Hey Badass, I am super amped for today's episode because pricing, knowing how to price your offer, knowing what to charge people for the things that you create, for the things that you do, for the things that you've seemingly just pulled out of thin air when you design your program for the first time or that course or whatever it is, can feel so intimidating and can be a massive source of complexity for people, overthinking, analysis, paralysis. AKA just a massive blocking point for so many people.
We know that we want to help people. We know that there's going to be some kind of vehicle to help people. Are we going to sell them a digital product? Are we going to sell them an online course? Are we going to sell them a coaching program?
How are we going to deliver and package up our education, our solution, into something that's going to help people? And once we've decided that, what are people going to pay for it? We don't want to lowball ourselves. We don't want to undercharge. We don't want to come across as the cheap one on the market to the point where people are thinking, “Oh, there's equality there. Are they even that good?”
But then we also don't necessarily want to massively over-inflate our prices or feel like we're overcharging people and start to feel that imposter syndrome and that guilt and that dread of saying that number out loud when we're speaking to someone about our pricing.
It's a very nuanced area because behind the decision-making, as always with a lot of entrepreneurial topics, there are no rules. And so the question of what to charge and what price point to deliver your product or service at is going to be that really frustrating zone of it depends.
Like a lot of things in entrepreneurship, it's both an art and a science. There's a lot of testing and tweaking that goes into it. At the same time, we're not just making it up. There are indications and rules and established norms that we can play to. And there are absolutely things that we can do to get you landing on a price point that is fair, that is valuable for your clients and your customers and makes a lot of sense. So we're going to be jamming on all of that good stuff today.
Now, the thing about pricing that we want to keep in mind is that it will depend on so many factors: your industry, your niche, your credibility, your program, the value add, the consequences of not making the investment for your ideal client.
There really are no hard and fast rules. It's not your simple supply-demand kind of model. If you think about the housing market, there are certain indicators of a house, how big it is, the suburb it's based in, how close it is to zoned schools, and anything like that, that gives an indication at any one time based on a huge variety of variables that allows people to say, yep, that's fair. Or, that's a steal.
It's a market that changes. Housing prices will change. But based on comparison, that ease of comparison and all of the variables, something that we're used to looking into. It's something that kind of makes sense, right? You look at a price and it can make sense in the online entrepreneurial world.
There are still prices that I come across that make zero sense. But the thing is that it makes zero sense to me. And this is another complex factor that makes pricing so nuanced. And that's that pricing is very personal. And it can be extremely triggering depending on where you're at with your money mindset journey.
[00:03:56] The Personal and Complex Nature of Pricing
Your relationship with money, what investing means to you, what's the difference between a cost and an investment. How do you see the world? How do you see the value of investing in yourself? What's too much? What's not enough, right? When I invested in my coach and I paid her $27,000 USD for six months to have two 45-minute calls per month with her that felt crazy.
Depending on who you are and where you're at in your journey and how much work you've done and all sorts of things, there's always going to be someone who will look at a price point and say, “That's cheap, that's worth it, that is a steal.” And another person who looks at that and says, “That's ridiculous.”
And it can be that for a handbag, it can be that for a house, it can be that for a cell phone, it can be that for a trip. Pricing and our perception of money and value is so personal. But just because it's complex doesn't mean it's not figureoutable. And in this episode, I want to make pricing clearer for you.
I want to give you some indications and some direction that's going to allow you to figure out a pricing zone. That feels right for your offer. And so what we're going to do is we're going to cover some of the most commonly held fears and beliefs that get in the way of entrepreneurs, of coaches, of course, creators, of educators, of them charging for their services at all, and then setting a profitable price point, setting a price point of value for you and your client.
There are some really common things that come up over and over again, that inner critic telling you, “Why would anyone pay for this? Why would anyone pay you?!” So we're going to get into the mindset side of pricing.
We're also going to talk about how your business model and service design will impact your pricing. This is because of course that number is going to be proportionate in general to the amount of value and transformation your client is getting.
And then we're also going to walk through some super practical parameters that will help you to hone in on your pricing zone, a bit of an indication as to where your pricing will probably land. This is going to be very much that aligned pricing for coaches and consultants, freelancers and course creators who are earlier on in their journey.
