It takes practice to quote your consulting billing rate with confidence. The tactics in this article will help if you bill by the hour or by the day. There are other ways to bill for your talent and expertise but those will be covered in another article.

Benchmark so you know your rate is reasonable. There are lots of ways to do this. Talk with other consultants, do a web search on typical management consulting rates in your city or state, and/or try converting your employee salary to an hourly rate. Warning: this last calculation will be quite low since it doesn’t include profit, expenses, or the time it takes to run your business; try increasing this number by 40- 50%.

It also helps to have an idea of what consulting firms charge for consultants of similar background and expertise. Although rate information is a closely guarded secret, based on my 20 years in the industry here are very rough ballpark numbers for “management consulting” (not IT consulting, project management, training development, etc.).