structure it U that all just translates to improve proove revenue for you so it's a win-win in that regard it's not the worst way but it's also not the best way U but there are ways that you can make it better and also cover your bases too like a lot of people that start off with onetime project price um there's sort of three camps you can either build all up front or you can build some type of Milestone schedule all at the end and so a lot of people because you know they first starting on business they don't fully understand kind of the implications of what they're doing they'll say hey let me do the project for a billy after that's a mistake you don't want to do that with onetime project billing because there's just so much freaking money uh in accounts receivable that you do not have access to that um if you Bill everybody after the fact you know your Revenue month-to Monon is going to go like this even if your company is growing and that's going to lead to cash flow problems it's inability to maybe staff or hire or pay for the softare that you need or that sort of thing so what people usually do in practice is they'll either Force full payment UPF front which is quite difficult and there's usually a fair amount of friction involved with that so most clients will prefer you to do some type of Milestone based structure where you might have 50% upfront 50% upon delivery uh or maybe 33% uh upfront 33% after Phase 1 and then 33% after the delivery of phase 2 uh these larger phase projects um I usually stay away from them I like the 50% upfront 50% deposit or 50% delivery it's just simpler for me uh but if you're doing like a 30 or 40 or $50,000 project usually they're going to be multiple stakeholders involved and they're going to want like a more granular pricing scheme hence you know the percentage Milestones so yeah um that's really valuable and then by forcing 50% up front you usually have enough to at least just make sure that all the costs you have in delivering the service you're paid for which is valuable um I mentioned the downsides are harder sell than hourly if you don't set strong expectations with a client they can use you and abuse you the reason for that is because you're not any additional time that you spend in the project is not being reflected in the pay and that's sort of the whole deal with our or with Project based pricing right so if you don't set expectations really well and then the client like oh like I want just this little thing added or I just want that little thing changed or whatever and you don't kind of put your foot down and you know are willing to sacrifice a bit of the client experience for obviously your business to succeed um a lot of them are going to take advantage of you and this doesn't happen every time um it doesn't happen very often to me but I think that's just because I set expectations very strongly initially um but you do need to keep that in mind like clients are probably going to ask you to do just a couple of additional things and you just need to be very firm about where you put that boundry down so you're not just doing a bunch of work for free um and then the last thing or last major downside is there is a bit of risk if there is a Services implementation problem so let's say you know this is

### [12:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQWWnu7vzI&t=751s) Risk

one of your first Times building like a monday. com CRM and then you miscope something and you don't realize oh you know I can't actually integrate portion x with portion y or I need to build this fancy workaround to like do the thing that I told the client I'd be able to do this happens extremely Often by the way no other service professional will probably tell you this but that's like probably 40% of all the time that you spend as a freelancer at least until you have better processes in place um if that happens uh you're not getting paid more for all the extra time and energy and so it really puts the onus on you to like really be airtight and scoping the project and like this is going to happen regardless so you are going to have a couple of projects that are usually less profitable than otherwise uh which is why you just charge way more upfront anyway right instead of $50 an hour times the 10 hours it would take you right is $500 you charge $3,100 let's say which is like 60 hours worth but maybe it takes you like 10 or 15 um the difference between that 60 hours and the 10 or 15 one obviously you're making a lot more money which is hoay uh but two it you have room for issues like this to arise and then even if you find yourself in a situation where you really mess up a project maybe you need to hire somebody outside and you actually lose money on that uh the other projects that you've set up in this onetime project pricing enables you at least like sweep that under the rug and not actually just like destroy your business so yeah that is the onetime project pricing model the third way to price is

