pricing__ feb 15, 2024 002_riverside

The podcast discusses the online coaching, online course, and spiritual industries. The host shares her own experiences and offers resources on how to do business in a more genuine way. The focus of this episode is on pricing for service-based businesses. The host criticizes the common practice of basing prices on personal financial goals, and instead suggests considering the going rate for similar services. She emphasizes the importance of knowing how much you need to make per hour and not undercharging. The episode concludes by encouraging service-based business owners to research the market and set prices accordingly. Welcome to the Why Don't You Say Something Podcast, where we are doing exactly that, saying something about the online coaching, online course world, and spiritual industry, because we're all wondering what the F is going on. I'm Eva, a former yoga teacher and online business strategist who slowly started to question some of the things that I was learning and teaching myself. I've now come to see the light, and I'm sharing those learnings with you here. In this podcast, we're going to break down some of the red flags we see, hear people's stories and experiences, and offer resources on how you can do business in a bullshit-free way yourself if you are in business. Heads up as you're listening, I swear a lot, so be careful of your kiddos' ears. Hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to today's podcast. It is a rainy Wednesday evening here in California. The weather has been a-raging. We've had storms. We've had power going out. It has been a wild ride. I thought, hmm, I've not made a podcast in a long time, and I thought, hmm, hmm, about one of the stupidest things that we see out there around pricing. I thought this is just the time to deep dive and tell you all about it. If you've been around in the girl bossing coaching world for a while, you definitely have probably heard the worst advice ever in the whole wide world about how to price yourself. That's what I want to talk to you about today. I'm going to give you something that you can do instead, some good guidelines to do instead. In general, when I give these guidelines, the people who follow my account, they tend to be people who might be, quote, under-earners, as in you may not be earning as much money as you need to or as you'd like to. It tends to be people who might avoid money or avoid charging higher prices. Why? Because people tend to go that way because if you were someone who was like, wow, $60,000 an hour, and I feel great about that, you probably wouldn't resonate with my account. You know what I mean? People tend to follow what we're talking about here who are a little more passive and careful and possibly under-earners with money. I'm going to talk about money and pricing from that lens because I think there's some really good things to look at from that lens. When we talk about pricing and we talk about, hmm, how should you price yourself? We look at some of the horrible, douchey, like what in the world, things that are taught out there. What I'm talking about today is service-based people, service-based businesses. That means maybe you are a massage therapist. Maybe you're a website designer. Maybe you're an accountant. Maybe you're going to clean homes. Maybe you are going to go over and coach with somebody, and you are trained and qualified and doing good work as a coach, but those are service-based businesses. You're not offering a product online as far as buy my hair scrunchie. That's a product business, and that's not what I'm talking about today. When you have a product-based business, it makes so much more sense to price yourself, I think, and I'm actually no expert in that. But if you have a scrunchie for sale, you're probably going to look at what are the other scrunchies go for online. You wouldn't work to say, wow, I believe my scrunchie is worth $20,000. Wow. It's harder to be more delusional when you have a product-based business, I think. Maybe. But it's a lot easier, hint hint here, to be de lulu when you are a service-based business owner, especially when you are the person who's providing the service. Especially easy to get your mind whipped up and charge your worth and just map things out in a way that makes absolutely no sense but benefits you and is pretty off for the client. So that's kind of what I'm talking about today. I'm talking about people who are service-based business owners, which is what my jam is and what I can speak to a lot. So in general, I mean, when you look at how to price your services, I think one of the very best things that you can do as a person, as a human in this world who is dabbling with money, who's got the money in the wallet, who has a card, who is in this world with the money, like as all adults are, what I mean, it's really good for you to know how much do you need to make an hour. As in, like, if you were to break it down hourly, the minimum that you're going to need to make an hour to be able to live in the world. So that means if someone offered me a position and said, hey, you're going to work full-time and it's going to be $14 an hour, you might say to yourself, well, wow, that sounds cool, but holy shit, $14 an hour would probably be not enough to live on as far as how much you need to make a year, what your expenses are. So I really, really, really encourage you to get a grounded feel for how much you need to make an hour so that you can know what you can provide as a person and make sure you're not undercharging from there. And like I said, most people tend to be underchargers who are following here rather than like wildly overchargers, but it definitely can go both ways. So for example, let's say you wanted to make $80,000 a year. That would come to about $54 an hour, and that is after benefits and after other things coming out of that money. So if you need to make $80,000 a year, then that would be $54 an hour. So I'm saying this to the people who are maybe healers or offering everything for free. And yo, when you look at where all the hours in your day went and you realized, well, oh, I'm not making enough because I gave away this many hours when really, if I have 40 hours in the week of working time, I would need to be making $54 an hour in order to pay my bills. So really good to check in with yourself on that and do some math to understand what you can't go under because that is just really good to know. Now, when we talk about, ooh, okay, all right, okay, Eva. So I've gotten how much you need to make an hour. Maybe let's throw it out there. You