How to Scale a Service Based Business: Serbia to $100 an Hour

A 10-Person Team Doing $10 Work for $100 Clients

If you're wondering how to scale a service based business, the answer usually isn't better work - it's better positioning. Service businesses that sell through marketplaces like Upwork compete on price by default. The way to escape isn't to get better at the work. It's to change where and how you sell. A Serbian founder I coached took his 10-person landscape design team from $10/hour on Upwork to closing his first direct client at over $100/hour in under 3 months. Nothing changed about the service. Everything changed about the sales channel, the positioning, and the founder's own belief about what was possible.

This is the story of how that happened, and the exact freelance pricing strategy you can use if you're stuck in the same trap.

The Scene: Belgrade, a Founder Who Was Too Good for His Own Price

I got on a call with a founder based in Serbia. About 10 people on his team. They did landscape design, specifically 3D renders for US landscaping companies. The workflow was simple: a landscaper in Texas or Florida visits a property, takes photos, sends them to Serbia. His team builds photorealistic 3D renders. The landscaper uses those renders to sell the project to the homeowner.

Good work. Reliable delivery. Real skill.

And he was charging about $10 an hour on Upwork.

His renders played a key role in helping US landscapers close $50,000 and $100,000 projects. His team was the engine behind those sales. And he was getting paid like a commodity.

Here's the thing. He knew the pricing was wrong. He could feel it. But every time he thought about charging more, a voice in his head shut it down. "We're from Serbia. Why would an American company trust us? Why would they pay us real money?"

That voice wasn't just his. It was cultural.

What Happened: The Beliefs That Were Costing Him 10x

To understand why this founder was stuck, you need to understand the Balkans.

Most of the region is made up of countries that came out of Yugoslavia, through wars and sanctions, into something resembling normal market economies only in the last 15 to 20 years, with some countries like Slovenia and Croatia transitioning earlier than others. The entrepreneurial culture is young. And the stories people grew up hearing weren't about building great companies. They were about how the only way to get rich is to be corrupt, connected to politicians, or running something shady.

That's the water these founders swim in. They're creative, technically strong, and incredibly resourceful. But they've been trained by their environment to believe that clean, legitimate success at a high level is for other people. For Americans. For Western Europeans. Not for them.

This founder had all of that running in the background. When I told him we could get his rates to $50, $75, even $100 an hour, he didn't argue with the logic. He just didn't believe it applied to him.

I've now worked with roughly 40 Balkan clients. I've seen this pattern enough times to name it precisely: most founders in this situation don't have a skill problem. They have a bias problem. And you can design around it.

How to Scale a Service Based Business by Changing Your Sales Channel

The core issue wasn't the quality of the work. US landscapers who used his renders closed more projects. The ROI was obvious to anyone who looked at it.

The problem was the buying environment. Upwork is a marketplace that rewards low prices. Buyers filter by rate. They compare proposals from 15 different countries. The platform itself turns every service provider into a commodity.

And when a buyer sees "Serbia" next to "$10/hour," they don't think "skilled European design team." They think "cheap outsourcing." The perception is baked into the platform.

So we built around it. Here's what we did, step by step.

Step 1: Register a UK company. We set up a sales entity in the UK. Not fake. A real registered company. The delivery team stayed in Serbia. But the business face, the invoicing entity, the address on the website, all pointed to the UK. This immediately changed how the company was perceived on LinkedIn and in initial conversations with prospects.

Step 2: Daily business English lessons. I'm going to be direct about this because it matters. The founder's English was functional but his accent was thick. And in B2B sales with American buyers, a heavy Eastern European accent can trigger unconscious bias. It shouldn't. But it does. We didn't try to eliminate the accent. We worked on fluency, confidence, and the specific vocabulary of business conversations. Daily practice. Not weekly. Daily.

Step 3: Build outreach lists and go direct. We identified landscaping companies in the US that were the right size and likely needed this service. The founder started adding them on LinkedIn and Instagram. Direct messages. Not spam. Genuine outreach showing examples of the work.

Step 4: Hire commission-only salespeople in the US. We found salespeople in Texas and Florida who worked on commission only. They were on the ground, in the market, with American accents and local credibility. They could get meetings that a cold LinkedIn message from Serbia never would.

Step 5: Daily coaching on Signal. This wasn't a "check in once a week" engagement. We were on Signal every day. When a prospect replied to an outreach message, the founder messaged me: "Someone replied. How do I reply back?" When a meeting got booked, he was excited. I kept it grounded. "The deal isn't closed until money hits the account." Every small step got a real-time response. That intensity matters when you're rewiring beliefs.

