Price increase?

[Czerwien]

Im only person in my area (Desborough and Rothwell) doing russian manicure. Attached are some pictures. I work at home after my main work. I started in December and initial price was £10. In May i increased to £15 and now Im thinking to increase to £20. What do you think?

 

[AcidPerm]

Your nail art is beautiful. You should definitely charge a lot more because otherwise, a lot of clients won’t appreciate the quality of your work.

 

[TheDuchess]

I agree. This is highly skilled and talented work. You should be charging a skilled rate for your artistry.

Try setting a premium rate for bridal work - say charge the usual salon rate for extensions and then add £3-5 per nail for nail art depending on whether you are applying crystals etc. You could do a Bride mani with gorgeous extensions and full nail art, a Mother of the Bride/Groom mani with shorter extensions and only 2-3 nail art nails and a Bridesmaid mani with/without extensions depending on age.

If you've got a good bridal business building you'll find it easier to charge your regular clients £30 per hour.

You've got no competition and there's only one of you. Good luck.

 

[linzi]

Here's my 2 cents on pricing:

The NMW is currently £8.21 for an employed person with paid holiday.

Therefore, as self employed, I believe that you could be charging at least £8.89 per hour of your time to allow yourself to still be paid for 4 weeks holiday, based on a 40 hour work week. You should calculate what it is for you. I will base my entire post on a 40 hour working week and 48 weeks per year.

Then you need to add in every single pennythat it costs to run your business.

Your supplier should be able to help you with cost per service information.

For annual costs, such as website and insurance, divide the cost by weeks worked and then hours worked per week. So your insurance at £50 a year works out to 50 ÷ 48 ÷ 40 = 26p per hour of your time.

If you do this for every cost you incur, you will see what you need to be charging as a minimum.

It doesn't matter if you are a home salon - I am - but you need to be meeting your costs at an absolute minimum.

You then need to build in a portion of money to cover future training and continued development and growth.

You may worry that you will lose clients if you go from £10 to £20, and you may well lose some - who doesn't want great nails for basically nothing?! However, consider this example:

Tech A charges £10 per client and has running costs of £6 per client. She is super busy and has 20 clients!!

Tech B charges £20 and is not so busy - she only has 8 clients She also has running costs of £6 per client.

Tech A brings in £200 a week. She's pretty happy with that for a part time gig. £200 isn't a bad top up afterall, right? Except it's not - she only makes £80 once she takes off her costs.

Tech B looks at Tech A with all her clients and maybe feels a bit envious - she only brought in £160 this week. However, her costs are also much lower. After subtracting everything, she's left with £112 for doing considerably less work.

You may lose the clients who don't want to pay for your work, but you will make up the difference from those who are happy to pay for quality. And they will be loyal clients - price-motivated clients will be off as soon as they see Six Pound Sally down the road. Woop! Cheap nails! And a tech who can't even afford to buy herself lunch.

Finally, your nails are lovely and worth more than £20 (a lot more, depending on the product).

 

[TheDuchess]

Tech B looks at Tech A with all her clients and maybe feels a bit envious - she only brought in £160 this week. However, her costs are also much lower. After subtracting everything, she's left with £112 for doing considerably less work.

Love it! In business you must do the numbers.

My only comment is that as an employer I use 120% of an employed wage to calculate the equivalent self employed rate. Don't forget national insurance and pension contributions as well as holiday pay. A self employed person needs to make these contributions himself/herself. So this suggests that the self employed equivalent to NMW is £9.85.

The average working week is 37.5 hours and statutory holiday is 28 days a year (5.6 weeks).

Also minimum wage will increase next April and the new rate will be announced in October. I believe at present it's expected to be £8.66 unless the economy shrinks a bit more.

Also the National Lving Wage Foundation has calculated the amount that adults need to earn to have a reasonable standard of living as £9 per hour. I've been working on a plan to pay all my employees over 18 this much from October (it might go up of course). Paying staff properly is part of being a sustainable business and companies that care about the environment should include caring about staff living standards as part of this. 120% of £9 is £10.80 so I'd suggest that anyone doing self employed sums should plan on earning at least this amount in after costs for 37.5 hours a week 46.5 weeks a year. This is £405 a week or £81 a day btw.

I have to say though that working flexi hours, part-time can be very cost effective. Years ago I switched from full-time hours to part-time, worrying I'd go bust in less than 6 months and I found that the savings in travel and childcare plus other saving I could make through having more time and not paying any tax meant that I wasn't nearly as badly off as I feared. We stayed solvent (just) for 2 years.