Pricing For Freelancers: 5 Ways To Set Your Rates | Back To Basics

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 257

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time joining me on the show today, first of all, welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. This show is for creative freelancers who are trying to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their soul.

If that sounds like you, you are in the right place. From our returning listeners, we are in the thick of it right now. I have averaged two episodes a week for like three weeks now, which I think is a new record for me, doing the twice a week thing.

My goal, unofficially, is to catch up for the eight month gap we had between when we rebranded from the 6 Figure Home Studio to the 6 Figure Creative way back at like episode 150 There was like this huge gap of just no episodes while we went through that rebrand as a big slog of things to do.

And maybe I can make up for it by just doing two episodes a week for a long time. Who knows how long I can keep this up. Today's episode is probably gonna be longer than the typical part of this series. We're on the Back to Basic series for those who have not been following along, where we're talking through a lot of the basics that many people skipped by or fell to really think about as they're building their creative freelance businesses.

And in this specific episode, we're gonna cover a pretty beefy subject, which is pricing or setting your rates.

And I don't know if I can cover this in the typical 15 minutes or so that these Back to Basic series have been. So this might be longer, although I haven't recorded this yet, so I don't know how long this is gonna be. But there's just a lot to cover when it comes to this.

So my goal for this episode is to give you five different methods for setting your rates or pricing your services as a freelancer, with one main goal in mind, is to increase how much a client is worth to you. This is a huge part of being a successful creative, a successful freelancer, or in my opinion, making what is the bare minimum you should be making as a freelancer, which is six figures.

This is a huge part of it. And if you're wondering why I mean the bare minimum, if you do the numbers of what actually what you take home as a six figure income earner, as a freelancer, it's typically worth about the same or less than what you'd be making at a day job. So when I say six figures, like that's the bare minimum you should be shooting for as a creative doing this full time. Otherwise, you'd probably be making more with health insurance and benefits and pay time off as a person with a day job. So our goal should be to surpass six figures and ultimately net six figures or more, even multiple six figures would be the goal. And we cannot do that if our pricing and our rates are not set properly. Here's how most people set the rates as freelancers especially. They look around, they look at what other people are charging, and they typically use a gut instinct to set their own rates in accordance to what they feel their value is in relation to people around them. And the problem with that sort of approach is that most freelancers vastly underestimate their skill level, the value they provide people, the talent that they have compared to other people. People have this comparison syndrome where everyone else is better than me, so I have to charge way less than everyone. So we end up setting our rates and charging our clients based on our lack of self-confidence and our fear of losing out on the project. And what that means is that we perpetually undercharge from what we should be charging.

And I know if you're listening to the show right now, that is you. I guarantee you, if you clicked on this show, I wonder what Brian has to say about setting rates or prices or whatever. I am almost guaranteeing you that if that is your thought of, like, hey, I wonder what he says about pricing, that you are probably undercharging right now. If you don't think you are, then just listen to this episode because I bet there is something in here that's going to spark the thought of, damn, I should probably be charging more. So I don't want to be insulting here because, like, we all start somewhere. But if we can't get out of this perpetual cycle of undercharging and not thinking through and having a process for setting our rates, here's what's in store for us as freelancers. You're going to be going through a lot of financial strain because you're not earning enough. That's an obvious one. So if you don't have enough money, you have more month than money. Go back to the budgeting episode I did a few weeks ago or a few episodes ago.