Picture this: Ten adults around a table, making business decisions, arguing over strategy, and having proper “aha moments” about their own behaviour. No PowerPoint. No flip charts. Just a board game.

Sounds like skiving off, doesn’t it? Like someone’s found a clever way to expense their lunch hour at the pub quiz.

Except there’s actual science behind why simulation games can teach you things that stick—and it’s not just because they’re more entertaining than staring at a screen for three hours.

How We Actually Learn Things

Here’s something interesting: remembering information and being able to use it are two completely different skills.

A study from the National Training Laboratories found that whilst we retain about 5-10% of what we read or hear in a lecture, we remember around 75% of what we actually do. That’s the difference between nodding along whilst secretly planning your Tesco order and actually being able to apply something when you need it.

The reason comes down to how our brains work. According to educational researcher Edgar Dale’s “Cone of Experience,” we remember roughly 90% of what we practice or simulate. Our brains file away experiences much more effectively than abstract concepts.

Think about learning to drive. You can read the Highway Code cover to cover, but you don’t really know how to navigate a roundabout until you’ve done it yourself—preferably without your instructor grabbing the wheel in panic.

That’s what simulation games do. They let you practice the mental equivalent of roundabouts without the bit where you might actually crash into a Vauxhall Corsa.

What Makes Simulation Games Different

Simulation games have been used for decades in fields that take learning very seriously. Military strategists use war games to practice tactics. Medical schools use simulated emergencies to train doctors. NASA doesn’t just tell astronauts how to fix a spacecraft—they run them through the scenarios repeatedly until it becomes second nature.

But you don’t need a multi-million-pound setup to get the benefits. A well-designed tabletop game can teach you just as much about decision-making, resource management, and recognising your own habits as any high-tech simulator.

The magic is in how they work.

1. They Mirror Real-World Dynamics

A proper workshop simulation isn’t just a game with a business theme slapped on top. The mechanics need to reflect actual challenges people face.

According to research from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, simulations work best when they create what’s called “cognitive fidelity”—meaning the mental challenges in the game match the mental challenges in real life. It doesn’t need to look realistic; the decisions need to feel realistic.

If you’re learning about client management, you should feel the tension of wanting to win the work without accepting terrible terms. If you’re learning about resource allocation, you should experience the stress of too many demands and not enough capacity.

The game becomes a safe testing ground for real problems.

2. Consequences Happen Immediately

In real life, bad decisions often take months to reveal themselves. Make a dodgy choice in January, and by the time it all goes pear-shaped in June, you’ve forgotten what led to it.

In a game, consequences are immediate. Overcommit your resources? You burn out two rounds later. Ignore warning signs in a client brief? You spin the wheel and discover what “scope creep” actually feels like.

Dr. Karl Kapp, a professor who studies game-based learning, puts it this way: “In games, failure is not stigmatised. It’s expected, and it’s a learning opportunity.”

That’s the crucial bit. People will take risks and make mistakes in a game that they’d never dare make in real life. And they learn from those mistakes without the part where they actually lose money or clients.

3. You See Your Patterns

This is where simulation games get interesting. It’s not really about winning or losing. It’s about recognising why you made the choices you made.

Do you hoard resources because you’re terrified of running out? Do you take on too much work because you’re rubbish at saying no? Do you ignore red flags because you’re desperate?

Those patterns exist in your real business. The game just makes them visible in 90 minutes instead of over three years of costly mistakes.

As psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who won a Nobel Prize for his work on decision-making) notes: “We’re generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.” Games force you to see the gap between what you think you do and what you actually do when decisions get hard.

Why the Group Element Matters

You could, theoretically, play a simulation game on your own. But you’d be missing half the point.

The magic happens when you’re around a table with other people. Here’s why:

You See Multiple Strategies at Once

When you’re the only one playing, you only see your approach. In a group, you see ten different strategies—some brilliant, some baffling, all informative.

You watch someone walk away from an opportunity you would’ve jumped at, and it works out better for them. You see someone take a risk that makes you wince, and it pays off. Or it doesn’t, and you both learn something.

It’s like getting to live ten different versions of the same scenario in one afternoon.

A study in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that collaborative learning—where people work together and observe each other’s approaches—leads to significantly better problem-solving skills than learning alone. You’re not just learning from your own mistakes; you’re learning from everyone else’s too.