Because of course, when you're 10 years in and you've written the book and you've done the keynote speeches and you are well regarded, to be honest, you can charge what you want, right? We're going to keep it market informed. We're going to talk about a great starting point and where you can grow to in the first few years, up to five years of your journey.
But first, let's be honest, you will never be able to set your prices, make them really exciting and profitable for you and valuable for your client if you haven't done the mindset work, and if you haven't worked through these limiting beliefs and blockers, that you're not enough, that you're not worth this investment and that this investment that your client's about to make isn't actually that great or that transformative and all of those kinds of things.
Because those self-sabotaging thoughts are going to keep you playing small, not putting yourself out there, dreading sales. Whereas, if you actually backed yourself and what you had to offer 100%, you'd be so excited to meet these people who have a genuine need for your solution.
[00:08:33] Overcoming Mindset Blockers in Pricing
So let's talk about these big pricing mindset blockers holding you back. Now, probably the most common one I see time and time again is guilt. “I feel guilty charging people.” Or “What about the people who can't afford me? I feel selfish putting my price point at that level because there are so many people who can't afford me.”
I want you to zoom out for a second here and remember that in our business model, which is creating community, creating content, educating and then creating an incredible offer or experience or product that's going to help these people so much. Don't forget that 99% of our work is volunteer. Let me tell you what I mean.
Let's take my example of Badass Careers. I have got over 170,000 Instagram followers on Badass Careers. The total number isn't reflected on my Instagram account because I've archived posts and cleaned it out, but I've posted thousands of posts on that account. I have created thousands of hours of YouTube videos for free because of that 170,000 on Instagram and the other 30k-ish on YouTube I've had about 2,500 clients. That's just over 10 percent of my community.
There will be the majority of your community who will never buy from you. They love your tips. They use your resources. They use your education, your value. They get results. They make micro wins. They wouldn't be following along if you weren't helping them. So most people will never pay you. And so in that way, all of that time, those years that I've spent creating, researching, writing, giving, building, most people will never pay you for that.
And that's okay. That's part of your mission. That's part of your service to the world. That's part of your impact. That's part of your contribution. So it's actually a tiny percentage of your community that will pay you because there'll always be the people who want the best. There's always going to be the people who want the fastest, most personalized solution.
They want the answers, they want the A to Z roadmap, and they want it now. So actually, you've got to flip that mindset and say, first and foremost, you're actually at the service of the people who can't afford it. And then you've got a premium model for the people who can.
It's that kind of freemium business model like Spotify, where most of their listeners are listening to Spotify for free. They have access to their favorite music, they make their playlists, and so on and so forth, but they have to listen to ads. Most of their customers are on Spotify for free. The free version and the few that upgrade to the paid zero ads experience, allow that whole company to exist and allow all those people to have that free information.
What I also want to say here is that as noble as it is, we want to help people who can't afford our services because they're the people who need it the most in the career space. I'm thinking about people who have been out of work for a long time. I'm thinking about high school students who don't know what they want to do with their life. I'm thinking about all sorts of different kinds of people who would love to be able to have that kind of level of support.
What I can tell you is that you staying broke won't help anyone. The more successful you can be, the bigger your business can be, the more profitable it can be, and the more money you can generate.
If you're this good purpose-driven person, the more good you're going to be able to do. Because the more money you have, the more freedom you have, the more options you have, the more power you have. And if you are running a successful, lucrative business that allows you to free up your time, you get to volunteer.
You get to give high school students those courses for free. You get to do free workshops for the people who have just come out of prison and need to get into the workforce. You get to give more and more the more you have. And as much as sometimes I wish the world didn't work like that, it really does.
Money gives people options, it gives you freedom, and it gives you your time back. And money in the hands of good people does a lot of good. So that's also another way of looking at it.
And this may be a little bit controversial, but I've seen it time and time again with myself, with my own experience, with my clients. When people get things for free, they often don't take action or they stop showing up because they have less skin in the game. When people invest in something, they’ll be there, they'll show up and they'll get the results and they'll go hard.
When I started out, I was coaching people for free to get experience and to get testimonials. I've never had so many call cancellations, so many excuses, so many people not doing the homework because they didn't have the skin in the game.
