A combination of word if mouth and eventually targeted business development activities (not sales, but business development).
To make it easier to charge more you have to go after customers who are less price sensitive, whose problems are costing them a lot of money, and who are accustom to acquiring outside help for things outside what they consider to be their core business & expertise.
In my case this was big enterprises. Nationwide law firms, banking & fin. tech. institutions, international distribution & logistics companies, etc.
It took a long time to build up to that point and to get access to those parts of the market. The way it worked for me was, early-on, I'd be doing smaller jobs for big companies. Sometimes with another vendor as an intermediary. So, I might work with Boeing or Lockheed indirectly, but I was fastidious about establishing direct personal relationships. Once I hit the media & marketing world, it was the same pattern. Work through an existing vendor of say Pepsi or Nike, and then make direct personal relationships that could grow later for their adjacent or orthogonal needs.
Eventually you have enough contacts and enough of a reputation that you don't need to leverage the credibility of intermediaries anymore.
I don't know that such a path would work for everyone for all kinds of work (everything I ever did was kind of esoteric for its time), but that's what worked for me.
To make it easier to charge more you have to go after customers who are less price sensitive, whose problems are costing them a lot of money, and who are accustom to acquiring outside help for things outside what they consider to be their core business & expertise.
In my case this was big enterprises. Nationwide law firms, banking & fin. tech. institutions, international distribution & logistics companies, etc.
It took a long time to build up to that point and to get access to those parts of the market. The way it worked for me was, early-on, I'd be doing smaller jobs for big companies. Sometimes with another vendor as an intermediary. So, I might work with Boeing or Lockheed indirectly, but I was fastidious about establishing direct personal relationships. Once I hit the media & marketing world, it was the same pattern. Work through an existing vendor of say Pepsi or Nike, and then make direct personal relationships that could grow later for their adjacent or orthogonal needs.
Eventually you have enough contacts and enough of a reputation that you don't need to leverage the credibility of intermediaries anymore.
I don't know that such a path would work for everyone for all kinds of work (everything I ever did was kind of esoteric for its time), but that's what worked for me.