What It Costs to Run a Workshop, and What You Actually Keep

The fee is not what you keep. Everybody knows that in theory and almost nobody works it out properly.

So here is mine, in full, with real numbers off a real invoice.

What one workshop costs to run

My last sourdough workshop was for forty women. Materials came to $78.

Bakers flour, two bags at $14, so $28. Packaging for the starter samples, thirty at fifty cents, so $15. Workbook printing, thirty at fifty cents, another $15. Inclusions for the sample loaves, the chocolate, cheddar and jalapenos, $20.

That is under three dollars a head, and it is the entire consumable cost of the day.

Most skills are cheaper to teach than people assume. If yours needs more than this, it is worth knowing that before you set a price, not after.

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What you buy once

The other cost is setup, and it is a one-off. If I were starting from nothing today, here is what I would actually buy.

Six loaf tins from Kmart, about $6 each, so $36. Three bannetons at around $15, so $45. Three cotton cloths, about $5 for the set. A thermometer, $10. Kitchen scales, $20.

That is about $116 to be properly equipped, and then you make do with what is already in your kitchen for everything else.

You do not need a Dutch oven to start. You do not need matching anything. Tins and cloths and a thermometer will get you teaching, and you can upgrade later out of money the workshops earned.

The costs nobody budgets for

Three things catch people out.

Travel. Out here it is the big one. I charge $1.20 a kilometre return on top of my fee, because a 200 kilometre drive is fuel, wear on the car, and half a day I am not at home. Charge it separately and charge it every time.

Insurance. Many halls, shires and community centres will ask whether you hold public liability cover before they let you run anything on their premises. Find out what your venue expects before you book anything, and if you need cover, price it into your year rather than your workshop. This is one to get proper advice on rather than guess.

Your hours. Not a cash cost, but the biggest one by far. A sourdough workshop is about twelve and a half hours by the time you count preparation, packing, driving, teaching and cleaning up. Two of those hours are the workshop. If you price for two hours you have given away ten.

So what do you actually keep

Take my numbers. A $1,000 workshop, minus $78 of materials, is $922 for about twelve and a half hours. That is roughly $74 an hour.

On your very first one, take the $116 setup out too, and you are looking at about $806. Every workshop after that keeps the full amount, because the tins and the bannetons are already yours.

That is a good rate for skilled work. It is not a fortune, and it is worth seeing plainly, because the number that lands in your account is what tells you whether this is worth doing again.

The bit about tax

The fee is not income in the way a wage is. Depending on what you earn, what you are registered for, and how you run things, some of it will be owed back.

I am not the person to advise you on that, and neither is anyone else on the internet. Have one conversation with an accountant early, before the money starts arriving. It is a small cost and it stops the sort of surprise that puts women off doing this at all.

What to do next

Materials and setup are the easy costs. The expensive one is the week of work behind the workshop, and that is the part you can genuinely shortcut, because someone has already done it.

Read: What actually goes in a workshop kit and why it saves you weeks