So another way of looking at it as well is that people who invest have their skin in the game and they're going to show up and they're going to get the results that you've promised them. So that's just one way of dismantling that concept around the guilt.
[00:14:42] The Value of Investing in Transformation Over Information
Another big one that comes up time and time again around mindset blockers is, “How can I charge for information that you can find on Google?” Ahem. What we need to remember is that there's a massive difference between information and transformation.
There is an abundance of information. You can Google anything. I've got a course on how to build a standout resume. You don't think you can Google how to write a resume? There are millions of content pieces on that very topic for free online. So why would people buy my resume course? There are a lot of reasons, but again, there's a difference between information that you can't assess whether or not it's high quality, you can't assess whether or not it's relevant to you coming from multiple different sources, having to spend hours and hours waiting through it, not knowing if it will actually work versus transformation.
When people buy my course, they get my methodology, based on years of experience and thousands of clients from around the world. A to Z. It's streamlined. It's the answer in one place. And it works. It's been proven to work time and time again. I don't just give them information, but I explain how it might apply to their situation.
I've got examples for students, for career changes, for top executives. I've got ways to help make it so personalized to you. I don't just teach you how to write a LinkedIn headline, I teach you how to write a LinkedIn headline and then I give you 80-plus examples of real-life clients, depending on their different industries and professions.
I categorize it by different levels of seniority. I make it fast, easy, simple, and applicable to you straight away. Rather than wading through thousands of hours of free content, trying to figure out what will and won't work. You've got the answer in one place, lifetime access. You can go back over and over again.
And that's what my clients do all the time.
So it's the fastest, most relevant, time-saving way for them to get their desired result. That's why they would pay for that.
You would never create a course or a coaching program or experience or a product that just gives people information. You teach them how to use it, how to apply it. And in that example, we can even give you a review. So you get human eyes on that resume you've built.
You support people through it. You hold them accountable. You make the learning process fun, not overwhelming. And you simplify the complexity for them. That's worth money.
[00:17:52] Navigating the Complexities of Competing Services
Another big blocker is why would they come to a coach when there are other services available? For example, therapists or other service providers. And this makes me think of one of my clients who is working in the world of education; Early Intervention for Young Children with Autism. They were very blocked around the idea of why would parents come to me to have me coach them through how to identify autism, how to implement behavioral interventions that are going to allow their children to thrive and develop and really become the best versions of themselves as early as possible.
Aall of the research points to the fact that the earlier you can get started in these adaptations and these ways of working with these children, the better the outcomes for the child and for the family. But at the same time, there are speech-language therapists, there are government-funded initiatives, there are hospitals, there are doctors. Why would they come to me?
And for example, in this specific space, yes, there are doctors. But in a lot of countries, there are doctors, but they’re not actually allowed to diagnose children with autism until they're at least two years old. Or, there's so much bureaucracy in place that people get shrugged off, they get sidelined, and then they get told we need to wait and see.
Tthe way the brain works is that developmentally there are stop gates. And if you wait and see for too long, then critical windows of development are missed. There's a whole thing around yes, there's support, but what does that look like? What quality is it really? Is the quality there and what's the lived experience?
Even if they are having a meeting with a medical professional, one hour per week, they can have that and have your guidance and support. Why not both? Plus, one hour per week with a different kind of professional, it's never going to be enough because having, for example, speech-language pathology for one hour per week for this child, that's great. That's amazing. But what about all the other hours in the days and the weeks?
The parents, they feel overwhelmed. They feel helpless. They feel like passengers in their child's journey. And if you told me that you had a coach who could empower these parents, show them from a trained professional background, show them how they can be working every day in terms of sleep, in terms of play, in terms of interaction, in terms of speech, how they can be stepping up and being the best possible parents and guides and mentors for their own child in between the medical appointments. How much of a value add is that?
So don't see yourself necessarily as a replacement, but an and, right? Into a complex ecosystem of people's lives. Life coaching should be a part of your life and will never replace therapy. They're very different things. Therapy is about healing your past, and looking back to understand how you are today.
