Whether you have your own business, work on salary for a corporation, or work independently as a freelancer, it is easy to get caught up in reducing your hours of effort. Working too hard to please your customers or your corporate masters can reduce morale and cram you into a bad habit that distracts you from the fine line of the “give and take” mechanism behind capitalism.
At the end of the day, if you have some service or product of value, you hold the key to obtaining top dollar for your talents by packaging it correctly and reaching the right customer base. Let’s break down how you can make more money without working extra hours below.
Cold Hard Cash
When it comes to financial assessments, you have to crunch the numbers to get the equation right. You need to calculate your annual financial obligations for housing, transportation, food, travel, entertainment, clothing, fitness, healthcare, and whatever else you commonly spend money on.
Once you have figured out how much you need, at the bare minimum, to afford your current lifestyle and financial obligations, you can then compare this number to the average amount of money that you earn per week. You should calculate holidays, vacations, weekends, and all those extra days off into the mix.
Once you know how many hours that you work per week, how much you are generating in net profits, and what your cost of living may be, you can figure out how much money you need to be charging to afford it. If you are reaching a deficit at the end of the year, you need to raise your prices or renegotiate your salary. Something has to be done to solve this imbalance.
But you also have to set realistic expectations of what the demand is for your skill sets. If the industry average pay for an hour of your work is $50, you’ll have to generate some serious credentials to generate $150 an hour. Although there is no cut-and-dry method for increasing your hourly rate, a lot of it has to do with supply-and-demand economics, professionalism, and word-of-mouth reputation.
The professionals who fare the best in this game are the ones who start their businesses in an area where the demand is so high that they need very little capital to attract clients. Because the demand is so high and they are serving a niche market where the price for service is typically quite high, the sky is the limit on what they can charge.
When you have an overflux of customers, you can cherry-pick the work that you are willing to do and charge a lot more than others in your field for a higher quality of work.
But it is all based on consumer perception and keeping your living expenses low enough where you can afford to go without work. If you become indebted, you will become more desperate to take on work and will burden yourself with heavy workloads that don’t generate you the same high hourly rates.
Break Down Your Work in Increments
If you want to see how much time you are wasting in extraneous activities that are only tangentially related to the core work, you have to keep track of time when you are supposedly off the clock. If you find that you are spending lots of time in meetings, carrying out administrative duties, social media, or managing accounts, this starts to whittle away at your billable hours.
Many workers don’t like to look at non-billable hours as work even though they are extremely time-consuming. This may be due to the fact that the participation requires far less mental efforts. The mental exhaustion or physical labor of many jobs is the core labor that most employees can’t handle when they are overloaded.
If you add up all those 15-minute, half-hour, or longer increments of time that you fret away with non-billable work, you may be able to see the hole that work is truly putting in your life. Although it may not be mentally or physically exhausting to do this leisurely work, you could still be enjoying yourself and building up a higher quality of social life.
Get a Rhythm Going
If you really want to focus on your work and generating income, you have to put aside the distractions. All that time wasted on social media, tied up with personal phone calls, and other non-billable activities that break up your workday must be limited.
You have to get a natural rhythm of focusing on your work and refusing to diverge from the core work. While you can make some exceptions, you have to limit these exceptions to a few hours a week. Building focused and healthy work habits requires some discipline and the right setting to encourage productivity.
A quiet work area that makes it impractical for you to engage in private conversation or web searches is the best area. A quiet workplace, such as a public library, can foster incredible productivity for freelancers.
Remain Objective
You need to keep track of how well you are improving and make adjustments as needed. If you are failing to adhere to your desires to avoid unnecessary breaks and activities that don’t pay the bills, you need to strategize and engineer effective methods.
And if you are not able to raise your rates without losing customers, you have to find methods of justifying the expenses. Most customers don’t mind paying high prices as long as they feel that these are industry standard rates.
When you use professional billing software to itemize the total costs and detail the reports, it is easier for them to see why you are forced to charge higher prices. Normalizing a higher price for services requires professionalism and a perception of value and convenience.
You may have to make some drastic changes to reach your financial goals and to earn what you are worth. This can be as easy as finding other job opportunities that promise to pay higher wages or moving to a location where the market will bear your price increases.
But remember, it is supply and demand. It doesn’t matter if you move to an area that is relatively poor if you are catering to the high demands of the affluent and working classes. When choosing the right market for your products and services to excel, you have to think outside of the box.
Any area that requires a high capital investment is loaded with competition. And you will cave into taking any work that is available when you are trapped in the high overhead for operating in that area. Always start out small and scale down your business, if necessary, to raise the prices and increase your net profits.
Lowering overhead is just as important as generating revenue. Yet, there is a fine line between how far you can push it. At a certain point, customers want a form of accountability and like being able to visit a licensed and well-kept establishment. But that establishment can just as easily be your home, or a nice car if you are traveling and marketing your products.
In any case, you have to keep working at your goals while keeping track of all the improvements. Over time, you will be able to engineer a successful strategy for increasing your net profits and reducing your workloads.