You Can’t Hide From Your Patterns

When you’re making decisions in private, it’s easy to justify everything to yourself. “That was the right call given the circumstances.” “Anyone would’ve done the same.” “It was just bad luck.”

But when you’re at a table with nine other people, and they all handled the same situation differently? That’s harder to explain away.

Someone inevitably says, “Why did you take that client? The brief was covered in red flags.” And you have to actually think about it. Because they’re right. And you ignored those same red flags last month with an actual client, didn’t you?

That’s the uncomfortable bit. But uncomfortable is where learning lives.

The Debrief Is Where It Clicks

The game itself is only half the workshop. The real value comes in the conversation afterwards.

“What did you notice about your decision-making?”

“When did you feel most stressed, and what did you do?”

“What patterns showed up that you recognise from your real business?”

That’s when people have revelations. Not because someone told them what to think, but because they saw it themselves. And when you discover something yourself, it sticks.

Educational psychologist Jean Piaget called this “active learning”—the idea that people construct their own understanding through experience and reflection. You can tell someone they’re a people-pleaser who takes on too much work, and they’ll nod politely and ignore you. Let them experience it in a game, and they’ll bring it up themselves in the debrief.

What Makes a Good Simulation Game?

Not all games are created equal. You can’t just grab Monopoly, stick it in a workshop, and call it professional development. (Though Monopoly does teach you that capitalism is exhausting and your family can’t be trusted, which is arguably valuable.)

A proper workshop simulation has a few things in common:

It’s challenging but not overwhelming. If it’s too easy, people get bored. If it’s too complex, they get frustrated and stop learning. The sweet spot is where people feel stretched but capable.

The rules are clear. Nobody learns anything if they’re spending half the game confused about how it works. Good simulations are easy to understand but difficult to master.

It creates genuine tension. You should feel something when you’re playing—stress about running out of resources, pressure to make a decision, frustration when things go wrong. If you’re not feeling anything, your brain won’t bother remembering it.

It’s relevant to real problems. The closer the game mirrors the actual challenges people face, the more likely they are to take the lessons back to their work.

The Business Case (Because Someone Always Asks)

All right, this is lovely in theory, but does it actually work?

The short answer: yes.

A study by the University of Colorado found that students who learned through simulations scored 14% higher on assessments than those who learned through traditional methods. More importantly, they were better able to apply what they’d learned to new situations.

In business contexts, companies like Deloitte, Accenture, and PwC use simulation-based learning extensively for leadership development and change management. Not because it’s trendy, but because it works.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review found that experiential learning methods (including simulations) improved leadership effectiveness by 25% compared to lecture-based training. Participants were better at making decisions under pressure, reading complex situations, and adapting their approach.

And here’s the bit that matters if you’re paying for training: people actually enjoy it, which means they show up, stay engaged, and don’t spend the whole time wishing they were somewhere else.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about simulation games: they’re not always fun in the moment.

Yes, they’re more engaging than sitting through a presentation. But they’re also more exposing.

When you make a terrible decision in a game and immediately see the consequences, that’s uncomfortable. When everyone else at the table handled the same situation better than you did, that stings a bit. When you realise the pattern that’s sabotaging you in the game is the same pattern running your actual business? That’s not a laugh.

But that discomfort is the point. As author and researcher Brené Brown says: “We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both.”

The best learning happens right at the edge of your comfort zone. Not so far out that you’re panicking, but far enough that you’re genuinely challenged.

A good simulation game puts you in that spot and keeps you there for 90 minutes. It’s not always pleasant. But it is effective.

Why It Works Better Than You’d Think

At the end of the day, simulation games work because they trick your brain into thinking the stakes are real.

You know it’s just a game. You know the money isn’t real and the clients are fictional. But in the moment—when you’re staring at that decision and trying to figure out what to do—your brain treats it like it matters.

And because your brain thinks it matters, it files the experience away properly. Not in the “interesting but irrelevant” pile where most workshop content ends up, but in the “useful information for next time” pile.

Three months later, when you’re facing a similar decision in your actual business, your brain goes, “Oh, I remember this. Last time we did X, it went badly. Maybe try Y instead.”

That’s the goal. Not to entertain people for 90 minutes (though that’s a nice bonus). But to create experiences that change how people think and make decisions when it actually counts.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly what good training should do—whether it involves a board game or not.

The Bottom Line

Simulation games aren’t a replacement for every type of learning. Sometimes you need information delivered directly. Sometimes you need time to think and reflect. Sometimes you need one-to-one coaching.

