Funny that no one answered the question of why businesses were wsilling to pay more.
Let me take a stab at it then. The easy answer is that businesses understand(hopefully) how business works. And specifically small businesses. I would bet that in this discussion of businesses almost invariably the businesses in question are small to at most medium businesses. People who understand what's involved. People who understand that you have overhead costs you need to figure into your pricing. People who themselves have to deal with all of the same little costs that add up to a rate substantially higher than a pizza tech.
People that aren't like most people. Most people are corporate cogs. They sit in their cubicle and crank widgets. The same little special task 40 times an hour, 8 hours a day, 250 days a year. They can't relate to someone who does a thousand different things every day for 365 days a year. They take their little hourly wage and multiply it by 80 and put the check in the bank every 2 weeks. They don't know what it's like to not get paid for 3 weeks. They don't know what it's like to work more than 8 hours a day. They can't imagine all the things you have to pay for that add up to your $75 an hour rate. To them, you make $75 an hour. But you don't. All the little things add up and you ACTUALLY make something way south of that.
They want their value meal pricing everywhere. Not just at Taco Bell and McDonald's. But everywhere. It's not just pizza techs that make it hard for you to tell a non-commercial customer you're charging them $75 an hour. It's Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, Super Chow Down Buffet, Ron Popeil and Everything's $1.
When the people in this forum deal with people at a business, it's generally not a corporate drone with no clue about anything past their cubicle. It's someone who sees all the things that are involved in running a business. I would imagine a lot of the folks here have at least met the owners of all the business they service and in many cases actually deal with the owner themselves. There's bound to be a level of trust because of that. The business owner trusts you do do a good job at a reasonable or fair price or he calls someone else next time. If you're overcharging just because you think your business clients will pay, I would imagine they will at some point migrate elsewhere.
Now that I've answered that, let me push the discussion in a different direction. What about different pricing for different business customers? Based on size or amount of business they bring you or type of industry or whatever? What about discount pricing to get new customers while you charge older customers the regular rate? What about setting rates based on zip codes? What about charging customers based on how much of a hassle they are?
