March 12, 2025
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A client walked into Robin Waite's creative agency on a Tuesday and asked for a logo, ready for a product launch the following Monday. The usual eight-week process would never fit. So Robin suggested the client come in for a full day on Thursday, and they would get it done together. Asked for a price, Robin heard himself say "£1,500" before his brain had finished the sum. The client paid in full, in advance, and by Thursday evening Robin had tripled his effective hourly rate by accident. That is the real lesson in how to price your services: it is far less a maths problem than a nerve problem.
Price your services on the outcome the client gets, not the hours you put in. Work out the financial value your work creates, then charge around 10% of it. That means productising your offer into a fixed-price package first, because you cannot price a vague, hourly service at its true value.
Most coaches, consultants, and freelancers do the opposite. They start with their costs, add a comfortable margin, and land on a number that feels safe. Safe is the problem. A price built from your inputs has no relationship to the result your client receives, so you end up charging a fraction of what the work is worth.
The truth is, pricing is a leadership decision before it is a spreadsheet decision. Robin Waite has coached over 2,500 clients over nine years, and the pattern is consistent: the people who charge well are rarely the most skilled in the room. They are the ones who got comfortable saying a bigger number out loud.
There are really only three ways to arrive at a price for a service. Most business owners drift between the first two and never reach the third. Here is how each one works, and where each one traps you.
You add up your time and overheads, then add a margin on top. It is simple, and for a predictable product with fixed inputs it can work. The trap is that it ignores the value the client receives entirely. When your work is worth ten times what it costs you to deliver, cost-plus quietly hands that difference to the client. It suits product businesses with tight, repeatable costs, not specialist service providers.
Also called competition-based pricing, this means charging roughly what similar providers charge. It feels sensible and it is easy to justify. The trap is that you inherit every mistake your competitors have made, and you race towards the average rather than the top. It suits crowded, directly comparable markets. If you are an expert with a distinctive result, copying the field caps you at mediocre.
Here you price on the financial outcome the client gains, not on your effort. A website that generates £40,000 of new enquiries is worth far more than the 72 hours it took to build. This is value-based pricing, and for a specialist service it is the destination. The trap is that it demands you can articulate and evidence the outcome, which takes confidence rather than cleverness. Robin covers the full method in his guide to value-based pricing.
For a specialist service, the choice is not really three ways. Cost-plus and market-rate are training wheels. Value-based pricing is where a business that pays you properly is built.
Start with the value, not the cost. Robin teaches a simple frame he calls the 10x ROI rule: when a client spends £5,000 with you, they should walk away with around £50,000 of value. Price becomes roughly 10% of the outcome you create, which keeps the exchange firmly in the client's favour and easy to say yes to.
Say your work reliably helps a client add £50,000 of revenue over the next year. The 10x rule says an investment of around £5,000 is fair, because they get roughly ten times their money back. Now compare that to charging by the hour. If the same work takes you 40 hours at £75, you would bill £3,000 and leave the rest on the table, for an identical result.
Your costs still matter, but only as a floor. Break-even tells you the lowest number you can survive on, never what the work is worth. Robin's phrase for this is that if you are worried about ten or fifteen pounds of card fees, you are almost certainly not charging enough. Use costs as a sanity check, then set the price from the outcome.
Hourly pricing has a ceiling built into it. There are only so many hours in a week, so the only way to earn more is to work more, and eventually you run out of week. Worse, it punishes you for getting good. The faster and better you get, the fewer hours you bill for the same result.
This is what traps service businesses in what Robin calls the Sales Cycle of Doom: sell, deliver, sell, deliver, with no time left to improve the offer or the marketing. You stay busy and stay broke until a holiday or a sick child forces you to stop, and then you start the whole cycle again. Raising your prices is what slows the cycle down.
A marine engineer is called in to fix an engine nobody else can. She listens, taps it gently, then hits one spot with a hammer and it roars back to life. Her invoice reads £100 for hitting the engine, and £99,900 for knowing where to hit it. Clients do not pay for your hours. They pay for the years of expertise behind the minute.
Once you have decided to price on value, the process is straightforward. Work through these five steps in order:
The seven pricing strategies most often listed are:
For a service business, most of these are noise. Penetration, skimming, and dynamic pricing belong to products and platforms, not to a coach or consultant selling a transformation. The real pricing strategy question is far simpler: are you charging for your hours, or for the outcome? Everything that matters follows from that one choice. Robin's pricing strategy work is built around getting it right.
Guessing your price from competitors or a gut feeling almost always leaves money behind. Robin uses an exercise called the Pricing Auction to surface what you can genuinely charge. It is deliberately physical rather than intellectual.
Write down one of your products and the price you think it should be. Then raise it, step by step, passing through the big psychological thresholds at 2, 5, and 8. Keep going and pay attention to your body. The moment you feel a knot in your stomach, you have just crossed your comfort zone, and that is your number. Then commit to pitching it to your next ten prospects.
Clients who run this exercise typically land at around 2.5 times their original price. One of Robin's clients, a virtual assistant, productised podcast booking at ten bookings for £1,000, then raised it to £1,500 once she became oversubscribed, for exactly the same work. The ceiling was always higher than she thought.
Value-based pricing is powerful, but it is not universal. Two types of business should be honest that the route is not structurally available to them.
If you sell an interchangeable product where the buyer decides purely on price comparison, outcome-based pricing has little to grip. When the customer can find the identical item cheaper elsewhere in seconds, you are competing on price and logistics, not on value.
If your fees are set externally by procurement or a regulated fee schedule you do not control, you cannot simply price on the outcome you create. The rate card decides. In that case the work is on changing your position, not your pricing formula.
Everything here comes down to one moment. Not a pricing model, not a spreadsheet, but the bigger number that comes out of your mouth the next time a good client asks what you charge. The maths is the easy part. The nerve is the work.
If you want to know where your pricing is holding you back, take the Fearless Business Quiz. It is 40 questions, free, and you will get a personalised report instantly. Then go and say the bigger number.
The 5 C's of pricing are cost, customers, competition, channels, and conditions. For a service business, customers should dominate the other four, because the value the client receives matters far more than what your competitors charge or what the work costs you to deliver.
Charge around 10% of the financial value your work creates. If your service helps a client gain £50,000, an investment of roughly £5,000 is fair and easy to justify. Start from the outcome, then use your costs only as a floor to check you are not going too low.
Price by the project, on a fixed fee tied to the outcome. Hourly pricing caps your income and punishes you for working efficiently, because the better you get, the fewer hours you bill for the same result. A fixed price rewards the value you deliver, not the time you spend.
Productise your service into a fixed package, work out the value it creates, and apply the 10x rule. Then practise saying the price out loud until it stops feeling dangerous. Undercharging is usually a confidence problem, not a market problem.
Estimate the outcome it delivers, set a price at around 10% of that value, and pitch it to ten prospects before you change it. You are gathering real data, not guessing. If nobody flinches, the price is too low.
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