Coaching is taking you as you are today, no matter what you've been through, and focusing on your future. They're very different professions, so it's not about competing with these things, it's about them being who you are today.
[00:21:42] Addressing Common Pricing Mindset Blockers
Other mindset blockers might be things like feeling like a fraud or an imposter for charging at all. And to that I would say, you know what, until you have that proof that your methodology gets people results and that it's working. Scale up over time. Do what I did. Start coaching for free. Then charge a lower amount of money.
Do what you need to until you realise that people are getting results from your experience, from your guidance. Another thing that people think through is, this is such a luxury, especially in this economy, how could people possibly afford it? Think about all the people struggling right now.
What I would say on that is, don't project your money shit onto other people. I used to do this all the time. I grew up really broke, so I used to project my money shit onto other people. And I would have a 21-year-old sign up for my $3,000 USD program and think, should I offer them a discount? I feel so bad. They're so young. They must have a massive student loan.
Because that was my story. And this particular character that I'm thinking of was like, “Oh no, all good, I'll just get my dad to transfer me the money, he's a neurosurgeon.”
And it just made me realize obviously we don't all have neurosurgeon dads backing us, but some people do. Just because I couldn't have afforded that when I was that age, doesn't mean that they can't. What if she had created a really successful side hustle and was self-funded? What if she had been saving for the last three years and had built up a personal development fund like another student that I met had?
You don't know what's going on in people's lives. Some people have paid for my programs with their trust fund. Some people have paid for it by selling their old stuff on eBay. Some people have paid for it by saving up for it over two years. Some people have paid for it and it's actually not my business.
So stop worrying about other people's finances. Know in your heart that you're putting out so much value and so much education for free as it is for the people who genuinely can't afford it. And remember that actually, this isn't a negative thing that they're paying you.
I have saved for things I've wanted really badly throughout my life. I'm sure you have too. And what a joy it is when you get to buy that thing and when you get to invest in it. And for some people, it will be your thing, your course, your program. You have to realise that they see the value in that coaching for their life, and that's what they want to spend their money on right now.
Not the trip, not the iPhone. They want that, and they're allowed to want that, okay? People spend their money on what they want. You are not holding a gun to anyone's head, forcing anyone to invest in your thing. Let them have it and let them enjoy it.
And then the last mindset blocker I want to touch on is just this concept around who do I think I am to charge more than X person? Who do I think I am to charge more than a more established coach over there with 200,000 followers? And remember pricing is so much more than time in the game. There are people who have been career coaching for a lot longer than me who aren't as competent as me.
There are people out there with bigger audiences than me who aren't as competent as me. Or they have a really cool offer, but there's no one-to-one coaching, for example, and so if I offer one-to-one coaching, I will be a stronger candidate for someone who wants that level of support.
[00:25:27] Understanding Market Dynamics and Pricing Strategies
Just like in any market, whether it's a haircut, whether it's a handbag, you're going to have $200 price points, $20 price points, when it comes to handbags, $20,000 price points. There's a market at every price point. And depending on your market positioning, your messaging, and your offer, that's what will make up your price point. It actually doesn't matter what other people are up to because they've got a different business to you, a different strategy to you.
Maybe they're cheaper because they don't want to spend any time coaching. So they've got a really cheap $200 course with zero support, zero follow-up, and that's how they want to do their business. So you can't compare them and your $2,000 program when it's just so different.
[00:26:23] Mindset Shifts for Pricing Your Offer
One time I had a coach tell me, and I don't know if I fully agree with this, but there's something to it… They told me the difference between someone who charges low ticket, a lower, cheaper investment point, and someone who charges higher ticket is honestly their guts.
They can stand in their value, and because they believe it and they back themselves, other people will too. I do think it's more complex than that, but I do think there's something to that advice, which is that your ideal clients, the people who are ready, who want transformation, who want to take action, they might actually wonder what's wrong with your offer, if you're too cheap.
It can be really off-putting. Don't price yourself in comparison to other people. Stand in your value and stand in your transformation.
So that's a handful of the mindset blockers. As you can imagine, there are hundreds more, but hopefully. This dismantling of them, this challenging of them, has got you thinking about some of the things that you believe to be true, or assumptions that you're making, or excuses you're making, or ways that you're self-sabotaging yourself on this topic, and will allow you to play this game of asking yourself, is that true though?
