Five lessons, just over an hour. Everything so far has been about doing the work well. This module is about surviving doing it — pricing that actually covers what your hour costs, an agreement that protects you before anything goes wrong, getting paid across a border without losing weeks or a chunk of it to fees, and tracking your own time without it eating your evenings.
Three ways to charge for the same work produce three very different months. Hourly billing, a monthly retainer, and a fixed package each shift the risk of "this took longer than expected" onto a different person, and each rewards a different kind of behaviour. Picking the wrong one for a given client isn't just a pricing preference — it can quietly make the work unprofitable no matter how good you are at it.
Every pricing model is a different answer to one question: who absorbs the cost when a task takes longer than either of you expected?
Month 1 — hourly. Nobody yet knew how much ongoing work the practice actually needed. Hourly billing let both sides find out without either one guessing wrong and losing money on the guess.
Month 3 — package. The file restructuring from module 4 was a one-off, boundable project — quoted as a fixed package once the scope was clear from the hourly month's data.
Month 4 onward — retainer. With a steady weekly pattern established — inbox, calendar, files, meetings — a retainer at a fixed monthly rate, capped at 25 hours, gave Adaeze budget certainty and rewarded getting faster at the recurring work.
Notice the order: hourly first, while nobody has enough information to price anything else safely. Retainers and packages both depend on being able to estimate effort reasonably well — pricing a large piece of work into a fixed retainer or package before you actually know what it takes is how skilled people end up quietly working for far less than their real rate.
Track your actual hours against any retainer or package for the first two or three cycles. If you're consistently well under the hours the price assumed, you've priced generously and can renegotiate upward with real data behind you. If you're consistently over, the price was too low for the real scope — raise it, narrow the scope, or move that piece of work back to hourly until it's better understood. The number that matters is your real effective hourly rate once a retainer or package is divided by actual hours worked — not the number that felt right when you quoted it.
If you don't have real hourly data for a piece of work yet, price it hourly until you do, even if a client would prefer a fixed number sooner. A confident-sounding guess that turns out too low is much harder to walk back later than a short honest period of "let's track this properly first."
Think of a piece of work you do, or would do, for a client. Decide which of the three models fits it right now, honestly — not which one sounds most professional, but which one matches how well you can currently predict the effort involved.
A rate that looks reasonable on paper can still lose money once every real cost of doing the work is counted, not just the obvious ones. Most new assistants price from a number that felt fair, or that a course or forum suggested, without ever adding up what an hour of their own work genuinely costs them to deliver. This lesson is that addition.
Your rate isn't what you'd like to earn. It's what covers every real cost of showing up, plus what you'd actually like to earn on top of that.
The step most people skip is the realistic billable-hours line. Counting a full working week as billable hours dramatically understates your real minimum rate, because a large share of any working week — even a well-run one — goes to things no single client pays for directly.
Costs change — data prices shift, power costs rise, your own circumstances change. A rate calculated honestly a year ago may already be too low for today's real costs. Treat this calculation as a recurring check, not a one-time exercise done before your first client and then forgotten.
Pricing below what your real costs require doesn't make you more competitive in any way that lasts — it makes the work unsustainable, which eventually means worse service, burnout, or quietly resenting clients for a rate you set yourself. Clients are generally better served by an assistant charging a sustainable rate than one who's quietly underwater.
Rough out your own five costs from this lesson, even approximately. Divide your target monthly take-home, plus those costs, by a realistic number of billable hours — not 40. Compare it honestly to whatever rate you'd have quoted before doing this exercise.
Adaeze and a new assistant agree verbally on scope, rate, and start date over a phone call, both genuinely intending to honour it. Three weeks in, a disagreement surfaces about whether weekend availability was included. Nobody's lying — memories of a verbal conversation just genuinely diverge over time, and there's nothing written to settle it. A one-page agreement exists to prevent this exact, entirely common situation, not to prepare for a worst-case dispute.
A written agreement isn't about distrust. It's about making sure two honest people remember the same thing three months later.
Not a legal contract requiring a lawyer to draft — a clear, plain-language page covering the handful of things most likely to cause a misunderstanding later:
For any new client relationship, or any package-priced piece of work from lesson 9.1, request a deposit before starting — commonly a third to half of the total, though the exact figure is a judgement call based on the relationship and the size of the work. A deposit does two things at once: it protects you from doing unpaid work if the relationship falls through early, and it's a genuine filter — a client unwilling to pay any deposit at all is worth a second look before committing real time to the relationship.
Scope: Inbox triage, calendar management, and file organisation, up to 15 hours per week.
Rate: [rate] per hour, invoiced monthly, payable within 7 days of invoice.
Outside scope: Additional projects (e.g. research tasks, document creation beyond routine templates) quoted separately before starting.
Confidentiality: All client and practice information remains strictly confidential, during this engagement and after it ends.
Ending the arrangement: Either side may end with 2 weeks' written notice. A handover document will be provided covering all active items.
Deposit: [amount], due before work begins, credited against the first invoice.
