Bee Jackson, America says…

5.0 out of 5 stars             A Great Investment of Money and Time!
November 1, 2019
Format: Kindle Edition  Verified Purchase

I am the owner of an independent ESL company, and I absolutely LOVE everything about the book! The information is invaluable, and it reads as if you are having a conversation with a trusted friend about matters of money in your ESL business. I will DEFINITELY be reading her other works and sharing them with the teachers that I work with.

Janet Sandford, Poland says…

If you are thinking to make the jump from teaching to freelancing and financial independence, this is the book for you.

Written by an experienced teacher and businessperson, it identifies the common pitfalls, such as the three-year death cycle, why many teachers undercharge for their services, and what to do about it.

The book takes you through a sequence of easy-to-follow steps to set up your business on firm foundations and is packed full of useful templates for costing, pricing and managing your finances.

Becoming a freelancer is an important step in your personal and economic development but there’s no need to go it alone with The Teacher’s Guide to Pricing Matters by your side. It tells you everything you need to know and more.

Caroline Maxwell, Indexer at Elm Indexing, member of Society of Indexers first comment in an email:

I enjoyed reading your book. It was very easy to read, and I thought it explained the business issues relating to freelancing very clearly. Initially, I thought it was perhaps a bit too light-hearted, but I quickly got used to it and enjoyed the stories and fables. My reaction is partly due to the fact that I read so many, very serious tomes, so this was a bit different. I could see that you were trying to get readers to visualise the problems and so remember the lessons and I thought it worked very well.

I particularly liked the concept of a ‘resentment number’ as it encapsulates exactly how you feel when you spend hours travelling from one teaching centre to another when you are paid only for teaching hours with a 50% enhancement for preparation time.

Caroline Maxwell’s review of Pricing Matters:

Teachers see many opportunities for freelance work but is it really possible to make a living as a freelancer in the long-term? In this book, Janine Bray-Mueller has encapsulated some key lessons on pricing, learned during her career as a freelancer.

In a competitive market, pricing is problematic, particularly in uncertain economic times. Establishing a sustainable business relies on charging enough to pay not just for immediate living expenses, but also to update and extend your teaching skills, and cover costs such as holidays, sickness and pension provision.

Understanding why many teachers are trapped in a position of underearning is the first step to escape. Your price should never fall below your “resentment number”, the lowest price you will accept without resenting it. Many teachers can be their own worst enemy if they lack self-confidence or undervalue their skills. Familiarity with local market conditions and competitors’ prices is important, but the going rate is not necessarily an appropriate rate to charge.

Janine explains how to balance your business on three pillars: consultancy (one-to-one teaching), training (seminar workshops) and leverage (information products). This will enable you to build up a sustainable teaching business.

Various pricing strategies are described with advice on how to select those which are appropriate for different types of products, services and customers. Specialisation is a key strand in establishing a sustainable level of pricing. You may be under constant pressure to discount prices, but Janine makes clear the dangers in doing so. She also deals with when and how to increase prices to avoid a return to underearning.

Value-based pricing is an approach which Janine has applied very successfully to freelance teaching and this is explained fully with valuable practical advice on how it can give you a more flexible approach to pricing.

This book is full of careful explanations of key business concepts and practical advice on applying them in the context of freelance work. Step by step instructions are given on how to identify both your personal and business costs. With the aid of this book, you can calculate your available teaching time, so that you are able to establish your resentment number and price range. The checklists included will help you to clarify your strategy and position yourself in the market.

Janine presents effective ways to manage pricing in an entertaining way and makes them both meaningful and memorable for the freelance teacher. Her book contains all you need to know to overcome your demons, price your teaching services effectively and establish a financially sound career which is sustainable in the long-term.

Cara Leopold, Leo-Listening.com in France says...

When Janine says tells her readers in the introduction that “This book is not intended to be a simple guide on how to price your teaching service. It goes deeper than that.” She certainly delivers on her promise. She goes on to describe and examine the psychological hurdles teachers put their way which prevents them from earning a decent living from their teaching business and plunge them into what Janine describes as the “3-year death cycle of a teaching service”.

There is an excellent balance in the book between theory and practical exercises to help you not only price your offer correctly but become a fully-fledged business owner and not just a “hobby teacher.”

This is the part of the book which affected me the most and I’m still working on shifting my thinking, and thereby my service and prices to a business model. It will take time to work through all the exercises and to shift your mindset, but I think it is more than worth it if you want to truly help learners and make your business flourish.

Janine does not bang on about “quick returns,” “ROI,” “high earning potential” or any of the other platitudes and “gimmicks” you may see among successful teacher-consultant figures. As she outlines early on: “Freelance teaching is a full-time job and is not for the faint-hearted. It costs your time. It demands your full attention. It demands your heart.”

Instead, the book is full of lively anecdotes and analogies which get to the heart of the problems that freelance teachers face and force you to confront them. She is on a mission to help freelance teachers create and run successful businesses and that certainly comes through in the book.

I would recommend this book, not only to freelancers starting out but also to more experienced teachers who want to move into freelancing or need to take their freelancing business to a new level.

I quit ELT because of the poor pay and conditions and have come back as a freelance teacher to take more control over my working hours and conditions. That said, I had thought that competing on price in an over-saturated market was inevitable — now I know that I can take control of who I teach, what I earn and my visibility on the market.

Helen Strong, MELTA Germany says…

This book contains invaluable advice to freelancers on how to price their services in today’s competitive language teaching market. The book acts as a kind of self-esteem building introduction to the main part, encouraging us to think about why we tend to set our prices too low and how we value ourselves in the teaching market and in society as a whole. It gives us tools which help us to determine whether we are under-earning, to evaluate our teaching business and to consider how we can re-focus our business to ensure we can enter a higher price bracket.

Janine outlines various methods which you can use to calculate what price you should charge for which services you offer. She advises against setting a single teaching fee, as this depends on factors such as whether you work for yourself or a language institute, what is included in the service you are offering, the needs of the customer and many more determinants. Concepts such as value-based pricing and ‘resentment number’ (the lowest possible fee you can bear) are introduced, as well as issues such as drawing up a contract with your clients and whether to publish your prices to prospective customers beforehand.

Checklists and practical examples explain in very simple terms how to ensure you cover as many eventualities as possible in setting the right fees for your work, and most importantly, in getting paid! It also examines how you can use other factors to complement your pricing strategy, such as implementing a Yes-Yes approach to pricing that limits offering your clients to two attractive alternatives.

In this book and on her website, Janine comes across as being a genuine protagonist of the right of freelance teachers to earn a decent wage and enjoy a reasonable standard of living. With her methods of calculating what that figure should be for each individual teacher, she explains how freelancers can deal with customers and institutions who try to dictate unsustainable fees.

For a long time, the issue of how much teachers should charge for their services (or expect to be paid by teaching institutes) has been avoided in general discourse. Pay surveys, such as the one conducted in Germany last year (see MELTA News Issue 84, Autumn 2014) only give part of the picture, since there are so many other factors which come into play when deciding how much to charge for your services. This book goes some way to clarifying that and to making teachers reclaim their self-worth and get paid commensurately for the work they do.

Robert Brunner, member of IATEFL Business English SIG has this to say:

I am 50 something-year-old university instructor in Korea. Korea, for many years now, has had a very low birth-rate. This is now causing universities to shrink staff. So that has me wondering ‘what is next?’ This book would be a great thing to read for somebody in my position. It lays out a good solid approach and will get you thinking about how to be a better freelancer and stop living from private lesson to private lesson. I think the information is presented in a way that is easy to digest.