We have talked before about how to make up service packages for your clients.
Service packages help you to get paid for your expertise, they help you to specialize your services for a select group of clients, and they help your clients know exactly what they will get for their money.
It can be a challenge to nail down your packages if you offer a wide variety of services, but once you do, the next step is to price them accordingly.
If you are accustomed to billing by the hour, then you will actually be able to do this part more easily than you think.
To set your rates, you first have to determine a billable rate.
Your billable rate will be whatever you want it to be. Sometimes it’s your regular hourly rate, or sometimes it’s higher than that.
But what you need to do with it is important.
First you need to write down every task you will provide for your clients – break it down as small as you can.
For instance, if you send out a newsletter – what are the steps that you need to do that?
Group the necessary tasks together into a basic newsletter send, and then separate out the additional things a client might need (ie research for statistics to support their article, image resizing, keyword or SEO setup, etc).
Does the client send you a finished article or just bullet points that you have to finish writing? All of these things factor into your time, expertise and task price.
The putting together of the actual content should be its own task. The rest can be add on services. Then you can also add on things like posting the article to the blog, publishing the article or a link to the newsletter on social media, or to article sites, etc. There are a number of things you can add on to any service, in this manner.
Okay so now that we know what we are looking at,write each of these tasks on a post it note. You will have one post it note for each small task. (Don’t mind the rough look of the post it note photos that accompany this article – they are my actual post-it notes from when I priced my own packages a few years ago!)
Determine the time it will take you to complete each part of the task and write that on the post it note as well. Do not try to put your ‘fastest’ possible time on this. It’s not a race. You must allow for tech issues, back and forth with a client for revisions, etc. So if something takes you 5 minutes to complete, be sure you look at a minimum billable rate of 15 minutes. (Don’t worry you are not ripping anyone off by doing this … keep reading!)
Multiply your average time to complete the task by your billable rate. Write that on your post it note as well.
Now…here is how you can price a package.
Take the basic task post it note.
Add any of the other task/pieces that you want.
Add up the billable time and the billable rates that are on all of those post it notes.
How does it look?
If each task takes you 15 minutes ‘billable’ time, and you have 5 tasks in your package, then you are looking at 1.25 hours or your new packaged service.
But you don’t just stop there. Does that look right? Does it seem high? Low? You can adjust accordingly once you look at the big picture. If you have a cushion of 5 or 7 minutes in each of those tasks, you can take a bit of that cushion out in the end … so maybe by combining the services you come up with only 1 hour of billable time.
Or, you can always look at your billable price now – and like what you see – and then figure out what else you can add to it to give your client more value. I often add in a 15 minute weekly or bi-weekly production call for my clients if they buy a package. It helps us stay on task and communicating.
Or maybe you could add some reporting – a weekly email opens report or a weekly social media interaction report.
Or even better, you can combine a variety of services to build an even bigger package for your clients. Go big or go home!
The ideas are endless for what to put into your packages.
The idea is to start with a basic service, identify your time and expertise required to complete the small parts of it, and calculating what your billable time is for the new package. (This is not your hourly time, do you see the difference here?)
When you have all of your services on post it notes like this you will see that you can form all kinds of packages for your clients – and you will be sure that you are not trading hours for dollars.
And remember you can create any kind of package you want, from your services list: client care, list building, social media, graphics and web, bookkeeping, general admin, calendar management/follow up … any service you provide can be packaged if you just think about what you can put with it to enhance it.
Let me know how your packages are shaping up! It’s easy to do when you break it down like this. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
And certainly if you need help to get yours on paper (or post its!), have a look at my self study program How to Package Your Virtual Assistant Services which will walk you through the steps to do it for yourself.
Let’s get you on the road to earning more money and providing amazing levels of service for your clients!