How to Price Your Work More Accurately
A concrete process for finding what your work is worth from outside your own head, so you stop pricing from effort and start pricing from outcome.
By James Schramko · Updated August 2026
When I left my job at a Mercedes dealership, I had written up a web audit that never got used. It sat in a drawer. Instead of chasing more work like that, I pitched two clients at $5,500 a month each and quit. That was $11,000 a month, serviced through a couple of hours of calls, on top of a side business I'd already built to $250,000 over two and a half years.
I didn't get that number from my own hours. If I had, I would have priced the call at what two hours of talking is worth to me. I priced it at what running their marketing was worth to them. That's the whole gap, and it's the reason most established founders are still underpriced years into a business that clearly works.
The two prices in the room
Every deal has two prices sitting in it. Yours is built from effort: how long the work takes, how hard it used to be, what you'd need to feel paid fairly for your time. Theirs is built from outcome: what it's worth to have the problem solved, the revenue unlocked, or the risk removed. Those two numbers rarely match, and when you're the one setting the price, only one of them gets used.
I once paid a property buyer's agent $10,000. Roughly three hours of his work, and the work was negotiating the deal, saved me $105,000 on the purchase. I didn't pay for the hours. I paid for what the hours produced.
Buyers pay for the expected result, the risk removed, and the speed and certainty of getting there. Your hours barely enter their maths, so a price built from effort answers a question nobody in the room actually asked.
Why you're the worst person in the room to set it
You know exactly how many hours a piece of work takes, because you've done it hundreds of times. You know it used to be hard and now it isn't, because you got good at it. Both of those facts push your number down, and neither has anything to do with what the client is getting.
I kept a membership price flat for about seven years once. I made less for more work every year that passed and didn't notice until I finally looked back at it. Familiarity does that to anyone who builds something long enough. It wasn't laziness. I was just too close to the number to see it move. The better you get at something, the smaller it feels to do, and the more your own price drifts downward exactly when it should be moving up.
I watched the same thing happen to a mentee with a serious corporate background, the kind of person who used to advise people at the top of their field. He was charging solopreneurs $1,000 a year for coaching. I asked him to repeat the number because I assumed I'd misheard. He hadn't. He'd just never had anyone check it against what it was worth to the person paying it, so it sat wherever he'd first set it and never moved again.
What the buyer already knows
Some buyers already know you are underpriced. I finally raised the price on my oldest customer, the one I was most nervous about losing. He told me I'd been on way too low for way too long. He'd known the real number the whole time. I was the one still charging the old one.
In his first ten days working together, one client received a complete coaching program build, eighteen playbooks pulled from his own calls, a cloned site, a funnel, and a ninety day plan. Conservatively, the work represented tens of thousands of dollars in replacement cost. He was paying $1,800 a month. Nobody looking at that delivery from outside would have priced it that low. I was too close to the work and the existing price to see the mismatch clearly.
A process for finding the real number
Stop trying to feel your way to the right price. Feel is what's broken. Run this instead.
List your last five to ten projects in the client's terms, not yours. Not hours spent, not how hard it was. What did they walk away with: revenue added, time back, a risk that's now gone. And what that means to them. For each one, record the result, its likely financial or operational value, the replacement cost, the speed gained, and the risk removed. Written that way, the list becomes a pricing worksheet, and it kills vague answers like more confidence before they start.
Find three reference points outside your own head before you touch the number. What would it cost the client to solve this another way, through an agency, a hire, or leaving it broken. What does a peer in an adjacent market charge for a comparable outcome. What has the client already spent trying to solve the problem, and what does leaving it unsolved continue to cost.
Ask someone with distance to price it blind. Describe the deliverable and the result to a peer or a mentor without telling them your current number, and ask what they'd charge. The gap between their answer and yours is the discount you've been running without knowing it.
Set the new number as a floor, not a suggestion. State it as a fact, not an offer to negotiate down from.
Test it on the next renewal or the next new client first, not your whole client list at once. Then hold it when someone pushes. Hold the floor unless new information changes the scope, the risk or the value. A buyer asking is never by itself a reason to discount the same work.
Run this pass every twelve months, not once. The moment you stop checking, familiarity creeps back in and the same discount you just fixed starts rebuilding itself.
Hold the number once you have it
Finding the right price is only half the job. Holding it under pressure is the other half. One business owner held a new pricing floor when a client pushed to renegotiate below it. The response was short: this is a new contract, these are the terms. The client accepted. That same month, 42 new clients signed on at the new rate, not the discount the market was hoping for. The floor held because it came from outside her own head, was checked against reality, and got defended the first time someone tested it.
Pricing your own work accurately is hard to do from inside your own head. Inside Mentor, it's usually one of the first numbers we go back and fix.