### [13:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQWWnu7vzI&t=829s) Productized

productized and this is even better than our previous model it's a lot more difficult in practice to make it work however productized companies and specifically produ ised like operations companies are some of the highest margin and most profitable businesses that you can run um a quick example of what this might look like is instead of you jumping on a call with a prospect and walking through your skills and why you're the right pick for the job you probably just have a landing page or maybe a couple of landing pages and a bunch of people on the internet talking about you and then you just sell a template so instead of $3,000 for a customized CRM implementation now it's hey pay us $987 for a clickup master CRM template all you have to do is Click one button download it onto your computer and then maybe you can sell accessory Services customizing that or whatever but um the actual core like the vast majority of the core value is just productized it's in like a it's basically like the digital product form now the reason why this is so popular and so many people are moving towards especially right now is because it is the most scalable way to transform knowledge into Revenue basically it's not the most quick like it's not the fast fastest way you're not going to make the most amount of money with the product I service initially the way that I see it is um you know if you're billing one time you're going to make more money up front and so like the growth of your business is going to look like and then it's going to kind of level off but then if you're running a produ ised business the growth of your business will probably be a lot slower initially but then when it takes off it goes basically vertical the reason for that is because you basically have no like added costs involved with this product if it's a template for instance or maybe it's just some service that you provide but that's very granular with very clear milestones and very clear breakpoints um it becomes super easy to calculate and then fix your internal costs so you know I'm making exactly 74% margin on every single project in order for one new project to get done I have to hire one new person let's say or maybe you know one person can do 10 projects a month and I just i' got 20 projects a month so I need two people hired right the Staffing gets a lot easier um the delivery your ability to plan and project Revenue gets a lot easier and that's really well producti is one of the gold standards in the service industry now um and then the last one is obviously you get like paid up front which is freaking amazing so super valuable there um just very low friction the cost is usually a lot lower and that sort of thing now you know no discussion of different pricing models would be complete without me illustrating the downsides and you know despite the fact the product dies is freaking awesome um there are still some downsides the biggest one is product IED Services usually perceived to be lower quality because people just feel like they're being sold like a product and there's no like person or human beside that um this doesn't necessarily have to be the biggest downside in the whole wide world if you think about it like if you want to buy a car in most parts of the world you need to go into a dealership and you need to like shake hands with somebody and they need to like you know sell you on why this car is the best that's kind of like the old school way of doing business right but that's still the way that most people sell like Automation Services projects or really any other Digital Services project contrast that with like buying a Tesla you just go on their website and then you like select the car you want add a couple of add-ons then press enter right you know it doesn't necessarily have to be a downside uh but we are working in business and a lot of the time working with people that um I don't want to say they're older necessarily but they're certainly used to slightly older ways of doing business I guess that's that that's a lot more relationship based and personal based um and as a result you know there is that per CE decrease in value just because there's not a person that's you know walking you through this process for instance um it's not necessarily that you can also have a salesperson selling a product IED service it's just usually the whole point of product IED Services is that it's like you know self- serve sort of deal because that's the most scalable there also just going to be some people out there like those people that I mentioned earlier that just like really like the relationship side of things um that'll just never buy a product IED service there's just nothing that you can do to make them want to buy it they just really need a person um as part of the process and if there isn't a person it doesn't matter if it's like $100 they're just going to say screw it all I'd rather spend you know $10,000 to have somebody walk me through this implementation than $100 to have something that I would need to make a couple of uh changes to so yeah that's that uh and then also you just can't really charge as much because you don't have like the personal time and energy involved in that um I might be mistaken here you know I've seen some people charge some pretty large amounts of money especially in the last few months here for product eyes services but I think generally speaking like it'll just usually be a lower price um and yeah that's productization I mean I'd encourage you guys to do this wherever possible I have a tab open here uh with Fat Joe um specifically because Fat Joe Davies is the founder of this company and uh I I run a Content company as well for those of you guys that aren familiar called one second copy which is now doing produ ised content writing and Fat Joe was a major inspiration of mine um both back then and more so now because the way that he set up his business here it's a big business we're talking eight figures minimum the way that this company works is it's all self-serve like self-order SEO um where it's just like that Tesla dealership where all you do is you just go on tesla. com you pick the service that you want there are there's media there's information there's education surrounding all of the content there so that you know exactly what you're getting and you're basically selling yourself and then when you're finished selling yourself you click buy so very scalable and very self-managed if you guys want to check out what like an actual super successful product ised company is or looks like head over to fatj. com and just like click on literally every single one of these it'll blow your mind okay the fourth way