need to make $80,000 a year. That's $54. Or maybe you're going to make $60,000 a year. That's $40 an hour. So you can't be doing no $15 for free reading kind of thing when at the end of the day, you're not going to be able to buy food. All right. So it's good to get grounded in that way and support yourself. And this will also help you check in to not get totally de lulu. Now, you've got that in your mind. Put that bee in your bonnet and you think, all right, Eva. I have a health coaching offer that you're putting out there. And let's say it's great. You are qualified. Maybe it is three sessions to work with people in some kind of certain way. And you're wondering, well, how the heck do I price this? How the heck do I price this? And when we look at the horrible stuff that is taught in the online business world, in the coaching world, let me yell on my soapbox here and tell you that it is not up to your clients or the people who are buying your course to give you what you need to make a month in order to cover your bills. It's not up to them to pay your freaking bills. And what I mean by that is a lot of people are taught, hmm, okay, I need to make $80,000 a year. So let me see, how many clients do I want to work with? I think five. Okay, so $80,000 a year divided by five clients. Okay, I actually have a calculator here in front of me. $80,000 divided by five. That is $16,000. Wow, that is the price of your program is $16,000. And that is not what you want to do. And holy mother, that is what everybody teaches people to do out there. Like straight up, actually. We see people say, here's another example. You want to make $10,000 a month. 10K, 10K, ooh, 10K. Let's say you want to make $10,000 a month. And they might ask, well, how many hours of work do you, how many hours a week do you want to work? And let's say they say five hours. I want to work five hours a week. So then they say, all right, you want to make $10,000. And you want to work five hours a week. Well, $10,000 divided by five, $2,000 a month per client. Boom, that's what they tell people to do. This is the insane math that I calculated for myself and tried to put on my sales pages and wondered why the F, I did not want to even remotely tell anybody about it. Now, mind you, I never really overcharged people. I always erred on the side of undercharging. But I never said $2,000 a month in any way, shape, or form. But we see people do that. Okay, it makes no sense to do the math like that. Now, imagine if a plumber did this to you. I would be very, very mad. Imagine if a plumber asked himself, hmm, you know what? I want to work one job a week and I want to make $10,000 a month. So, well, wow, one job once a week, that will come to $2,500 to fix your leak, ma'am, person, whoever. I would be pissed if they said, I'm basing how I'm going to fix that pipe based on the vacations that I want to take or how much that I want to make. I would be pissed. And I would say, hey, you're a crook. You're a wackadoodle. Why? Because I could go and look on Yelp or wherever people look these days and go and check what the going rate is for a service like that. And so, hint, hint, that is the world that we want to get into when we look at pricing our services. So, now we've hit on how much you need to make like a year. Good to get grounded in your numbers. How much do you need to make an hour? Good to get grounded in your numbers. And what not to do to make some sideways thing up about the kind of lifestyle you want and then just divide that by the clients. No. So, Eva, what should we do instead? Oh, what do we do instead? Instead, we are going to ask ourselves, what is the going rate for this? What is the going rate for this? Let's say, for example, you are a private yoga teacher. All right. You maybe meet with people on Zoom or maybe you meet with them in person and you are there one-on-one helping them with the private yoga. So, you could ask yourself, what is the going rate for this? And so, you can check, take a Google, take a Yelp look around. What do other professionals offering the same thing charge? You can look at their websites, get a ton of quotes by looking around online. What do yoga teachers charge for privately online when it's just on Zoom? Do their prices change? What do yoga teachers charge in person? You could also look around in different parts of the world or for us, for me, in different parts of the United States. What is the going rate for this? And you can also look at what are other similar professionals charging? So, the somewhat similar professionals in any way, shape, or form, it would be very good to look at what does a massage therapist charge? What do they charge for in a spa? What do they charge to go to somebody's house? Good to know. What does a therapist charge or a mental health counselor? What do they charge? When you've heard me rant about this on the internet a lot, they have like, I mean, eight years of schooling over like, hey, I had an idea to become a coach, man, right? What are they charging as a professional in their field? What does a physical therapist charge? Those are other people that I might look at to help me get grounded in my pricing. So, the question is, what is the going rate for this? And what are other teachers or similar professionals charging? Okay. You can also ask yourself, how many hours will it take you to do this thing? Like, for realsies, for realsies. And this is also why I mentioned how much you need to make an hour. Because let's say you're a yoga teacher and someone says, hey, will you come to my house and teach yoga? And you say, uh, sure. Okay, it's $30. Now, that is way too low and not going to work. But let's say it's actually 45 minutes to drive one way. You set up, you chat. Oh, then you start your session. Then it's another 45 minutes to drive the other way. And maybe it ends up being like, three hours of your time. So, you need to know in your calculations, how much you really need to be compensated an hour. And therefore, how many hours is it going to take you to do the thing, to do the whole thing, like really? When I first started making websites for people, I was cuckoo. I thought, oh, yeah, it's so quick. It's so quick to do. But I seriously need to factor in all the hours of email, collecting content, scheduling calls to review things, edits back and forth and time to design and things like that. I had to really track my hours and see, how long does it really take me to do this? Which is good to do. You also got to factor in, when you look at your pricing, what are expenses and taxes? Like, if you got $100 for a session, oh, taxes