1.1 Why your rate is lower than you think

Picture a week. Forty hours, Monday to Friday. Now color in the hours somebody paid you for.

If you work alone, it’s rarely more than fifteen or twenty. The rest is email. Notes after a session. An invoice. A proposal that didn’t come to anything. Finding the next client.

None of that is wasted. It’s the job. But nobody pays for it directly. The hours a client pays for have to carry all the others.

So here’s the mistake almost everybody makes. They take what they’d like to earn in a year, divide it by forty hours a week, and charge that. At forty billed hours, the example year in this course needs $50 an hour.

Then they sell fifteen hours a week, because that’s what a week really holds. And they bring in 38% of what they needed.

That’s not a pricing problem you can fix by working harder. There are only so many hours. It’s a counting problem.

So count the right hours. Not the hours you work. The hours somebody pays for. That number goes at the bottom of the sum, and everything else goes on top of it.

On top: what you want to take home. The tax on it. What the practice costs to run. The fees a card takes on the way in. In the example, that’s $92,573 to collect in a year.

Divide it by 690 hours, which is fifteen a week for forty-six weeks, and an hour has to cost $134. Not because that’s what the market pays. Because that’s what it takes to keep the take-home.

That number is your floor. You can charge more. You can’t charge less without paying for the privilege yourself.

The next lesson works out yours.