But when you need people to understand their own behaviour, recognise patterns, and practice making better decisions? Stick them around a table with a well-designed game, and watch what happens.

They’ll surprise themselves. They’ll surprise you. And they’ll leave with insights they didn’t have two hours ago—not because someone told them, but because they lived it.

And that, really, is the whole point.

The post Why Playing Board Games in Workshops Isn’t Just Messing About appeared first on Problem Solving Catalysts.

Last month, I spoke to an electrician who was really pleased with himself. He’d finally raised his rates to £60 an hour and clients were paying it without pushback. He was fully booked, working about 40 hours a week, and he thought he was doing alright.

Then I asked him what he was actually taking home after everything was paid.

The pause told me he’d never really worked it out properly.

When we sat down and went through his numbers, it turned out he was netting about £32,000 a year. Not terrible, but not the £60,000 he thought he was making when he multiplied his hourly rate by his working weeks. He’d been so focused on keeping his rates “competitive” with other local sparkies charging £50-55 an hour that he’d never stopped to work out if those rates actually made sense for his business.

The problem wasn’t that he was bad at his job. The problem was he’d priced himself based on what everyone else was charging without questioning whether everyone else knew what they were doing either.

The Market Rate Trap

When you’re trying to figure out what to charge, the first thing most people do is look at what their competitors are charging. Makes sense, right? You don’t want to price yourself out of the market.

So you look around. One electrician’s charging £45 an hour. Another’s at £55. Someone else is advertising £40 for the first hour then £50 after that. You think “right, I’ll go somewhere in the middle, £50-60 seems about right.”

Except you’ve just made a massive assumption. You’ve assumed that all these people have worked out their costs properly and are charging sustainable rates. What if they haven’t? What if they’re all just copying each other, all racing to the bottom, all struggling to make a decent living but too scared to be the one who charges more?

The electrician I spoke to had done exactly this. He’d matched his rates to the going rate in his area. Except the “going rate” was being set by people who either had lower overheads than him, were running their businesses into the ground, or were supplementing their income with employed work on the side.

He had a newer van with higher finance payments. He’d invested in better testing equipment. He carried proper insurance and paid his tax on time. His costs were higher than the bloke working out of a 15-year-old Transit with dubious insurance who was doing half his work cash in hand.

But he was trying to compete on price with that bloke. Which meant he was subsidising his customers’ expectations of cheap work with his own lower income.

What Competitive Actually Means

Here’s the thing about being “competitively priced” – competitive with who, exactly?

If you’re a qualified, insured, reliable electrician who turns up on time, does the job properly, and guarantees your work, you shouldn’t be competing with the cowboy who’s cheaper because he’s cutting corners.

But when you price based purely on market rate, that’s what you end up doing. You’re competing with everyone, including the people you shouldn’t be competing with at all.

The electrician was getting calls from people who’d say “I’ve had three quotes and yours is the most expensive.” Well, yes. Because the other two quotes were from people who probably weren’t going to show up on time, might not finish the job properly, and definitely wouldn’t be answering the phone in six months when something went wrong.

But he kept dropping his prices to win the work because he thought that’s what you had to do to stay competitive. All he was actually doing was attracting the clients who only cared about price, not quality.

The Hidden Costs That Kill You

The real issue wasn’t his hourly rate. It was that his hourly rate didn’t account for the actual cost of running his business properly.

He was charging £60 an hour. Seemed reasonable. But when we actually broke down what that hour cost him, it told a different story.

He was spending about two hours a week on admin and paperwork that he wasn’t billing for. That’s 100 hours a year, call it £6,000 of unbilled time. He was driving between jobs, sometimes an hour each way, and only charging a £30 call-out fee that barely covered his fuel. He was spending time quoting for jobs he didn’t get – about five hours a week on average. Another £15,000 of time he wasn’t earning from.

His van cost him about £8,000 a year between finance, insurance, tax, MOT, and maintenance. Tools and equipment, another £2,000. Insurance, £1,500. Accountant, £1,200. His phone constantly ringing with people asking daft questions they could Google, but he felt like he had to answer or he’d lose business.

When you added it all up, his actual costs per billable hour were way higher than he’d ever worked out. He thought he was making £60 an hour. In reality, after costs, he was making closer to £35-40. And that’s before tax.

The Jobs That Look Good But Aren’t

Then there were the jobs he was taking on that looked profitable but weren’t when you actually broke them down.

