Christina Hall argues that business owners—especially solopreneurs—often believe they must add more work to justify price increases, but the real justification should be the value of what they deliver rather than sheer output. She emphasizes that perception and presentation (e.g., appearing experienced) affect clients’ willingness to pay higher prices and that demonstrating skill-level value is sufficient to command higher rates.
Chapters
If you're a business owner and you want to raise your prices, but you think the only way to do that is to add more work to your plate, as in putting in more into an offer or adding on more to a service in order to justify raising that price, you are wrong. Let me tell you why, but first I want to explain why you think this is necessary. As business owners, especially like solopreneurs, we constantly are thinking that our output is the only thing that's justifying our income. But the truth is, what should be justifying our income is the value of what we are outputting. If you know that you have the skill level to deliver to your clients what they are looking for when they come to you, that is truly enough. But if your clients are failing to understand that it's highly, highly likely that you do not look worth your prices. If you have 20 years under your belt, but you look like someone who only has a year under their belt, they are not going to pay you 20 year prices. And that's just one example of how our brains are constantly processing information away to justify what we're about to put out. Honestly.