How should you price a job you have never done?

Unfamiliar work is usually priced by taking a guess and adding a margin for the risk, applied to the whole job. That is arbitrary in both directions: it overprices everything you already know how to do, and there is no reason to believe the margin covers the part you do not. It also produces a number you cannot explain, which is a weak position in any conversation about it.

Decomposition solves most of it. Almost every unfamiliar job is mostly familiar — the access, the preparation, the materials, the finishing, the administration are things you have done many times, and one or two components are genuinely new. Pricing the familiar parts from your own records and isolating the unfamiliar ones turns an unknown job into a known job with a small unknown attached.

That small unknown can then be handled explicitly rather than absorbed. Options include pricing it on a time basis with a stated cap, quoting a range for that component alone, doing a paid investigation first, or stating an assumption and what happens if it proves wrong. All are honest, all are common in trades and professional services, and all are considerably better received than a large unexplained figure.

The investigation option deserves particular mention because it is underused. Where the uncertainty is genuine and material, a paid piece of diagnostic work that produces a firm quote is a legitimate product and frequently what the customer would prefer. It also removes the situation where the business absorbs a large risk to win a job and then has to manage the consequences of having guessed.

The risk that decomposition does not address is the one that comes from unfamiliarity itself: it will take longer than it would take someone experienced, and there will be steps nobody anticipated. That is a real cost and it should be priced honestly rather than absorbed as a learning investment, unless learning it is a deliberate strategic decision. If it is, that is a choice about developing a capability and should be made as one rather than discovered in the margin afterwards.

Whatever the price, what is written down matters as much. Stating which parts are fixed, which are estimated, what assumptions were made and what would change the figure gives the customer something they can evaluate and gives the business a defensible position when something is found. A single number covering both certain and uncertain work has no way of accommodating what happens next.