How much should you charge in your VA business?

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Finding out their fees is probably one of the scariest things you can do as a virtual assistant.

Not really, but it sure feels that way.

How do you price your value?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions on VA forums and by my coaching clients.

Decide to open a VA business.

You know what services you can offer.

But you have no idea how to price it. How much is too high? How much is too low?

The truth is, actually, it’s pretty easy to understand.

I developed a simple rate calculator many years ago, that helps you easily view your rates and find out what makes sense to you.

And the whole ‘calculation’ starts with know how much money you want or need to earn.

When you have a company, you need to think in terms of what you need to bring in and then do the math from there.

Here are a couple of examples of how you can calculate your fees:

If you want to earn $ 50,000 a year and work full time as a VA (30 billable hours per week), which is $ 961 per week or $ 32 per hour. So your hourly rate should be at least like this.

If you need to earn $ 2,000 per month and you can work part time (10 hours per week = 40 hours per month), so you can do that math too – you’d need to charge $ 50 per hour.

In these two examples, we have two completely different hourly rates based on what you need to earn. So it helps you start with what you want and work your way down.

Many virtual assistants try to pick a number out of thin air and trust me, it is never correct.

When I started my company in 1998, I was making $ 16 an hour at my job. When I was trying to figure out how much I should charge my freelance clients, I added $ 2 for ‘overhead’ and charged $ 18 per hour. But I didn’t realize all the expenses I would have, including taxes, and at the end of my month I was always completely penniless.

I did not do any math to calculate what my rate should have been. When I did that, it made a huge difference.

The easiest thing for me was to start with what I knew I needed to bring each month to contribute to my home. I knew I needed around $ 900 ‘clear’ since that was what my paycheck had been. But that meant calculating my actual income at the highest rate; in fact, I needed around $ 1500 per month to cover my expenses as well. Big difference!

Try it yourself. You can find it in the sidebar of my blog: the rate calculator is fun and shows you a few different scenarios, if you have a part-time job, if you want to work in advance, if you are working as a subcontractor, and it will show you what need to load.

The package contains the calculator itself, as well as a training video to show you how to use it. Enjoy! And be sure to tune in next week when we dig into this!

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