I've been in talks with some people at an accounting firm. They have an enterprise level Microsoft Copilot Premium subscription. They mentioned how they have been trying to use Copilot to automate certain tasks but the results are unreliable. I can easily fix their issues by creating a custom agent that would live in their Copilot widgets. That should increase the accuracy and quality of the output to the standards they need while keeping things simple enough for their old-school consultants. The whole project shouldn't take more than 60 hours of work. Because their business unit is composed of 100 people, saving them 1 to 3 hours of manual work per week would translate to 400-1,200 hours of work saved every month. I'm new to this type of consulting work, so I'm struggling with the pricing. The first strategy that comes to one's mind is to charge them an hourly rate for 60 hours work. But their savings are huge. At the same time, the people I'm talking with at this firm would know that the complexity of the work involved is not that great. I also have an interest on getting a fully satisfied customer to increase my chances of getting referred for future work. I'd love to gather some ideas on how to proceed here.
Struggling with pricing strategy
byu/DavidOrzc inEntrepreneur
Posted by DavidOrzc
7 Comments
Well how much of this work have you done? Even if the work is simple per se charge accordingly.
Do you have a rate you want to charge an hour that you can sell as a total cost? If doing this kind of work I typically charge $150 an hour as an internal rate with a minimum cost of 6k for any project.
So if this would take 60 hours like you say, then I would charge atleast $9k and then sell a training and management and optimization retainer for $500-$2k a month depending on how you position or bundle upselling other agent builds.
If uncomfortable with the above rates just know, something will go wrong, and they will need assistance. So charge knowing you’ll be helping beyond just the build itself. Especially as most companies are not even close to making good use of AI in its current state and the overall experience of their employees
From my perspective the best way to charge is to figure out how much money are they loosing per hour due to this problem then calculate total money lost per month due to that problem by then then charge 75% of that final lotlst money as your charges to solve that problem .
Never charge by the hour for this kind of work. You will always lose.
Price on results. They are saving between 400 and 1200 hours a month. That’s a huge return on investment, even at ₹500 per hour. Ask for a flat project fee of $3,000 to $5,000 plus a small monthly fee for maintenance.
The people you’re talking to already know that the complexity isn’t crazy, but they also know that the value is real. With a flat fee, you won’t have to have the “but it only took 60 hours” talk.
At flow-genix, we always base our prices on the problem being solved, not the time spent. It makes clients trust it more and takes away the need for hourly negotiation.
Don’t price this like 60 hours of labor. Price it as a fixed pilot tied to one workflow, then expand if it proves savings. Leadline fits this kind of work too because named pain inside firms is way easier to sell than generic AI consulting.
Don’t sell 60 hours sell the problem disappearing. Nobody at that accounting firm cares how fast you built it if it saves them from babysitting Copilot every week.
Tell your potential customers how much hours you would save them then ask what these hours are worth to them in real math.
Then ask for a small chunk of that, I would assume 10-30% of the perceived value of the customer, is a good min-max price assumption.
But like really real, you just gotta run tests and keep asking questions about it as time goes on. Prices are the number 1 variable for a business to make money, so it makes sense to have a system in place that continuously tests what the most profitable price point for your offer is, overall.
However, I have no expierence in your market. Idk if there is a special pricing strategy that would make sense.
Yeah this pricing thing trips up every new consultant I know. I used to go hourly and clients always nitpicked the hours instead of seeing the massive ROI. Anchor to their savings instead. 10% of first year value as a flat fee works great, gets you paid fairly and that referral you need. Learned it after undercharging my first two deals.