Let's actually argue for a different perspective and see what comes out of that.
[00:27:48] Practical Guide to Pricing Tiers
Moving on to the more practical side of things, let's dive into some actual parameters, some actual things that will indicate where your pricing might be sitting. And obviously, keeping in mind that it depends on so many different things, but in general, let's give this a crack in terms of trying to give you a bit of a zone to turn to when you're thinking about how to get started with your pricing.
Now, the first parameter for me is around access to you and back-end fulfillment, how hard or complex or hands-on is it for you to actually deliver against your service? So when we talk about really low ticket entry-level products, usually digital downloads, they can be ebooks, they can be meal planners in a recipe book, they can be, for example, a career coach might sell a bunch of networking emails and message templates done for you.
Low ticket, we're really looking at that kind of up to $99 kind of mark, right? That first hundred bucks, because there is zero access to you, zero support, zero time involvement, and zero complexity in terms of delivering that. Someone will purchase it. It gives them value. It gives them help. It's enough for a sort of mini-transformation to occur if they apply the information.
But in terms of your involvement, it's pretty passive, right? You develop it once and then it's hands off. And so that will indicate around about how much you can charge for something like that.
This person, even though they are getting value, they're not getting any support from you, they're not getting any personalised guidance, and it's up to them to apply the information and stay accountable to themselves, which is really hard to do.
Moving more into mid-ticket, that's usually that $200-$500 range, we've typically got self-study courses. These are things like my interview course, for example, where I have put so much experience and knowledge and more templates and swipe files and supports and made this incredibly comprehensive course on interviews.
Now, there's still no personal involvement from me. I'm not supporting them. I'm not coaching them. I'm not on calls with them. However, the quality of information, the experience it took to pull together this course, and then for them to be able to take it and implement it, it's a simple enough event or experience to self-study and self-implement, but it's incredibly valuable.
If they can go from dreading interviews to feeling confident and seamless in interviews and that lands them a new job, how valuable is that?! So it's a bigger transformation compared to something like a $47 ebook on the 30 most popular interview questions and how to answer them. It really goes through the mindset and confidence piece of interviewing. It goes through the common core questions. It goes through the complex scenarios you might face and how to navigate those. It goes through every single aspect and different phases and types of interviews. It's just so much more comprehensive.
So that would be typically a self-study course price point that $200 to $500, $600, $700 mark that when it comes to higher ticket. So we're talking about a thousand to $3,000. That's usually when you start to see either group, hybrid or private coaching programs.
And these are typically, eight to 12 weeks in duration, but they could be anything from two months to six months to 12 months. But of course, in this model, they have more support. They've got more access either to you or to support coaches that you've hired and they have real-life human support, helping them to implement the materials, helping them to adapt, helping them to get over mindset blockers and challenges that they're facing, and helping them to really get oftentimes a bigger result.
So an example of that for Badass Careers would be the career glow-up program where it was a four-month program going through clarity, figuring out what you wanted out of your career, branding, resume, cover letter, LinkedIn, all the way through to landing.
So job search, networking, interviewing, salary negotiation. They got every single course that Badass Careers had to offer, plus the human support, the individual resume reviews, LinkedIn reviews, right? “Can you check out my LinkedIn headline? Can you review my response to this interview question?”
Personal support and advice. Depending on the price point, we'll really indicate how much support and hands-on help you do get so It might be one group coaching call per week or it might be one one-hour private call per week. It really depends again on where you're at and what your offer is looking And then you have that sort of super high ticket range, which is usually five to ten grand and above.
This is really for high level and this is either usually because you have access to an incredibly credible proven expert in a field in some kind of one to one or mastermind capacity. So the goal is very much access to this person who has achieved something exceptional. Or it's because you are a service provider and it's either done with you or done for you.
So for example, if you're an operations manager for someone's business, you might charge $3,000 a month, every single month, to dedicate a service five hours per week to helping a CEO to run their business. That would just be one example. And so you're very hands-on you're doing it for the person or with that person very closely.
