How to price your service—eek! What a personal & touchy subject. There are ultimately an infinite number of factors that might affect your ideal rate, and I couldn’t possibly attempt to touch on all of them. One point I DO want to emphasise is that it’s extremely important not to underprice yourself when utilising a niche marketing strategy. As a niche service provider, your number of clients will probably (but not always) be limited in comparison to someone who utilises mainstream marketing. But you still deserve to earn a good living, for full-time work especially. And niche marketing does entail spending many more unbillable hours doing marketing and research.
Since it’s critical not to underprice ourselves, we are going to begin our math by calculating the minimum that you should charge. We can always increase that number if it seems lower than where you wanted to be based on the marketplace. Having a higher published price tag than your minimum needed charge is very cool because it leaves you some wiggle room to run financial booking incentives of various types. But before we start all that, it’s very important to research the existing marketplace so that we can understand the pricing environment.
1) Evaluate Your Market
Research advertising venues relevant to your style of work. Typically you should focus on your local market, especially if that’s primarily where you see clients & it’s a highly active market. But you might also consider a regional or multi-city approach if your base city is not very active or has traditionally not responded as well to you as other cities.
Note the varying standards of professionalism in terms of media quality, styles of copy, use of websites/design, etc, between providers at various price points within your chosen market. Note the volume of providers at various price points. Identify upper & lower limits in pricing, as well as price points where strong trends occur, such as major shifts in business model (now vs by-appointment, intuition screening vs reference-screening, phone contact vs email contact etc), media quality, services offered, etc.
This will help you understand what is “culturally” expected at various price points and give you an idea what it might take for you to do well at any given price point. Not everyone who is advertising is getting booked, so take it all with a grain of salt. Perhaps this type of evaluation will give you some initial clues about where you would like to fall on the pricing spectrum. This is a great place to start. Keep these thoughts in mind, and we will check back in with them later once we have calculated your minimum suggested charge per session.
2) Evaluate Your Financial Needs
Come up with a figure for your monthly income needed. You will need to include both your personal expenses and your professional monthly overhead in this number, along with taxes and savings.
3) Choose Your Ideal Appointment Length (for example: 2 hours)
4) Use Modified Freelancer’s Formula to Calculate Your Minimum Pricing Based on Ideal Appointment Length
[4a] Guesstimate a realistic weekly volume based on your ideal appointment type (ex: 3-5 two hour appointments per week; 8-10 one hour appointments per week; etc.)
[4b] Multiply your guesstimated weekly volume by 3 or 4 weeks per month to come up with your guesstimated monthly number of sessions
[4c] Divide your needed monthly income by monthly number of sessions to find your needed profit per session
[4d] Calculate an estimated figure for your per-session expenses
Note: Do this in a way that maximises your ability to cater to the client’s convenience within whatever you’re personally comfortable with. This is very important when utilising a niche marketing strategy. Same-day Incall bookings and uber rides to the next city over can both be expensive. But it may well be worth calculating these expenses into your rate in the first place-which sets you up to say YES easily when you receive those type of requests. Of course, if either of those are things you’re simply not interested in doing for other reasons, then it obviously doesn’t make sense to consider those expenses. Remember that monthly overhead expenses such as monthly rent on your incall space should have already been included under monthly overhead earlier in the formula- so no need to count it again here. Only per-session expenses. If you always buy yourself a nice meal after seeing a client, for example, be sure to include that expense here too, unless you’ve already accounted for it elsewhere in your personal expense budget.
Another Note: You may have drastically different expenses for various types of appointments. I personally didn’t find it worthwhile in the long run to maintain different pricing for Incall & Outcall. To me it was more trouble than it was worth. Clients often had trouble with it, I felt, and to me it was just much easier to have one price for my time across the board. I would pretty much go with the higher needed price based on the more expensive appointment type for me (in my case, Incall). When I got booked for the less expense involved appointment type, for me Outcall, it just meant that I had a higher profit margin. You can average your figures, go with the higher one, or work with multiple prices… it’s totally up to you how to handle that.
4e) Add your required per-meeting profit to your estimated per-meeting expenses and round slightly to come up with your minimum rate that you should charge for your ideal session
5) Check your calculated minimum rate against your market evaluation & adjust if necessary
Does your number fall where you wanted to fall according to market trends? If not, let’s adjust the number, unless you’re flexible about where in the market you want to fall. You can increase the number to match a higher rate level. I do not recommend decreasing it, but make sure to think of ways to cut expenses realistically to make up for it if you decide to.
Note: if you end up choosing a higher rate than your minimum needed rate that we calculated, there are several ways to use leeway in your pricing to your advantage; for example:
- incentivising advance bookings secured by deposits with a discount
- running fundraisers (donate $X of every appointment to a cause, charity, etc)
- create a special savings fund toward a major business investment / upgrade
6) Create a fleshed-out fee structure centered around your ideal appointment type. Make your length preference CLEAR from your pricing structure.
- Eliminating other options is the clearest indication of your preference and VERY effective! Don’t be afraid to make your ideal appointment type your minimum booking!! You can always keep seeing your steady regulars for one hour bookings behind the scenes.Noticeable price disparities between options also sends a clear subconscious message. If your 1st hour is very expensive but your two hour appointment is priced market-average, that tends to drive home the point. Same can be said for having an expensive two hour price but a market-average three hour.
- The point is to encourage bookings of your ideal appointment type specifically. Niche marketing is especially conducive to encouraging multi-hour bookings. Of course, if you like shorter meetings, that’s fully understandable. The only issue with shorter meetings & niche marketing is that it can sometimes be difficult to get enough volume of business due to the tendency that many clients have to book the minimum session available. You may definitely find ways around this with a little creativity, but I personally tend to recommend encouraging longer bookings if you enjoy them.
What happens if your needed numbers are just way higher than what your marketplace evaluation will allow for? How can you utilise this strategy when you need to earn far more per session than others in your marketplace are charging? These are good questions. I will cover this topic in a future article called Pushing the Boundaries with Your Pricing.
I really hope that the lack of numerical examples in this article wasn’t too confusing! I had written it with some included, but ultimately felt that it served to unnecessarily alienate people whose expenses and rates might be drastically different, so I removed them.
Check back here next Monday for next week’s installment of The Niche Escort Marketing Guide! Next week’s topic is TBA… 😉