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Pricing Virtual Assistant Services

So you have started planning your Virtual Assistant business and you have started building your website. It all seems great until you get to your services page. How the heck do I price Virtual Assistant Services? Do I price by the hour? What do I charge? Or should I price by the job? How do I figure out how long each job will take? It can be totally overwhelming!

Luckily, I have been through it and can give you some insight into what works and what doesn’t!

Niche Matters When Pricing Virtual Assistant Services

Which VA niche you have decided on will effect your pricing greatly. There are some projects that just work better at a package rate.

For instance, you can set up a Social Media Management Package and charge one rate to post a set number of times on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn each week.

Or if you are going to be doing recipe development for blogs, getting paid a set price for each recipe make sense. You might have to test each one a few times but will only end up with one product for your client.

Charging hourly makes more sense when it is hard to plan the whole project ahead of time or the number of hours will change over time. You might charge per hour to load products into a client’s website. This month is 12 products, but next month it is only three, making package pricing difficult.

Can you figure out what the main types of jobs you will be doing? Are they easily broken down into packages? Or will they vary greatly week to week or month to month?

How to Find Your Hourly Rate

Finding your hourly rate is a little intimidating. You don’t want to price too low, you might not be taken seriously, but you don’t want to price too high, no one will want to hire you! What’s a girl to do?

First, figure out what your costs are per hour. Will you be paying for your own office? Time tracking software? Accounting software? How much do you have to pay in taxes each year?

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Then, figure out how much you need to make to cover your expenses. This is your base cost and it is only what you make over this amount that you will get to keep. A good rule of thumb is three times you base cost = your hourly rate.

According to Payscale.com in the US the median rate is $16.06 per hour. Personally, I charge more than that, but my niche supports that.

If you are going to be paid by the hour, you should consider selling blocks of time. It can be easier to keep track of, especially with multiple clients or clients who only need small jobs done. You can have your client pay for 10 hours upfront and then let them know when they are getting low on time left. Some people even give a small discount for clients who buy multiple hours upfront.

Selling Virtual Assistant Packages

Creating packages is simple if you have narrowed down your focus. List out all the jobs you are willing to do and then group them together into jobs that a client might want done at one time. You might offer a Newsletter Package, you will write and send two newsletters a month for one price, or a Social Media package where you will update the clients Social Media accounts a set number of times each week.

How will you know what to charge for each package? I try to estimate the number of hours I would spend on each project and then add a little padding. This way if I get stuck on something I am covered. If you have figured out your hourly rate then it is just multiplying it by the number of hours and voila! you have your package price. Of course, you might want to adjust it a little to make a nice, neat number, like round up $86 to $90 or $122 to $125, but that is up to you.

Now that you have figured out your Virtual Assistant pricing, go out and get some clients!