How Much to Charge - Susie Jackson | Charge with Confidence

Katie is a copywriter and translator who works from Spanish and Portuguese into English. She supports sustainable brands with their language requirements and also helps other freelance translators attract their dream customers through their copy. Katie currently lives in Spain but often comes back to the UK to visit her family in Cornwall.

Katie joined Charge with Confidence in June 2020. She’d been doing a lot of translation and copywriting for the tourism industry, but when the pandemic hit that work disappeared overnight. Having lost one large tourism client, Katie decided to use the extra time to take a step back, evaluate things and decide where she wanted to take her business.

The challenge: helping Katie understand how much to charge in a way that made sense to her

When Katie signed up for Charge with Confidence, she readily admits that she had no idea what to charge or how to calculate a price that made sense.

Katie had heard people say that, to get your hourly rate, you have to decide how much you want to earn before dividing this figure by the time you have available. However, that approach didn’t really make sense to Katie because she struggled to quantify how much she wanted to make. As far as Katie was concerned, she didn’t want to put a limit on her income.

My aim was therefore to show Katie how to do her pricing calculations, basing them on concrete numbers and logic she could identify with.

I also wanted to help Katie get her business finances in order. Splitting her time between Spain and the UK, she had bank accounts in both countries and felt she lacked clarity and coherence in her finances. She wanted to be more organised and have different accounts for different purposes.

The solution: providing Katie with the resources and perspective she needed to take a holistic approach to her business finances

We began the programme by looking at exactly what Katie needed to be taking into account in her pricing calculations. This included her business expenses and tax contributions but also her personal expenditure as well as some form of investment for her retirement.

After showing Katie how to divide these expenses into different bank accounts and separate pots of money, I provided her with the resources she needed to calculate her rates.

My rate calculator allowed her to input all the numbers necessary to arrive at her minimum hourly rate. However, it also included space for an aspirational rate, which encouraged her to dream big. By giving Katie the range of her minimum and aspirational financial requirements, she was able to understand the lowest she could accept for a job to be financially viable, but she also had something to aim for in the long term without putting any constraints on herself and her earnings.

In the final week of the programme, we also carried out a client assessment. This helped Katie really think about what she wanted from her customer relationships besides financial income. Doing this in a spreadsheet and rating each client according to specific attributes that mattered to Katie made everything much clearer for her. It allowed her to take a holistic approach to customer relationships, not just assessing clients on money but also on how nice they are to collaborate with and how fulfilling the work itself is.

“It was a real watershed moment and there’s very much a before and after. I’ve taken so much of it forward and developed it since we finished the programme.”

The results: Katie works less than she did previously and feels far more confident when it comes to saying no to clients

Katie says that Charge with Confidence has helped her take the emotion out of her finances. She no longer feels like she’s putting a price on herself as a person, which makes it less impactful when a client says no to her quote. Equally, she also finds it easier to say no to her clients.

After the programme, Katie raised her rate with one regular translation client. She was particularly nervous because she thought they wouldn’t be able to pay more than they were already paying her. Instead, they accepted the increase straight away, which gave her a confidence boost to increase her prices with other clients too.

At the end of the year, the big tourism client that Katie had lost in March 2020 also came back to her. However, thanks to the client assessment and the ideal attributes Katie had identified, she realised she didn’t want to work with them anymore. Rather than picking up where they’d left off, Katie turned them down.

“I think what’s stuck with me since we finished is a much-improved sense of self-worth.”

In recent months, Katie has said goodbye to another couple of long-term clients she’d been receiving regular work from since the start of her freelance career. She’d still been enjoying the work she did for them at the end of Charge with Confidence. But since finishing the programme, she’s come to the conclusion that it’s not the sort of work she wants to be doing moving forward. Instead of continuing the collaboration, Katie has chosen to free up time for other clients and feels confident that there will always be more customers to fill any gaps.

In fact, Katie now schedules copywriting jobs in advance and is booked up for her website copywriting services for the next 3 months. She has found the confidence to tell clients she can’t take on their projects for a while, rather than feeling like she has to accept all the work she can get straight away.

As a result, Katie is able to enjoy more free time for herself. She works less than she did previously and is a lot more intentional during the hours she does work. Tracking her time and understanding how she spends it has helped her arrange her workload in a way that works for her. As well as knowing how much time she needs for certain jobs, she’s working more intentionally in smaller chunks rather than procrastinating!

“I would 100% recommend Charge with Confidence to anyone, and I do recommend it regularly to people I speak to. It’s an invaluable investment in your business and it’s important to make those investments rather than keep putting them off. Know that you are worth the money! An investment like this might feel a bit intangible, but investing in changing your mindset is the best thing you could ever do. It has absolutely changed my life!”

I’m so pleased Katie feels Charge with Confidence has had such a huge impact on her business and on her life in general. It just goes to show how taking a holistic approach to your finances can change your outlook and the way you decide to do things.

I also feel really proud of how Katie is continuing to apply everything she learnt during the programme. She’s constantly honing who she’s working with and the direction she’s taking her business in to make sure she feels happy and fulfilled in her work.

If you’d like to adopt a holistic approach to your finances so you can apply it to your business and customer base, you can take Charge with Confidence right now. To find out more and get clear on your pricing based on both your financial and non-financial goals, click on the button below!