Client #1, Part 3 — The Evolution of the Invoice
A dollar a minute. That’s where I started in 2011.
I landed on it mostly because the math was easy and I needed a number, any number, to put on that first invoice to Client #1. I wasn’t thinking about my competition and what they were charging, I was thinking about not embarrassing myself on the first try.
That starting rate held for a while. Then my freelance work started expanding, and the pricing expanded right along with it.
Small nonprofits started finding me, mostly through word of mouth. These were worthy organizations that needed IT support but rarely had a line item in their budget for it. I charged them less than my standard rate. Small businesses came next. Real offices with a few employees with overhead were a different category of operation than Client #1 working solo out of his home. I charged those clients a higher rate than my baseline.
Three different numbers. Three different mental calculations running every time a new client appeared in my inbox. Which category is this? What should I charge them? Is this fair to them, fair to me, fair relative to the last client I quoted? It was unsettling to me in a way that never quite showed up on the invoice itself. It showed up in the mental gymnastics, trying to be generous and sustainable at the same time, and never being entirely sure I’d landed in the right place for any given client.
Client #1’s voice was still in my head through all of this. When you charge more, you eliminate the punters. Don’t blink. But his advice assumed one number. I had three, and blinking three different amounts of confidence depending on who was sitting across from me wasn’t the system he’d been describing.
In 2020, in the middle of the masked, uncertain early days of COVID, I decided to lift the needle off the first record I was playing...and put on a new groove.
For what I do, for the service I offer, for the way I treat my clients, I told myself, I am worth significantly more than I’d been charging. Professional services like counseling charge more than that. There are people I might give a discount to for their circumstances, but I found that most clients contacting me have the money. I came up with one number. Across the board. Still no blinking or grimacing when I said it.
I tested it on a new client, someone who’d found me through a word-of-mouth referral with no history of my old rates to compare against. I said the number. They didn’t flinch. It was almost expected, like a real consultant simply charges real money and anything less would have been the surprising outcome.
Well, that was easy enough.
I’ve held that standard rate ever since, and things have been much more relaxed for all involved, particularly due to much less friction with my process. There is only one exception, and it’s not about the client’s category. It’s about the nature of the work itself. If someone calls because they’ve been hacked and need to get their online life back to stability, the work for full immersion in their privacy and security remediation, that work commands a meaningfully higher rate. Not because I’m taking advantage of someone in a vulnerable moment, but because crisis work carries higher stakes, higher complexity, and a higher cost if I get it wrong. The price reflects what’s actually on the line, not who’s asking.
If anyone asks me today what I charge, I look them in the eye with my business face and say it calmly. Just the number, held with the same steadiness Client #1 told me to hold fifteen years ago.
Somewhere in my journey as a technology consulting business owner, I observed something important about the kind of work I actually wanted. The small business contracts, with their multiple stakeholders and shifting priorities and committee-style decision making, never quite fit the way working directly with individuals and solopreneurs did. My introvert self does better one to one. One person, one relationship, one conversation at a time, rather than navigating an office’s worth of competing opinions about what their technology should do.
The invoice evolved because I evolved. Not toward charging more for its own sake, but toward charging fairly, consistently, and without apology, for work I’d already proven I could do well for fifteen straight years.
I’m no longer unsettled about saying so.
More later...