Rates: trying to put a value on myself

So after a very fun week of exploring the Kenyan coast and cycling through wildlife (see below) I spent the majority of this week grappling with the question: “what am I worth?”

I’ve been progressing with a number of organisations about doing work with them, and we’re at the stage of deciding on payment, etc.

Whilst I’ve had this a little in the past (negotiating wages for a job) it’s much starker when the scope of work is a short term/ open-ended.

The broad options have been:

• Pay for time (“What’s your day rate?”)
• Pay for value (“How much to get this done?”)

which means trying to place an amount on how much your projected work is worth, and taking a view of how much you’re willing to get out of bed for.

The starting position for a few has been the former route, but intuitively the latter makes more sense, even though placing a value getting a discrete business function done requires a bit more thinking time.

Either way, traversing the semi-awkward topic of “how much are you going to pay me” when based in my non-native country has been a new and rather enlightening type of conversation to be having.

In other news…

It turned out that my friend Greg had an extra day in Kenya which meant that as well as checking out the idyllic Swahili island on the coast, we could also go camping in a National Park.

Ilona (a Finnish girl in our hostel in Lamu) was free too, and so she came along with one of her friends as well.

Hell’s Gate is where they “filmed” the Lion King, and after driving up on Saturday afternoon, we pitched our tent on top of one of the cliffs.

An evening of BBQ and cards was followed by a day of cycling through the wildlife: all the lions have gone now, it’s *just* giraffe, zebra, buffalo, warthogs, and other non-predatory animals so it’s all deemed safe.

With its proximity to Nairobi, this is a fairly legit type of weekend activity to do, and so I doubt it’ll be the last time of visiting.