### [19:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQWWnu7vzI&t=1168s) Retainer

to price your automation agency Services is as a retainer now there is so much Hub up on the Internet about retainers right now and I think a lot of people to start just don't really know what a retainer is a retainer basically just means you pay somebody to have them available to you in any time what a lot of people think a retainer is it's just like mrr for service companies or agencies and it's an interesting way to think of a retainer for sure but in reality the way that a retainer works is more akin to hey pay me $3,000 a month and you'll get 20 hours of build time in practice this is usually what a retainer is going to look like for you so what does that mean it means that we're still technically framing the services that are being delivered in terms of hours obviously we've eliminated a lot of the problems with hourly billing like the accounts receivable and the instability of the revenue and all that stuff um but we're still framing it in terms of hours right if you do the math $3,000 a month divided by 20 is $150 so you are now capping your time at $150 um so you know there's an issue with that obviously the benefit to that though is the latter half of that word here the slash month uh because now you've turned your one-time project revenue or maybe like a onetime hourly project or something from that one time into a monthly or recurring service and in the online world uh for those of you that are unfamiliar recurring revenue is King like recurring revenue is the gold standard for everything it allows you to be able to project the growth of your business over time it allows you to um sell your company for what's called like an Enterprise multiple and these Enterprise multiples can usually be pretty big um it's so impactful and important that like basically every company around the world online has completely changed the way that they run their business specifically so that everything is now as a monthly recurring subscription as I'm sure you guys know so yeah it's King right um even if it's month-to Monon and you have a really high turn let's just hypothetically say you know we have two options here one is like a $5,000 project UPF front another is a $3,000 a month service um and the average time is 3 months well by the person uh coming back for 3 months obviously it's three times whatever the monthly cost is so 3,000 time three is equal to $9,000 that's almost two times more what the hell am I talking about um so you basically add just a boatload to your customer lifetime value and then in addition um you're spreading that out over a longer period of time which technically means you're making less like money per minute but it also means now you can project okay like next month assuming that the vast majority of our customers stay we're going to have $27,000 available for us to do investment into marketing um if you're just doing everything one time it's very difficult to get that predictability and usually what happens to practice is month one you might have like you might make like a million dollars month two you might make $400,000 month three you might make $1. 8 million month four you might make $128,000 right like the revenue changes so quickly that it's difficult to sustainably um grow your business project costs and project uh you know Marketing sales and that sort of thing so very important um I mentioned the Enterprise Value thing the way that it usually works out to in mathematical terms the multiples on buying and selling businesses in um automation just they aren't really good because this is still like an agency service essentially or like a managed service that somebody's providing even if you productized really well the multiples just really aren't that good uh in 2024 March 5th and this may change drastically over the course of the next couple of years as the market rebounds or maybe changes as priorities I think an average earnings multiple you'll make is like 2. 5 to three maybe 3. 5 if your business is more productized and what that means is you basically just take your annual profit and then you just multiply it by that multiple in order to get your sale price so if your annual profit is a million dollars for instance and your multiple is two and a half then you'd make $2. 5 million or at least your company would be valued at $2. 5 million when you sell um a quick you know just way to sort of do that mathematically um is you know I'm assuming your margins are going to be somewhere around the realm of 50% um mine are about like 55 60% uh from month to month some months a little bit higher when I do a lot of marketing Services another other months it's a lot lower when I don't really do a lot of spend but if you add let's say $3,000 a month in monthly Revenue you can conceptualize that as adding $36,000 a year to monthly Revenue if you cut that in half your earnings are now $188,000 a year and if you multiply that by around three um that's going to add about 50k to your price so the difference there between 50 and three is basically there's like a 16x on the monthly Revenue you can think of just sort of as like a general add to your Enterprise Value and why that's important is because selling a business is like one of the best ways to like make a ton more money because you get to make money while the business is operating and then you also get to make money when it sells um this isn't always the case in low multiple business or low multiple verticals like agencies and stuff a lot of the time if you have high margins just makes sense to keep operating it because selling is very involved and sort of a pain in the ass but anyway Worth to at least consider uh you also get paid UPF front which is obviously huge from an accounts receival perspective now you don't have to you know worry about whether you're going to get your 20 hours worth ofay pay next month or in six months or whatever like that if a client is being really shitty uh you know that you get it ahead of time and so always charge for retainers up front okay awesome and the last way