Step 6: Raise prices on new clients only. We didn't touch the existing Upwork clients. Some of them were decent relationships and provided steady cash flow. The new pricing, $50 to $100+ per hour, applied only to new direct clients. This meant there was no revenue disruption during the transition.

The whole approach was about changing the sales channel and the perception, not the product.

The Turn: When the First Invoice Hit Different

The first direct client closed roughly 2.5 to 3 months after we started.

There wasn't one dramatic moment. It was a series of small wins. The first reply to an outreach message. The first meeting booked. The first proposal sent at $75 an hour instead of $10. The first "yes."

But I'll tell you the moment I knew this founder's business had permanently changed. It was when he sent the first invoice to a client at a rate north of $100 an hour. Same team. Same renders. Same turnaround time. Same quality.

The only thing different was how he sold it and who he sold it to.

His biggest client ended up paying a bit over $100 an hour. That's a 10x increase from where he started on Upwork. Not because the work got 10x better. Because the buyer's perception of the work shifted completely.

Most of the old Upwork clients didn't survive the transition. One did, a client who genuinely loved the quality and was willing to pay more for it. The rest were price buyers. And price buyers are the clients you want to lose when you're scaling.

In my experience, most of the service business scaling problems I see come down to exactly this. A lot of founders don't have a skill problem. They have a bias problem, and you can design around it.

What I Learned: Pricing Is the Biggest Lever You're Not Pulling

McKinsey's "The Power of Pricing" research

found that a 1% improvement in pricing yields roughly an 8% improvement in operating profit, a bigger impact than equivalent improvements in volume, variable costs, or fixed costs. For service businesses, this effect is even more pronounced because your margins are directly tied to your rate.

This founder didn't need more clients. He didn't need a bigger team. He didn't need better processes or new technology. He needed to stop selling his $100/hour service for $10/hour because a marketplace and a mindset told him that's what he was worth.

I've seen this with founders who stay stuck on the fire ground instead of building the business that could charge what the work is actually worth. The bottleneck isn't the team. It isn't the market. It's the founder's own ceiling on what they believe is possible.

The real problem isn't your rate. It's your sales channel and positioning. Your rate is a symptom of where you sell and how you're perceived. Change those two things and you can change the rate overnight.

The Direct + Sales Entity Strategy: 6 Steps to Escape the Commodity Trap

The Direct + Sales Entity Strategy is a framework for service businesses that are underpriced because of marketplace dynamics or geographic perception bias. It works for any service provider selling to a higher-purchasing-power market from a lower-trust jurisdiction. The strategy separates delivery from sales positioning, allowing businesses to command rates based on the value of their work rather than the cost of living in their home country.

Here are the six steps:

1. Keep your delivery team exactly where it is. Don't relocate. Don't restructure operations. Your team's location is an advantage for your margins. The cost arbitrage is a feature, not a bug, as long as it's not visible in your pricing. The Serbian team's skill didn't change. Their output didn't change. What changed was everything around the transaction.

2. Create a sales entity in a trusted jurisdiction. Register a company in the UK, the US, or another market where your buyers already do business. This isn't deception. It's structuring your business the way international companies have structured for decades. The entity handles sales, invoicing, and client communication. The US Small Business Administration provides guidance on setting up business entities, and the process for a UK limited company is straightforward and affordable.

3. Update your entire online presence to match. Your LinkedIn, your website, your social media profiles, everything client-facing should reflect the sales entity. This isn't about hiding where your team is based. If a client asks, you tell them. It's about making the first impression match the quality of the work, not the assumptions buyers make about a country they've never visited.

4. Upgrade your communication skills. For this founder, that meant daily business English practice. For you, it might mean presentation skills, sales conversation training, or learning the specific vocabulary your target market uses. The goal is to remove friction from the sales conversation. Every moment a buyer spends noticing how you talk is a moment they're not focused on the value of what you deliver.

5. Move outreach off marketplaces and go direct. Build prospect lists. Send direct messages on LinkedIn and Instagram. Hire commission-only salespeople in your target market if possible. The emphasis should be on direct relationship-building, which outperforms transactional competition for high-value services. On Upwork, you're one of dozens of proposals. In a direct conversation, you're the only one at the table.

6. Raise prices for new clients first, then reset legacy clients. Don't blow up your existing revenue. Keep legacy clients at current rates while you build the new pipeline. Once you have enough direct clients at the new pricing to sustain operations, you can either raise legacy rates or let those relationships naturally end. This protects cash flow during the transition period.

