I'm completely new to the independent contractor thing, but I have a Statement of Work from someone who's considering hiring me. He wants some estimates on what it's going to take, but the SOW just lists one-sentence descriptions of each thing that needs to be done, and no other details. I can't figure how many hours it would take because I don't have enough detail and I could severely underestimate the time it would take. I can't set a flat price to complete each task because I haven't gathered requirements and scoped it. By trying to estimate, I have come up with some questions to ask though. Because of the I get the sense that the client needs someone to take over having to do this requirements and scoping work for him because he's got so much on his plate already. He has a good sense of what the company needs to be able to do right now and what would make their lives easier, but maybe doesn't have time to dig into the details. What's a good step by step approach to getting to the point I can give an accurate quote? I've never had to do this before; my previous work has always been a veteran in the company and industry sussing out what needs to be done with department heads, stakeholders and decision makers, and from a big-picture analysis of service tickets, then assigning the work to me. Now I've got to do that and negotiate or decide on rates and such,. You could say it's a nascent soft skill that has been neglected until now. It's hard to estimate this kind of stuff because the processes to make it happen are NOT standardized or known. I'm going to be discovering and making up something that works. How do you figure out what to estimate? I don't want to lowball it and then give the client sticker shock when their first invoice comes in, but I don't want to scare them off with something they would feel is ridiculously high either. It feels like flippant guessing, even after spending hours poring over the SOW. I wonder if getting all my questions answered about the SOW would even help that much or if I'd still be guessing just as wildly.

Could you give them a very very broad range overall and then give them one specific number for the investigation where you'll feel more comfortable giving a number? E.g. something like "It's really hard to say without a bit more detail on your requirements and investigation on my part, but based on what I have right now, it's probably somewhere between 20 and 200 hours of work (and maybe a little detail here on where that range came from). I realize that's a huge range, but for now, let's agree for me to put 10 hours of investigation and work into this, at which point I should be able to give you a firm estimate of how long this is actually going to take. After that we can sit down again and discuss how you want to proceed." If you have the kind of relationship with this client where they trust you, that'd be my ideal approach. If that's not going to work, I think you're stuck just guessing and trying to find the right spot on the scale between "I'm definitely lowballing this, but I need the work and/or want to build a relationship with this client and am potentially okay eating the cost/hours overrun" and "This is going to be a scope creep nightmare and they're really inflexible and I'd better just double the maximum amount of hours I think I need so there's room in the budget for everything they actually need, but haven't told me about yet, and if I overcharge or lose out on the business, oh well"

Thanks for the input. I think the client just really needs someone who can be flexible and work with rapidly changing scope, so I'm probably creating obstacles by requiring them to give me all the nit-picky details up front. On their SOW I see several things that SOUND like I know what it would take, so I could offer to do those for a flat rate, then do the tentative/probationary/investigative hourly approach on the other items. My idea now for the complicated stuff is maybe I should offer to start working on it and figure it out the best I can, and if it shows promise of making good progress with me working on it, then make out another contract to do the rest, like you were saying.