The Pricing Controversy

Speaker 1 (00:06):

Hey, Outlaws. Welcome to episode 35. Today. We are talking about the controversy behind pricing. Now, if you are wondering what has happened, whether this is something new, honestly, it’s not. And here’s the funny thing I’ve had this episode planned for a little while. It’s been sitting in my clicker up episode 35, the pricing controversy. And I went through my notes app on my phone, just a couple of nights, cigar I have a lot of brain dumps and things that I’ve already used in content or ideas that just no longer valid. And as I deleted some of the, the notes, I found a note for myself from 2019, the end of 2019. And I was talking about pricing, why we struggle so much as online business owners to price our own work, why we struggle to know what our hourly rate should be, that we believe it’s something so deep and sorted.

Speaker 1 (01:17):

And we’ve been told that it is that it’s, it’s our stories and our money books and look, yeah, definitely a part of that. It applies right, but I couldn’t help, but thinking apparently two years ago, there was something more to it that it wasn’t quite as simple as we just have this inability to price ourselves that we don’t want to ask for money or the sale. And the reason this is interesting is that when I saw this and I saw that it was dated November, 2019, I was kind of surprised because back then I really struggled with pricing and I avoided it as much as possible. I was probably still continuing to undercharge and undervalued myself, which is funny because there’s also been times in my business a few years ago where I was probably overcharging truth, be told I was probably overcharging for things. And that’s a whole other story we’ll probably get into in today’s episode.

Speaker 1 (02:20):

But so it’s not new, right? This is not new. This is not something new. There is not some sudden sudden controversy happening in the online business space. It’s ongoing. So many business owners, myself included. I still get hung up sometimes on how to price something. We get really stuck in, in the question of what will people pay for this, right? What will people pay for? There seems to be the, the narrative that we replay over and over again, when we’re trying to price a piece of work. And back in episode 32, when I spoke to Christina Montalvin she asked me a question at end of the episode, if you caught it, she asks me how I price my work. And I shadowed a little bit about the process I now fuller. And we’re going to go into that today. I’m going to talk a little bit more about that, really the process that I follow now, but I’m also going to give you some ideas of how I use my intuition to help me price and how this can help you to now, like anything that we talk about on this episode, I am sharing with you, things that have worked for me.

Speaker 1 (03:25):

I am not immune to the pricing struggle. This is still something that I can come up against because I’m still unpacking a lot of the rules and stories and strategies that I’ve been taught in online business over the past five and a half years. So if you don’t struggle with pricing, absolutely cool, fine, amazing. But if you do struggle to price, so you struggle to know whether your pricing is the right thing, or maybe you find it really hard when people bring here in a Facebook group and people like you should raise your prices because there’s a lot of narratives and some really toxic narratives around pricing. And a lot of people want to give us advice on how to price our own work when maybe they don’t really know what we need to press our work at. So let’s get into that in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the pricing controversy, why I believe that we struggled to price our work, but also I’m going to give you, as I said, some ideas and some that are not even strategies that just ways of reframing pricing so that we can start to price our content price.

Speaker 1 (04:27):

I’ll work, sorry, in a way that feels really good, right? So that’s going to be today’s episode. So I’ll see you on the other side.

Speaker 1 (04:54):

Okay. Outlaws, let’s talk about why we overthink our pricing right? When we come to pricing our own work. And I think the fundamental reason is that there’s not a lot of business coaches or just anyone in the industry. Who’s actually teaching business owners, online business owners, how to price their work, to reflect the industry. I, and you might think that this only happens for service providers or coaches and mentors, people who don’t have a physical product or even a digital product. Right. But in my experience, it’s not the case. I think it happens across the board, no matter what we’re selling, we still have those moments when we’re not sure if that price is the right price. Should I, is it too high? Is it too low? And I do believe there is not enough emphasis on teaching business owners, how to price their own work, to reflect their industry.

Speaker 1 (05:50):

There is a lot of talk about money. There’s a lot of talk about abundance and versus scarcity. Absolutely. But there is not enough of an emphasis on pricing and reflecting that in your industry. And what I mean by that? Well, my husband said to me a year or so ago, we were talking about pricing and I was putting forward a price, an hourly rate for some walk. I was a little inside and I was like, Whoa, you know, this is what I want to charge based on how much money I want to make per hour, based on how many hours I have to work in the month. And I was like, I’m just not sure. And he said to me, well, surely you’ll run your pricing should be, it’s only worth what anybody will pay for you. I didn’t like that. I’ll be honest.

