What To Charge

Before we start

Busy and profitable are different things

I have met readers with a full diary who are earning less per hour than the person who cleans their windows, and they have no idea, because they are looking at the fee and not at the job.

A sixty pound reading does not earn you sixty pounds an hour. Not even close. By the time you have answered the messages, taken the booking, prepared, read, written your note and chased the one who did not turn up, that hour has quietly become two, and the payment processor took a slice on the way through.

This module counts it properly, and then decides your price from the real number rather than from what you hope people will pay.

Lesson one

What you are actually selling

You are not selling forty five minutes. You are selling every year you spent learning to do this well, delivered in forty five minutes.

That is not a nice thought to make you feel better about your price. It is the accurate description of the transaction, and until you believe it you will keep discounting, because a person who thinks they are selling three quarters of an hour will always feel slightly guilty asking for sixty pounds for it.

Lesson two

What the market actually charges

Before you count your own job, it helps to know roughly what the room looks like. So I went and read the published prices on a set of UK readers' own websites and checked every figure myself on the day.

Now the important part, because a table of other people's prices is the most dangerous thing in this module.

1. This is a small sample, not a national averageNine readers. It tells you the shape of the market, not the truth about it. Do your own look around your own area before you decide anything.
2. The spread is the lesson, not the middleLook at the hour. Sixty pounds to ninety five pounds, and at the College of Psychic Studies up to a hundred and seventy five. Same length, same craft, nearly three times the price. Nobody is being cheated. They are selling different things to different people.
3. A price tells you nothing about a businessYou cannot see how many bookings that reader gets, how long their session really takes them, or whether they are making any money. Copying a number off a website is copying the only part of their business you can see.
4. Written readings are the trapTen pounds for three cards looks like easy money until you count the writing time. Put it through the calculator below with an honest number of minutes and look at what it actually pays.

Lesson three

Count the whole job

Every paid reading drags a tail of unpaid work behind it. Write yours down honestly. Most readers guess fifteen minutes and it is closer to forty.

Now put your real numbers in and look at what your hour is actually worth.

Change the price by ten pounds and watch what happens to the last line. That is the whole lesson in this module.

Lesson four

Setting the number, and saying it

Once you know your true hourly rate, the price stops being a feeling and becomes arithmetic. Decide what your hour needs to be worth, then work backwards.

1. Price the whole job, not the readingIf the tail is forty minutes, your forty five minute reading occupies nearly an hour and a half. Price accordingly rather than resenting it later.
2. Pick a number you can say flatSay it out loud in the mirror. If you hear yourself soften it, add a but, or rush past it, it is not your price yet. Either practise until it is, or it is genuinely too high for now and you set a lower one and put a date on raising it.
3. Never apologise in the same sentenceIt is sixty pounds. Full stop. Not it is sixty pounds but I know that is a lot. The second half of that sentence is where discounts get invented.
4. Put it in writing before they askThe price goes on the website, on the booking page and in the reply. Making people ask costs you the nervous ones, who are often the ones who need you most.

Lesson five

Money before the reading, every time

This is the single change that will make the biggest difference to your week, and it is the one readers resist hardest.

Payment is taken at the moment of booking. Not after. Not on arrival. Not by bank transfer when they get round to it.

Three reasons, and the third is the one that matters.

1. Impulse does not survive a delaySomebody who decides at eleven at night that they need a reading has changed their mind by Thursday. Paying is the decision.
2. It ends the chasingNo reminders, no awkward messages, no standing in a doorway working out how to ask for money from somebody who has just cried.
3. It changes who turns upPeople who have paid arrive on time, having thought about their question. People who have not, do not.

You will lose a few bookings from people who wanted to pay on the day. You will lose far more hours to the ones who never came.

Lesson six

A booking system that does the work

If every booking is a conversation, then every booking is unpaid labour. The job of a booking system is to remove you from the middle of it.

It does not matter which one you use. It matters that it does these six things.

1. Shows only the times you actually want to workSet your hours once. No more offering three slots by message and waiting.
2. Takes the money at the point of bookingIf it cannot do this, it is a calendar, not a booking system.
3. Sends the confirmation and the reminderAutomatically, with your terms and everything they need to know attached.
4. Lets them reschedule themselves, within your rulesThis removes most of your messages in one move.
5. Blocks out your own lifeBuffer between readings, and a hard stop at the end of the day that you do not move.
6. Collects the question at bookingOne box. What would you like to look at. You arrive prepared and they arrive having thought.

Lesson seven

Discounts, friends and events

Three places where prices leak, and the rule for each.

And one warning about events specifically. Five hours of fifteen minute readings is the most tiring work in this job, and it pays worst per hour unless you set the minimum properly. Use the calculator above with fifteen minute readings and you will see it immediately.

Worksheet

My money, decided

Fill this in with the numbers from the calculator in front of you, not from memory.