Why Hourly Pricing Is Keeping You Broke
What if I told you that the very thing you think is keeping you safe (your hourly rate) is actually the reason you're exhausted, underpaid, and stuck?
Today we're getting into something I wish someone had told me before I started: hourly pricing is a trap. And most VAs don't even realize they walked right into it.
Today we are going to talk about why hourly pricing is keeping you from hitting multiple 6 figures. Now don’t get me wrong, hourly can carry you all the way to 6 figures, if you want to be working 24/7.
In fact, I scaled my virtual assistant business so fast that I was making about $200,000 a year but charging hourly so I was honestly working about 65 hours minimum. Sure I was making great money from home but I was doing it all wrong.
The entire reason why I wanted to work from home was to be available for my baby and suddenly I found myself overwhelmed, overbooked, and on the verge of burnout.
We will dive into that more later but first lets talk about the hourly pricing illusion.
Charing Your Clients By The Hour Is Keeping You Broke
Charging by the hour feels safe but creates a ceiling on your income. In the beginning I do believe it's very important to charge hourly. Understand what you can do, how quickly you can do it, and ultimately this will help you understand how to package your services but staying hourly for too long, like I did, is where the honeymoon of working from home ends.
The math that proves you literally cannot scale when you charge hourly. So if you want to make $100,000 per year but only want to work 20 hours per week, you would need to charge a fresh $192.30 per hour to make it happen. I can promise you babe no one is paying a virtual assistant that amount per hour but they would pay you a retainer at a flat fee. Again, we will get into this later.
I’m going to be 100% honest here: clients lowball hourly rates because they can. The ones who want hourly are the needy ones, the micromanagers, and the ones that will suck your soul dry.
This is where the burnout comes in.
Why Charing Hourly Always Results In Burnout
When you charge hourly, you’re constantly working more hours to make more money — and it's unsustainable. There are only so many hours in the day!
So then you know what we do, we go on instagram and start comparing ourselves to all the other quote successful freelancers and you see them thriving while you and busting your booty.
They aren’t smarter, faster, or better than you. They just are charging retainer fees instead of hourly.
Now, again, hourly is pivotal to your business in the beginning but can have lasting effects in the long run if you don;t understand how to price your services and sell them in a value based pricing way.
How To Sell Your Freelance Services
This is my favorite thing to talk about right here: Value based pricing. This means you are not charging by the hour or even what you think you are worth because honestly you are far more precious than rubies and if you don’t believe me check the facts in Proverbs 3:15 - but I digress.
You are focusing on what it means to charge for the result or solution you are providing! Clients will actually pay MORE when you shift your positioning to this. When you start selling them how their life or business is enhanced by hiring you.
For example, if you are a social media manager, you would position yourself like this, “By hiring me to create and manage your social media, you are gaining back hours of your week to spend doing the things you love or to spend more time expanding the business in others ways, in turn growing the revenue.”
See how that sounds so much more awesome than: I will create and post to your social media 3 times per week.”
When you romanticize what hiring you looks like in their business and life, things change and clients pay more.
I have a client paying me $5,000 per month to manage her email which might have gotten 10-20 emails per day. BUT I took the stress of having to continuously check it off of her and it gave her more freedom to build a program that allowed her to make so much more money! $1.2 million every 12 weeks to be exact! So in retrospect, 5k was nothing if it meant she was freed up to make more.
Hourly pricing was never meant to get you to six figures. It was meant to keep you comfortable enough not to change. And sis, you were made for more than comfortable.
If you are making at least $4,000 in your freelance business and charging hourly, we need to talk! You are on the fast track to burnout and broke. (trust me I’ve been there!)
Go find me on Instagram right now and book yourfree private success student audit. Let’s see how your business is doing, what you need to niche to, and what you need to be packaged at.
It’s not hard, it’s strategy and I’ve got the golden ticket.
& if you ready to start your own work from home business, grab my Work From Home Starter Kit here!