Speaker 1 (06:37):

I didn’t like that on. So I was like, well, but nobody’s paid me for this white cat. No, with me saying the price, I was doing this walk for other people. And they were paying me what they wanted to pay. I wasn’t, I hadn’t set the price. I hadn’t set the ball for this work. And he said to me, well, why don’t you go in a little bit lower than that? And you can always raise your prices like to right. You can always do that. And I did, and I got the work and that relationship continued. And you know, I was definitely being paid fairly for the work I was doing. Right. But the point of that is the, that isn’t that practical, that very like practical way of approaching money and pricing. That conversation doesn’t really come up. Right. At least I have not been witnessed to that conversation in the online space.

Speaker 1 (07:31):

I’ve never had someone just be very practical about how we approach pricing. So we hear a lot of things like price, your West charge you with, right? We hear a lot of people talking about raising your prices, right? There’s a lot of people using that as their like strategy. I find that incredibly strange that their entire strategy is that, well, you do the same watch, but you raise your prices. I understand this, right? I understand this. But here’s the thing. If we struggle to ask someone to pay us a certain fee, hourly rate, whatever it might be for our walk bracing, our prices isn’t going to solve that. That is probably just going to make us even more uncomfortable, right? Because we don’t believe that we should be pricing that way or charging that amount for whatever reason, whatever that reason is, we have got to a point where we don’t, we don’t believe that we’re able to charge that amount or that we are.

Speaker 1 (08:38):

Maybe we don’t believe we’re worth that amount. Or maybe we don’t believe the us skills value to that price. Raising our prices is not the solution. And I feel like it’s really, really dangerous for people who don’t know the individual don’t know the circumstances don’t know the situation, don’t know the person at all to just say, well, you should raise your prices. That’s I don’t see that as a strategy, I think is really, really dangerous to do that. So when it comes to pricing and this, and this struggle, I want to talk a little bit about how I now price my walk or how I at least look at pricing and money. And it’s very, very practical and straightforward. And I say that because I think there is a lot of complication around pricing. There is a lot of nonsense around it. And so I, I talked about this back in episode 32 with Christina, but I’m going to just mention it again. So basically what I do is I look at how many hours I have available to work each month. Here’s why this is possibly one of the, well, there’s two really important factors in this whole pricing equation, but this is one of them. The reason this is important is because how many hours I have to walk each month, it could be really different to yours. So

Speaker 1 (10:14):

No one else should look at my pricing and say, well, I’m going to price the same as high, because they don’t know without really asking. You don’t know anyone else’s situation and you don’t know how many hours they have available to work. So that’s the first thing, right? I look at how many hours I have available in a month to work. Realistically, I’m not like inflating. It I’m like how many hours do I have to work? The second and equally most important part of this equation is how much money to I need to own in a month. Right? So what are my bills? Do I have anything that I’m paying off? Do I, you know, how much do I want to be able to save? I need to think, consider my taxes, all these things, right? All these factors need to be considered when I’m looking at my pricing.

Speaker 1 (11:06):

So how much money in a month do I need to make, to cover my bills and to be able to, you know, save a little and also pay my taxes. So I’ve got these two things. These two eight Coolie important scenarios, how many hours I have to work in a month and how much money I need to make in a month. And I know, right? I’m saying need to make, okay. There is always room for growth. There is always room for growth. I’ve been having this conversation with a friend of mine just recently. We’ve been talking about it a lot, this idea that whatever we decide to do in our business, apparently we going to marry this and it’s going to be the thing we do for the rest of our life. We’re not allowed to change our mind. It’s not going to evolve. If you’ve been in business for any longer than a minute, you know, that things evolve, right?

Speaker 1 (11:55):

Things that were important to you a year ago may not be important to you now. So it’s the same with your pricing. Your pricing can evolve, right? That’s that’s fine. The hours that you work, could it change and evolve. You might have more hours. You might have less hours. So this is not something you’re going to do once and never look at it again. You’ll pricing is something that you want to be checking in with regularly. You don’t need to just raise your prices because it’s November. You don’t just need to raise your prices because January check in with yourself, right? I’m so sick and tired of everyone talking about the business and the idea being that there’s this business and that we had just this thing that exists to run the business. You are a person you’re a human being and you deeply deeply matter.

