The scary questions when it comes to running your own business. When your self employed, there’s nobody above you to set the prices and make sure you’re being paid properly – that responsibility lies solely on your shoulders. It’s scary and can be daunting, but what’s scarier is finding out that you’ve essentially been paying your clients to receive services from you.

What to consider when determining prices:
Market research is important but it is not how you should set your prices. Because Jane down the street is charging $80, you should too? I don’t think so. It’s important you know the prices around you but these shouldn’t be the main factor when your pricing your services.

When deciding the prices of your services, there are three main areas to consider:
• The investments you have made so far (the cost of the courses, your time and energy it took to complete them)
• The daily costs of running the lashing business (the materials you use, and what you need for running the studio)
• The value you are offering: are you delivering high quality, safely applied lash extensions using high quality lash products? If yes, your pricing needs to reflect that.

It’s important to understand your local market and know the approximate pricing for Lash Extensions around you. If you price yourself too high you’ll appeal to a smaller customer base and may struggle to get off the ground. If you price yourself too low, clients will be suspicious as to why they are so cheap. When your starting out, you want to offer an Introductory Price so that clients are expecting the price to increase once you’ve gained more experience. Don’t sell yourself short in the beginning.

Breaking-Even: what is it?
To break-even is the point where your income covers all of your expenses however you won’t have made any profit yet. It’s important to know your Break-Even Point so you know exactly how much money you need to be making in your business to pay your bills.

How to work out break-even
To work out your break-even you need to take into consideration absolutely all of your expenses there are two main types of expenses:
Initial Start Expenses
On-Going Expenses

It’s important that you recover all of the money you invest into your lash career, so take the time to work through each and every element that you’ve invested.

Initial Starting Expenses:
When you first begin your career you’re likely to encounter the biggest expenses. There’s the physical expenses of purchasing things such as your training courses, lash bed & furniture, lighting, stocking all of your tools & supplies. Remember to also include all of the “business” related expenses such as: Graphic Design work – logos, gift vouchers, business cards, business registrations, licensing, website building ect.

Work out the timeframe in which you’d like to have all of your initial starting expenses recovered, typically you’d want to recover these expenses within the first 12 months of operating your business. Now you add up all of the expenses you’ve incurred and divide them down into a time frame that makes sense to you.

For example:
Let’s say you invest $12,000 on starting up your lash business. Over 12 months to recover this cost you need to make:
$1000 Per Month (based on 12 months)
$230.77 Per Week (based on 52 weeks in a year)
$46.15 Per Day (based on 5 day work week)
$5.77 Per Hour (based on 8 hour work day)

You can break it down to however is suitable for you to set your targets but this allows you to see the minimum you’ll need to recover your start up expenses.

On-Going Expenses:
These are the expenses that your always going to be encountering and working with, this is where you’ll find the most information to tell you what prices you should be setting for your lash extensions.

There are 3 Primary Groups of Expenses for your everyday running costs:

1) General Expenses
These are things such as: rent (even if you’re a home salon, you need to calculate a portion of your rent that’s for your lash room) water, electricity, gas, insurance, wifi, retail products, phone, supplies, cleaning products.

2) Service Fees
These include: Booking system subscriptions, accountants / accounting software, spotify subscriptions.

3) Marketing
Facebook Ads, business cards, pricelists, gift vouchers, photo editing app subscriptions, website hosting, google ads.

Finally, you cannot forget to set aside a minimum of 10% for Tax purposes & the standard for wages is 10.5% of your pay for Superannuation, so ensure you are setting money aside for your future. These are two areas that are often overlooked however are essential to being self employed.

I recommend creating a spreadsheet to tally up all of your expenses and keep track of the money you’ve invested. You can subscribe to accounting programs such as Xero to handle it for you, however as a beginner a simple Excel Spreadsheet is more than sufficient.

Once you’ve calculated all of your On-going Expenses, use the same method of adding everything together, once you have your total you can divide it into monthly, weekly, daily or hourly so you can see your break-even amount for each time frame.

Lash Product Pricing
At Lash Baby, we’ve taken the guess work out for you and broken down the costs using our Lash Baby Products to perform a Full Set of Lashes. Keep in mind different companies will have different costs for their products, things such as Premade / Promade lash fans will incur a much higher cost per client so you need to calculate the expenses relevant to your business.

You now know all your expenses and how much you NEED to make to cover your costs, but how much do you actually want to make on top of that?

If your break-even point is $40 per hour. If you are charging $50 - $60 for an 60 minute infill you’re only making $10-$20 per hour. You need to ensure you are paying yourself at least minimum wage. Minimum wage for a level 1 Casual Lash Artist is $29.23 for Full Time / Part Time it is $23.28.

Let’s get real, you didn’t become a lash artist to break even or make minimum wage. It’s essential that you know how much money you’re really making to ensure this career is viable for you long term. We all want a little more money, so make sure that you are accounting for all of your expenses when you set your pricing. You want to make money not lose it!

At Lash Baby we’re here to help, if you have any questions or would like to discuss anything further please feel free to reach out via any of our socials or send me an email at: lashbabyau@outlook.com