Should You Charge Less Because You're More Efficient? Obviously, no.
Blog Overview: I did the math on my $88 haircut and couldn't stop thinking about what it says about how we pay people. This is a general thought piece on hourly billing, who we hire, and whether we actually practice what we preach about charging your worth. Feeling spicy 🌶️ [4 min read]
Back in 2023, I paid $88 for a haircut (and have again and again) and posted about it because I caught myself ruminating about the cost after I swiped my card. She was (is) a senior stylist I trust; she’s skilled, fast, and part of me thought, ‘this feels like a lot for this.’
So I followed the thought through. Would a junior stylist who charged less and took twice as long have felt like a better deal? Would the cut even turn out the same? Maybe, maybe not. I looked in the mirror and decided I didn't care either way. I'd paid for the years, and the result of those years, not the forty-five minutes.
the post from 2023, for reference.
You don’t get cheaper by getting better at your job
The better someone gets at a job, the less time it takes, and we treat that backward. They've seen the problem before. They know which questions matter and which ones are just stalling. A job that used to eat a whole afternoon gets done before lunch, and somehow that makes us suspicious of the price instead of impressed by the skill.
A bookkeeper who spots a reconciliation error in ten minutes isn't doing ten minutes of work; she's doing eight years of pattern recognition in ten minutes. A web designer who fixes your layout in an afternoon isn't getting lucky; she's skipping the three rounds of trial and error someone newer would have needed. The speed is the expertise. It's not a discount coupon.
Why skilled people stop charging by the hour
Hourly billing punishes you for getting good at your job. The faster you solve the problem, the less you get paid for solving it. Try defending that logic out loud.
That's why Design Days exist. Why VIP days exist. Why a fractional CMO charges a flat monthly rate instead of logging hours. You're not buying someone's time; you're buying the fact that they can solve in six hours what would take someone else three days.
A day rate or a project fee isn't a markup for speed. It's the only pricing model that doesn't punish you for getting good at your job.
We love telling people to charge your worth
If you're self-employed, you've heard it a hundred times...or more?
Know your worth
Hold your boundaries
Raise your rates
Stop undercharging
I heard it constantly for years as a travel advisor, and now I say it to the advisors I work alongside, meaning every word.
It gets a lot more complicated once we're the ones holding the invoice instead of sending it.
Your bookkeeper or accountant raises her rates for next year. Your social media manager's packages go up. The quote for your website redesign lands higher than you budgeted for, and before you've even finished reading the email, you're drafting the 'any flexibility here?' reply in your head.
What it actually comes down to is whether we're willing to pay for the work we're hiring someone to do, not just agree with the idea in theory, for ourselves. It's one thing to believe people should charge their worth. It's another to open your wallet when their quote reflects it.
Your rate isn't a verdict on your worth
'Charge your worth' makes it sound like the number on an invoice says something about the person, not the work. It doesn't. A rate is the price of a result: skill, years gathering experience and knowledge, and the unglamorous cost of staying in business. Software. Insurance. Courses. The hours of invisible admin keeping the business running that nobody bills for. None of it is scoring you as a human being, despite business feeling personal AF.
Seeing it that way takes the heat out of the exchange. A rate increase tells you what it costs to keep doing the work well, full stop. If it doesn't fit your budget, that's a business decision…but one that might come with a tradeoff.
The real cost of hiring help
At some point, running your own business, especially if you want to scale (or have a life), stops being a one-person job. You bring in a bookkeeper. An email marketer. A web designer. An accountant. Maybe a social media manager or an assistant. Each one is a piece of the puzzle with expertise to help you reach your goals.
That's the actual trade-off. Can't pay for ten years of experience? Maybe hire two years instead. That's a legitimate call, not a failure. What doesn't work is expecting the two-year rate to deliver the ten-year result, or expecting whoever you hire to keep absorbing more scope at the same rate because asking to revisit the agreement feels awkward.
And the cost of choosing less experience is real. You take on the training, the extra questions, and staying in the loop on something you'd hoped to hand off completely. Now you're micromanaging and giving out tasks instead of ownership. Ownership goes to someone you trust enough to run with it unsupervised, and that trust usually takes experience to earn. That's not a knock on anyone starting. It's just the trade you're making, so be honest with yourself about which one you actually need when you're hiring for what you need.
Respecting a price doesn't mean accepting every price
In my world of design, sometimes the pushback is fair. Maybe you didn’t realize what was actually involved, or the service genuinely isn't the right fit right now. Doing it yourself, or finding someone else, is a reasonable call and often it’s the right one.
It's not fair to expect someone to shrink their rate to fit your budget, or to let scope creep until the original agreement stops describing the work and everyone starts getting frustrated.
You can respect someone's expertise without hiring them. You can tell your copywriter her rates make complete sense for her business and still say they don't work for yours. That's an honest answer, and most people would rather hear it than get talked down - or worse, ghosted 👻
So, charge your worth. But pay it too.
If we want our clients to accept that our rates grow as we do, we owe the people we hire the same room. The advice only works if we're willing to live with it from both sides of the table.
So next time a quote lands in your inbox, give it a second before you react. You don't have to say yes. You definitely don't have to spend money you don't have. Just look at the number the way you'd want someone to look at yours - and don't forget to acknowledge the time it took to draft that proposal with a quick thank you.
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