IT Consulting Rates: Getting the Most from your IT Consulting Dollar

Consulting is a valued source of capital for businesses, large and small. Consulting contracts contain a set of promises between you and your client regarding the delivery of services and compensation. It’s important to approach pricing in the terms of this agreement with care — neither undervaluing nor overestimating the cost of services that you will provide. Market value research, past consulting experience and strategic incentives should all play a role in your formal estimation of fees. Setting the right rates will not only seal the deal with your customers but keep them coming back for more. Calculating consulting fees depends on the kind of pricing models and payment methods that you choose.

It’s even possible your IT team has their own way of doing things, and that may not fall in line with where your business needs to be. If you’re in the market for a paperless tool to use in your client service, check out our Consulting Partner Plan here. Most clients will naturally gravitate towards the middle package because it looks like a good deal . It’s also good practice to add some form of fanfare to the middle option. For example, many firms add a tag of some form to draw attention – like “most popular,” “best value,” etc.

But if you’re early in your career (0-5 years), using a consulting rate of $100 per hour to determine your daily rate or project fees should be good. The high-end service level is ideal for businesses requiring full hosted or cloud infrastructure. Your organization benefits from a full scope of related services. Some of the plans offered by IT companies cost $300 per user monthly. The exact price depends on the complexity of your infrastructure requirements.

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Now, it’s more complicated than the simple example above. And it certainly looks like a lot more money than the other pricing strategies, but it’s a lot harder and more complex. Unless you can PROVE the incremental value and your client agrees, value-based pricing is complicated to pull off. And you’re not charging based on the deliverables as in a project-based fee. If you want a more stable income and trusted expert consulting brand, fixed-price billing combined with value-based thinking works wonders.

To calculate your costs, add this to the amount you owe. Using a fair profit margin requires you to weigh costs, market demand, and perceived value. So, we will present you with a simple step-by-step process that you can use to calculate your consulting rate. A project-based consulting fee is determined by agreeing upon the project scope, analyzing the deliverables, determining the time to complete the project, and accounting for expenses. Clients are less bothered by incremental price increases or structure changes than you might think. The clients who would push back at your evolution are not your ideal clients anyway, right?

Average IT Consulting Rates by Industry

Determine your hourly rate based on your experience and industry standards. For smaller projects or exploratory phases, the Consultant can propose a negotiated daily rate. The total fee is then calculated based on the actual number of days spent on the project. Since Consultants are primarily selling their time, the time spent on a project is the main cost driver. Usually, the price is calculated as the product of the daily rate multiplied by the number of days spent on the project. We occasionally offer free in-depth consulting through graduate students working in the SCC for STAT 8001 course credit.

It’s a good choice once you’ve worked with a consulting company for some time and ready to continue month-to-month cooperation. It’s a great option if you want to get an experienced consultant for a reasonable price. They have 10 to 100 developers and consultants in-house serving SMBs, but also occasionally work with Fortune 500 companies.

Will you charge by the hour, per project, by performance, or will it be a combination? Make sure you make this decision based on the project you’ve been asked to work on, how your client works, and the structure that you think will get you fairly compensated. The competitive landscape and your physical location are the final components that will influence your consulting fees. While you don’t need to mirror your competition’s prices, it’s important to weigh in how much others are charging to remain competitive.

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Yet, this doesn’t mean they can substitute the listed in-house specialists completely. You may have acquaintances who have also become consultants and it is tempting to ask for their advice on the manner. This is not exactly the wrong move, but basing all of your decisions on that one factor alone can be a fatal mistake. There is a reason why it was not included in the section above. Performance – The quality of your work will be judged and you will be paid based on that.

Determining the value of your services is often tied up in your own self-worth, making this conversation even trickier for most people. For example, if you’ve worked as an employee for the last 30 years and never made more than $50 it consulting prices an hour, it might seem inconceivable that your services are worth $100 an hour. And the same amount of consultants (80%) are actively looking to increase their fees. 75.15% of consultants we polled are male, and 25.8% are female.

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Here’s how you set your consulting fees using the project-based method. The project-based method is a strong pricing method for beginner and intermediate consultants. But it removes a lot of the uncertainty around hourly billing.

• Your market value can be converted to an hourly wage that you would earn if you were a salaried employee.
• The consultant will also need to build in a percentage of the time allotted for contingencies.
• Now, it’s time to learn how to communicate your prices with clarity and confidence.
• If your rates vary from industry benchmarks, be prepared to back it up.

Charging for your consulting services at an hourly rate is especially useful if the work involves many meetings and in-person consultations. For consultants with previous experience working in salaried positions, the 2x or 3x hourly method can be especially practical. Upwork is a leading market for freelancers, according to its data.

But how do you get the most out of your IT services dollar? Unfortunately, the web is always full of self-proclaimed “IT gurus” that offer https://globalcloudteam.com/ sub-par tech expertise at a high cost. The same refers to crooked IT consulting agencies that don’t even have their own teams .

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Everyone is great in their specialty, so businesses shouldn’t cut costs on staff. Don’t get distracted by adding new clients or branding your business—just do your best possible work. Rinse and repeat, slowly raising your prices with each new client.

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At the low end, it will cost 98 dollars, and at the high end, it will cost 68 dollars. According to salary data, this is the median hourly rate for IT consultants. The average price of their services is $54, with the lowest end of their spectrum being $40, and the highest end being $68. It costs around $200 per hour to hire a tax consultant.

Depending on the situation, you might need to suggest a complete overhaul of the IT department if that is what is necessary. If they were to hire you or someone else to provide the service you are about to provide, they’d be paying for all of those things out of their own pocket . Paying you more to not be an employee actually saves them money in the long run.

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Remember, there’s no perfect one-size-fits-all way to calculate a consulting rate. The experienced/MBA consultant makes $215,000 annually, working 40 hours. However, if they wanted to make the same compensation, only working 20 hours, that’s $206 per hour. Long-term projects provide consistent cash flow and reduce revenue variance. So, to win the project, you could consider slightly reducing your rate when calculating the project fee.

Here are three action items for you if you’re serious about raising your rates and increasing your revenue. We always ask our list of consultants to tell us about other aspects of their business. Consulting is known to be a high profit-margin business — and the data supports that. 9.51% do not offer productized consulting and aren’t interested in doing so. It’s one of the best ways consultants get leverage and increase their earnings without spending more time working. Value-based pricing is a hot topic in the consulting world — and for good reason.