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Many of the idea’s that you may have for this project, may initially rely on you charging either an hourly or set fee for providing a service. What you may be asking though is how do you calculate this fee. It is a good question which actually has many answers. I will try to give you a basic idea here, but it can vary quite a lot from idea to idea.
First you need to work out what you wish to pay yourself hourly. Often this can be either based on minimum wage, or on a rate that you decide for yourself. While everyone would like to make a really high amount per hour you also need to take into account the potential for actually selling the service. For example you may think that you would like to make $100 per hour, and want to mow lawns, well to be honest you are probably going to find yourself making nothing, because most people know they can hire someone to do the same job for less. Setting a rate between $10 and $30 is often a good starting point depending on the type of work.
Secondly you need to take into account any consumable items you may need. For example Lawn mowing you need petrol for the lawn mower, and for running errands in your car you have all the expenses of running your car. As an example you may find that it costs your lawn mower uses $1.20 in fuel per hour. Or it costs 50 cents per km to run your car. These are costs that you need to add on to your hourly rate.
Finally, if you have any other expenses associated with your business for example insurance, or licenses or any number of other things you need to make some educated guess to calculate this into the equation. For example you may have to pay $600 per year for insurance, to work this into your price you need to take an educated guess on the number of hours that you expect to work that year maybe 1200 hours. Which means every hour you need to charge 50 cents to cover your insurance.
So to sum this up with an example for a lawn care business. You want to make $15 per hour, it costs you $1.20 per hour to run the mower, and on average $4.00 to run your car between jobs, plus $0.50 for insurance per hour.If you average job is about 1.5 hours the following would be how to work out the price of the job.
($15.00 * 1.5) + ($1.20 * 1.5) + $4 + ($0.50 * 1.5) which comes down to
$22.50 + $1.80 + $4.00 + $0.75 = $29.05 for a 1.5 hour job.
As you can see the additional costs you incur in running a business if not passed on in the price that you charge the customer could easily eat away at your profit. In this case, if you just charge $15 per hour you would in fact be making closer to $11 per hour. It is just like giving money away unless you are smart with working it out properly.