The fear of pricing your work~

Sam. Hello and good evening, everyone. I'm Katie McManus, your practical business coach. And new business owners work with me so they can leave their corporate 9 to 5, replace their 6 figure income by doing work they love. And tonight I want to talk about the fears that new business owners tend to have when it comes to figuring out their pricing. And this is a big one, right? Because if you underpriced, you're not going to get paid what you're worth and you're probably not going to get paid enough to live on. And it can be the death toll or the death knoll of your business. So figuring out your pricing is going to be really important. But we can't figure out your pricing and price you fairly if you, you have all this like, mental garbage going on if you're really stressed out about what people are going to think of you if you think any of this stuff. So let's talk about the fears that hold people back from pricing themselves fairly and how you can get past them, how you can, like, logic your way into pricing yourself fairly. And full disclosure, I am going to be pushing you to my five day challenge, the build you'd business five day challenge that starts on Monday, day four. I literally walk you through how to figure out your pricing. Okay? So if you don't know your pricing, if you have an offer, if you know how to speak to your clients and all that stuff, but you don't know how to price your work, guess what? You should sign up for that challenge because I'm going to show you exactly, exactly how you can price yourself so that you can make enough money doing work that you love. I am going live on Instagram, on YouTube, on LinkedIn, and over here on my phone on TikTok. And for some reason, however, the lighting is on my phone. I look a little orange. How do I fix this? That is so weird. Oh, I just like my own life. That's not what I meant to do. Hold on. Yeah, I look a little like, like I had a little too much fun with the self tanner. Yeah. No idea. No idea how to fix it? Nope. No clue. We're just, we're just a little tan on the, on the iPhone. Anyway. Okay, so let's talk about where people start when they try to figure out their pricing. And this is the part that, you know, you probably think you're like, so smart and you figured it out and like, this is the way you're going to figure out how you price yourself for your services. And everyone starts here and everyone gets it wrong. Okay? So if you're starting here and you are freaking out about this, you're not alone. Hi, Mark. Welcome. Mark Ziegler, welcome. Hello, Ukaz. Welcome. You're not alone. This is where everyone starts, and it's this. Everyone looks at how much they made in their last job. Everyone. Everyone looks to see what their hourly rate was for when they did this work in a corporate setting. And they try to figure out, like, what this would look like as a package. And like, yeah, working in a corporate job where you make $75 an hour and you're paid $75 an hour for 40 hours of work. Like, let me just pull up my little calculator here, and let's do the math, because typically that'll be a decent chunk of change. Okay, so let me see. So $75 times 40 is $3,000 a week. Let's do that. Times 50, 50 weeks. If you're taking two weeks vacation, that's $150,000 a year. That is decent money if you are working a job. But what we don't take into account when we work for ourselves is it is very rare that we're going to be doing 40 hours of PA paid work. Right? So if you were to charge $75 an hour, but you're only doing 10 hours of work a week, that's not enough. Okay? That is absolutely not enough to live on. Let's just do the math. 75 times 10 is 750. You know, which, I mean, like, I used to make that in a week when I worked in restaurants and I waited tables. That would be three nights of work. Let's do that. Times 50. That is $37,500 for the year. I don't know about you guys, but I can't survive on that. And I don't know many people in the United States who could survive on that. That is the poverty level. No one is supporting themselves and thriving and being able to buy property and living their best life on $37,500 a year. All right? So when we base our pricing on what we've made in corporate jobs before, what we end up doing is signing ourselves up for hardship. And we don't want that. Right? Because you are so fucking talented. You are so talented, and you have so many gifts to give the world. And if you underprice yourself, if you don't charge enough, the work that you do, what's ultimately going to happen is you're not going to make enough money to live. And when you don't make enough money to live. You're going to have to quit doing this work, which means you're going to have to abandon clients who've decided to work with you because you can't afford to continue working with them. And no one wants that. Hi, Howard. Hi, Jules. Hi, Mary, Eva. Hi, Lisa. Hi, Susanna. Welcome. Hello everyone. And that's not right. That's not right for you. And that's not right for your ideal clients, the people who really want to work with you. Great. On vet. Oh my gosh. Logging out and back in for my business business account. It was so great to see you. And hi, Alan. Welcome. Hello. I'm just gonna keep checking Instagram because the comments for some reason on Instagram don't come through the stream yard. So I have to like constantly be looking at different things. Hi, Zach. Hi, Bulldozer Rob. Hi, Maureen. Welcome. Hello. Yeah, so it's really, really important when we start our businesses to really, really figure out what pricing we can do that is going to allow for us to live a really good life. And that's going to be something that our clients will pay. Now a lot of times