Building a church youth sound system

by Randy Holley
(Tampa, Fl )

Question I am building a live sound reinforcement system for a church's youth program.

I know about equipment and signal flow. My issue is that I've never done this for money and I have no clue as to what to charge. I'm doing all the purchasing and set up of the system which is all pretty much fun for me.

Also, if it's in the budget I'm gonna build some sound absorption panels and buy some rugs for the painted concrete floors. I don't wanna shoot myself in the foot and I also want what's fair for both parties.

I'm charging by the Job not Hourly. What is fair?

Answer Well, it depends on a lot of factor how you are going to charge for a specific job. It's always good to measure out from the monthly, or yearly average wage.

According to this site the average wage for sound engineers in Florida is around $35.000 a year.

$35.000 a year is about $18 dollars an hour on average.

35000/12 = 2.916 a month divided by a typical 40(160 in a month) hour work week = $18

Now this might be a typical salary for an educated professional that's done this for a while, so you have to keep that in account as well. If you are inexperienced and uneducated this figure should be lower.

When charging for a job it's always good to think about how many hours it is actually going to take you, although you might not be charging by the hour. When I'm given a sound engineering job I estimate the number of hours that go into it and give a ballpark figure around the hours I'm thinking I will be working.

Take into account all the billable hours you will be working. Doing all the purchasing, doing research on what to buy and all the preliminary work counts as billable hours as well, so don't sell yourself too short there either.

That said, do you have special ties to the organization? Do they expect you to do it cheaply because you know them? Then you might think about charging a little less than what you were originally thinking.

So saying you think this will take you a solid work week to do and at the typical $18 a hour(depending on experience this should be less) that comes up to $720. So depending on your experience, connections and point of view this could be a nice and fair figure, or it could be all wrong and you shouldn't do it for more than $500.

A last note, will this organization give you any more work? If you think they will then I would recommend charging them less to begin with so they keep coming back to you with projects.

Hope this helped. I know I didn't answer the question directly, but I am too unfamiliar with how things in Tampa work to be able to give you a concrete answer. Rather I hope I was able to spark an idea of how you can charge what you think is fair.

If you have more questions, you can add them in the comments.

Thanks!