How do I price a project I've never done before?
Price it exactly the way you price work you've done many times, because the number never came from your familiarity with the work. It came from what the outcome is worth to your client, and that value exists whether or not you've solved this particular problem before.
What to do when the work is new to you:
- Run the same value conversation. What is the problem costing them, and what changes when it's fixed.
- Scope it wider than feels comfortable. New work carries unknowns, and the fee should carry them too.
- Break it into phases if the back half depends on what the front half finds.
- Sanity-check against your floor, so an unfamiliar project can't cost you money.
The instinct with unfamiliar work is to discount it, on the reasoning that you're learning on their time. Resist that. Your client is buying the outcome and the judgment you bring to it, and the twenty years that let you approach a new problem well are the reason they called you and not someone cheaper.
What stays the same across every project I price?
The method stays the same, and it's more of the engagement than consultants expect. Only two things change from project to project: the scope of the work and the value of the outcome.
| Changes every time | Stays the same every time |
|---|
| The scope of the work | The questions you ask to uncover value |
| The value of the outcome to that client | The order: value, then engagement, then price |
| The timeline | Your floor, and your willingness to hold it |
| The mix of activities | The way you present one fee for a defined result |
Once you see how much sits in the right-hand column, "every project is different" stops being an obstacle. Your projects differ the way two houses differ while both get built the same way. The method itself is the same one you would use on a repeatable engagement.
How do I stop rebuilding my pricing from scratch every time?
Build a small library, never a rate card, so each new project starts from something. Consultants who feel they reinvent pricing every time are usually reinventing the description of the work. The number isn't the hard part.
What belongs in the library
- Your standard questions for uncovering value, so discovery never depends on your memory.
- A written list of your Race Track Items: the high-value, low-lift things you already do and forget to name.
- Two or three engagement shapes you can adapt, so you never build a fresh structure each time.
- Your floor, reviewed once or twice a year.
What does not belong in it
A price list. The moment you write down what a diagnostic costs, you've created the rate card you were trying to avoid, and you'll start quoting that number before you know what the work is worth to the client in front of you.
What if my client wants a fixed number before the scope is clear?
Sell a short, paid first phase. Guessing at a number for work neither of you can describe yet helps nobody. A client asking for certainty you don't have is asking a fair question, and the honest answer is that the scope is the thing you need to establish first.
That first phase has its own defined outcome and its own fee, and it ends with a recommendation for the larger engagement. Two things happen: your client gets a real answer, and you get paid to produce it. It usually takes one of these shapes:
- An assessment, where you evaluate what is in place today and what is missing.
- A diagnostic, where you find the cause of a problem your client can only describe by its symptoms.
- A discovery sprint, where you and their team define the work together over a short, fixed window.
- A roadmap, where you deliver the sequenced plan and they decide who executes it.
If you would rather not phase it, widen the scope, say plainly what the fee covers, and name what would count as a change in scope. Then put that in the proposal in writing, before the work starts, never six weeks in.
Leah's take
The women I work with say "every project is different" as though it disqualifies them from having a system. I hear it as a description of consulting. Of course every project is different. That is the job. Nobody hires a consultant for the standardized thing.
What is underneath that sentence, usually, is a wish for someone to hand over a rate card so the deciding is done and there's nothing left to get wrong. I understand it. Deciding a number feels exposed in a way that reading one off a list doesn't.
But the rate card was never going to work, because it prices your side of the transaction and the value lives on theirs. Two clients can hire you for the identical engagement and the outcome is worth four times as much to one of them.
So the thing to standardize isn't the price. It is the process that produces it: the questions, the order, the floor, the way you present one number attached to one result. Do that and you can walk into any project, including one you've never done, and know how to arrive at a number you can say out loud without flinching.
