How much should I charge for my drone services?

This is one of the first questions that we get from most of our professional drone training students attending our GVC course. Price positioning is critical to ensuring that your services can continue and making sure that you get paid at the end of the month. It also has a significant effect on how your potential clients view your position in the market and if they buy (or not) your services.

So, what should your price be? What should it reflect? Let us consider the following.

1.Being too cheap will result in your business losing money from day one. You will have to trade on numbers rather than quality, and customers may view your services with an air of suspicion because they are priced so low.

2.Being too expensive without justification for being so will be an instant turn-off to clients. You will get unreasonable expectations as to what your business is able to offer and may struggle to secure clients who do not see the value in your service.

3.How much do you need to make? Have you considered what you need to make, considering all your costs and factoring in enough profit to make every job worthwhile? Whilst doing this you should also consider your startup costs.

4.Have you got a sales and marketing strategy? Does your marketing messaging communicate the perceived value of your business? Perceived value is what your clients perceive is in favor of them when they decide to use your business. For example, when you are faced with choosing either a tin of Heinz beans or Tesco value beans, you will always choose Heinz because you know they are going to taste better. This is because Heinz has established the perceived value of its product. And you perceive they are better for you. And guess what, they are 3 times the price!

So what do I need to do?

Sit down and work out how much you need to make (do not forget to add all of your costs and wages) and then look at what your local market rate is (you’ll probably find it way too cheap). Once you have this information work out what your ‘cost’ price is, then add on a healthy percentage to secure a reasonable profit. Personally, I would recommend positioning your price at least 20-40% above the local market rate or cost price, whichever is higher. Once this is done you then need to figure out how you will communicate the perceived value of your products to your chosen audience.

Then finally, you can execute your marketing strategy, push your sales campaign forward and all three working together should secure some healthy sales!