I honestly don't ever look at what my competitor's prices. I don't know if this is naive or not but I don't think it's information that's helpful. Like ... AT ALL. If you can't cover your expensive and you don't give yourself money to grow as an operation... why does it matter what your competitors charge? Who's to say they have a good handle on their numbers also?
I think maybe if I was in a small town like you I may think about it more but your primary objective is to stay in business. Something you can't do with no money. You also need to be pricing in things like:
- The yearly cost of continueing education. Maybe there's conferences you want to go to that would benefit the business
- Additional licenses or maybe something in the future
- What would your business 5 years from now have - what kind of building, what kind of other infastructure. You need to price that stuff in. A good example would be your salary. I'm super guilty of this btw. Someone doing my job would make XX per year. I need to be paying myself that (if I can) and I also need to price that in to my overhead when I'm determining what to charge. If I don't do that, I'm never going to get out of the business myself. This is something I need to change now actually. haha
