Your Prices Don’t Determine Your Worth
If you are interested in watching my YouTube Video of this same title here is the link:
We often hear that we should charge what we are worth, I personally believe this isn’t possible because you are priceless.
To the right people what you charge won’t matter. To those that don’t see your value, whatever you charge will never be right.
I feel like when we use price as a determinant of worth, we are going down a slippery slope. Why you might ask, well what happens when we don’t sell the item, service or so on, using this metric we are saying we are worthless and that’s just not true. I also feel like the online space has created this concept that the more you charge the more valuable you are and that too in my mind isn’t true either. I’m sure you’ve purchased so called cheap products and raved about them and on the flip side have purchased expensive products and felt like you have wasted your money.
The thing most people forget to include in this equation is that most people expect more when they are paying more. The bar is set much higher from a standards perspective when we are investing a larger sum of money. This is where people can get caught out. They potentially put themselves in a place where they over promise and under-deliver. Not only will this damage your reputation which is very hard to get back but it can also cause you to create an offer that you don’t want to honour, hence the over promise and under-deliver. For some they believe the high-ticket offer will bring in aligned clients, and the offer will be easy to honour, but what they often find out is that due to higher expectations they are now on the hook for a lot more than they can give, leading to frustration and possible burn out.
Disappointment often comes from higher priced offerings not being fulfilled as intended, is this what you want to be remembered for?
My personal experience has been one of disappointment with higher priced offerings. I’ve been let down more times with higher offerings than lower price point ones. The main reason is as stated above a lot was promised but then somewhere they decided they didn’t want the commitment and changed aspects of the offering to suit them but not the price and often without a get out clause if anything changed on their part. I was supposed to just go “isn’t that fantastic” that you're honouring you, but you forgot to honour me in the equation. I left very disappointed and as a result I will never purchase a 12-month program again.
Anything that I purchase from here on out has to have an option to cancel my membership/offer if it’s no longer aligned with the original offering or I simply learn that we are not a good fit anymore. This adds another layer because if they are unwilling to offer this (which again has been my personal experience) then that shows to me that I was only ever seen as dollars on a spread sheet and not a person on the other end of the offering. I believe that if you want to honour your offering you would have an option to unsubscribe or cancel the membership at any point, I am often left asking “why would you want someone in your program when they clearly don’t want to be there?”. As stated, before I am often left with the only conclusion of wanting my money and not caring what I think of them or their program. However, we know in business that reputation is very important, once lost it’s very hard to regain, so I would suggest that you be mindful of getting caught up in charging what you’re worth and considering more about what the offer requires of you and pricing around that and anything else that needs to be considered to make it viable for you.
Thinking in terms of worth when pricing your service creates limitations because there is often more than just your time to consider when pricing your offering.
Things to consider when pricing:
Hours involved
Products used during the servicing of the product/service such as subscriptions, insurances that you pay to run your business, supplies such as in my myotherpy work I use essential oils, special creams and so forth
If you hire anyone to help with the service such as VA, receptionist, branding printer and so forth.
Any additional overheads such as power/electricity, rents, computers, water etc
So, as you can see there is so much more involved in pricing your product or services above your time. I personally believe that we should move beyond the statement of charging what your worth, you really need to be charging what is viable and sustainable so that you can stay in business for the long term and not end up frustrated and burnt out.