CEO Mindset Monday
Pricing for time freedom isn’t just about raising your rates—it’s about building a business that respects your hours as much as it respects your talent. Most new entrepreneurs, especially those balancing a day job, fall into the trap of pricing for survival instead of sustainability. They focus on making the sale, but don’t stop to ask what those sales actually cost in time, energy, and opportunity.
I know, because my first “win” looked promising on paper: an $1,000 contract to train two employees at a local company on Excel basics… that included workbooks. For a brand-new entrepreneur, that felt like a solid start. But when the classes ended, so did the income. With no repeatable pricing model or pipeline, I found myself scrambling for the next opportunity—chasing survival, not building freedom.
That’s the hard lesson many of us learn early: pricing isn’t just about money. If your numbers don’t line up with the life you want, your business will pull you into the same hamster wheel you were trying to escape. This post is about shifting that pattern—learning how to set prices that create balance, not burnout, and building with freedom in mind from the very beginning.
The Trap of Trading Time for Dollars
One of the biggest mindset shifts when you step into entrepreneurship is realizing you can’t keep thinking like an employee. Employees trade hours for paychecks—it’s a fixed equation. The more hours you work, the more you earn (or at least the more you’re expected to). Many new business owners unknowingly bring that same equation into their pricing: set an hourly rate, undercut the competition, and hope enough clients say yes.
But here’s the truth: that equation doesn’t scale when it’s your own business. Every low-priced client takes up the same hours as a higher-paying one, and those hours are the most limited resource you have. If you’re building your business while holding down a full-time job, the math gets even tighter. Suddenly, you’re burning your evenings and weekends for rates that barely move the needle.
I learned this quickly. After that first $1,000 Excel training contract, I didn’t have a steady model to replicate. The work dried up, and I jumped at whatever I could find—projects that didn’t align with my vision, contracts that drained me, even a certification client who never paid me for the work I completed. It felt like progress in the moment—“a sale is a sale”—but looking back, I was just running in place. My hours were spent, but the freedom I was chasing was nowhere in sight.
And that’s the trap: thinking every sale is good for business. In reality, every sale comes at a cost. Ask your self a couple of questions.
Does your pricing reflect the freedom you want to build?
Or are you just swapping one grind for another?
What Pricing for Time Freedom Really Means
Pricing for time freedom isn’t about charging the highest (or lowest) rates possible—it’s about designing your business so your income and your lifestyle line up. Instead of asking, “What do people usually charge?” the better question is, “How do I want to spend my days, and what will it take for my business to make that possible?”
For me, the benchmark was a 10-hour workweek. I knew I didn’t want to pile another full- or part-time job on top of my life. And once I left my day job, I didn’t want to replace one rat race with another. My goal was simple: keep a 10-hour schedule and spend the rest of my time traveling, relaxing, and actually enjoying life while I’m still healthy enough to do it.
That’s the essence of pricing for time freedom. If your schedule goal is 10 hours a week, your pricing needs to sustain that. If your dream is Fridays off, or afternoons with your kids, your offers and rates should reflect it. The point isn’t to work nonstop just because you can—it’s to build a business that bends around your life.
When you approach pricing this way, it stops being just a numbers game. It becomes a design tool—a way to create balance, attract the right clients, and make sure your business fuels the freedom you set out to find.
How to Calculate Pricing for Time Freedom
The idea of pricing for time freedom becomes real when you put numbers to it. It’s not about pulling a rate out of thin air—it’s about reverse-engineering your business model so your income supports both your lifestyle and your schedule.
Start with two key questions:
How many hours do I realistically want to work each week?
How much income do I need to cover my life and business goals?
Let’s run through some examples.
Trading Time for Dollars (Service Model)
If you’re offering services, start by reverse-engineering your numbers.
Ask yourself:
How many hours do I want to work each week?
How much income do I need each month?
Let’s use a 10-hour workweek as the baseline. That’s 40 hours per month. If your income goal is $4,000/month, dividing that by 40 hours gives you $100/hour. But because you can’t bill 100% of your hours—some go to admin and marketing—you’ll likely only have half of that time billable. That means your effective rate should be closer to $200/hour.
That doesn’t mean you literally charge by the hour. Package it instead:
5 projects at $800 each
2 monthly retainers at $2,000 each
or similar combinations that protect your 10-hour schedule
The point is that your pricing reflects both your time boundary and your income requirement.