He’d quote a fixed price for a job. Let’s say £800 for a full rewire of a small flat. Sounds decent. Should take him two days, that’s £400 a day, works out at £50 an hour.

Except the job actually took him three days because the previous work was a mess and nothing was where it should be. The materials cost more than he’d estimated because he had to make extra trips to the suppliers. The customer wanted to pay in installments, so he ended up waiting six weeks for the final payment.

By the time he’d actually worked out what that job cost him in time, materials, fuel, and the hassle of chasing payment, he’d made about £150 profit. For three days work. That’s £50 a day. About £6 an hour.

But he kept taking jobs like that because he thought that’s what you had to do. The customer had got other quotes, his was in the middle, seemed competitive. He won the work. Except winning work that doesn’t make you money isn’t actually winning.

The Race to the Bottom

The problem with competing on price is that there’s always someone willing to go cheaper. Always. And if your strategy is to be cheaper than the next person, you end up in a race to the bottom where nobody’s making any money.

The electrician told me about another local sparky who was advertising £35 an hour. How was he supposed to compete with that?

I asked him if the £35-an-hour guy was busy. He said no, actually, he’d heard the bloke was struggling for work and might be packing it in.

Right. So the person charging £35 an hour wasn’t successful. He was desperate. And yet my electrician was using him as a benchmark for what “the market” would pay.

This is what happens when you base your pricing on what everyone else is doing without questioning whether everyone else is actually making money.

What Actually Makes You Competitive

Being competitive doesn’t mean being the cheapest. It means being the best value for the type of client you want to work with.

If you’re targeting customers who want reliable, quality work from someone who’s going to answer the phone in six months when they need something else done, you can’t compete on price with the cowboys. And you shouldn’t try.

Your competition isn’t every electrician in your area. It’s the other electricians who are targeting the same type of customer, delivering the same level of service, and operating the same way you do.

And when you look at it that way, the “market rate” is completely different. The good electricians, the ones who are busy with the right kind of customers, aren’t charging £50 an hour. They’re charging £75-90. Because they’ve worked out what their business actually costs to run properly and they’ve priced accordingly.

The electrician I spoke to had been so focused on not being “too expensive” that he’d never actually looked at what the successful people in his trade were charging. He’d been comparing himself to the wrong people.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

Running your business at too-low rates doesn’t just mean you make less money. It means you can’t invest in the things that would make you more efficient, more professional, or more capable of delivering better work.

You can’t afford better equipment. You can’t afford to spend time training. You can’t afford to turn down difficult customers because you need every job. You can’t afford to take time off. You end up trapped in a cycle of being busy but broke, working harder and harder just to stand still.

And the worst part? You start resenting your customers. Not because they’re bad customers, but because you’re working for rates that don’t make sense and then blaming them for not valuing you enough.

Except they didn’t set your rates. You did.

What You Actually Need to Charge

I can’t tell you what your hourly rate should be. It depends on your costs, your overheads, your area, your target market, and what you’re actually good at.

But I can tell you that if you’ve set your prices based on “market rate” without working out what your business actually costs to run, you’re probably undercharging.

And if you’re trying to compete with the cheapest person in your area, you’ve already lost. Because there will always be someone willing to go cheaper, and competing on price is a race nobody wins.

The question isn’t “what’s the market rate?” The question is “what do I need to charge to run a profitable business and work with customers who actually value what I do?”

And that number is probably higher than you think.

The post The ‘Competitive Pricing’ Trap appeared first on Problem Solving Catalysts.

Every business owner hits this wall eventually. You’re sitting there, staring at a blank email, trying to figure out what number to type. The potential client has asked for a quote and you’ve got absolutely no idea what to tell them.

So you do what everyone does. You Google “average rates for [your industry]” and get a thousand different answers. Some people charge £30 an hour. Others charge £300. The range is so wide it’s basically useless. You look at what your competitors are charging but half of them don’t even list prices on their websites. The ones that do seem to be all over the place. One person’s charging £500 for something similar to what you do. Another’s charging £2,000 for what looks like the exact same service. How are you supposed to make sense of that?

You think about what you need to earn. You do some rough maths. Bills, rent, food, the occasional night out that doesn’t involve eating beans on toast. You work out you need to make about £3,000 a month to survive comfortably. Maybe £4,000 if you want to actually save something. You calculate backwards, factor in how many hours you can realistically bill in a month, and you land on a number. Let’s say £75 an hour. That feels about right mathematically.

