If you can’t pay yourself what you’d pay someone else to do your job, your pricing is too low. That’s the whole idea. Everything else in this post is just the maths behind it.
This isn’t a handmade problem, or a service problem, or a product problem. Coaches, tradies, consultants, bakers, cleaners, designers, retailers — if your price is built around your own underpaid hours, you’ve built a ceiling into the business before you’ve hired anyone.
What paying yourself properly actually means
Most pricing conversations start with “what should I charge.” The better question is “what am I actually paying myself to make this” — because if you skip that step, you’ll never know if your price works.
Here’s the test: price your product or service as if you were paying someone else, at a real rate, to do exactly what you do. If the number that comes out the other end doesn’t cover that wage, your price isn’t a price. It’s a hobby with an invoice.
A worked example — what $10/hour is really costing you
Meet Barb. She makes handmade bras and pays herself $10 an hour to do it. Each bra takes five hours.
$10/hr × 5 hrs = $50 labour, + $5 materials = $55 cost price.
Barb doubles that cost price, then doubles it again — the classic retail formula. $55 becomes $110, which covers making the thing: studio, tools, overhead. $110 becomes $220, which covers selling the thing: website, transaction fees, ads, marketing time.
Before anyone panics about the retail price — it checks out. Custom-made bras genuinely run anywhere from $60 to $350+ depending on materials and complexity, and dedicated custom-fit specialists charge $250 to $350 per bra. Barb’s $220 sits comfortably mid-to-upper range. The retail price was never the problem.
Your production ceiling (and why it caps your income)
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Barb works a 40-hour week. At five hours per bra, that’s a hard ceiling of eight bras. Not eight bras if she hustles harder. Eight bras, full stop — that’s what the hours allow.
Run the full week: revenue of $1,760 (8 × $220), minus materials, marketing, and overheads, leaves $1,245. And that $1,245 isn’t earned in 40 hours — it’s earned across the 40 hours she spends making bras plus the time she spends marketing them. Once you add a realistic marketing load on top of production, her actual hourly return sits under $25 an hour.
For context: the Australian minimum wage rises to $26.44 an hour from July 2026. Barb’s ceiling, running her own business, sits below what she’d earn on minimum wage stacking shelves.
The true cost of an employee (and why hiring breaks the pricing)
This is the part most people never run the numbers on. Barb’s whole pricing model assumes she is the one making the bras, at $10 an hour. What happens the day she needs help?
She hires someone at $30 an hour — a realistic, fair rate for skilled hand-sewing work. Same five hours. Same $220 retail price, because nothing about the price has changed.
| Barb makes it ($10/hr) | Barb hires it ($30/hr) | |
|---|---|---|
| Labour (5 hrs) | $50 | $150 |
| Cost price | $55 | $155 |
| Retail price | $220 | $220 |
| Marketing + overheads | –$59.40 | –$59.40 |
| Profit per bra | $105.60 | $5.60 |
Same product. Same price. The moment she pays someone a fair, real wage to do her job, the profit is almost entirely gone. Not because the hire was a bad decision — because the price was never built to survive it.
This is the true cost of hiring: it isn’t just the hourly rate you agree to pay someone. It’s whether your existing price can absorb that rate at all. If you want to actually estimate the cost of bringing someone on — including materials, overheads, and margin — this exercise works for any product or service business, not just handmade ones.
What super and on-costs actually add to your own wage
If Barb wants to pay herself properly — not just a wage, but a wage with the same protections she’d give an employee — there’s more to add. Superannuation currently sits at 12% on top of ordinary earnings. Workers compensation insurance typically adds another 1.3% to 1.8%, depending on state and industry. Once you factor in leave entitlements, the honest multiplier used across payroll calculators is roughly 1.3x to 1.45x the base wage — meaning a “$10 an hour” wage really costs closer to $12.90 once it’s properly on-costed.
For sole traders, superannuation isn’t compulsory the way it is for employees — which is exactly the trap. It’s easy to skip paying yourself super because no one’s forcing you to. But skipping it doesn’t make the cost disappear. It just means future-you is quietly absorbing a bill that current-you never priced in.
So what should you actually charge?
Not “whatever feels fair.” Not “whatever the market seems to be doing.” Price built from the real cost of your labour — properly on-costed, not just what you feel comfortable asking for — plus materials, marketing, and overheads, plus enough margin to survive the day you hire help.
If the number that comes out the other end doesn’t let you pay someone else a fair wage to do your job, the fix isn’t working harder. It’s the price.
If you want help running these numbers against your actual business — real hours, real costs, real margin — that’s exactly what Your Pricing inside the Build with Matriarch classroom is built for. It’s US$21/month with a 7-day free trial.