Speaker 1 (12:42):

And your energy matters to the amount of work you can create the amount of the amount of what you can deliver, your output, your productivity, you are an important part of that. And if you are not pricing in the right way, that can be affected. If you’re working too many hours, that can be affected. So we need to look at these things and know that they can evolve. They can change. They can add, but they can float. And it’s okay. Right? No one. And even if no one’s ever said it, I think it alluded to too often, you do not need to marry the price that you set right now. You don’t commit to it, to this. It’s not forever, right? You can change your mind. Let’s normalize, changing our minds. Let’s normalize evolution. Let’s normalize, ebb and flow. Let’s normalize the fact that you are an important part of your business. So with that in mind, I’m going to step off of my site books and let’s get back to this pricing equation, right? So we have how many hours we’re going to work in a month and we have how much money we need to make in a month. Okay.

Speaker 1 (13:50):

We now look, look at these two things to calculate a hourly rate. And I think this is really important. I mean, it’s, it’s important for anyone to understand what their hourly hourly rate is. Whether you sell a service, a you’re a coach or you sell programs, products, whatever it might be. I think it’s really wise to understand how much money you need to be making in an hour. Right? So we do the equation and we look at what hourly rate is. The first time I did this, the first time I looked at how many hours I had to work, right? So I took the amount of money. I want to make an amount of dividing it by the number of hours I have to work. And that gave me my hourly rate. The first time I did this, I was like, Ooh, that’s a lot.

Speaker 1 (14:46):

Here’s the thing. I tend to typically walk within my son’s school hours. The first I did this equation, it was the end of 2019 pre COVID. Right? COVID wasn’t even something we were discussing. And so I was only working and I had planned to only work between the hours my son was at school. So that limits drastically limits. How many hours I have. I’m not walking nine till five, right? It reduces the amount of time I had. Well, then COVID happened. And I was not lacking within my son’s school hours. I was working all over the place all different times of day. And I was truthfully working way too much, but I was working all over the place. So I had more time available. The number one mistake I made here was not factoring in how many hours I was now walking. I didn’t check back in with myself.

Speaker 1 (15:40):

Right. I did not check back in any point during COVID as, okay, well, this is now how many hours I had my, had I done that? I would have realized that I was probably working too much. Right. I was probably working too much. In fact, I was working too much, but I would have noticed that this is the importance of checking back in with ourselves. Okay. So when life changes and it does ebbs flows, evolves, whatever it might be, we can check back in with ourselves. We can check back in with our pricing, right? No one there’s no like pricing police. I got to tell you that you can’t do that. So check back in with yourself and see what your hourly rate is, you know, has, has that been a change in circumstances? Are you able to work more hours now? Right. So do you now, you know, you, don’t probably don’t need to reduce your hourly rate.

Speaker 1 (16:31):

If you already have an hourly, an hourly rate set and you start liking more hours, for some reason, you don’t need to reduce your rates, right? But you know that you can take on another client. You might, and you can look at which areas of your business you can take on more work. Is there certain work that you can do in that time? Is there certain work that is just not going to fit into that schedule? This is really important stuff, really knowing our own work, knowing our own schedule, knowing our own ability and how we’re pricing that and reflecting that in our time. And this may seem really dismissing, really practical. It may seem, you know, it’s not so sexy, right? It’s not so sexy as like charge your worth. But here’s the thing attaching our self worth to our pricing is really dangerous, really dangerous.

Speaker 1 (17:24):

It’s just as dangerous as telling somebody you don’t know to raise that prices, right? Because telling people, and this still continues to happen, telling someone to charge that worth instantly attaches that Southwest to that pricing, they are now attached to that pricing. This is now I’m worth this. You are worth like a million bucks. So we need to move away from the charge out charge. Our wife will charge your worth ideology because attaching our self-worth to a product or price it’s dangerous. It’s really dangerous for our mental health. Because the moment someone says no to that price, right? Or that product or that service they’re saying no to us. Right? And so much of business is about being in relationships who now we feel hot.

Speaker 1 (18:24):

And now, so often what happens is you’ll go to a, you might go to a Facebook group community that you’re in and say, I had this really shady experience. I told somebody in my pricing and they said, no, I was too expensive. Someone will say, raise your prices. Right? Somebody will say that somebody will say they don’t value you. Somebody will say, well, that’s their problem. That’s their story. It’s not about you. Well, it kind of is about us because they said no to us kind of is about us because they said no to you. So we need to detach ourself with, from a pricing, right? That’s really important. We don’t need any more anymore interruptions in, in our mental and our mental health. When it comes to our businesses, it’s already so much, that affects how we think about ourselves, how we think about businesses, whether we think we’re successful and there’s already so much weight on our shoulders when it comes to money. And whether we’re doing the thing in the right way, we don’t need any more of that. So being able to detach your self-worth from your pricing is really important. And being able to understand right, how, what your hourly rate is, how many hours you’re going to walk in a month and knowing how much money you need. It makes it far more practical. It takes away yourself. It detaches itself from yourself, detaches you from the pricing, right? Your self worth is no longer attached.

