What should I charge??

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[RobertFisher]

Charles,

You raise an interesting question here for me, but not the one you posited. I will also supply an answer to what you have here, but first:

I have no way of knowing how you came to work for the company you are with, but since I run an agency, I want to suggest that if you are taking on clients that could be going to your agency, whether or not you believe they are a good fit, you need get approval from the agency. You state:

"I'm looking to take on a few more clients and have built a nice local reputation so I have a few different people approaching me, **right here, my question is, how did you come by this reputation? Before you went to work for the firm you are with or while with them? **normally I'd pass them on to my boss but there are a few clients I would rather keep to myself as I don't think they'd be a good fit for my agencies model." **When you do this work, do you use any of the agencies tools? Say they have software licenses that you have access to, are you using that software to assist in what you are doing? **

To me, this is not even a gray area, but black and white. You are performing services it appears your agency performs or close enough that you make the statement they are not a good fit for an agency model.

To me, this is the bigger issue than fees. Short of that, how you charge is very nuanced to individual situations. For me, we started out several years ago much lower than I wish we had. Today, we are much more expensive because we have learned that nothing is as easy as it seems or as the client lays it out to be. My favorite example of this is the ecommerce site we took over and rebuilt. The only thing that had been left out of the original equation was that they had never had a sale. Yes, I wish I had charged more now. But, for link building, content, etc. you need to set reasonable expectations and charge to achieve them. We charge between US $75 and $200 per page depending on the content type and amount. For link building, a complex site will be thousands of dollars per month and we try to be very clear about expectations.

Lastly, I have allowed our people to occasionally take on a freelance gig. On one or two occasions, I sent prospective clients to one of our people to handle as I knew they could not afford us. One of them is now a client since that individual did a good job. When they needed a site, they came to us.

I hope all of this was helpful,

Robert

[AlanBleiweiss]

I agree with BigFish22 - out of ethical respect for the agency you work for, it is important to be sure there is an acceptable arrangement.  If it's kept secret, that leaves you open to either being fired or worse. Your personal brand reputation could be seriously harmed.

Having said that, the way I did this was once there was discussion with the agency I was with when I began offering side work was to charge what I felt was fair and reasonable for the work I performed.

A big aspect of this was my ability to see how that thought process is directly connected to my sense of self worth for the services offered.

Things to consider are how many years of experience you have, what your track record is for getting results, and the scale of the type of businesses you are offering the services to.

Alternately, if you want to attract bigger clients and if your experience justifies it, increasing rates can help identify your services as being a good fit for those larger clients.  It would mean less of the smaller clients would hire you so there's a trade-off.

And when working directly with clients, remember you have overhead - business administrative needs that an employee doesn't deal with when working for an agency.  Bookkeeping, marketing, taxes, business operating expenses, research time all go into the time and energy a consultant needs but where you don't get to charge individual clients for that time. So you need to work those additional hours into the vision you have for how much per hour of actual direct client work you charge.

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[RobertFisher]

Charles,

That is all good then. So, your challenge is finding the sweet spot for you and for the client. One thing for us has been that as we go on further and further, we no longer can accept less for more. So, we can't do low price work as it just won't get us to where we want to be. In fact, there are times I am fairly sure we are in the top pricing because we want to limit our clients to those who are willing to pay because they understand the complexities of all the issues and the work that must go into them.

It makes me want to scream when I deal with a reasonably sophisticated business person who has no understanding of the Internet and wants to believe sales come from magic fairies.

Best,