Template New
Getting Paid
The terms that stop it happening, the invoice that can actually be paid, and six messages to send in order when it happens anyway.
CA$9.99
Workbook
Pricing a Service
The floor below which work costs you money, what moves a price above it, and the arithmetic of a rise that shows you can lose two clients in ten and still be ahead.
CA$9.99
One time purchase. Instant download. No subscription.
The problem
What this solves
Pricing gets treated as a confidence problem, which skips the hard part: almost nobody knows what their own work costs them to be available to do. So they divide the income they want by the hours in a year and get a number that ignores both their business costs and every unbilled hour.
Contents
What's included
- Pricing a Service, nine pages, as a PDF and as a web page.
- Part 1, three ways to price and where each one hurts, including the honest case against pricing by value.
- Part 2, your floor, from four of your own numbers, with the usual calculation shown beside the correct one.
- Part 3, six things clients pay for that are not hours, and the question that surfaces the sixth.
- Part 4, quoting a job you have never done, and how to charge to find out.
- Part 5, the price rise: the arithmetic first, then the message.
- Part 6, four conversations, and Part 7, four sheets to print.
- Free updates for as long as the product exists, in your library.
How it works
Using it
Track your billable hours for two weeks
Before anything else. It is the input everybody overstates and the one the answer is most sensitive to, so guessing it wastes the whole exercise.
Fill in sheet 1
Four numbers and two divisions. Fifteen minutes. The result is not your price, it is the line below which taking the work makes you poorer than not taking it.
Run sheet 3 against your existing clients
Hours all in, including the calls and the chasing and the small favours. There is usually at least one client below the line, and finding out is the point.
Quote the new price to the next enquiry
Before you raise anybody you already work with. It costs nothing and it tells you quickly whether the number is wrong.
Outcomes
What you get out of it
- A refusal line, so you know which work to turn down instead of regretting it later
- The reason a discount costs more than it looks, because it comes out of the gap and not the price
- A way to quote a job you have never done that does not involve guessing low and suffering
- The arithmetic that removes most of the fear from a price rise, before the words for it
- Four sheets, including the one that tells you which existing clients are below your floor
Fit
Who it's for
Anybody who sells their own time or work and has to say a number out loud, especially in the first few years, when the rate is usually one inherited from whoever they last worked for.
Specifics
Product details
- Format
- Workbook
- Version
- 1.0
- Licence
- Personal use
- Language
- English
- Edition
- Global
- Last updated
- September 2026
- Nine pages, as a PDF and as a web page
- Two worked calculations, both recomputed on every build so the sums cannot drift
- Four conversations with the words to say back
- Four printable sheets: your floor, the three point estimate, client profitability, the rise plan
- No market rates, no industry averages and no region, so nothing in it goes out of date
Questions
Frequently asked
Does it tell me what to charge?
No, and no honest document could. It gives you a floor from your own numbers and a method for the distance above it. There are no rates anywhere in it, because a rate here would be from somebody else's trade in somebody else's city and would be stale by the time you read it.
Are the example figures a benchmark?
No. They are illustrative, they say so in bold beside both calculations, and the document is explicit that they are not a recommendation. What they are for is showing that the arithmetic works, and both worked examples are recomputed on every build so the sums you are invited to copy stay right.
Is it Canadian?
It has no region and no currency claim. The method is the same anywhere. The one jurisdiction note it does make is that coordinating prices with competitors is illegal in Canada, the United States and most other places, which is worth knowing because it happens in trade groups.
I am not confident enough to raise my prices.
That is why part 5 leads with the arithmetic rather than the encouragement. Ten clients, a thirty per cent rise, two leave, and you are ahead on eight. Seeing how much has to go wrong before a rise fails does more than being told to back yourself.
Does it cover tax?
No. The floor is before tax, and what you keep depends on where you are and how you are set up. The guide says so and points at an accountant, which is the honest answer rather than a guess.
Reviews
What customers say
No reviews yet, and we will not invent any. What you can rely on instead: you get the files listed on this page, they are yours to keep, and updates are free. If anything is wrong with them you get your money back.
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Workbook New
The First Ten Customers
A list of ninety real people, a definition narrow enough that a friend can refer somebody, one offer with a price on it, six messages, and twelve weeks of a weekly habit.
CA$12.99