While Rick and I run seperate businesses, we each do the same thing. I spend my day travelling to various homes and businesses all over town to work on computer problems and train people how to get more from their systems.
To do this I have been charging $50/hr. for homes and $75/hr. for businesses. Does that sound like a lot? Probably not if you live in a bigger city, but let's compare that to everything else out there.
As gas prices have gone up and everything else has gone up in price right along with it, I have kept the same rates for over two years. I hate raising my rates. But, after doing some math and some research, I don't feel too bad about making the big move to raise my rates.
I often have to recommend jobs to other local businesses, so I won't pick on them. But, I will pick on non-local businesses with such initials as BB and CC.
Above all, my goal is to do a good job at an affordable price. I don't want my clients to be afraid to call if before a small problem becomes a large problem. I do all of my work on-site unless it is something catastrophic that requires that I bring it home to fix it in my workshop.
The most I try to ever charge someone is $175 and that is basically a complete system overhaul. This could be more if they don't have the disks or if they need a piece of hardware, but I am very careful about not giving bills that approach half the price of a new system.
Twice lately I have been asked if I was serious about my rates. Not that they were too high, but they were too low.
We have a BB and a CC in town and I have been given prices quoted by each of these stores for doing basic jobs like setting up a computer, transferring data and removing viruses.
I will give one example. Today I met a friend that I hadn't seen in a long time as I was coming out of one of these places. He was taking his mom's laptop in to be repaired.
I explained that I would be happy to do if for him, but to go ahead and get a quote from the retail joint. I told him it wouldn't hurt my feelings if he wanted to go with them, but I would bet that I could do it cheaper.
I was expecting a $200 quote from the other guys.
The official quote was thus, $60 to look at the problem up to $225 without consent for the repair (they would do that much work before they called to ask if it was OK). If they wanted their information backed up it would run another $100 up to 9 gigabytes and they would only backup Office type files (text documents, spreadsheets etc.) and JPEG picture files.
He also didn't have the disks and so more would be charged for finding drivers, installing the OS etc. if the problem needed it.
My quote before the discount for being a best friend all through school was $125 max if she could come up with the original disks or $125 + whatever it cost for Windows XP.
About two weeks ago I setup a brand new computer, transferred data from the old system and got a brand new broadband connection up and running for a client. Since it tool 1.5 hours, I charged $75.
"That's a lot better than _________. They said it would cost $230 to take it out of the box and transfer the documents with no guarantees that they would transfer anything else.
In the mean time we cancelled our summer vacation to Salt Lake City so that we could pinch pennies.
So, as much as I hate to raise rates, I have decided that effective October 1, my new rates will be raised to (drumroll please)… $60/hr. for homes and $80/hr for businesses. I will also make a few other changes by adding some new flat fees for certain jobs and cutting back on the types of work I do for offices.
In the end, a yearly bill for my services for any one client (typically between $50-$500) will be less than a year of cable, a year of milk, a medium size plumbing job, five days of golf, a year of having the kid next door mow the lawn, or two years of dog food for a Jack Russell Terrier.
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