How to Price Your Services as a Consultant or Freelancer Without Underselling Yourself

There is a pattern Robin sees consistently among new clients: a consultant or freelancer who is genuinely excellent at what they do, fully booked, working long hours, and still not earning what they should. When he asks what they charge, the answer is almost always an hourly rate. And that hourly rate, however reasonable it seems, is almost always the entire problem.

Pricing your consulting or freelance services is not just a business decision. It is a statement about how you value your own work. This guide covers the frameworks Robin has used with more than 200 clients to help them charge what they are actually worth and build a more profitable, sustainable business.

Why Does Charging by the Hour Keep You Stuck?

The hourly rate feels safe. It is easy to explain, easy to benchmark, and seems fair to both sides. But it is fundamentally broken as a model for service businesses, and Robin has not seen a single exception to this across two decades of coaching.

When you charge by the hour, you are selling time. Time is finite and cannot scale. It also punishes you directly for getting better at your craft: the more experienced you become, the faster you work, and the less you earn for the same result. A junior designer who takes 20 hours to build a website charges £2,000 at £100 per hour. A senior designer who completes the same work in four hours charges £400 at the same rate. The senior designer’s work is more valuable by every measure, but the billing model says otherwise.

There is a second problem that is less obvious but equally damaging. When clients pay by the hour, every conversation defaults to time. How long will this take? Can it be done in fewer hours? Could another provider do it cheaper? Those questions turn your expertise into a commodity and invite comparison with whoever charges less. You are no longer selling the outcome. You are selling the ingredient.

The truth is that clients do not care how long something takes. What they care about is the result. A marketing consultant who generates £200,000 in new revenue for a client has created exactly the same value whether the work took 10 hours or 100. The hours are entirely irrelevant. The outcome is everything. That is the starting point for a different approach to pricing.

What Is Value-Based Pricing?

Value-based pricing is a method of setting your price based on the outcome or transformation you deliver to the client, rather than the hours it takes to deliver it. Instead of multiplying time by a rate, you ask what is this worth to the client and price accordingly. It is the model Robin advocates for every consultant and freelancer he works with, without exception.

This is not simply about charging more for the same thing. It is a fundamentally different conversation. When you price based on value, the client is no longer comparing your rate to a competitor’s rate. They are evaluating the return on their investment. A consultant who charges £5,000 for a project that saves the client £50,000 is not expensive. The return is 10 to 1. That conversation is entirely different from competing on who charges less per hour.

Value-based pricing also changes the dynamic of the client relationship. Instead of monitoring hours and querying invoices, the client is focused on the outcome. Both sides are aligned around the same goal. There is no adversarial element to the engagement because the value, not the time, is what has been agreed.

For a view of how pricing is evolving across the UK consulting and coaching market, Robin’s UK coaching industry report shows the shift away from hourly rates towards fixed-fee and outcome-based models gaining real traction.

What Are Productised Services and How Do You Build One?

Value-based pricing needs a delivery model to work. That model is productisation: packaging your services into fixed, named offers with a defined scope, a defined deliverable, and a defined price. Instead of a bespoke quote for every project, you have a clear menu of what you do and what it costs.

Most consultants and freelancers already do roughly the same work repeatedly. They are just presenting it as custom each time, which adds unnecessary friction for the client and unnecessary unpredictability for themselves. Productisation takes what you already do and makes it consistent, repeatable, and easy to buy.

Building a productised service involves four clear steps:

1. Identify your core work: Find the one or two types of engagement you do most consistently and that deliver the best results. For most consultants, this is a small number of project types that account for the majority of their revenue and all of their best client relationships.
2. Define the scope: Decide exactly what is included, what is excluded, and what the outcome looks like at the end. The more clearly you can define the deliverable, the easier it is for clients to say yes and the harder it is for scope to creep without a formal conversation about additional fees.
3. Set a value-based price: Price the package based on what the outcome is worth to the client, not what it costs you to deliver. Use the 10 per cent principle from the next section as your starting point.
4. Name it for the outcome: Give the package a name that describes what the client receives, not what you do. Revenue Clarity Sprint tells the client what they will walk away with. Marketing Consultancy describes your process. The client is buying the outcome, so that is what the name should reflect.

Once you have a productised service, the sales conversation changes from what do you charge per hour to here is what I offer and here is what it costs. That is a fundamentally stronger position. It is one that separates consultants who build sustainable businesses from those who stay stuck in the time-for-money trap. Robin covers productisation in depth through the Fearless Business Accelerator, where it is consistently one of the highest-impact changes members make in their first few months.

How Do You Actually Set Your Price?

This is where most consultants and freelancers stall, because the honest answer is not a formula. It starts with a question: what is this work actually worth to the client?

Robin uses a straightforward principle with every client. Your price should represent roughly 10 per cent of the value you create, leaving the client with a 10 to 1 return on their investment. A business consultant who helps a client add £100,000 in revenue has created £100,000 in value. A price of £10,000 for that engagement is not expensive. It is proportionate. A client who understands the return will not negotiate hard on the fee.

Getting to that number requires asking the right questions before you quote. What is the cost to the client of this problem remaining unsolved? What does solving it unlock for their business? What has it already cost them? These questions reveal what your work is actually worth in their specific context, and that number is almost always higher than most consultants expect.

Market rates matter, but only as a floor rather than a ceiling. They tell you the minimum clients expect to pay, not the maximum they are prepared to invest in exceptional work. If your only benchmark is what competitors charge, you will always compete on price rather than on value.

There is a confidence dimension to pricing that Robin addresses directly with every client. If you quote a price and feel vaguely embarrassed by it, it is almost certainly too low. A price that makes you slightly nervous, just outside your comfort zone but not terrifying, is usually the more honest reflection of your real value. Robin calls this the price that makes you take a breath before you say it. Say it anyway. For context on what consultants and coaches are charging across the UK market, the full breakdown of consulting and coaching fees in the UK is worth reviewing before you set your next rate.

What Happens When You Raise Your Prices?

This is the fear that holds more consultants and freelancers back than any other: the belief that their clients will leave the moment they charge more. The money story that says their work is not worth more, that the market will not bear higher rates, that the clients they have are only there because of the price.

Robin’s experience across more than 200 clients is consistent on this point. When you raise your prices, some clients do leave. But the clients who leave are almost invariably the ones who were taking the most time, paying the least, and causing the most friction. The clients who value your work stay. That is not a loss. That is a filter, and it is one that improves your business in every dimension.

Higher prices send a clear signal to the market. They communicate confidence, expertise, and a genuine belief in the value of what you deliver. They attract clients who are focused on outcomes rather than costs, and that shift in the quality of your client base changes everything: fewer difficult conversations, less scope creep, less resentment, and more of the work you actually want to be doing.

The practical principle Robin uses is to play just outside your comfort zone. You do not need to triple your prices overnight. You raise them at the next opportunity, by an amount that feels meaningful but not reckless. You watch what happens. In the vast majority of cases, either the client says yes without hesitation, or you lose someone you were already frustrated with. Both outcomes move you forward.

The money mindset is the final piece of this. Most undercharging is not a pricing problem. It is a belief problem: the belief that you are not worth more, or that asking for more is somehow unreasonable. Until that belief shifts, the pricing will not. If you want to know exactly where your pricing stands right now and what to address first, take the Fearless Business Quiz. 40 questions, free, and you will get a personalised report showing you precisely where to focus.