Pricing & Rates
Set a price you can defend: build your true cost floor, run the five-competitor local survey, land above the middle of the range, and hold the number when the kitchen-table negotiation starts.
This is the pricing method that works for any service business, from house cleaning to loan signing to video editing. You will build a cost floor from your own numbers, survey five real local competitors, decide where to land in the range, and practice saying the number out loud without flinching. Then the maintenance: raising prices without torching your client list, and a set of rules for when a discount is a tool and when it is a confession.
The promise here is specific and honest. By the end you hold a defensible price, meaning one derived from your costs, checked against your local market, and backed by a sentence you can say to a client's face. What I will not promise is that the number will be comfortable. Most people discover their floor is far above what they planned to charge, and that discovery is the entire point.
What this course is not: a rate table. I will not tell you what a cleaning visit or a notary signing or a detailing package "should" cost, because those numbers belong to each business course and to the market where you live. This module teaches the method that produces the number. Every course in the library applies it to its own trade.
The floor
The price is the business
Why your rate is the one decision that shapes all the others, the two ways it goes wrong, and what a defensible price actually means.
Your cost floor
Build the true hourly number below which an hour of work loses you money: take-home target, billable share, overhead, and the tax gross-up.
The survey
The five-competitor survey
How to mystery-shop five real local competitors, what to record beyond the number itself, and the conclusions you are not allowed to draw.
Where to land in the range
Sort your survey, put your floor under it, and choose your position: how anchoring works, how commodity drift pulls prices down, and why the bottom of the market is a trap.
The conversation
Saying the number
The kitchen-table moment where prices actually get decided: how to deliver the number, what to do with silence, and the scripts for the three objections you will hear most.
Raising prices without losing the base
The arithmetic of a raise, the triggers that justify one, how to announce it so clients stay, and what actually happens to the clients who leave.
Discount discipline
When a discount is a tool and when it is a confession: the break-even arithmetic every operator should know cold, the four honest discounts, and the rules that keep them honest.