Proven: The most effective way to price&package your VA services. When you just starting out.
Migle Kapoor
In just 3 days I'll help you build such relationship with your VIP stakeholders they'll rave about forever!
We've all been there when you have to set the price: selling your stuff on Vinted or during job interview sharing your desired salary to the new employer. When it comes to pricing and packaging your VA services the most common situation is no pricing.
This basic and straightforward way will make you package and set your virtual assistant services pricing in a few hours time.
As you know what are your strengths and what are the market needs, you can design your services, package them and decide on pricing. This is one of the most tricky parts in building your VA career.
You might ask but why Migle, why to package? I could just set an hourly rate and that’s enough.
Yes and no.
Even if you decide to set the hourly rate I highly recommend making packages.
If you are a generalist VA, then you can start with packages consisting of hourly rate and even I’d encourage to do that cause at the moment you have no idea how long the tasks to complete will take time for you.
While if you are specific in your services, let’s say you’ll provide minutes taking services, then I’d suggest packaging your business as per specific aspects: industry, language, number of words, etc..
Start with 3 to 5 packages.
Generalist VA packages sample:
- 1 hour rate
- Up to 5 hour rate
- Up to 10 hour rate
- Up to 20 hour rate
- 20+ hours rate
Name the packages! Don't overthink it, it can be as simple as one star, two-star, etc. or silver, gold, platinum.
If nothing comes to your mind, let it be 1hour plan, 5hour plan, etc. It is important to name to ease the communication between you and your client.
How to set the pricing? Two step process
First step: check the market
Don't try to invent a bicycle, it has already been done!
So start simply from the market research. Check how much other VA service providers are charging for similar type of work.
And for the goodness sake - make notes!
Use Excel or simple notes app on your phone to add all your findings so that later on you don't have to search it again (it will slip from your mind once you start getting into the jungle of Google). Whom I teach, you are the admin guru!
Decide how much time you want to spend on this research and put a timer, never allow yourself do as much as you feel especially in research cause you'll end up the whole day if not the whole weekend just researching and trying to run away from making the decision. Remember: bad decision is better than no decision.
You can always do more of the research but for now spend, let's say, 1 hour for it and after one hour write down the interval of pricing you've managed to understand from your research. Follow your gut feeling a little bit!
Second step: ask yourself
The second path of pricing your services will require even more bold statement of yours.
Answer this question: How much do you need and want to earn?
Why I say bold cause I know it's not easy but you have to start somewhere.
Let's say you want to earn 1000 EUR per month. And you are ready to devote your full time to the VA career, which means full time 40 hours per week (8 hours/day) you'll be working.
Count your billable hours cause trust me it's not possible to work on your client tasks for full 8 hours. You'll need time to have rest, to have coffee, to search for potential clients and build your personal brand. So for billable hours I'd say leave 5 hours/day which counts to 25 hours/week.
Count your expenses
Even if you are planning to work from home, take into consideration that you'll need some paid tools (for example since beginning I use Gsuite which costs around 10 EUR a month) or you'll decide to work from a co-working space that would be around 200 EUR more. All in all let's say your expenses would be around 250 EUR.
TAXES.
Yes, you have to pay taxes! Depending on where you are based taxes will vary, so check that in your country where you register your activity.
In Lithuania it will take around 20% from your earnings. That would be another 250 EUR/month.
All in all, you need to earn 1500 EUR to get your desired 1000 EUR.
Simple formula says: 1500/25*4=15 EUR/hour
Let's assume after market research you found that the average hourly rate of similar services is 20 EUR. Just get the average of both the numbers and in this case I'd start from charging 18 EUR/hour rate.
Viola! You have your pricing & packaging done.
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