Scaling Beyond Hours (Products & Systems Model)
The service model can get you started, but it has a ceiling. If your freedom goal is to work less while earning more, you’ll eventually want a scalable path—products, courses, apps, or systems that don’t depend on your direct hours.
Here, the equation flips: instead of “How many hours can I work?” the question becomes “How many units do I need to sell each month to hit my freedom number?”
Example:
You build a digital course priced at $297. To hit $4,000/month, you need to sell about 14 courses.
Or, you design a small app or automation tool priced at $47/month. To hit $4,000, you’d need 85 subscribers.
Or, you create a signature system priced at $997. You only need 4 buyers each month.
This model creates leverage: your income isn’t capped by hours, so your freedom expands with every system you build.
The Mindset Shift: Value Over Volume
Whether you’re trading hours for services or scaling with products, the same truth applies: you don’t need more clients, you need the right clients at the right price. That’s the shift from volume to value.
In the beginning, it’s tempting to say yes to everything. Every client feels like momentum. Every sale feels like proof you’re “making it.” But the reality is that filling your schedule with low-paying work leaves no room for growth. A full calendar isn’t success if it robs you of balance.
The most successful entrepreneurs flip that script. They price high enough to protect their time, package their offers so each sale has weight, and focus on delivering deep value instead of chasing numbers. That’s why selling 5 clients at $800 each is far better than scrambling to manage 20 clients at $200. The workload is lighter, the impact is higher, and your freedom hours stay intact.
It’s the same lens I use in my day job: is the effort worth the lift? That question applies just as much to pricing as it does to process design. If the energy you’re putting into a client or offer outweighs the return—in money, alignment, or freedom—it’s a signal your pricing (or your model) needs to shift.
And the same goes for scalable offers. You don’t need thousands of customers for your course or system to work. You might only need a few dozen committed buyers each month to replace a full-time salary. By focusing on value—building something that genuinely solves a problem—you make each sale count more, without having to live in constant hustle mode.
Pricing for time freedom is about protecting your most limited resource: your energy. Once you internalize that, the way you price, package, and even market your business changes.
Guardrails for Balanced Growth
Pricing for time freedom doesn’t work if you can’t protect the boundaries you’ve set. It’s one thing to charge more per project or design scalable offers—it’s another to make sure those decisions stick when opportunities (and distractions) come knocking. That’s where guardrails come in.
Guardrails look like:
Systems that repeat themselves. Automations that handle scheduling, invoicing, or onboarding so you don’t burn hours on admin.
Packages with clear scope. Well-defined offers that prevent scope creep and keep your workload predictable.
Freedom hours blocked first. Treating your non-work time as non-negotiable—just like client deadlines.
Without these structures, even the best pricing can collapse under pressure. With them, you create a framework where both your business and your time are protected.
Research backs this up: companies that prioritize strategy and structure in their pricing are more likely to grow sustainably. Harvard Business Review notes that pricing strategy is one of the most powerful levers for profitability—not just for big corporations, but for solo entrepreneurs who need to balance profit with lifestyle.
If you want help building these guardrails into your own business, Work Less, Build Smart walks you through how to design scalable systems, automate repeatable tasks, and set up a business model that supports your freedom goals from day one.
What Balance Really Feels Like
Picture this: your week is no longer a scramble of back-to-back tasks. You log into your business for a focused two hours, deliver work you’re proud of, and then close the laptop without guilt. The rest of your time is yours—whether that means hopping on a plane, lingering over lunch with family, or simply resting without that nagging feeling you should be “doing more.”
That’s balance. Not perfect, not static—just a rhythm where your business funds your life instead of draining it.
For me, that rhythm showed up in small but meaningful ways. On my recent trip through Southeast Asia, I’d spend an hour or two each morning on my business before heading out to explore. When I dropped my son off at college last weekend, the days were packed, so I carved out a couple of evening hours once things quieted down. The business flexed around my life, not the other way around—and that’s what freedom really feels like.
Your version may look different. Like those weekends with family. Maybe it’s reserving afternoons for your kids. Whatever the shape, the principle stays the same: when your pricing protects your time, you create a life you don’t need to escape from. That’s not theory. That’s the outcome of pricing for time freedom.
The Secret to Balance Is in Your Pricing
At the end of the day, pricing for time freedom is more than a math exercise—it’s a mindset shift. It’s choosing to design your business around the life you want, instead of forcing your life to fit around your business. When your prices reflect your goals, your boundaries, and your vision for freedom, balance becomes possible.
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