### [24:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQWWnu7vzI&t=1475s) Subscriptions

to price your automation agency or freelance service is with a relatively new business model that I'm referring to as subscriptions now subscriptions are basically retainers it's just instead of billing based off hours like the vast majority of companies will do you just based off the value that you're providing you just build based off the value you're providing to the organization and so an example would be instead of $3,000 a month for 20 hours of Bill time you'd say hey pay me $619 a month and you'll have access to me or access to my company or uh you'll get weekly calls or you'll get something but the something will just not be ours and so in my case you know and I've tried this out and I'm currently doing this for a couple of clients with reasonable results um you know I might say pay $4,400 a month excuse me for access to a fractional Chief automation officer or chief operational officer who will do all of the following for you and then I have like a big list of deliverables and the things that are involved in my case it's usually like a weekly call it's usually um some type of like comprehensive road map uh that I set up in month one and that we follow every month thereafter but obviously you know depends on the way that you want to price or model your specific business now why are why is the subscription model so much better than the retainer model I would say um is because you're value aligning once again and so it's sort of like the onetime project price to the hourly pricing um well I guess what I'm trying to say is uh subscription is to retainer what one time hourly or onetime billing is to hourly billing and so just you know kind of keep that in your mind that this is sort of like the new and improved version of the retainer because you're fully value aligned uh if you do a really good job you don't have to spend as much time you get all of the benefits of recurring Revenue you don't have to deal with any of the hourly headaches so you don't have to deal with like maybe going over and doing sales Administration or going under and then having a client you know wonder why uh they're not fully making use of all of the service time that you've allotted for them and then you also have full flexibility to set this up however you like this is a relatively new business model uh one that I've only really seen start working and taking off in the last year or two so this still very nent and people don't really have full strong expectations around it um the way that I see this work in practice is usually there are companies like design joy and this is a design company not an operations company so take everything I'm going to say with a grain of salt but instead of uh you know offering Design Services per hour for instance it'll just be 4,995 flat per month and then you can literally work in an unlimited capacity with that with the client uh and then usually just have like a Trello board or something like that and then they just add their tasks to the trell board you guys consult or coordinate what the next week of work is going to look like uh maybe in like a brief 15minute meeting and then um everything is just managed through that board and then you know you can only work on one thing at a time so that when you're done you know you move it to complete it or whatever they get a notification they can check it and that sort of thing so you can set it up that way you can do some type of daily Consulting call if you want to be more on board or maybe take more of a Hands-On position in the company whatever works for you have total flexibility over it the downside is also and I didn't add this uh you have full flexibility over this and so if you don't really know what you're doing you can really shoot yourself in the foot instead of you ideally making more money per hour than you were when you just charging flatly per hour you can make way less money if you spend too much time or energy or don't really understand the best way to pitch the value of your service another downside is it's much higher friction um because it's new you know you also have to S sell them on the idea of a subscription as opposed to a simpler idea of hourly billing which most people are accustomed to like if you go back to retainer usually the pitch for retainer is hey you know my normal rate is $200 an hour but if you purchase a package of hours and retain me then I'll only charge you $150 an hour right that's a pretty easy sell to make when you're trying to transition from hourly to a retainer a subscription doesn't really have that there's no real way to pitch that um that's simple and kind of well understood within the industry so keep that in mind um you know the clients definitely need to understand the value that you bring to the table um and have that be disconnected from the time that you spend in order for it to make sense it's very difficult to set expectations I find now that I'm doing this and uh and that I have a couple clients on this model um sometimes I actually spend more time than I would with an equivalent retainer and I think that's just sort of part of the job and just something that I'm figuring out as I go and then yeah I mentioned that not a lot of people are doing this right now so still something that you sort of have to figure out um but I've noticing I'm noticing this working in a lot of Industries and if you just think about it logically the subscription is just like better in basically every way to a retainer because you're just eliminating that hourly component so yeah now uh

