Have you ever wondered how much to charge for your services? If you have ever struggled with pricing rest assured you are not alone. With these uncertain times and inflation going up, a lot of MSP’s have said they have increased their rates by 12% over the last year.
With many factors that go into deciding how much to charge your clients from range of activity, level of experience, to depth of project it is hard to determine what to do. We meet up with Lisa Hendrickson who shares with us what she is charging this year, her thoughts on inflation, and what you should do.
Video Transcription
Harry Brelsford
Hey nation nation back with Lisa Hendrickson in sunny Florida. I'm coming to you from sunny Austin, Texas. Sure. Love the sun. How you doing? Lisa?
Lisa Hendrickson
I'm good. I love the sun too, as you can tell. Yeah.
Harry Brelsford
My goodness. So you had an interesting conversation to share with us about pricing. That's always a timely, a timely topic, how much to charge?
Lisa Hendrickson
It is. And you know what the thing was, the inflation going up and everything I'm seeing a lot of other MSPs talking about, they've increased 12%. Now, I'm a break fix person consultant. So I'm, I'm not like computer repair so much. But I do break fix work. But in addition to that, I also do consulting, training, project management, migrations, a lot of extra things that take specific skills and experience, right? Yeah, so I'm at 25 An hour right now, which my clients aren't even questioning. They're paying fine.
Harry Brelsford
I'm not charging enough. But go on. This is why
Lisa Hendrickson
I'm trying to give this as an example in this interview. So if you're charging and people aren't questioning it, you need to raise your rates. Number one, okay, that's kind of the rule of thumb. But I've been cozy here for a year, I raised it last year quite a bit. So what I'm doing now is I'm trying to find other consultants to see what they're charging so I can compete. And I've just found out today that one of my competitors, who is not really a competitor, is that 350 An hour.
Harry Brelsford
Wow. So that was really paid by lawyer.
Lisa Hendrickson
Well, you know what, I have a lot of lawyer clients, they rely on Outlook, they rely on their systems to run. So I'm not going to go and jump up to 350. But I have to really gauge my, the services I'm doing for what kind of clients that's the other thing. You know, this this client I helped this morning, as I'm assisting him for a one hour job. He's working with 365 dynamics. He pays his consultant 10 grand a month for that, where I was like, wow, and he was like, yeah, just to get you for an hour's nothing. So my clients aren't caring about the hourly rate, they want things done. Yes, I'm in a new boat here. So maybe in our next interview, I'll tell you what I ended up going up to but I'm doing a lot of analysis right now. On the work I'm doing who I'm helping the expectations and I'm have to say no, again, because my work is really a lot of like eight appointments a day. I'm jumping in and out systems all day with all my knowledge and I don't google that's what you need an expert. You know, like you're just get in there firefight Hired Gun, get it fixed.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, let me know, I'm just making this up as we go. We can talk further off camera, but let let me know, if you want to do a, essentially a salary survey against our community, we can have that talk. Again, I know, I'm springing that on your thing in an interview, but I'll leave it up to you think about it. We're here to help. But that could be a very, I'm very interested in this topic.
Lisa Hendrickson
Right? Well, let me just say, as a close here, that a lot of the MSPs, from all my experiences with being in the group someone not, you know, the, the thing that they they don't do is really upsell training, and they don't offer it, it's just kind of under the rug. And that is something I'm going to work on this year with my new training company, is trying to figure out a nice mix of, you know, getting the videos that people don't want to watch, they want a real person to configure consult trained with, versus the like, the older videos that you still find out there. And so the MSPs can offer training, but it's not going to be cheap. And that's what people don't want is to have to pay extra. Yeah. So guess what? They have to pay extra if they want custom work. Yep. And that I get with with what I do. I don't do any cookie cutter training anymore. It's all custom. And people will pay it.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah. Yeah. I always love training. And I'll end on this back of the first part of the century. I was on the road doing hands on labs for Microsoft on Small Business Server. And here's what I liked. was when the class ended at 5pm. You're done. I loved it.
Lisa Hendrickson
You know, I hear you had to think about what I had a little like thing over two years of I've been doing this 25 years working as a helpdesk tech support person, right? But what do I really love? I love the Configuring the reworking broken systems configuring them and dealing with the break fix as it comes up. That's what I love the most within Outlook 365 So I'm like, so what I love is when I help these small businesses of five to 10 people, we reconfigure everything, set it up, then I train them. So that's that's an a business I want in time I think I had an exploratory year with 21 with the investigation stuff, it's still there, just sitting there and then the my.com which is the training and I'm fine with that. But if I do a whole new company, it's not gonna be called call that girl. Okay?
Harry Brelsford
I know this is a good legacy name but I get it.
Lisa Hendrickson
It actually is killing with my with my marketing, so I'm gonna use that as a sell as a sales lead. They call right now.
Harry Brelsford
Okay. All right. We'll talk to you next quarter.