Speaker 1 (20:01):

Now, if you are selling programs or courses, memberships, maybe one of the ways in which we’ve got really up with our pricing is this five X in the price of something only to slash the price down, right? You’ve all seen it, right? This is valued at $25,000, but today you’re only going to pay nine 97. This boys’ club, bro marketing narrative, is it feeds into this idea that, you know, raise your prices, charge your worth, but we’re not going to actually do that. It’s very, very confusing, right? It is no reason we overthink our pricing and that we struggle with it. And then we get hung up on it because how do we go from where was so much, and this is our worth, but we’re not going to charge that we’re going to charge this. Yes.

Speaker 1 (21:08):

Right. It’s, it’s really confusing. It really does a number on our, on our life. It does a number on our ability to know what we should charge for something it’s really, really confusing coupled with the six-figure bench. The six-figure benchmark. Right? Right. I’m not even going to talk about the fact that today, the, the frustration I feel around this decision that we should all be making six figures. What I actually want to talk about is the fact that it doesn’t always fit the math. Right? So I’ve had this in the past years ago, when I was working with a business coach, she had this like whole walk back of way of working out what we should be charging. There wasn’t really a formula as such. We weren’t being given any formula of how to calculate an hourly rate. There was actually, no, I don’t believe there was any focus on how many hours we had to work. Instead we were like fitting in all of our programs. What will we going to offer them? Yeah. And I think a little of this, and I had this big lofty goal of making six figures.

Speaker 1 (22:20):

And I realized that I would have to work with like a thousand clients in a year. And I was like, that is just, there was part of me that just, I remember that feeling. I was so upset because I knew that that wasn’t possible. I knew that it wasn’t possible to work with that number of clients in a year. Not only because where the hell was I going to find all these people, but also because I didn’t have the time, all the energy. I mean, at this point I was burning out. And even though I could see that this wasn’t going to work, I was so deep into this, this coaching echo chamber that I just kept going. I was like, well, it will figure itself out. Right. It’ll figure itself out. It was never going to figure itself out because it doesn’t always fit.

Speaker 1 (23:11):

Right. Six-figure benchmark, doesn’t always fail math. Doesn’t fit our time. Doesn’t fit our energy levels. This comes back to why it’s so important. We need to check in with ourselves, checking in with our financial goals, checking in with how much time we have, and also checking in with what we need, because I’m going to say it, do you need six figures? Do you need six figures? You might want it. I’m not turning down six biggest, but do I need it? And what am I willing to sacrifice to get that right? What am I willing to sacrifice to get that? What am I willing to do and not do? What am I willing to on? These are really important questions that we need to be asking ourselves,

Speaker 2 (23:50):

Right?

Speaker 1 (23:51):

And this is why it’s so important for us to create this solid, hourly rate as a foundation, right? Because if we don’t have a solid, hourly rate, if we don’t know what our hour is worth, everything else feels harder.

Speaker 2 (24:09):

So

Speaker 1 (24:09):

It’s really important that we take back some agency,

Speaker 2 (24:16):

Right?

Speaker 1 (24:16):

We look at our pricing from this practical way. May not be sexy. I get it. But really looking at it from this practical way. This is us dismantling bro marketing, because bro marketing is what has got us here, all of this, like back and forth of how much we’re going to price. And

Speaker 2 (24:35):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (24:38):

One of the things that I recall when I fast I in my online business and I think this is so important because I live in an area of the country. I’m in, I’m in the UK, in the area I live in. Wages are not great, right? They’re not awful, but they’re not great. Especially compared to the cost of living. The cost of living is not low here, but wages are pretty crappy. At least they were a decade ago when I applied for the last jobs I applied for. And I think there’s a lot of careers or career options in employment where people are vastly underpaid. Right? So to give you an example of this, when I first started my online business, I started in the health and fitness industry. And so of course I had done like part of my anatomy and physiology and my personal training and diplomas.