### [29:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQWWnu7vzI&t=1751s) Pricing

something a lot of you guys are probably curious is okay Nick these are the four or five business models but how exactly would I price if I was a beginner or if I was like an expert or Prower or whatever uh and that's what I'm going to walk you guys through right now so let's say you're doing hourly billing as I mentioned a lot of you guys are probably going to have to do hourly billing if you're getting started with Automation Services for the first time and that's cool uh what I'd recommend you price at is between 40 to 60 bucks an hour now if you look through like the average pay for somebody that do automation it's going to be lower than that but you don't want to go much lower than that the reason why is because when you price your services too low people start wondering who the hell you are and why the hell they should even care um it sort of like subcommunication actually has to think like is this something that we should you know is this a service worth getting and if they answer that question is yes then usually people that they're willing to hire at that range they'll sort of attribute a bunch of positive qualities to like competence and skill and that sort of thing so you can seem like more of an expert than you actually are in all honesty if you charge between 40 60 an hour at the same time it's not so high that you know a client that doesn't fully understand the value of automation will like raise their eyebrow and be like dude why would I pay this guy $90 like I could just do some dragging and dropping myself right so seems pretty conservative to me prices are obviously getting more globalized uh throughout the world so um you know a few years ago I would not have been able to put $40 to $60 an hour here and then everybody that watched it would understand but I think now we we're all sort of like all Digital Services professionals whether you are in Bangladesh or Singapore or whether you're in North America like you these prices are all sort of like melding together and so regardless of where you are I would charge somewhere around this much and if you go any lower than 40 just don't go much lower than 40 if you're a pro if you've been doing this for a while uh and you know your value then I charge about $120 an hour but again if you if you're a pro you probably shouldn't really be doing hourly billing in the first place um I charge on average I want to say about $120 an hour when I do hourly projects I very rarely do hourly projects now um uh probably the last time I've done an hourly project is like a couple of months ago and I think that was like a brief maybe like an hour and a half quick call uh for a client that I'd worked with like a year or two ago that were that was used to my lower prices and uh I really like them and I just wanted to help them with something but I also didn't want to do it all uh completely for free because then I thought the client might sort of take advantage of me and that sort of thing so um anyway long story there but uh yeah I'd charge at least $120 uh dollar keep in mind all the stuff is in US dollars so translate that to whatever it means for you if you're doing a onetime project um I do have a list of prices in a previous video which I will hopefully if I remember um add somewhere here hopefully right now future Nick um it breaks down the various services that people provide like clickup crms or monday. com crms or maybe some lead generation systems or whatever so it's a lot more granular than this but generally speaking if you're a beginner charge like $1,500 or more for your project your projects are probably going to take you at least like 15 hours to fulfill if you don't really know what you're doing and you're running into road blocks right so um you know this is still at minimum probably going to be about like one and a half to two times what you'd make in an equivalent hourly rate uh but as I mentioned the downsides to this are some projects can go over scope and then when they go over scope it's your fault and you're kind of paying out of your pocket for it so you always need to have a little bit of that buffer if you're a pro I wouldn't uh I wouldn't take less than 5K for a project um simply because uh you know it just wouldn't really be worth your time otherwise and if you're a pro and you're running an agency so there are multiple other people in a company that are working with you i' probably charge even more maybe even double this um simply because the second that you throw another variable into the mix like another human being man does it get difficult to like constantly guarantee good margin so yeah for pros charge at least 5K a project but again you know I consult that other video If you want more specific pricing on you know crms versus lead gen systems that sort of thing product sized very