I charge my Business clients £20 p/h and I've got a fair number of clients now so keeping my prices low has worked well for me.
Lol how can you survive charging this... You'd earn more and have less hassle working for someone else.
I charge my Business clients £20 p/h and I've got a fair number of clients now so keeping my prices low has worked well for me.
I've got remote access all set up, its about 11 miles from where I live. From what I can tell they don't really care about IT, especially backups etc as long as everything works and the business can continue operating then it's all good.
I don't, no, I take backups of everything before I even start working on things, that's my only insurance
I haven't said it before, but I basically need to manage 5 workstations, 2 printers and a server running Windows 7 Home Premium (O_o). That's what they have at the moment. It's sales and accountant and a business owned by my sister's boyfriend. Once I get all their problems sorted, just got Sage Act in shape I will negotiate my pay for it.
That's bad. You need liability/indemnity insurance before something bites you. Hard.
Also, you've started doing the work before negotiating the rate/getting them to sign a contract. Puts you on a back foot.
Charge them the most they're willing to pay.
Lol how can you survive charging this... You'd earn more and have less hassle working for someone else.
That's bad. You need liability/indemnity insurance before something bites you.
That's £39000 a year, assuming he has enough work to do it full time. Nothing to sniff at around most of the country. The £40 quotes take you to £78000 and while you have some costs associated with running your own business, general IT services aren't worth that much in my opinion when highly technical and specialist staff will fail to earn that much.
Of course the mentality of the thread is correct, charge as much as you can get the client to pay and obviously if it's only a couple of hours work, the client will be willing to swollow higher rates but you probably won't see regular work unless they really like you. It's a balancing act.
Honestly, do this - while taking backups is a step in the right direction, think about what would happen if you forgot one day, or the backup was corrupted, and you did accidentally kill the server.
That's £39000 a year, assuming he has enough work to do it full time. Nothing to sniff at around most of the country. The £40 quotes take you to £78000
£40-50 per hour, anything less and you are a mug.
You wouldn't be doing it all day, at most charging 3-4 hrs a day unless doing a roll out or project etc. Also that is turnover not profit.
That's bad. You need liability/indemnity insurance before something bites you. Hard.
Exactly. I've witnessed people relying on backups to cover their backsides and seen what happens when the backups are corrupt and they hose a server. Not pleasant.
Work for food?
You wouldn't be doing it all day, at most charging 3-4 hrs a day unless doing a roll out or project etc.
Also that is turnover not profit.
It's a business. A lot of time is taken up getting new clients, doing admin work and such. £39K in turnover (not profit) isn't much.
Let's assume 20% profit. That's £7,800 or £15,600 before any taxes. Not exactly worth working full time self-employed for, is it?
Business failure number 1. Thinking that charging significantly less than the competition is a sure fire route to success. It's a market rate for a reason.