Do you opt for hourly billing? With you a lot of entrepreneurs. Sometimes it works fine, too. As a client, you know what you're paying for and it's easy to save money. For you, it's convenient because you can be sure you'll get paid if you put more time into something. On the other hand, you can divide your services much better into packages. Let me explain why.
You can hide your hourly rate
People often shy away from an hourly rate because they compare it to a salary. Of course your hourly rate is higher than a salaried salary. But you have to pay for your laptop and your office yourself, not to mention printers, business cards, insurance and your accountant. So many things to pay for! It's going to cost you a lot of time if you have to explain this every time. With packages, you can hide your hourly rate. You calculate in advance how much time you're going to spend on the tasks in the package and multiply that by your hourly rate. Round it up to a nice number and it's much less daunting than hourly billing.
It motivates you to work harder
If you work at hourly billing slow, it doesn't matter. You get paid for it anyway. Other than the fact that I hope you don't have such an attitude, I enthusiastically tell you that with packages you don't have this. Clients pay you a flat fee. So if you're slow, you're just wasting your time, because you don't get extra money. Motivation!
Repetition = easier = time-saving
You have fixed tasks in your package. Of course, every customer is different but you do pretty much the same thing every time. This makes you better at it because your brain doesn't have to constantly get used to new tasks and systems. It then becomes easier for you, saving you time. And I just said, the faster you work, the more you get on average per hour.
You can combine packages
Divide your packages strategically, in a way that they fit together. For example, I have a separate package for Design and for Copywriting. People get a discount on one package if they bought the other. Crossselling.
You don't spend time on administration
When I still worked hourly, I kept track of every minute in a spreadsheet. For each task I wrote down what I did (sometimes with comments), when and how much time it took me (in minutes). Excel then used formulas to calculate the total price. You understand that this can be quite time consuming. First, you have to remember to check when you start and remember or write down that time. Then you also have to go into that spreadsheet every time and describe exactly what you did. Fat hassle, really, trust me. Now you don't have to do that anymore = more time for your work = yet more money per hour on average.
Customers know where they stand
Customers know in advance exactly what they are getting and at what price. Because you do roughly the same thing every time, you can also make estimates of the process. For example, how long steps take, what a convenient sequence is, what the customer's role is and what the final result is. Clarity for both parties, isn't that nice?