difficult to say um and there's no real like Pro or Noob difference here it's very variable generally what I find and what I've seen is that productized services are usually between 20 to 30% as much is like a bespoke implementation and so that 70 to 80% or whatever difference uh just represents the value that a person would provide in the process some type of like personalized implementation expert if you want an example as I mentioned earlier just head over to Fat Joe uh these guys do it for SEO and content writing design and video PR right all these marketing services and you'll see more less how they price compared to what an industry standard might be also note that you have total control over this so whatever price you choose is you know play around with it start low or start high and then kind of work your way around the Spectrum uh find out what makes the most sense and highest Roi for you guys for retainers um the way that I'd structure them is if you're a beginner I probably do somewhere around $1,500 a month um I would pitch my services probably at like 70 or $80 an hour and then i' pitch the retainers like a discount to maybe 50 an hour for that 1,500 so maybe you're doing like 30 hours for this um that 30 hours though is like a lot higher value than just billing them hourly because now you have a guaranteed sort of deal and it also allows you to build a long-term relationship with a client that's paying you and I think the value of that cannot really be overstated uh basically every small retainer that I had at the beginning of my career has now evolved into a much larger U relationship whether it's some type of Revenue share or just a lot higher hourly rate or a lot higher number of hours so that's quite valuable and then if you're a pro I charge probably about $4,000 a month plus um I would probably pitch my services at be as being worth at least 100 or $150 an hour then maybe drop that down to 100 um obviously totally up to you and this is all dependent on the way that you priced um hourly earlier but yeah lastly if you're running a subscription I would as a beginner charge no less than $2,000 a month keep in mind you're a beginner it's very difficult to pass yourself off as like a chief automation officer or chief operations officer if you just if you don't really have a lot of experience behind you so most of you guys will probably not be able to do this at least for a couple years uh but even if you somehow did I would always make sure that my value is represented um somewhere around like the 2000 plus Mark and then for pros I'm putting $4,000 a month here just because I've experimented with charging that much for my own company left click um which is right over here and basically um I'm charging $4,400 a month and basically uh you know what I found is in practice I usually spend way less than whatever the equivalent would be let's say we're doing $100 an hour I spend in practice way less than um 44 hours a month it's usually like 15 or 20 hours a month so my hourly rate has now just doubled up to 200 or maybe 250 for an equivalent amount of time and the value there is because it's on a subscription basis some months I might actually spend more spend less but I'm basically like the partner to the person that's working with me and I'm not just like kind of building systems for them now I'm sort of going into a Consulting role where I'm proposing systems and proposing changes and that sort of thing um and then as inside I find if you guys are trying to run an automation service charging a money charging money for a subscription and then upselling them later on at some sort of increased service or maybe some type of like partnership or Revenue share is a lot easier because again you're not framing yourself as somebody that's working hourly now you're framing from a value perspective and most of the time when you pitch these people you're pitching a business owner who doesn't really like working hourly either and they like the value perspective so um yeah they're just going to consider you a lot higher value and they're going to see just a lot more uh I think opportunity in working with somebody at their level as opposed to like just some little worker be that they pay an hourly rate okay sweet so I'm going to attach this notion in the video description as per usual um that's it on my guide to pricing Automation Services uh again some of this was Consulting operations some of this was automation but I trust you guys are mature enough to see the difference if you guys have any specific requests you guys would like me to do next feel free to just drop that down below as a comment more than happy to take that and then potentially record a video on your suggestion otherwise please like subscribe do all that fun stuff and I will catch youall in the next video thanks so much bye-bye

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/12783*