The goal is clarity both sides can actually read and remember, not a document dense with legal language that signals distrust before the relationship has even started. Plain sentences, specific numbers, one page. If a client's situation genuinely requires more formal legal protection — significant sums, complex intellectual property, anything unusual — that's worth a real lawyer's input, but the great majority of assistant-client relationships are well served by a clear, honest page like this one.
The agreement should exist before any real disagreement, not get drafted defensively once one has already happened. Sending it as a normal, expected part of starting any new engagement — rather than only when something feels risky — keeps it from ever reading as an accusation.
Draft your own one-page agreement's five sections, even in rough form, for a real or hypothetical client relationship. Notice which section was hardest to write specifically — that's usually the one your actual practice is least clear about yet.
Adaeze's London and New York consulting clients pay in pounds and dollars. Getting that money into a usable Naira balance involves a currency conversion, a transfer rail, and — the first time it happened, before the route was understood properly — a wait of close to two months for one particular payment to actually clear and settle, caused by a slow correspondent-banking chain on the client's international wire and a new-account verification hold on the receiving end. Nothing was wrong, exactly. Nobody had mapped the route in advance, so nobody knew to expect it.
The fee you're quoted is rarely the whole cost. The exchange rate spread and the wait both cost real money — one visibly, one by tying up cash you needed sooner.
A slow international transfer isn't usually one single delay — it's often several, stacked: the sending bank routes the payment through one or more correspondent banks rather than directly, each one adding processing time and sometimes a further currency conversion; compliance checks run automatically on transfers above certain thresholds or from new relationships, adding days without any visible explanation; and a receiving platform or bank may hold funds from a new or unverified sender account until its own checks clear. None of these individually take two months — stacked together, on a first payment from a new client through an unfamiliar route, they realistically can.
Verified the receiving account fully — identity documents, business details — before the next payment was due, rather than mid-transfer, since new-account holds were a real part of what delayed the first one.
Asked the London client to send via a dedicated transfer service built for exactly this route, rather than their bank's standard international wire — generally fewer correspondent-bank hops for a well-established transfer corridor.
Compared the platform's quoted exchange rate against the real market rate before accepting it, rather than assuming it was close.
Built a cash buffer sized around the longest wait experienced so far, so a slow payment doesn't create an immediate cash crunch even if it happens again.
Before the relationship's first invoice, actually test the intended payment route with a small amount if possible, note how long it genuinely took and what it genuinely cost after both the fee and the spread, and only then treat that route as reliable for a client's real payments. What a platform advertises and what a specific route actually delivers, on a first attempt with a new account, are not always the same thing.
A payment route is not properly understood until it's been tested with a real, if small, transaction — not just read about or assumed reliable from a platform's marketing page. The drill at the end of this module asks for exactly that proof, for good reason.
If you have or plan to have international clients, research two real payment routes available to you. Note the explicit fee, and actually check the exchange rate offered against a real market rate for the same day. The gap is often larger than expected.
Friday evening, invoice day: forty minutes spent trying to reconstruct which tasks happened when, across three clients, from memory and a scattering of half-remembered messages. This happens to almost everyone who starts billing hourly without a system, and it is entirely avoidable with a habit that costs seconds, not minutes, if it happens at the actual moment work happens rather than after the fact.
Time tracking done in the moment costs seconds. Time tracking reconstructed from memory costs an evening and is usually wrong anyway.
The single habit that makes this easy: log the task and the time the moment you move from one thing to the next, not in a batch at day's end. A simple running note — task, start time, end time — takes five seconds to update when switching tasks and is essentially always accurate, because nothing has been forgotten yet. Reconstructing the same information hours or days later is slow and reliably inaccurate, because memory rounds and merges tasks in ways a live log never does.
With a clean running log, invoicing becomes filtering by client and date range, then summing duration by task category — a matter of minutes rather than reconstruction. This is the entire payoff of the habit: the tedious part happens in five-second increments spread invisibly through the week, instead of arriving all at once as a dreaded Friday-evening task.
If keeping a live log consistently feels like too much friction, that's often a sign the underlying rate model is wrong for the work — lesson 9.1's point about matching the model to the work applies here too. A retainer or package removes the need for granular time tracking almost entirely, at the cost of the risk-sharing trade-off covered in that lesson.
Set up the four-column log now, even if it's empty, in whatever tool you'd actually use day to day. The habit only works if the log already exists the next time you switch tasks — build it before you need it, not after the first messy Friday.
This drill produces three real pieces of your own business infrastructure — not exercises about a fictional client this time, but the actual documents and a tested payment route you would use.
Whether the business side of this role is actually built, not just understood in the abstract. Every previous module's drill tested a skill on Adaeze's behalf. This one turns the same discipline on your own business, because the course only pays off if the person who took it can actually get paid, reliably, for doing everything the first eight modules taught.
You should now have: a rate card built from real numbers, a one-page agreement you could send today, and a proven payment route with a real transaction behind it. Module 10 turns outward — choosing a niche, building proof of work, and finding and winning your first three real clients.