when we think about what our pricing should be after we get past the phase, we're like, well, this is what I made in my last job. And so I should just charge that here and realize the math just doesn't math there. We then go to the next question of, okay, well, what am I worth? And this is a big existential question for people, right? Because like, what are you worth? Right? Like what is your worth as a human being? Tell me, tell me. While you do the mental math on that, you know, how do you do the mental math on your worth? Like, what is that based on? And oftentimes, like, this is where you start getting all, all of the shadow work out of this little trunk that you keep hidden in your personality. And you have to start going to therapy because you start realizing, oh my God, I have really low self esteem because I don't see myself as worth that much, right? Because like, there's so much that goes on when someone has to like assess themselves to be worth an amount of money. For one. Like there was a war that was fought that over 150 years ago, I think. And you can't assign a price to a human being. No, you can't. That's illegal for two. Like, worth to who, right? If you spoke to your mother, if you spoke to your children, if you spoke to your partner, if you spoke to your best friend, what amount would they put on you as a human being, I bet you it's going to be a lot higher than you would ever put on yourself. Right? Hi, Chris. Hi, Maggie. Hi. Shoe king. Oh, I do love shoes. The real Scytogs. Welcome. And Whitbit. Welcome. Hello. And let me just check in 302 notary service. Oh, that's you, Yvette. Hi. Welcome back. Anyway, yeah, so like, your worth as a human being, like, doesn't is neither here nor there, right? Because here's the thing. When you think of this, like, you could be the absolute shittiest human being in the world. You could be the scum of the earth. You could be someone who ruins lives, who is just so toxic to be around. Like, has really bad like, hygiene. No one wants to spend time around them. And yet you could absolutely be the penultimate engineer for like shipping vessels, right? And like shipping vessels, like you are the one that comes in, that makes shipping vessels that much more efficient in going from one side of the ocean to the other side, you know, bringing in billions of dollars a year for that shipping company, right? How much is that person worth? How much is their work worth? And I hope at this point you're kind of like a light bulb is going off like this. If this shitty person can have that big of an impact monetarily for their clients, maybe pricing is not actually based on how much I'm worth as an individual, it's actually based on how much the results are that I get my client, right? And that's what we really want to think about. We want to think about what are the results that we get our clients worth, right? So for instance, like, if I think about what I do for my clients, you know, I can think about, you know, any number of clients. So like, I have a client right now who just signed a consulting gig where she's making $650 an hour, right? In about three months of work, she will make over a hundred thousand dollars just, just in doing fractional work, right? That's it. And she's, you know, loving the work. She also does some coaching. She also does some of this stuff. She, she's been working with me for a while, right? And like the value of my work has helped her get there, right? If I only charge like $2,000 for her to figure that out, like that's undercharging. Obviously I'm not going to charge a hundred, a hundred thousand dollars for her to work with me because she's just starting a business. Like she, you know, when she started with me she was just starting, and of course, she's building and building and building. I'm not going to charge everything that she would make, right? But, like, I do have to charge my worth for the results that I get her, right? The result that she gets through working with me. I have another client who, you know, went from making about $2,000 a month with their copywriting business. They didn't want to give up their job because they loved their 9 to 5, but they did want to make enough so that they could retire their wife, who hated her job. And, you know, in about a year and a half, they built from making $2,000 a month to making $150,000 a year, working only 12 hours a week in their side hustle copywriting job. That is an amazing result. And you know what? Like, you have to charge. That's what you're giving your clients. You have to charge accordingly so people are invested in getting those results. Hi, Baron. Hi, Lawrence. Welcome. Hi. F. Wa. I love that. Anyway, yeah, so, like, you have to figure out what are the results worth when you work with your clients. What are you helping them with? Let me see. Braze, Mom. Jay. What? What's my worth? Oh, gosh. Are we gonna. We're gonna dig into some family drama here, Yvette. Oh, gosh, can't wait for it to unfold. But, like, notary services, you know, like, let's go into that event. So nerve services, like, yeah, sure, like, there's a standard rate that goes for notary services. But, like, is there a convenience level that you give? Is there, like, an extra service that you make it easier for people to sell houses faster? You know, there are so many things that go into it that ups the value of the results you give. I'm trying to think of another example here. Um, you know, and the other part about pricing that we, like, don't look at when we're trying to figure out what we should be pricing our work at is like, what's. What's the minimum that your clients are going to see you as good quality? Right? Because oftentimes when we start