I'm working at a small company that prints stuff, makes stamps for people, designs business cards, makes engravings, and a lot of other stuff. If you want something printed on a paper, or piece of plastic, and designed at the same time, you go to us. I handle designing and producing (printing, engraving, etc.) and also taking orders and pricing them.
Thing is I don't know a thing about how much we earn from selling a product, the costs of production, materials, etc. etc. I'm basically just producing the goods, and talking with clients and taking the money. If something is a constant good, like a stamp, it always has the same price that is listed inside the system. But very often we do custom things, with different sizes and made from different materials. Never had any kind of training about how to exactly price those. Yeah, I've been told, often vaguely, how much, say, a 60×40 cm printing on a plastic should cost. Usually I have no sense of how much something is actually worth, and when I'm asking my collegue who works here 20 years, I don't get a concrete answer. Very often he would just say: “Well, you gotta just feel how much it's worth”. OK. That's a fucking pretty much useless advice.
And my boss very often, when I'm not sure how much to take for something and I say something that seems reasonable to me, will be surprised that I price it too low. And tells me a way higher price, which seems unreasonable to me at first, and I say that it seems pretty high to me, and she says something like “Well, we have to earn money. You WANT your salary, don't you?”
It's not said in a toxic way, but I'm just baffled by several things at once in moments like this. That the price seems very high, that her reasoning isn't consisted of concrete informations about material costs, production costs, etc. but a vague “We have to earn” sentence, and that she expects me to magically know how to price a product when I have no idea how much even the materials cost. Is it really unreasonable to expect some kind of training or at least concrete informations so I actually LEARN how to price things? Instead of “going with the feeling” all the fricking time?
Sorry for the vent, but I'm just getting very annoyed by this nonsense. Overall, I'm just irritated that there are no concrete informations for me to learn from about pricing. Yeah, I can get out of my way and ask, but this is a small company, there is tons of work and neither I or the colleagues have the time to go through a questioning about pricing.