Paying yourself is part of hosting well

Plenty of hosts can tell you what the venue cost, often to the dollar, and have never worked out what they paid themselves.

That makes sense. Hosting usually starts as an act of care. You wanted people to have a weekend that mattered, so you made one. Paying yourself can feel like it would spoil that.

It won't. A take-home goal is what lets you keep doing the thing you care about, year after year.

Unpaid hosting runs on borrowed energy

The first unpaid retreat can feel fine. You're running on excitement, and the guests' thanks feel like enough.

By the third, it usually feels different. The hours you gave start showing up somewhere else, in your patience or your savings. A tired, quietly resentful host can't hold a group the way a rested one can.

Hosts who burn out stop hosting. When that happens, the people who would have come next year never get their weekend at all. Paying yourself protects them too.

What a take-home goal changes

Setting a goal before you price changes the decisions that follow.

• Your work becomes visible. The hours you put in sit in the plan next to the venue and the food, where you can see them.
• Your price gets honest. Guests pay what the gathering really costs to make, including the person making it.
• Trade-offs get clearer. When a free seat for a friend comes out of a number you've written down, you can make that choice knowingly.
• You get to rest afterward. Hosting is tiring work. Being paid for it means you can take the Monday off.

How to set your goal

Start with your hours. It's easy to guess low, so count every part of the work, including the weeks before and the day after. Here's an illustration for a three-day retreat. The hours are made up to show the method.

Next, choose an hourly rate. Think about what you'd charge for similar skilled work, or what would make a weekend away from other paid work worth it. Say this host picks $40 an hour.

72 hours × $40 = $2,880. That's the take-home goal, and it goes into the price alongside the venue and the food.

Now run it the other way. If the host had priced the retreat to take home $1,200, that's $1,200 ÷ 72 = $16.67 an hour for planning, marketing, cooking, leading sessions and cleaning up. Seeing that number written down tends to change the price.

When charging more feels wrong

Some hosts worry that a fair price will shut people out. It's a fair worry.

First, a price that pays you is what makes next year's gathering possible.

Second, if access matters to you, build it in on purpose. Set aside two lower-priced seats or a scholarship ticket, and budget for them the same way you budget for the venue. Then the lower prices come from a decision you made, and your pay stays whole.

It also helps to tell guests what their ticket covers. Many people are glad to pay once they can see where the money goes, including the part that goes to the person who made the weekend happen.

When the goal and the price don't fit

Sometimes the take-home you want pushes the ticket price past what your guests can pay. That's worth knowing before you announce anything.

You have more choices than giving up your pay. You can book a cheaper night, trim the comped seats, add a higher tier for guests who want more, or run the retreat a day shorter. Our guide to pricing a retreat so it actually pays you shows what each of those does to the price, with the math.

If you still lower your goal, write the new number down. Then it's a choice you made, and you'll know exactly what this retreat paid you.

See what your hours are worth

The sample retreat has a take-home goal and an hours field built in. Change either one and it shows what your take-home works out to per hour, and what your tickets need to average to get there.

Whatever you use, write your number down before you set a price. It's the one line in the budget that's about you.