in the States might take up to 30%. And I am no tax professional. I am no money queen here in that way. Money queen, what? I don't know anything about taxes, really. I do know you're supposed to pay them. So, that is the point here, is you also need to say, ooh, if I charged $100, if I had to set aside 30 for taxes, and then I had to set aside some more for any other expenses, well, hot dang, how much is it really? All right. So, another way to get grounded in the understanding of how much you're really going to take home, okay? Take home. And my last little tidbit here is, when you look at your pricing, you don't want to be the lowest. If someone was searching for a yoga teacher, private yoga teacher, and they saw the going rate was $100, and they saw someone was charging $30, they're going to think, oh, like, my mind just went to, oh, gosh, are they going to, like, steal an organ? Are they going to cut an organ out of my body? I mean, that's how crazy I am. That's where my mind went. If your money is too low, if your price is too low, they're going to think you might steal an organ from their body, okay? So, you don't want to be so low that someone's like, what is going on and really doesn't want to deal with you. And you don't want to be so high that you are out of your mind and off of your rocker to just think, like, money's fake, money's monopoly money. We charge my worth, and everyone just jumps and leaps in the quantum field. It makes absolutely no sense to be priced so high and so far off from other professionals in your field. It makes no sense. We don't want to do that at all, at all. And quickly circling back, it is kind of tricky to look at what other professionals charge because let's say you had a health coaching offer, and you look at what other health coaches charge. I mean, hot dang, you could find, you could close your eyes and, you know, just press a random button on Instagram and land on someone who's charging, like, $7.77 for an hour. For what? For what? So, when you are comparing your pricing, you do got to look at people who are in the land of reality and have good, fair, standard pricing and find yourself a good spot in that. Don't want to be too low where it's creepy. Don't want to be so high that it's like, what are you talking about? And also, they tell you to price yourself so high, they, air quotes, the, like, mean, bad advice givers, they tell you to price yourself so high, and it's like you have no one knocking on your effing door. Like, you have no one knocking on your door. What if you said it's $90 for an hour? Fine. And you actually had many people booking in a day, and then you could raise your prices over time. There's just this weird, like, elite feeling of, if I am not listed as this much, then surely I am a loser and a fool, and I'm sad, and I don't like myself, and my yoni's probably dry. When really, it's like, yeah, you can price at, like, a good rate if you enjoy it and it's working, and then you can raise it over time when there starts to be a demand for it, then great. So, anyways, not too low, and we don't want to be too high. And the final thing is, from there, you want to test it. You want to just be testing your pricing. What works? What doesn't? Maybe you set a price for an hour to go to someone's home and teach yoga, and you realize, holy crap, it really takes a lot out of me. Hey, I'm paying this much for gas. Hey, I'm ending up going to a place to teach a group. I'm having to bring all of the materials. It's a much bigger project than I thought. So, you can test the pricing to see what works for you, and also what works for the people who are wanting to sign up with you. And you can always raise your price over time. So, better to start lower rather than higher, because if you have something at 777, which don't do that, don't do the angel numbers thing. If you have something listed at 777, and then next week, it's at like $100. People are going to be like, what? Huh? Like, wait, wait, wait, what? Is she, does she owe someone money? Is she freaking out? What's going on? And then all of the people before you, all of the people you had before who you charged 777, they're going to wonder, well, what the F? Why are you now charging much less? Okay? So, you can always raise it later in a slow, grounded way once you have demand for it, rather than dropping the price later and making people think that you are doing something weird. Well, that's what we have for you today. Oh, my goodness, all around pricing. How can you feel grounded around pricing? How can you kind of gauge, like, what's the going rate for this? And moral of the story is, what in the God's name are they talking about when they say, look at how many clients you want and look at, hmm, how much do you want to make and what vacations you have lined up and how much you need to pay your coach and make your pricing from there? So, instead, we're saying, I mean, holy crap, look at what other industry professionals are charging. And you're also looking at it from the lens, if I didn't mention this before, like, what kind of training do you have? What kind of experience do you have that matches that level? Like I was saying, if I am a brand new health coach and I've done my training and my qualification and I'm working within my scope, I'm not making stuff up and stuff like that, but I see that the going rate for therapists that have possibly eight more years of schooling than me, then hello, my pricing is not a match. It's not making sense when, if I ask myself, ooh, what is my training, my qualifications, my experience that matches that pricing? Hey, now, wait now, whoa. So, yes, there you go. We have been talking more about this, this and more in the new classes that I'm doing. They're super chill, they're low cost. We dive into things like this topic and then we get to chat about them live. And it's not like creepy hot seat coaching. It's like, hey, what's worked for you? What do you like? What do you think? And we all get to chat about it and learn about it together. And of course, I'm happy to give my feedback and my expertise and my quantum codes anytime, anytime on the call, of course, comes included. Anyways, thanks for listening. Let me know what questions you have and check out the classes if you want to learn more along these lines. And I will see you on the next podcast. Bye. Thanks so much for listening. Wow, you're a real trooper. You got all the way to the end and I appreciate it. Make sure to check out the website, whydontyousaysomething.com for classes and things and things going on and come hang out on the socials. Bye.