But then you think about actually saying that number out loud to a real human being and something happens. Your stomach drops a bit. You start second-guessing. Is £75 too much? Will they laugh? Will they think you’re taking the piss? You remember that competitor you saw charging £40 and suddenly £75 feels wildly unreasonable. Maybe you should say £50. That’s safer. More reasonable. Less likely to scare them off.

So you type £50. Hit send. Feel relieved that you didn’t have to have an awkward conversation about money. The client says yes immediately, no negotiation, and you get this sinking feeling that you’ve just undercharged yourself again. Because if they said yes that quickly, they probably would have paid more. But it’s too late now. The number’s out there.

What’s Actually Happening Here

The “I don’t know what to charge” problem isn’t really about not knowing. You’ve done the research. You’ve seen the range. You’ve done the maths on what you need to earn. The information exists. You could, if you really wanted to, pick a number right now based on industry standards and your own financial needs.

The real problem is that you don’t trust yourself to charge what you’re actually worth. You’ve got all this noise in your head telling you that whatever number you pick is probably wrong. Too high and you’ll scare clients away. Too low and you’ll be broke. There’s apparently some perfect sweet spot that everyone else has figured out except you.

But here’s the thing nobody tells you when you’re agonising over pricing: there is no perfect number. There’s no magical formula that spits out exactly what you should charge. Every single person who’s confidently charging £100 or £200 an hour went through the same uncertainty you’re going through now. They just decided on a number and stuck with it long enough to get comfortable saying it out loud.

The difference between you and them isn’t that they know something you don’t. It’s that they’ve made peace with the discomfort of stating a price and letting the client decide if it works for them. You’re still trying to read minds, predict reactions, and protect yourself from rejection by charging less than you need to.

Why Market Research Won’t Save You

Looking at what other people charge feels like due diligence. It feels responsible. You’re being smart, doing your research, making an informed decision. Except all you’re really doing is finding reasons to doubt yourself.

Because competitor pricing tells you absolutely nothing useful. The person charging £30 an hour might be desperate for work, under qualified, or running their business as a side hobby. The person charging £300 might have twenty years of experience, a killer reputation, or just be really good at selling themselves. You have no context for any of these numbers. You don’t know their overhead costs, their target market, their business model, or how booked they actually are.

What you do when you look at competitor pricing is this: you find the lowest price and think “well I can’t charge less than that, I’d be working for free.” Then you find the highest price and think “I definitely can’t charge that much, I’m not that good.” So you land somewhere in the middle and call it competitive pricing. But middle-of-the-road pricing attracts middle-of-the-road clients who are shopping around for the best deal. Is that who you want to work with?

The other thing that happens when you base your pricing on competitors is you end up in a race to the bottom. Someone undercuts you, so you drop your prices to stay competitive. Then someone undercuts them. Before you know it, everyone’s working for poverty wages and wondering why their industry doesn’t value quality anymore. Except the industry’s fine. You’ve just trained clients to expect cheap work.

The Maths You’re Probably Getting Wrong

Most people do the basic calculation wrong anyway. They think about pricing like this: “I need to make £40,000 a year. There are about 2,000 working hours in a year. So I should charge £20 an hour.”

Except you’re not billing 2,000 hours a year. You’re not even billing half that if you’re honest about it. Because running a business isn’t just doing client work. It’s marketing, admin, proposals, invoicing, chasing payments, updating your website, networking, dealing with software that’s stopped working for no apparent reason. All of that is work, but none of it’s billable.

If you’re lucky, maybe 1,000 of those 2,000 hours are actually billable client work. Which means you need to charge £40 an hour just to hit that £40,000 target. But that’s before tax. Before business expenses. Before you factor in that you need to actually save something and have a life outside of work. Realistically, you probably need to be charging £60-80 an hour minimum just to run a sustainable business.

But most people don’t do that calculation. They just pick a number that feels reasonable, work backwards to justify it, and then wonder why they’re constantly stressed about money despite being fully booked.

What Value-Based Pricing Actually Means

Everyone tells you to charge based on value, not time. Charge for the outcome, not the hours. Price based on what it’s worth to the client, not what it costs you to deliver.

That all sounds great in theory. But what does it actually mean when you’re staring at an email trying to quote for a website redesign?

Here’s a practical way to think about it. If you’re redesigning a website for a business that makes £500,000 a year, and your new website is going to improve their conversion rate by even 2%, that’s an extra £10,000 in revenue for them. Your £3,000 fee suddenly looks like a bargain, doesn’t it? They’re making back triple your fee in additional revenue.

