How to price your sessions as a
Forest SChool Leader
Deciding how much to charge for your sessions or services is really tough. All too often we compare ourselves to others and begin a race to the bottom and then struggle to earn enough.
When I started out as brand-new Forest School Leader, I charged £20 an hour to run a two-hour session for a local charity. I would often get over 25 children turn up and once I had paid for resources, tools and petrol to get there (never mind all the preparation time), I was left essentially working for free.
When Covid hit and the sessions ended, I was honestly relieved. I had poured my time and energy into those sessions but was still left struggling to pay the bills. I decided that there is no point putting in all of the effort to promote, plan and run sessions if you then have to close the sessions down after a year to get a job that can pay the bills.
Since then, I have designed the pricing of my sessions to ensure that I can both meet my overheads and pay my bills. As part of that I have created a five-step framework to help other practitioners set rates that make their sessions sustainable.
5-step framework
1. Work out your minimum income – The first thing you need to do to set your rates is work out how much money you need to take home from a given day/week/month to pay the bills, put food on the table and keep a roof over your head. This is highly personal and a big reason why there is no ‘standard rate’ for outdoor session. A married mother/father of three with a mortgage will have a different number to a single person living with relatives. This means going through your budgets and determining what is the minimum you need to bring in to maintain your standard of living.
2. Work out your business overheads – Now’s the time to do this for your business finances, go through and work out what all of the business expenses are from fixed overheads such as insurance, to your average cost of resources and tools over the course of the year. Your goal should be to arrive at a single number for all of your expenses and divide that down into the average amount per month.
3. Calculate your monthly revenue target – Start off by adding your monthly minimum income to your monthly expenses to get your business base rate, then I would look at adding between 10-30% to cover sick pay/holiday pay/pension/business investment/taxes etc. You now have the target monthly revenue; the amount you are looking to take in to your business before expenses each month.
4. Work out your daily revenue target – The next thing you need to do is work out how many days you are able to deliver sessions in a normal month/week (I standardise to a 4 week month and often take any 5th days off to make things simpler). Depending on the admin, planning and development burdens you may have, you will probably be able to deliver between 3 and 5 sessions a week with the rest of the days set aside to plan sessions, deal with finances, develop marketing and answer emails. You can then divide your monthly revenue target by the number of delivery days to arrive at your daily revenue target, which is essentially your base rate as a leader.
5. Make adjustments – If you are working for an organisation then all you will need to do at this point is give them your base rate plus any additional extras (site hire, extra services etc.) as your daily rate, or multiply it by 0.6 to get your half day rate. If you are going direct to customer then you will need to work out how many participants you are willing to take on on a given day and divide your base rate by this number.
The complete video guide
Hopefully, at this point you now have a good idea of what your session rate needs to be, but don't worry if all of this seems pretty difficult I have created a complete spreadsheet to help you through the whole process.
FREE ALL-IN-ONE SESSION RATE CALCULATOR
Work out how much to charge to earn a living, all in one free spreadsheet.
If deciding how much to charge people is a constant headache and you often end up selling yourself short and barely covering overheads, then this tool is for you.
With this spreadsheet you can:
- Easily break down your overheads and expenses per session, month and year so you can work out how much is leaving your account.
- Calculate how much to charge per session or per day to meet your income goals.
- Quote a session rate quickly and easily for any Forest School or Bushcraft activity.
- Quickly work out fuel costs for conferences, workshops and events further afield.
- Take the guesswork out of how much to charge for your services.