So it's very much about high touch access, hands-on, and having a huge degree of your time involvement or your expertise sharing on tap, essentially. So that's a general indication of what we're looking at in terms of that low touch, low fulfillment, all the way through to high touch, very hands-on, very involved.
Now on this note, I don't want you to think that more is more, right? There's a difference between creating a course and thinking that you're putting more and more information into it and steps into it and modules into it, that it's better and it's worth more money. It's not. Best courses are streamlined and they get the person results as soon as possible.
So there's also something to be said for it's not about the more stuff, the more information. It's about it being more effective, more transformational, and more likely for them to end in the results that they desire, okay?
[00:35:07] The Impact of Audience Size on Pricing
The second parameter is very much your audience size. It's about how much traffic are you able to get.
Because, at the end of the day, think about how much money you want to make, right? Just say you want to make $100k per year. How many $100 e-books would you have to sell? To make a hundred grand, like 10,000, right? That is so much marketing you need to do. So many leads you need to generate. So much traffic to get those kinds of sales.
It's a completely different business model. Yeah, you're not doing the client work at the back end, but you best be marketing. I can tell you right now, if I had the challenge of making a million dollars based on a $100 product or some cheap downloadables or ebooks, I would struggle with my audience size.
That is immense without paid ads, which I'm really not a fan of because it's so out of your control that the pricing can change all the time. I'm a big fan of organic marketing and organic leads. Using content to sell that many eBooks, and that many cheat sheets, whatever you've created is immense.
And the crazy thing about online marketing and business is that they've shown time and time again, that if you create an evergreen funnel and evergreen sales funnel, and at the end you pitch a $200 course or a $2,000 coaching program, the conversion rate averages out at 2-3%. So 2-3% of people who signed up for that webinar, for example, will end up converting into being clients.
Isn't that crazy that there's a price point? So wide, $200 to $2,000, and the conversion rate's about the same. So that means, if you have a hundred people go through that evergreen funnel, two or three of them will buy your $100 thing, and two or three of them would buy your $1,000 thing. So if you're gonna do all of that effort marketing and getting leads and getting traffic and getting people through your funnel, it's just a no-brainer man. You'll make so much more money with a higher price point.
And yet, if you're starting out and you have a very small audience for now, you're much better off having a high ticket, personalized, hands-on, transformative offer at a high price point. You'll absolutely be able to make your 100k.
But a small audience, even an audience of a hundred thousand people, trying to make your $100k based on a cheaper product, you better have a damn good content machine in place, a very advanced evergreen system working for you because that would be a massive challenge, even for someone like me.
I would take on the challenge heavily, but it would be a big challenge. So if your audience size is smaller, you absolutely want to go higher ticket at first.
[00:38:20] Quantifying the Value of Your Offer
The third parameter to keep in mind is of course the value of the offer. Now people buy things and invest in things for both tangible reasons and intangible reasons.
If you think about that profile, that operations manager who helps to streamline workflows and processes and allows backends of businesses to run better and faster and free up people's time, especially for the CEO if I were to hire someone like that to help me streamline and scale my business, the tangible reasons I would hire them would be to free up my time, cut back the number of hours that I'm spending at work and that I'm spending doing low value add tasks, low-level tasks, not CEO tasks to better delegate to my team, to optimize my operations, to turn my vision and strategy into a roadmap that actually happens and to feel organized and in control, right?
That would be really tangible for me. The intangible reasons would be things like not burning out, not feeling so stressed, not feeling so overwhelmed, not feeling so alone, just peace of mind, just knowing that we're going in the right direction, actually feeling like a CEO, actually feeling like I'm working on the right things at the right time and clearing the shit out of my way so that I can actually make the impact that I was here to make.
So it can be hard sometimes when you know you've got an offer that doesn't necessarily have and from a very tangible perspective. If a CEO of an online business can free up enough of their time per week that they make one more sale into their coaching program per week because they're able to focus on sales now and proactive things, and just say their coaching program was worth $3,000 a week for 52 weeks of a year, that would be a value add of $156k into my business per year. Even if it's just a couple of hours per week that work frees up.
What about Badass Careers? If my clients invest $3,000 into Career Glow Up, and they land their dream job with a $50,000 pay raise, the $3,000 is a no-brainer. So is there any way to quantify how tangible the outcome can be of your work?