businesses, we're like, well, I'm brand new. I should have baby prices and just get a few clients in at this, like, low rate. And then once I have some, like, testimonials and proofs that I can do this and blah, blah, blah, blah, then I'll raise my rates. Well, ultimately, what that ends up doing is you attract clients who, like, don't expect you to be that good. And because they don't expect you to be that good. They don't take you as seriously as they should. And so they're not as invested in the work. And so they don't show up the way that clients who would pay more would show up. And so you end up getting clients that like, are happy with you, but they're also not your ideal clients. And also they didn't really get the results that like the big payers will get because I mean, here's the thing, people associate quality with price. Hi, Legacy wealth. Welcome. And hi Lucy. And hi Jose and hi butcher dude. And Ruben Castillo. Welcome. So if you're undercharging for your work, what you're basically telling a bunch of people out there is, hey, I'm actually not that good at what I do, so you should go see someone else. I can't tell you how many times. And I charge a lot to work with me one on one. If someone wants to work with me one on one, they get unlimited access to me pretty much whenever they need. Like they have my cell phone number, they can call me at any point, they can text me. I'm basically holding their hand and helping them build the business from the ground up. Right. But for that access, they need to invest a lot of money. And I can't tell you how many times I've talked to people who are looking for a business strategist or a business coach. And we get on the phone, they're like, full transparency. You're not the only person I'm interview really want to find the right business coach. And I'm like, okay, great. My answer is always this. You need to find someone that you trust. You have to find someone who you know is going to be the right fit for you in this process. Because if at any point you lose trust with this person, you're not going to get what you need out of that relationship. Right. And I can't tell you how many times I've had that first call. They say, this is amazing. I'm really interested in this. I really like you. I still have to go and talk to these other people. I'm assessing them to potentially be my coach as well. And we set up a follow up call and in that follow up call they come back to me and they're like, okay, decided I want to work with you. And here are the reasons why. And top amongst those reasons, it's because I was charging the most of all the coaches that they spoke to. Because when they, when they looked at all the options and they looked at all the coaches that they were thinking about working with. What they really wanted to see was like, who's going to give me the permission to charge more? Who's going to push me to charge as much as I possibly can for the work that I do? And because they are able to do it for themselves. Right. When you charge more money, people assume you are the better one at the job. Now, of course, you have to actually be good at what you do. You can't just go willy nilly and be like, I charge this much. I'm the best. You have to actually be really good at what you do. But chances are you are really good at what you do. You just don't have the confidence around it yet. Right. And that comes with time. That comes with working with clients and getting them results and all the things. There's a stair rate and administrative cost plus travel expenses. I don't get many clients from certain places because they're tire kickers, not looking for a service provider. Yeah. You know the cool thing when we charge more than others is we actually scare away the tire kickers because, like, they are able to see right away, like, oh, no, never mind. That's not going to be the person for me. But yeah, like, figuring out your pricing is probably one of the most vulnerable things you're going to do as a business owner. And it's never going to stop. Right. Because, like, you're going to have reach, like portions of your business or of your life cycle in your business where you have to raise your rates. And you have to revisit this conversation now. Next week in my build your business in five days challenge starts on Monday. Again, the link to register is if you're watching this on Instagram or on TikTok, it's in the link in my bio. If you're watching this on YouTube or on Insta. I'm sorry. Or on YouTube. YouTube or YouTube. YouTube or LinkedIn, then go to the link that I shared in the description of this live and you can register there. On day four of that challenge, I'm actually going to show you my exact formula for how you figure out what you charge. Not only that, but later that evening, after you get the very clear instructions about how to do this, I'm going to hop in a zoom room with you as part of our daily coaching and I'm going to help you figure this out. I'm going to coach you through the answer you got. I'm going to give you feedback. I'm going to give you a reality check. If you're charging too little or in the very, very low probability that you're charging too much. I will check you on that. But honestly, like you, you being successful in your business, a big factor in this will be you charging the right amount from the very beginning. Okay. If you don't charge the right amount from the very beginning, you can actually do them yourself. To failure. I know it sounds really dramatic, but it's very true. Because if you don't make enough to support yourself, then you're not going to do it. Let me see. I don't get many clients from certain places. Oh, like Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's. I