A musician I met once summed it up perfectly: “I’ll happily play for free. That’s easy. But you have to pay me for traveling over the place and setting up my gear.”
So what can you charge a nursing home for your traveling all over the place and setting up your gear?
I’m in the northeast, and work mostly in the NYC metro area. I charge $150 for an hour of performance. For strolling room to room I earn $80 an hour. However, I always play at least an extra hour in order to give everyone a song on all of my assigned floors, so effectively I earn around $65 an hour. I can of course rush through it and make it a solid $80/ hr.
The beauty of my strolling gigs is that I am on a bi-monthly schedule with them. They take longer, but I don’t have to set up gear. I go room to room with my guitar at my own pace. When I’m staying in NYC I can jump on the subway with my guitar. It’s OK if I need to shift the schedule an hour earlier or later. The arrangement is very flexible - and that is so helpful when you’re juggling as a freelancer.
That’s why I love these gigs, even though they “pay less per hour” on the face of it.
The days I play shows in front of a seated crowd are easier in the sense that I’m done well within 2 hours instead of 4. I can be in and out in 90 minutes.
There is sometimes resistance when I quote $150 for a show. You may think Assisted Living facilities with grand interiors and wealthy residents paying over $8,000 a month to live there means larger music budgets.
Nope. The most deluxe Assisted Living facility in my area will not budge over $130 for a show.
The way I split the difference is, I can work for $130 if it’s within 40 miles or so of my home.
Think of these criteria when you’re negotiating your rate to strike the right balance for yourself:
-Do I want to create a steady client here? Might they put me in regular rotation? Close enough to home?
-Am I still learning the ropes and need all the new clients I can get?
-Am I learning something I don’t get from other facilities? For ex., maybe you want to beef up your Spanish language skills and song repertoire and a facility is in a Hispanic community.
-Is it close to other things you’re connected to, may it benefit you to be in the area on a regular basis?
-Are the staff nice? Cooperative activities director? Do they pay on time?
Sometimes the negotiation begins with the question of what you charge. Sometimes it begins with them telling you what they pay.
Once you’ve had that exchange, ask these questions:
-When will payment be sent?
-Who should I follow up with if I don’t receive the check?
This is the bad news: Nursing homes are often late in paying. I want you to have the benefit of what I have learned. In the next post we will delve into that more thoroughly.
For our purposes with this post, I want to stick to practical matters of establishing your fee. Trust me when I say that you MUST ask those two questions with all new clients.
Let’s move on to invoicing. I’ve just discovered free online invoicing software! For all these years I’ve been knocking out home made invoices in Word. If you do that and you want to set up your own system of keeping track of payments, fine.
Make sure your invoice has the following on it:
- your name, address, phone, email
- the facility details and your contact there
-an invoice number (I use the date of the gig, so if I play on April 4 it’s Invoice # 04042024)
- date and time of your performance
-date of invoice
-a due date
-how the check should be made out
-Make it into a PDF before sending
I explored free online invoicing software when I became exasperated following up on late payments. Now, instead of digging through my calendars, my Word docs and my memory- I just CLICK and I can see at a glance who has not paid on time. Within 5 minutes I can generate payment reminders and send the invoices again.
The templates look professional and of course can be customized. I am using Zoho. There are several to choose from.
I’m curious to know what experiences you’ve had around negotiating your price. The Merriment Experiment is a network, a community. I’m just one person offering my 2 cents! Let’s hear from you, and move the conversation forward so we can all learn and benefit.
We take this work seriously, and the residents need our music. Let’s figure out the money part, and make it Win Win for all.
I used to perform as a stilt walker and a juggler. One time Stew Leonard’s in Danbury called and wanted us to perform on a busy Friday for two hours. They said that they couldn’t pay us, but they would give us lots of publicity.
I told them that would be fantastic! We would love to do that. Just one thing. We would love to then shop in their store for two hours. We wouldn’t pay, but we would give them lots of publicity.
They didn’t accept our offer, but I still like to give them publicity when I can.