rate for assisting over phone 2

[byrdj]

I would like some opinions, discussion, on how to determine a rate for providing guidance via telephone/email.

A little background. I am a Field Service Engineer for Power Generation equipment (turbine generator controls). A normal assignment would involve travel to site and several days while observing problem, then corrections, then verification. For the past 30 years, solving a problem over the phone was not a big concern since I was working for a company. Now I am working for myself, I can see the opportunity becoming more available, but see it as a grave loss of income.

A recent example would be to assist with the upgrade of a control system. Customer A requested me on site to be available during commission and thus about 80 hours billing in 7 days. During the period, several problems were identified and corrected. Customer B called yesterday during a similar commission and the problems that were solved were the same as those I corrected for customer A. Customer B’s billing was only 1 hour.

I recall once, my company billed a customer 24 hours for a similar phone call and the customer now has banned ME for their site.

BTW, my billing rate is only 50% of what my companies charged, thus I feel the onsite work is already heavily discounted.

Thanks for any comments

 

[brandoncdg]

Seems like if you could bill 80 hours on A and just 1 hour on B, you learned something very useful for your own business. I would say going free on something really useful that only takes 1 hour for you at this point, might reward you later on by good word of mouth. You also appear like you are willing to do a little more for your clients that maybe the bigger guys would just overcharge for. I think that goes a longer way than say a few hundred dollars you may be able to add on to the invoice.

CDG, Civil Engineering specializing in Hillside Grading in the Los Angeles area

http://www.CivilDevelopmentGroup.com

 

[byrdj]

Just to let everyone that post, I am still reading and greatly appriciate the discussion.