But if you’re thinking about pricing from an hourly rate perspective, you’re probably calculating how many hours the website will take you and multiplying by £50 or whatever you think is reasonable. Let’s say it takes you 40 hours. That’s £2,000. You’ve just left £1,000 on the table because you priced based on your time instead of their result.

Value-based pricing sounds complicated, but it’s really just this: figure out what the work is worth to the person buying it, not what it costs you to do it. If your work is going to save them money, make them money, save them time, or solve a problem that’s costing them sleep, it’s worth more than the hours you put in.

The reason this is hard is because it requires you to have a conversation about impact instead of just sending over a price list. It means asking questions about their business, their goals, what success looks like for them. Most people skip that bit because talking about value feels uncomfortably close to selling, and we’re all terrified of coming across as pushy.

Why You Keep Dropping Your Price Before Anyone Asks

There’s this thing that happens when you’re about to quote someone. You’ve done the work to figure out what you should charge. You’ve got a number in your head. Let’s say it’s £2,000 for the project.

Then you start typing the email and something in your brain goes: “But what if they can’t afford that? What if they think I’m expensive? What if they’ve got quotes from other people for way less?”

So you hedge. You write something like: “For a project like this, I’d normally charge around £2,000, but I could potentially do it for £1,500 if that works better for your budget.”

You’ve just given them a £500 discount they didn’t ask for. They hadn’t even responded to the £2,000 yet. For all you know, £2,000 was perfectly within their budget. Maybe they were expecting to pay £3,000. But you made the decision for them that they couldn’t afford your full rate.

This happens because you’re trying to avoid rejection. If you quote £2,000 and they say no, that feels personal. It feels like they’ve looked at your work and decided it’s not worth it. But if you give them a pre-emptive discount and they say yes, you’ve protected yourself from that rejection. Never mind that you’ve just cost yourself £500.

The uncomfortable truth is that when you drop your price before anyone asks, you’re not being flexible or helpful. You’re being scared. And that fear is expensive.

What Happens When You Finally Pick a Number and Stick With It

At some point, you have to just decide. Pick a number that’s based on what you need to earn, what the market will bear, and what the work is worth. Then say that number to clients without apologising, without hedging, without offering alternatives before they ask.

The first time you do this, it will feel awful. You’ll quote £100 an hour or £3,000 for a project and your heart will be racing while you wait for their response. You’ll be convinced you’ve just priced yourself out of the work.

Then one of two things happens. Either they say yes, in which case you realize you could probably have charged more. Or they say it’s outside their budget, in which case you have a conversation about adjusting scope or you part ways professionally and find a client who can afford you.

What almost never happens is the scenario you’ve built up in your head where they laugh at you, tell everyone you’re a rip-off, and your business collapses because you dared to charge a fair rate.

Most people find that when they finally commit to a price and stop second-guessing themselves, clients respond to that confidence. There’s something about stating a price clearly and then shutting up that makes people take you seriously. When you’re apologetic about pricing, defensive about your rates, or offering discounts before anyone asks, you signal that your prices are negotiable and your value is questionable.

The Real Answer to “What Should I Charge?”

You should charge enough to run a sustainable business. That means covering your costs, paying yourself a living wage, having some profit margin for reinvestment and savings, and not working yourself into the ground for poverty pay.

For most UK service providers, that’s probably somewhere between £60-150 an hour depending on your industry, experience, and target market. If you’re established and good at what you do, it’s probably closer to the upper end of that range. If you’re newer but solving expensive problems for businesses, it might be even higher.

But the exact number matters less than you think. What matters is that you pick a number you can say confidently, you quote it without apologizing, and you’re willing to let clients walk away if it doesn’t fit their budget.

Because here’s what nobody tells you: the clients who are the best fit for your business are the ones who can afford your real rates and see the value in paying them. Everyone else is just keeping you busy while you stay broke.

The question isn’t really “what should I charge?” The question is “am I willing to charge what I’m worth and deal with the discomfort of some people saying no?”

Once you can answer yes to that, the pricing bit sorts itself out.

The post I Don’t Know What to Charge (Here’s Why That’s Not Actually Your Problem) appeared first on Problem Solving Catalysts.

The post The £2,000 Project I Charged £500 For (And Why I’ll Never Do It Again) appeared first on Problem Solving Catalysts.