Speaker 1 (25:30):

You had to do a whole module on business planning. And so I had done the research to look at when I looked at local personal trainers, how much were they charging per hour? What kind of pricing structures did they have? And it was very typical. You know, they have the hourly rate, but they wanted you to try and do a package. So it was slightly cheaper, but the average hourly rate, and these were people who were more qualified than me because they had more years experience. They maybe had more qualifications under their belt. Now that didn’t necessarily mean they’re a better personal trainer, but anyway, they were charging around 30 to 35 pounds

Speaker 2 (26:05):

An hour. And

Speaker 1 (26:12):

If you look at personal trainers in gyms, they were typically charging even less to give you a comparison. If you looked a personal trainer in London, not a celebrity personal trainer, but like a personal trainer in London that will likely to be charging around 75 pounds an hour. Because the fact that cost of living in London is higher. Wages are higher.

Speaker 2 (26:36):

And

Speaker 1 (26:39):

I knew this, right. I had this experience from doing this research and then I came into the online space and I was like, well, what do I charge? Because do I charge the same it’s online. They don’t have that one-on-one access. I mean, they have one-on-one access to me, but they don’t have the same kind of access to me. And I remember being told you could charge, you know, just charge whatever you want. And I was like, well, you don’t have the same limitations in the online space because the things that limit you, impossible people’s wages. Like that’s none of your business in the online space. So just charge what you want. And they go to numbers seem to be $100 per hour as a pretty new personal trainer. Somebody who was not working in a gym at that time, I was still working my corporate job.

Speaker 1 (27:30):

I had not started working in a gym or in a health facility. I was like $100 an hour, seems like a little money. And so that was the number, everything from that on got calculated at $100 per hour. And so when it came to pricing programs and courses, everything was based on this $100 power. I never felt comfortable with $100 an hour. And you might think, well, why didn’t you just do, because I didn’t know. I honestly, I was like, you know, you tell me what to do. I’m going to do it a hundred dollars an hour. Cool. Let’s go. I never questioned it. I didn’t like it, but I never questioned it because I genuinely believed. Cause that was all I saw around me. This is the way it’s done. This is the way it’s done. And now I have these conversations with friends and peers who came into the online space around the same time as me and some of us had similar business or business coaches or the same business coaches.

Speaker 1 (28:32):

And none of us are charging this $100 an hour fee. None of us are charging that because we’ve got to the point where we’ve realized that it’s okay, cool. If someone’s charging now, I’m not, I’m not questioning that. But if you are brand new person into that industry, I don’t know. I don’t know how much, I don’t know how confident I would be to charge them. Now. I, I, in my head, I just had Vivian K telling me what would Chad do? And she’s and if you don’t follow Vivian K I’ll link to her in the show notes. But if NK has this she created this, this guy, Chad and Chad is like, she goes into the media, could white dude who would have the audacity to do the things that we don’t do. And I a hundred percent agree with that. Right?

Speaker 1 (29:24):

I need to channel my Chad so much honestly, but I think also we have to remember that sometimes how we feel about experience says a lot. It says so much, you know, I talked about this on the show before, but knowing that we feel good about what we’re doing that struggling to sleep at night, that it’s not this like constant B or all this constant anxiety of before we get on a discovery call or any of those things, having confidence in our pricing, having confidence in how much we charge that that is so powerful. It’s so powerful because we don’t have confidence in ourselves. We don’t have confidence in our pricing or confidence in what we’re doing. It’s really palpable. You can feel it, right. Your audience feels that your clients feel it. I know this, right. I know this because when I don’t feel good about something, no one is going to resonate with him.

Speaker 1 (30:30):

Right. It’s like writing a piece of content for the sake of writing your piece of content. It never does. It never, it’s never the great piece of content. It’s never going to be that Epic post because it wasn’t written from your soul. It wasn’t written from your values. So yeah. You know, I think it’s, I think it’s really complicated. I do think it’s complicated. I think there’s so many layers to it. And as individuals, we have our own stories and our own layers to peel back. But I do believe if we can understand that foundation of our pricing, it’s going to help us in the long run. And so some of the other things I want to talk about kind of moving away from specifically pricing, but really talking about that feeling right. Tapping into our intuition. So one of the things that I have been using this year in 2021 is really asked myself, what do I need?