And sometimes you can look at that as in, what else are they spending their money on? Are they spending their money on self-soothing, self-care rituals that don't actually work long term, they're just a temporary band-aid? Are they spending money on other things that are trying to plug the gaps or trying to plug the holes but actually it's not really working for them?
Think about if you've got a program to do with self-confidence, and it has allowed one of your previous clients to land that promotion that they've wanted, finally go for it, and they got a $10k pay raise. Is there a way to quantify what this transformation can be like for your person?
Now, often we are, of course, working with the priceless. If you help women in their 50s to get their libido back, for example, after many years of just having no interest in sex, of course, you could take it far and be like they're avoiding divorce lawyers, or they're avoiding whatever. But sometimes there are things that are really hard to quantify.
There's a couple of things, and it's, really what is the value, because that just becomes priceless, right? What is the value of a happier relationship or a relationship that feels like it was distant and now they've got connection and joy and laughter again, or they're bickering less, giving them that time back, giving them that peace of mind back, giving them that confidence back.
That has a value, even if you can't put a number on it. You can articulate that value and then you can also let the market decide. Now, when you're starting out and you're having conversations in the DMS or sales calls around signing clients, you should be getting a no 50% of the time.
If every single person you speak to signs up, you're too cheap. So find that sweet spot where about half of the time people are like this is a bit more than I was wanting to invest or whatever it is. And half of the time people are like, “Yeah, you know what? It's a big investment, but I'm going to give it a go.” And that's a bit of a rule of thumb of where you want to get to after your first few months in business. You also let the market decide when you start selling out, right?
I remember selling out my first cohort of the Career Glow Up. It was $1,200 USD early bird or $1,500 USD full price. I wanted to sell 10 spots. I sold 15. Next time I put up to the $2,000, it sold out again. Next time, rather than put the price up again, I took away access to me. So rather than having, weekly small group cohort call, I was having three calls per week, I ran one per week. One big call for the entire group, even if it didn't work for their time zone.
And I rotated across the different time zones per week and kept it at the same price. Eventually, it was two calls per month. Then over time it scaled up and got adapted and I hired support coaches, but at some point it got to the point where it was $3,000 and I had a brilliant career coach who was doing weekly calls, but me, I only had one call per month and that was our least successful launch.
The market told me it's too high of a price point for that design, for that level of access. So I kept the design. And went back down to $2,500 and it sold really well.
So also at some point, the market will decide if you really find, the tangible concrete value, difficult to put your finger on. Also, there's going to be an interaction with the market that will help you as well. Some other things to keep in mind would be how rare the skillset is on the market.
For example, I cannot tell you how hard and far I searched for a web designer that could make a beautiful good looking Kajabi website. I use Kajabi for my website and for my courses and everything, and my gosh the designers out there are very blocky very stale. You can't imagine my joy when I found someone who had the aesthetic I was after and I was honestly like “Take my money! I don't care what it is. I don't care what the price point is!”
So also how rare the skill set is on the market or even looking at myself as a business coach, only 2 percent of female founders have ever cracked the million dollar year. And you can't just go and study this stuff. You can't study how to become a successful online entrepreneur, you have to learn from people who have done it. And that in and of itself, finding a good business coach is very hard. Now it's not about how many there are. There are a lot of business coaches out there. It's how many good ones there are.
Another big pricing principle that's going to help inform what you can charge for your offer is the rule of the vitamin versus the painkiller. Now, people love vitamins. They love taking vitamins. It makes them feel like they're doing something proactive and good for their health.
And you can take a vitamin that's better immunity, and boost your sleep. Lots of really cool promises, right? But how often have you bought a bottle of vitamins and stopped taking them, forgotten to take them because they're just nice to have, right? Versus something like a painkiller. If you have a headache, you want a painkiller and you will take that painkiller because you want to feel better so badly.
So there's always going to be an element of vitamin versus painkiller in your industry and your offer. For example, if your promise to me is that I'm a baby sleep consultant and you have been waking up to me every two hours for the last three months, you feel like a zombie, you're fighting with your partner, you can't take it anymore. And I'm promising you, with my methodology, your baby's gonna be able to sleep six-hour stretches. It's just “Name your price.”
