Ep #15: The Energy of Committing to Your Pricing

Have you ever thought about what to charge and then start feeling wobbly and uncomfortable about that number? Pricing is money, and money is emotion. So while it's natural to have feelings about your pricing, letting those feelings take over and determine your pricing is definitely not an empowered action to take.

I'm Kendall. Tune in this week to learn the number one mistake most coaches make when they feel uncomfortable with their pricing. Discover why committing is worth thousands for you in coaching income, and what to do when you're feeling wobbly about your pricing. Plus, I'm sharing my number one favorite go to coaching tool to support you in achieving your pricing goal with grace and ease minus the drama. It's all here for you in this episode of The Money Coach School Podcast. Let's dive in.

Welcome to The Money Coach School Podcast. To really excel at coaching women, you have to be skilled, confident, and even fearless at money coaching. If you're passionate about women holding genuine money power and love supporting women entrepreneurs, then this is the show for you. Now, here's your host, money feminist Kendall SummerHawk.

Hello, beautiful coaches. If you're listening to this in real time, happy New Year. I cannot believe the difference in the vibe between this year and last. Last New Year, the vibe was well, we won't even go there. Okay. It was a challenging year for a lot of people, myself included.

But what I love so much is that those challenges are definitely in the rearview mirror. The energy, the vibe of 2024 is already off the charts. It's positive. It's inspired. Most of all, it's powerful. 2024 is an eight year, which is great news for all of us. The themes of an eight year are expansion, financial wealth, and embodying strength.

It's a year devoted to leadership and power, as in owning and stepping into yours, and a year focused on expansion. In light of that, today, we're going to talk about you and your pricing. This is not the first time I've brought this topic to you in the podcast, and it will not be the last. Pricing is one of my all-time favorite things to talk about because it's such a hugely critical, tangible, physical bring together of all the money personal growth work that you do, all of that money mindset.

My students inside of our Money Breakthrough Business Coach certification training, they know that my go to example of what to focus their marketing on, their speaking topics on, or where they want to become a true expert, I always waved the flag for pricing. Because we all know that pricing is the number one indicator of success in a coaching business. You can be the best coach on the planet.

But if your pricing is too low or if it's out of line without your ideal clients, you are never going to overcome that issue. Unless you're somehow magically able to attract huge volumes of clients, which let's face it, that's not realistic for most coaching business, mine included. When I look back at my journey of coaching on pricing, it was actually how I got my start as a business coach over two decades ago.

I noticed that what women business owners were charging for their services was crazy low. I held the belief that they could absolutely charge more. So I know you look at me as a multimillion dollar coach and a self-made multi-millionaire, which is all factually accurate, but I had a starting point. My starting point was signing on my first three coaching clients.

I did that by asking a few exploratory questions about their businesses and then letting them know that we were going to work on their pricing. I did not promise I would help them make more money. I didn't make these wild grandiose claims. I just said we're going to coach on your pricing. You're going to end up charging more and the result of that coaching, you'll have more money flowing into your business with every single client. They each said sign me up.

What's amazing for me to look back on now is that at that time, my own pricing, it definitely needed some help. Which proves the point I'm always saying to my certification students inside of Money Breakthrough Business Coach is that you can effectively and beautifully coached clients on something that you're actively working on yourself. In other words, being on your path is more important when you're first getting started than pressuring yourself to already be an expert. Your expertise will come. It'll come with learning with practice and experience. In the meantime, you can absolutely coach others on topics like pricing with great success and tangible results for your clients even while you're in that learning phase in your own coaching business.

So today what I want to talk with you regarding your pricing is number one, the number one mistake most coaches make when they feel uncomfortable with their pricing. Number two, why committing to your pricing is worth thousands for you and coaching income. Number three, I'm going to share with you my number one favorite go to coaching tool to support you in achieving your pricing goal with grace and ease minus the drama.

So let's dive in with number one, which is the number one mistake most coaches make when they feel uncomfortable with their pricing. That mistake is they don't commit. Now the word commitment means being dedicated, being unwavering. It means staying decided. Commitment to your pricing, whatever that number is for you right now, it means you're not changing your mind and changing the number because you're feeling uncomfortable.

It means if you have thoughts come up about your pricing that you don't then use those thoughts as a reason to change your pricing, as a way of avoiding having to do the inner work of looking at those thoughts. In other words, you don't change your pricing and keep your thoughts the same. No, that's a huge mistake. Instead, your pricing stays or lifts up. Based on today's episode, I hope you'll raise your pricing. So your pricing stays and what you change are your thoughts about it. All right.

Because what happens when you keep changing your number is it creates instability, and it gives power to the energy of doubt and questioning. That is not going to help you or your business or help you sign on clients. So instead you choose your pricing, and then you find the thoughts that make you feel confident and clear about your pricing. I call it you sell yourself on your pricing. I call it validating your pricing. I did a whole episode on this on how to validate your pricing. I'll link to that episode in the show notes. It was episode number 13.

So what happens when you focus on finding the best thoughts possible about your pricing is that you're not being swayed by the projections of others who might say things like well, the economy is really funky. Don't you think you should charge less? You're not being swayed by situations that come up, like maybe someone who really wants to coach with you, but doesn't have the money for coaching at this moment. You stay committed to your pricing because you know your coaching is worth three times what you're charging. I covered how to do this is episode 13. So definitely check that out.

You stay committed to your pricing because you know the value of your coaching over a span of time for your client, not just for that 90 days or six months or one year container that they've stepped into of your coaching offer. It's about that span of time of two years, three years.