Speaker 1 (31:27):

Right? I talked about this earlier, but not so much. What do I need per month? But what do I need? What do I need for my business? What do we need to feel when I’m delivering this piece of work or I’m delivering this project or whatever it might be, I’m walking them. And so when I start to price, we’ll look at the pricing of my walk. For example, this year I released to the outlet journal and it was actually a fairly easy thing to price. I did have a small hesitation when I pressed it. And then I thought to myself, you know what? This is crazy. I’m charging 15 pounds for a book that I have written that is going to help people. And there are people charging thousands of pounds, dollars, whatever, for stuff that is half quarter third as good. We pay, we chart, we invest, we pay and invest so much money into these things that we even don’t use, or we don’t get. We went from. And I was like, and I’m questioning charging 15 pounds or something. No. So, you know, I taught I based that on my market research and was like, this is what the price is going to be. This is what I would pay for it.

Speaker 1 (32:38):

When I priced outlook collective, I definitely have that feeling of, I could charge more for it. I could, of course I could. I don’t want to, I don’t want to charge more for it. And the reason I don’t want to charge more for the outlook collective is because one of my values is that it’s financially inclusive. And this was something that I had felt for quite some time. And it was one of my friends who put that phrase into my head financially inclusive. It’s difficult, right? It’s difficult. I think the only way you can truly be financially inclusive is by having a sliding scale. But I was like, this is as financially inclusive as I can be right now in the stage in my business. At the same time, I made some really outlawed decisions like charging in my currency. Now I’m chatting with a friend about this just recently, but everyone charges in us dollars. Now I know some Canadian folks who charge in Canadian dollars, but it is really interesting to me. That’s

Speaker 2 (33:48):

Again,

Speaker 1 (33:49):

When I started my business, it was like I was charging in U S U w. There was no consideration of charging anything else. But if your currency is not us dollars or anything,

Speaker 2 (34:05):

You

Speaker 1 (34:05):

Are going to get charged more. And so it was these kinds of things. These little things are a pricing and charging that I’ve really had to unpack and look at and basically Outwell them, right. In the sense I’m going to do the thing that feels right for me. Right? So when it came to publishing the journal, I had to charge in my currency because I’m in the UK and that’s where I’m publishing it. So when it came to price me out, we’ll collect him. I was like, well, it just makes sense that I would charge him pounds. I’m going to charge him my currency. And it’s been fine. Nothing bad has happened.

Speaker 2 (34:48):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:08):

And I have this really sneaking suspicion that if we, as individuals had more confidence in our pricing, if we took back our agency to make these decisions, if we had this like practical way of pricing, we wouldn’t get caught out by overpriced fluff. Right? We wouldn’t get, we wouldn’t get caught out by all this fluff that is, has CHOGM pricing to it and is likely not worth the price that’s on that. You know, I don’t see money as bad thing. I don’t see money as about thing. Money is not bad. It’s inherently great. It helps us to be a, be more impactful. It helps us to grow. It helps us to create economy. It allows us to small business owners to continue growing and to continue making an impact. And for me, that’s where my success lies my success lies. And to be able to continue growing, continue giving back to my audience, continue growing my business so that I can help more people. Right. But we need to give a lens, a really good clean, and we need to do really good research. Right? We need to understand our pricing. We need to do our research

Speaker 2 (36:30):

Such because

Speaker 1 (36:34):

Ultimately whether you charge a worth, raise your prices. If no one’s going to pay you for that, you’ve got an expensive hobby, right? If no, one’s going to pay you for that, you’ve got an expensive hobby. And I think we need to be okay. Right. This stops with being okay with our own version of success, understanding how many hours we have, how many, how much we need to add them in a month, calculating our hourly rate. And then seeing with that right. Slowing down and seeing with that and saying, okay, is this, am I comfortable with this? Is this feel good? Right. And going from that, and I believe that by doing that, we would have that confidence, right? Because it has zero to do with our value, our worth.

Speaker 2 (37:29):

We

Speaker 1 (37:29):

Understand that this is an amount that we have come to based on information based on data. It’s not a random figure. And in addition to that, that gives us more confidence to tell people our pricing, you know, the, especially the coaching industry. I mean, this is like the only industry where people don’t tell or share their pricing. I mean, this also happens in services as well. Like it happens in coaching and services. Everyone’s like super shady about how much they’re charging, how much a package is worth. And honestly, if I go to a website and the pricing is not on there, if I have to book a call or fill in a form, I’m probably not going to know I’m probably turned off. And some of you might say, I don’t agree with that. That’s cool. Here’s why I feel that way.