This strategy took a Serbian 3D rendering team from $10/hour to closing their first direct client at over $100/hour in under 3 months. The constraint is that it requires daily effort on outreach and communication improvement. It works best for B2B service providers selling to US or UK markets from lower-cost jurisdictions, but the principles apply to any service business selling through a marketplace at commodity rates.

Why the Marketplace Is Holding You Back

Marketplaces like Upwork create a structural ceiling on your pricing that no amount of 5-star reviews can break through. They serve a purpose - they reduce friction for buyers and give new freelancers their first clients. But they also trap service providers in commodity pricing.

When a buyer posts a job on Upwork, they see dozens of proposals with rates ranging from $5 to $50 an hour. The platform design encourages comparison shopping. Ratings and reviews help, but they don't override the price filter. If you're a $10/hour provider with 5-star reviews, you're still a $10/hour provider.

The buyers on marketplaces are also self-selected. They're looking for a deal. The landscaping companies willing to pay $100/hour for renders typically aren't browsing Upwork. They're looking for a trusted partner through referrals, direct outreach, or industry connections.

Moving off the marketplace doesn't mean burning the bridge. This founder kept his Upwork profile active during the transition. He just stopped depending on it. The new direct clients came in at 5x to 10x the rate, and in our experience, they tended to stay longer because the relationship wasn't mediated by a platform that could change its algorithm, raise its fees, or surface a cheaper competitor tomorrow.

If you're building your revenue on a platform you don't control, you're building on rented land. That's true whether it's Upwork, Fiverr, or any marketplace that sits between you and your buyer.

The Confidence Problem Nobody Talks About

Most "raise your rates" advice skips the hardest part: the founder's own belief about what they deserve to charge. This founder had the skills. He had the team. He had the proof that his work helped US companies close big projects. And he still couldn't bring himself to charge what it was worth.

That wasn't a pricing problem. That was a confidence problem rooted in a very specific cultural context. When the prevailing narrative in your country is that legitimate success is rare and suspect, pricing yourself at $100/hour feels like a lie you're telling.

The way we broke through it wasn't with affirmations or mindset exercises. It was with evidence. Small, repeated evidence.

First outreach message sent. Someone replied. A meeting got booked. A proposal went out at $75/hour. The prospect didn't laugh. They said yes. Then another one. Then a bigger one.

Confidence isn't something you build before you act. It's something that accumulates because you acted. I kept this founder from delegating the critical judgment calls during those early sales conversations. He needed to be the one on the call, hearing the "yes" himself, because no amount of me telling him it would work was going to replace the experience of it actually working.

The deal isn't closed until money hits the account. And the belief doesn't change until the founder sees it happen with their own eyes.

5 Lessons from Going from $10/Hour to $100/Hour

1. Your rate is determined by your sales channel, not your skill level. The same 3D renders sold for $10/hour on Upwork and $100/hour through direct sales. If you're selling on a marketplace, your price is set by the marketplace. Moving to direct sales is the single highest-leverage change a service business can make.

2. Buyer perception bias is real and you can design around it. A company based in Serbia triggers different assumptions than a company based in London. Registering a sales entity in a trusted jurisdiction, improving business communication, and updating your online presence are concrete steps that address perception without changing the quality of your work.

3. Raise prices on new clients first to protect cash flow during a transition. Don't disrupt existing revenue. Build a parallel pipeline at new pricing. Once direct clients provide stable income, reset or release legacy marketplace clients. This founder kept one Upwork client who valued the work. The rest were price buyers who weren't worth keeping.

4. Commission-only salespeople in your target market can accelerate direct sales dramatically. Hiring salespeople in Texas and Florida gave this Serbian company local credibility and access to networks they couldn't reach from Belgrade. Commission-only structures significantly reduce upfront cash outlay and help align incentives around revenue, though recruiting, onboarding, and management still require time and effort.

5. Confidence follows action, not the other way around. Waiting until you "feel ready" to raise prices means waiting forever. The founder's confidence built through dozens of small wins over 2.5 to 3 months: first reply, first meeting, first close. Start the outreach before you feel confident. The confidence comes from the results.

What This Means for You

If you're running a service business and selling through a marketplace, or if you're undercharging because of where you're located or what you think the market will bear, the problem probably isn't your work. It's your positioning.

The Direct + Sales Entity Strategy isn't theoretical. It took a real founder with a real team from $10/hour to closing his first direct client at over $100/hour in under 3 months. The same work. The same people. A completely different result.

When you're ready to figure out where your own pricing ceiling is and what's holding it down, start with a Business MRI. It takes about 10 minutes and it'll show you where the bottleneck is.