What Should You Charge? A Simple Pricing Guide For Business Consultants

Stop trying to guess the maximum a client is willing to pay

If you don’t know what to charge, asking others won’t help.

For starters, people fib about their fees to impress others. Second, you’re not asking a question about fees but a question about strategy.

Your fees should reflect the audience you’ve decided to target, the services you’ve decided to offer that audience, your positioning relative to competitors in that niche, and the investments you’ve made in yourself.

Most business consultants, I suspect, take a pretty crude approach to setting their rates. They try to name the highest figure they think the client will accept. They might use questions such as ‘How much is this problem costing you?’, ‘What is the size of the team?’, or ‘How much are you spending on [object]’?

Then they name a high figure, send the proposal, and hope for the best. There are plenty of problems with this approach. The biggest is it’s simply not consistent with everything else the consultant is doing.