love that you're bringing this up, because not every social media platform is going to be the right place for every single business. Hi. Ticking, tick and. Oh, my gosh. Tikkuna takuna lana. Hakuna matata. Hello. How are you? Welcome. I'm sorry, I can't pronounce your username. I'm probably putting the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllable anyway. But, yeah, like, the beauty, though, when you have the right pricing, when you know exactly what your work is worth and you're able to get on a sales call with someone and you're able to communicate it, and you're like, wow, that's expensive. But you know what? I see why this is worth every single penny. Sign me up. That is the magic. When you figure out your pricing, you get it right. That is when you start attracting only your ideal clients to come and work with you. That is when you, like, actually get to build the freedom and flexibility to live your life on your own terms. Because, oh, my God, my dog is licking my knee. Hello. What are you doing? What are you doing? You want to be on the live? Luna, you want to be on the live. Come here. You want to get up, up, up. Touch, Touch. You want to say hi to everyone? Touch. Ready? Oh, no. You come here. Come here, grouchy goose. You got to say hi to everyone. Oh, my God. Hi. Oh, thank you. You smell like sardines. Did you have sardines? Is that good? What do you want? Yeah, do you want to tell people about how they should price their work? Luna has a lot of wisdom with this. You done? You don't want it. You don't want to be part of the live anymore. I get it. No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not giving you anything right now. I'm working. I'm working. I'm talking to people on the interwebs. You can't see them but they just saw you anyway. This is like one of my favorite things of working from home is that I get to, you know, spend all my time with my dog. Hi, Rosemary. Hi. The running fairy. Hello. Welcome. I'm just gonna check in with everyone. Yeah, okay. So, yeah, but once you have your pricing set up and it's proper, you're gonna attract your ideal clients, you're going to be able to make enough that you get to make the rules in your life. You can work from home, you can like have your dog jump up on you and kiss you on a live. Whatever it is that you want to incorporate in your life, you get to decide that when you make enough money to do that. That is the magic of this, right? And there's something that happens when you start charging what your work is worth. Hi Patty. Welcome. And you see people coming to work with you and they are so excited to pay it. And when they work with you, they are just getting everything out of it and they're so excited every time they log in with you. And there's something that happens to your self esteem, there's something that happens to your confidence. Like you really start embodying this person that you're becoming. You become this powerhouse version of yourself and there's no going back from that. You know, even if at some point you decide, actually I don't really want to run a business, actually this is not the right fit for me. When you go back to find another job or in any other endeavor you might do, you go into those conversations knowing at a core, bone deep level just what your work is worth. Right? And you can advocate for yourself in ways that you could never do before, before you did this kind of work. Anyway, with that, I hope you'll be joining me for the challenge that I'm doing next week. Again, it's the build your business in five day challenge. If you want to sign up for it on TikTok and Instagram, go to the link in my bio. If you're watching this on LinkedIn or on YouTube, then go to the link that I shared in the description of this live and register there it is, completely free. Every single morning you're going to get an email lesson from me in your inbox. Breaking down. Here's like what you need to do and here's a really simple exercise that you can do in five minutes or less to get this part of your business done. We're literally going to set up the foundation of your business in five days. And then every evening at 5pm around this time? Well, the half hour before, you're going to be hopping into a zoom room with me with a group of people and I'm going to be giving you free coach coaching on exactly what you need to do. I'm going to be giving you feedback on the exercise that you did earlier in the day so that you're not just like sitting there being like, I did the exercise. I have no idea if this is right. You're going to know. You're going to have the exact feedback and by the end of the week you are going to have a very clear cut, simple action plan for what you need to do to go and get your first five high paying clients. Okay? That is my promise to you. Anyway, I hope to see you in the challenge next week. For right now I do have to go and deal with my dog. She was coming to tell me that she probably needs to go out. So I wish you all an amazing evening and I will be going live again tomorrow on Friday at 5pm So I will look forward to seeing you there. All right, thank you to everyone who joined. I can't even list everyone over on TikTok, so I'm not even going to try because I will miss people and I don't want anyone to be offended. Oh, and Edvin, welcome. Even Gabriel Demoris. Hello, welcome. And then to Yvette and Tick Tikunilana and to Alan and everyone over on Instagram. Thank you for being here. I hope this is useful and if you have any questions, you know where to find me. Just shoot me a DM. Anyway, have a great night everyone. I'm Katie McManus, your practical business coach and I will talk to you all very soon. Bye.