You stay committed to your pricing because of what your number reflects for you. You stay committed to your pricing because of what gets to happen for clients who invest that to come step through that portal and coach with you. You stay committed to your pricing because you are not going to climb into someone else's wallet and decide for them what they can or cannot afford.

You stay committed to your pricing because you have your reasons why it's the perfect number for you at this time. You stay committed to your pricing because you're no longer available for waffling or wobbling or questioning this decision that you already made.

So does this mean that you never change your pricing? Well, of course not. You're going to lift your pricing many times throughout your business. That first year for me as a coach, I raised my prices four times, and I raised my prices every time I was low on clients. I would coach for a while. They would complete. I was low on clients. I would raise my prices, get new clients, and the same cycle continued.

So you're going to change what your coaching containers look like. You're going to adjust your pricing to line up with those changes throughout the whole life of your coaching business. But these are rock solid business reasons for changing your pricing, not reasons based on emotional deflection of uncomfortable feelings.

All right, number two, why committing to your pricing is worth thousands for you in coaching income. This is very simple. When you charge more, you make more. A coaching business that is charging appropriately can easily experience 70 to 80% profit. That means for every $1,000, for example, every $1,000 you charge, 700 to $800 is retained as profit after expenses. Now I'm using that number before taxes because that can vary so much, but 70 to 80% after expenses before taxes. That is phenomenal. I'll go into more depth about that type of money planning in future episodes.

So for today, just focus on the fact that pricing is an asset of your business. Pricing is how you make money. Pricing is how you attract clients who take your coaching seriously. Pricing is how you own up to and resolve any of those feelings of worth or value. Who am I? Pricing is your catalyst. Again, I will go more into this in future episodes. We have so much to talk about in pricing.

All right, number three, I want to give you my number one favorite go to coaching tool to support you in achieving your pricing goal with grace and ease minus the drama. If you're saying pricing goal, what? Yes, you want a pricing goal.

So this tool that I created, I call it stair stepping. It’s not a very fancy or sexy title, but that it's very logical to me. So stair stepping, here's what it is and how to use it. Stair stepping is where you incrementally lift your fees, raise your fees headed in the direction of achieving your goal price.

So, for example, let's say your goal pricing is $5,000 for a six month private coaching offer. Now you can absolutely jump right into that number if you want to go for it. But you can also use the power of stair stepping to step up into it step by step.

So, for example, what this could look like is maybe you say okay, for my first one or two clients, I'm going to start at $2,000. One or two clients. So you get your first two clients, then you bump up your pricing to that next stair step. So maybe that's 3,000 or 3,500, great. You sign on one or two more clients, then you lift your pricing up the next level to 4,000 or maybe even just go ahead and jump to that goal of 5,000.

But here's the most important part. Most coaches would take years to do this. That's insane. You don't have that kind of time to waste. I want you to set a predetermined number of clients that you'll sign up at your new pricing at each level, and then you lift it again. So I gave that example. One or two clients, lift your price, one or two clients lift your price.

Stair stepping works so brilliantly because you're getting out of your comfort zone and creating new confidence. That's awesome, but you're not over challenging your confidence. So this strategy allows you to stay in the stretch zone and not get triggered into the freakout zone. I would rather have you commit to $3,000 and stair step from there then jump straight to that 5,000 and be wobbly the whole time.

Here's the big takeaway from my stair stepping strategy. Charging more does not mean adding more time or more stuff into your coaching container. It means gaining confidence as you gain experience. So for example, and we see this all the time inside of the Money Breakthrough Business Coach Certification.

So for the example here is $5,000 for a six month coaching container will quickly become $6,000 for that same container, then 7,500 for that same container, 10,000 for that same container. What's the difference? Same coaching containers. The only difference is you. You feeling more confident and seeing for yourself the results of your coaching. You getting that experience under your belt. That's the only difference. Of course that experience is priceless and worth, well, it's priceless.

All right, so one more resource I have for you today is you can download my free pricing guide for coaches. It's a collection of 15 different pricing do's and don'ts that you can use as a guide in setting up your pricing. Or you can use it as an audit checklist for how you've been charging. I'll link to where you can download that free guide in the show notes.

I always say intentional money actions lead to prosperity and growth over a lifetime. Your intentional money action today is to intentionally choose your pricing. Then find that best feeling thought or those best feeling thoughts, many of them, about that number so that you're clear and committed. Not wobbly or worrying.

Pricing is one of my favorite go to tools for reframing your experience of money regardless of what is currently in your bank account or what your past experience has been. It doesn't matter. Today is a new day. This is your choice. This is you being intentional. Pricing is your pathway to a profitable business, profitable with every single client. But pricing is also an incredibly powerful mirror for your own self growth work with money, and I love that.

I would really love to hear what you think, and I would love to hear your questions. So drop me an email at podcast@kendallsummerhawk.com. Ask me any question you want about money, pricing, and anything and everything and all things coaching. I'm here for you. All right. Thank you for listening. I am super excited to connect with you again next week in our next episode.

Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of The Money Coach School Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you follow so you never miss an episode. Also, I would so love and appreciate if you would leave a 5-star review. Your review supports women just like you in discovering all of the juicy tips and insights I’m sharing here on how to coach women on money.

And if you want to learn how to excel at coaching women on money, definitely go to KendallSummerHawk.com and check out the wealth of money coach trainings that we have for you. Thanks so much for being part of this money coaching movement and for tuning into the show every week.