Work At Home Experts

When working from home in a consulting basis, it’s difficult to discern how much to charge for a particular project.

Under or over charging can result in negative issues for your business.  Under charging can cause you to lose money and precious time.  Over charging can put you in a place of pricing out of business.

When figuring what you should charge take your current annual earnings or your ‘hoped’ or ‘average’ earnings for your industry and divide those earnings by 2080.

2080 are the numbers of working hours in a given year based on a full time salary and work load.

When you have this figure it will be your hourly base rate.  Once the base rate is calculated, list any external or contract costs you may have.  For instance, if you are consulting as a decorator, then consider travel, samples, any contract labor, or other areas where you will have to spend out of pocket. 

Total the extras and stick this to the side.  Now take the project and write a project guide containing all the steps involved with the project.  Calculate how much time it will take you start to finish and allow for a 3% buffer in the black for unknown costs.

Take the total number of projected hours to do the job and multiply your base rate times those hours.  This will give you the total job cost.  Add in the outside costs and the 3% and it will give you a good estimate on the cost of the job.

If you do a job by the hour, be sure that you get a retainer or deposit up front of at least 50% of the total job cost and make it non-refundable except for extreme failure on your part to produce a finished product.