Speaker 1 (38:33):

I’m not gonna spend, I don’t know, 20 minutes, half an hour. It could be longer to fill in an application form to sit there and think about all of these deep questions that you want me to think about. I’m not going to book a 45 minute, maybe longer. Cool. If I’m then going to find out that the price is not within my budget, because if I have a budget in mind, I’m not going to extend over that budget, right? I’m not necessarily going to extend over that budget. We need to be more respectful. As, as coaches, mental service providers, as, as people, we need to be more respectful of someone else’s budget understand that that budget is not anything to do with our self-worth. And I think that’s asked someone to jump through a lot of hoops or to commit time. And I mean, this just makes sense, right?

Speaker 1 (39:30):

Cause from both parties, if two people are now coming to an hour core discovery call and this discovery cool is going to actually be kind of a sales coaching call or an objection coaching call. And you’re going to tell me that the price is out of my budget. Well, now I’ve just wasted a whole amount of time and you’ve wasted time too. No matter how great you think you are a sales strategy, you know, two people have now wasted an hour of that time. And so transparency within our industries, transparency around pricing. So important. If you have a pricing that’s maybe custom. So if you have custom pricing, maybe you, you have like Alec type pricing. So you, you want to be able to give people different things. Then just tell people like basic or packages stop from, right. I always have packages stop from or retain a starts from. And then if someone wants to book a call with me based on that, right, we will go through, okay, well that price is for this. If you also want this, this is something separate.

Speaker 1 (40:43):

We have, we don’t let people decide. We assume people are like, w we don’t let people decide. We don’t let people make their own decisions. We have been trained and coached into believing that people can not make decisions for themselves. And that we have to remove all possible options and give them one thing. And I get why that is. But I think it’s very outdated. I think it’s really harmful. And I just don’t think it’s good for business anymore. And so building some transparency into our pricing, building transparency into what we do and how we do it with the processes, giving people options. This is how we help people feel safe. This is how we remove some of that trauma and that weaponized, these weaponized phrases, these weaponize situations, just like discovery calls. They are deeply weaponized

Speaker 2 (41:43):

All of these things

Speaker 1 (41:45):

To actually build that trust back. We need to lead by example. We need to build transparency into our pricing. And I was thinking about this just recently.

Speaker 2 (41:58):

I don’t know,

Speaker 1 (41:58):

Have an answer, but it was a thought. And I want to share that thought with you is that perhaps in the coaching industry, so many people are charging these elaborate prices for packaging packages, sorry,

Speaker 2 (42:14):

That’s the one,

Speaker 1 (42:16):

The reason we don’t put our prices. Well, the reason people don’t put the prices on that sales pages, the reason these prices and pricing is hidden somewhere deep inside the sales page or not at all is because of this lack of confidence because of this attachment to the worth, you know, is this why we’ve been trained to not be transparent? We’ve been coached to, you know, ask people to book discovery calls so that we can coach them into working with us. Is this because we are really uncomfortable and lack confidence in our pricing. And I think if that’s the case, then that speaks volumes, right? That speaks volumes. And we need to get back to basics and go, okay. As I said a few times now throughout this episode, Alice, what we need to make in a month calculation start here.

Speaker 2 (43:09):

Can you charge

Speaker 1 (43:10):

More than that? Absolutely. But this is the starting point. This is the foundation, right? This is the foundation.

Speaker 2 (43:18):

So I think

Speaker 1 (43:21):

The underlying thing, when it comes to pricing, when it comes to pressing our own work, when it comes to having conversations with people about pricing is to kind of slow down and pause and realize where, you know, perhaps we need to

Speaker 2 (43:37):

Be

Speaker 1 (43:38):

More aware self-aware and aware of others understand that someone else’s situation is no ours.

Speaker 2 (43:46):

So

Speaker 1 (43:47):

Telling them to charge their worth or raise their prices is not always good advice. More times than not, it’s harmful, right.

Speaker 2 (43:53):

Voice and create this foundation and then check in with ourselves, check

Speaker 1 (44:00):

And with ourselves, which we should be doing over many, many things, but with pricing a hundred percent

Speaker 2 (44:04):

Check in with your prices, check in with

Speaker 1 (44:08):

What’s working, and what’s not what, what not, what isn’t working. Right. And don’t be afraid to do that. And don’t be afraid to communicate that with your clients, your customers, your audience, whomever, it might be because

Speaker 2 (44:22):

Was not changing your pricing because you’re afraid of what may happen.

