​Defining the price of a service and a product is a recurrent question among freelancers and people starting their business, a natural step to understand how much you should charge to keep things running and providing for yourself or the people you're responsible for!

Have you ever had any of the following questions?

- How much should I price?
- How much should I earn?
- Should I charge per hour or per day?
- Or should I just charge per month?
- How much profit margin should I aim for?
- What if the client ask for a discount, how much can I offer without losing money?
- What expenses should I consider?​
- Can I work less than 8h a day, 25 days per month and don't go broke?

​​If you're facing any of the questions above, I can help you out! Budgeting don't need to be complex, especially when we're talking about individual costs or small businesses.​

It's quite common that when budgeting we consider only our immediate expenses, but because of that it's also common to price only the bare minimum to survive. We need to provide you with enough money to be prepared for unexpected expenses, but most of all, to live life with quality when your business can provide you that!
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With that in mind, I've compiled over a decade of learnings in budgeting services, entrepreneurship and administration into a sensible spreadsheet that takes you through only 4 simple steps to identify your costs and determine you sales price.

You can preview the spreadsheet here and download it through the button below:
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Hope this document helps you to define a proper cost for your services and an understanding of how much you cost, and most important of all, how much you deserve to earn and to spend with yourself!

One of the fundamental steps in any business is to know the purpose of it, regardless if you’re working with web development, aerospace design or baking bread. That gives a common goal and damage prevention to any reveries that can come from the people involved in a project, from the intern to the CEO, and at the same time it can give more flexibility to improve your product or services. Not to mention that having a shared goal while understanding the capabilities of the business can nurture camaraderie when done correctly.

I’ve worked in places where innovative concepts were constantly created, but the business model was so  rigid that embracing new products wasn’t possible and good opportunities were lost. And I have worked also in the opposite scenario, where the business model was so flexible that the company stuck only with creating experimental projects and also lost good business opportunities. But does that mean that both cases were a waste of time? Well, not necessarily, it depends on what each one wanted to achieve with their business model.
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For this and the following example I have used the free tools at the Canva.com website, where you can find different boards and visual communication templates, including the Business Model Canvas and the Lean Canvas. Both formats are valid and easy to use, I'll start with the Business Model Canvas since it’s the more traditional way of visualizing or defining a business model with speed. 

I had my first contact with the Business Model Canvas back in Brazil when doing a series of entrepreneurship and administration trainings. Over the years, I’ve used the template for dozens of times to define the main scope of a project and to realign the business model of where I worked, helping to shift back the focus on priority solutions.
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​For a demonstration, I’ve used the following template from the Canva.com to create a resume of the Chocolate Cookies bakery. Each field is a significant aspect that, when combined, creates an understandable and fast visualization of the fundamental pieces of the business. It’s ideal for briefing and pitching a business to anyone, can be your team, an investor or even yourself.

If you read this far, you have my appreciation. To conclude the post, here’s a few comments I want to reinforce:

• Knowing your business or even yourself is a crucial first step that shouldn’t be overlooked. As a company or even as a freelancer it’s easy to lose focus when you’re starting, so by doing a simple Business Model Canvas or the Lean Canvas you can set a direction and start growing towards a clear goal. It might take time, you might need to be flexible sometimes to support the income, but in the end you’re knowing where to go. This is also an important connection to facilitate the innovation process in your business, as it can give voice and help the whole “chain of command” to participate and iterate your business, but I’ll save this topic for a future post.

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• Knowing the business also helps your client, through that definition you can propose a solution that fits your capabilities and is relevant to the client and its customers. Using , the previous examples again, if the clients wants some baked products, you can offer them some cookies given that’s your specialty, maybe some muffins if you want to reach further, but offering pasta or lasagna is already a different area that is elusive and might end up failing to attend to your client's necessity and damaging your product, your business and, most importantly, your team.

• You don’t need to spend hours or days to create an extensive business plan to know what to do or help others with what they should do. The Business Model Canvas and the Lean Canvas are fast solutions that can even be made in less than 15 min depending on how many people are involved.

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And just like the burger, after you know at least what kind of bread and patty, what sauce, what cheese and what vegetables, you have an understanding to either go through or prepare the burger. I like to think of each main ingredient as a Lexia, opening up a branched understanding of the main subject, and it’s through them that you can delve even deeper to know how the tomato is grown, who made the bread, what is the sauce's secret ingredients and so on. The thing is that this more complex information will be necessary only later on, knowing the fundamental details are the first step to getting started.

With all this in mind, I’ll be breaking down in the next post of this series what is necessary to kickstart a project by knowing your business, understanding a purpose of the project and how to efficiently communicate with your team, your client and, most importantly, yourself.

​Until next time!​

​It’s hard to resume more than seven years in a brief text, especially when it’s filled with so many remarkable moments. A recurring memory I have is watching the center of Helsinki from our previous office, where I would many times stop to watch people passing by or contemplate the snow falling gently to the window, slowly covering the roofs during the graveyard shifts while I thought about what the effort I was putting into helping the company grow would mean to my life and to others around me. It’s with this memory in mind that I write this text.
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