Compare that to someone's offer that's “I'm going to help you become more self-aware. Or, I'm going to help you become a better critical thinker. It's awesome. There's a lot of benefits.” I'm sure you as the expert could list a huge plethora of benefits. But it feels like a vitamin. It's not urgent. It's not necessarily urgent. It's not necessarily a priority. It's not necessarily something that will really change my life and my day-to-day and how I feel about myself or how I feel about life over the course of the next few months.
Whether I work on it this year, next year, or the year after, it won't make too much of a difference to me. So you've also got to factor that into your pricing model as well. Is this a vitamin for people or is it a painkiller? And yes, every industry has painkillers, every single one.
[00:48:24] Navigating Your Pricing Journey
Now my parting thought for today is that it is normal that this will feel really scary.
Every single time you level up your pricing, it will feel like shit. And. Even in launching Badass Empires, I was working with my business coach, one-to-one, private coaching. I paid, as I said at the start of this episode, $27,000 for six months, two 45-minute calls per month. I had to get up at 5 am sometimes to make it work. It was intense.
In working with my coach, it was a really wonderful experience because, she's so different to me and I hired her for exactly those reasons. I hired her because she was able to make incredible money online working far less hours than I did at the time so I wanted to learn about that from her but at the same time, I very much realised that I was not only running a higher revenue business, but a higher profit, business.
I was also managing a more sophisticated business. I had things in place like content plans and evergreen funnels and team and culture and delegation. I had so many things down that she hadn't mastered yet. And I realised that, if you were to hire a coach based on experience, based on revenue, based on profit, based on sophistication, based on experience, I am absolutely at that level. I'm absolutely at the level of the coach that I hired.
And yet I'm not there yet where I can charge $2,7000 USD to work with me for six months, right? I kicked off my price point at $8,000 USD, which is a really great price point that feels really good to me right now, but I am absolutely capable of playing at the level of that higher level price point.
So why don't I, right? We all go through this. You'll never feel a hundred percent ready for that price. You get to start at a price point that feels good, feels fair, feels market-informed, and also feels a little bit wild to you. Maybe it makes you think, “Holy shit”, because if someone invests at that level you better believe I'm showing up for them.
At $8k I am there. They are my number one priority in my business, my client's success, my client’s happiness, I am living for that, okay? It's about your skin in the game too. And that feels good to me right now. And I know it sounds crazy, but one day, when the demand is intense, and when it's feeling like I give so much, and I have so much access to me, and I give so much expertise, and I've helped people build six-figure, multiple six-figure, seven-figure businesses, it will make sense for my prices to be a lot closer, if not in excess, of my coach's price point that I invested in.
So just want to say that this is a journey and I've decided to start at a place that feels comfortable for me, even if on paper, I absolutely could have “charged more” because that's how I feel. And until I get the proof and I've got a number in mind. Because that's what feels good to me right now. As the success stories are rolling in and as the testimonials come in, and as I'm building my confidence as a business coach, not just a career coach, I'm on that journey too. This never goes away, it never feels easier. There's always going to be a compromise and an internal dialogue you're having with yourself about what feels good, what feels right.
At the end of the day, I launched my Instagram account and within a week had booked out four months in advance and made over $100k and I have never ever positioned my services as a career coach at that price point before. So sometimes as well, it takes a little bit of self-belief and it takes a little bit of dash of trust from your market and your community and that pat on the back yeah, you know what, you are worth it.
It comes together over time. And this is why it will feel like a journey. And you will evolve over time. And your pricing will change over time. And when you find that sweet spot between your skin in the game, their skin in the game, your access, your fulfillment. That balance between how much marketing and traffic you want to generate versus the client work and the delivery, there'll be a moment where you're like, “Yeah, I'm in my sweet spot. This is where I want to play.”
So I would love to hear from you. Send me a message, send me a DM on Instagram, and tell me about what you're thinking for your pricing and what this episode has got you reflecting on. I'd love to understand your thinking journey on your own pricing design. And until the next episode, keep building that empire of yours. Stay very badass as you always do.
I'm looking forward to chatting with you next week.