Speaker 1 (44:29):

Right. Cause you’re afraid they might quit or they might stop working with you. That’s a whole other, you know, mindset roadblock that we have to address. And again, it’s individual. So I’m not gonna sit here and give some kind of blanket fights for that. I’m also not gonna prescribe a ton of books. Right. I have a real bee in my bonnet about that, about this idea that we just prescribe a gen serums, Jen Sincero book. And it’s like off you go. So, you know, this is one of the reasons that I don’t often talk about money in my own business, in the sense of how much money I make, because I could report, I could publish a report card of my latest launch, or I could add conversion rates and profit margins. But what would be the point, right? What would be the point of sharing this with you? Because I know there’s a lot of people that share it based on this kind of, well, I don’t know why they share it, honestly. I think perhaps they think it’s transparent.

Speaker 1 (45:37):

Perhaps they think it’s breeding transparency. Perhaps they do it to inspire others. But I don’t think knowing my fig is give you any real information. It’s not going to give you a framework. It’s not going to support you to grow your own business, right? It’s not going to support you to grow your own business. And I think knowing and working to your own definition, definition of success, that is what’s going to help you grow your business. That is what’s going to help you to understand the challenges that you find with pricing, right? You need to establish your own framework for achieving what you want and need. And that’s so important. You know, I’ve given you kind of an equation that you can do, but beyond that, it’s knowing and working to your own definition of success. That is where the success lies as individuals. So

Speaker 1 (46:38):

I would love to know your thoughts on pricing. I would love to know what you think about, you know, how do you feel about pricing? How do you, do you have an equation? Do you have a system that works for you? Right? Because remember this is the system that works for me. And I think it’s very basic and I think it’s very practical. And I think that you can do so much with it from that kind of foundation hourly rate. But I would love to know if you have other ideas, if you have other ways of doing things and how do you feel about sharing a prices publicly? You know, do you talk about them? Do you tell people upfront what your pricing is? Are you going to start doing that or do you think I’m completely wrong and that’s fine if you do, I would love to know.

Speaker 1 (47:22):

So make sure you come over to Instagram, entrepreneurial underscore Outlaws and follow us over there because we dissect these episodes every single week as well. So if you’re not following us on Instagram, this is where we dissect each episode. And we take you behind the scenes of some of that content as well. And we’ll look at this in greater detail. And next week we actually have a money coach coming on the show. So this was actually really, this was really great timing. I did not necessarily plan for this, but next week we have Kathy for Goza coming onto the show and she is a money coach and she is going to be chatting with me about money. She’s going to be chatting with me about financial goals. She’s going to be helping us to see how we can make empowered money choices by creating unique and sustainable financial goals.

Speaker 1 (48:16):

Because as she describes, you know, life transitions happen, right? So when life transitions happen, we can flow into them with ease, right? So is there really, we sat down and it was a great conversation. I cannot wait for you to hear it. And I think the fact that this is piggybacking off of the back of this episode, talking about pricing, it’s really, really going to be, well-rounded really powerful. So make sure you check in next week for episode 36, with Caffrey, Cathy for Goza. And just to give you a little bit of an update over the summer, we are heading into June. So in June, July and August, we are going to be scaling back to two episodes. Apart month, I’m going to be taking a little bit of a break over the summer. I’m going to be getting ready to hit the ground running from September.

Speaker 1 (49:06):

I’m going to be sitting down with some guests. I’m going to be recording over the summer, but we are going to be taking a step back to do two episodes a month to give you time, to really dig into these episodes because these episodes are a little bit longer, truth, be told we’re going to be digging into some really great conversations with guests, but also there’ll be some solo episodes over the summer as well. So you can check in as always over on Instagram, we’ll be keeping that updated on a weekly basis. And I’m really excited to sit down and record over the summer, ready for September, because I can’t believe the podcast is going to be a year old in a few short months. And I have so many ideas of what we’re going to be doing for its fast Beth day. And I’m really excited for that to happen in October as well.

Speaker 1 (49:51):

So next week, as I said, we have Kathy for girls on the show. And then it will be a few weeks before we have another episode, but more on that next week. Make sure you come over and check us out on Instagram, entrepreneurial underscore Outlaws. And if you are looking for transcription or any of the show notes, go over to Melanie nights.com forward slash podcast, where you can find a full transcription of today’s episode, along with all the show notes and any links I’ve mentioned in today’s episode, they will all be listed there. So until next week, Outlaws.