Time Value

Now, your time is your most valuable and limited resource in this business. Yeah, it's the one thing that so many nail techs consistently undervalue when setting their prices. So today we're going to look at how to properly account for your time in your pricing strategy. Because understanding that can literally double your income without working a single hour more. Now hear me out. When you truly understand that time equals money in your business, you, you will start making very different decisions about your service menu and about your pricing structure. Now, let me show you why this matters so much. Let's think about two common services that you might offer right now. So let's imagine a gel polish service and let's imagine it takes one hour and you're currently charging £35. And then let's imagine that you've also got a builder gel service and that takes you an hour and a half and you're currently charging for £40. Now on the surface, getting £40 instead of £35 seems better, right? But let's just break this down by your actual hourly rate. So for the gel polish, you are earning 35 pounds per hour. But for the builder gel, you are earning just 26 pounds, 67 per hour. Now that's a drop of over eight pound per hour. Or if you put it another way, you are giving up 24% of your potential income by filling your books with gel extensions at that price point. Now multiply that by five clients a day, five days a week and 50 clients a year. Sorry, 50 weeks a year. That is potentially £10,000 in lost income annually. Now this time valuation comes even more important when you factor in your fixed costs that we talked about previously. So your rent, insurance and other fixed expenses continue whether you are doing a one hour service or, or a two hour service. So longer services need to generate proportionally more income to be equally profitable. I see this pattern all the time. Nail techs will so often spend significantly more time on more complex services, but only charge marginally more for them. That creates a situation where your most basic services are actually your most profitable on an hourly basis. Now let's look at this from another angle. Say you have eight working hours in your day. You fit eight one hour gel polish services at 35 pounds each. That totals 280 pounds for that day. Or you could fit five gel extension services in at 40 pounds each, totalling just 200 pounds. So by filling your day with underpriced longer services, you're effectively losing £80 every single day. Now this isn't about working harder. And it's not about working faster. It's about making smart decisions about how you value your own time. Every service on your menu should be generating a similar hourly rate for you. If it doesn't, then you've got three choices. You either increase the price to reflect the time invested, you reduce the time somehow that it takes to perform the service, or you simply just remove it from your menu altogether because it's not profitable. Now, if you want to increase your efficiency, you can sometimes reduce your service times with the right training and tools. So. So investing in an E file and becoming really effective with it can cut down your gel removal and your preparation time dramatically. Or moving consultations online. Getting your clients to fill in an online form or something like that on your website before their appointment can save valuable in chair time instead of having to have a 10 minute consultation chat at the start of their appointment. Developing systems and routines for all of the services that you do can eliminate waste of time and movement. Just making waste what you do a little bit more efficient. So I'll give you an example. One of my students was spending two hours on a full set of builder gel extensions. Now, after analyzing her process, we identified that unnecessary steps and inefficient techniques were being used. So with a little bit of training in E file and some practice, she was able to reduce her timing down to 90 minutes without compromising on the quality. In fact, she actually felt like her nails lasted a little bit longer with once you started using an E file. So that immediately increased her hourly rate by 33%. But efficiency can only take you so far. So sometimes the answer is simply just that your prices need to reflect the time required. And sometimes it just isn't possible to go any faster. And that's okay. But just make sure that you charge for your time. If your gel extension service takes 50% longer than a gel polish, it should logically cost at least 50% more. Now, looking at your service menu this way might reveal some surprising insights. You might discover that some of your services that you've been offering for years are actually costing you more money once you factor in the true value of your time. This is where the tough business decisions come in. It might make sense to remove certain services that you feel you can't price appropriately for the time they take. Maybe those intricate nail art designs that take an extra hour, but clients resist paying significantly, significantly more for just need to be reconsidered. Maybe those express services that require the same setup and cleanup time as full services, but generate less revenue could be restructured. Now I've seen nail techs completely transform their income by simply eliminating their least profitable services and filling those slots with their most profitable ones. I done it myself once when I removed acrylics from my treatment menu and and suddenly it became so much more profitable. Sometimes doing less can actually earn you more. You don't need to be the nail tech that offers everything to everyone. Now I know you might still have that thought of me. Clients won't pay more for these higher prices. But remember what we have discussed about value perception. When clients truly value what you provide, they will pay prices that reflect the time, skills and quality that you deliver. It's about finding the clients who appreciate what you offer and and marketing to those people rather than undercharging everyone. Now, the current income calculator inside this module will allow you to calculate the actual hourly rate that you are earning for each service after accounting for both your fixed and variable costs. This is going to reveal which services deserve more of your time and which ones might need reconsideration. Remember, every hour of your work and day is valuable and it's limited. Each appointment should contribute equally to your income based on the time it takes when you start making decisions through this lens. This is when you will build a more profitable, sustainable business without necessarily working longer hours. Your time is your most precious resource. Price it accordingly.