In this episode, we dive into how to determine your pricing and the steps you can take to confidently sell your products/services for the pricing you desire.

First things first, pricing is UP TO YOU!

Pricing is an IMPORTANT topic when running your own business. The hard truth of it is: IT’S UP TO YOU!  Right?  There are some helpful formulas that might set you out on the right foot, but ultimately YOU get to choose what makes sense for you and your business and that’s what makes pricing so challenging.

We are super excited today, because not only is this a topic we’ve been wanting to tackle for a while, but we actually received a voicemail question specifically about this challenge!  

It’s our first voicemail segment and we can’t wait.  Since we can’t meet in person for our podcast these days, we’ve decided to start taking your questions as voicemails. That way we can still help you tackle those challenges you’re facing in your day-to-day business life.  So let’s listen to our first voicemail message from Cyrinda….

Voicemail:

“My name is Cyrinda and I’ve been in business for about 3 years. I make handmade luxury, coconut soy wax candles as well as other organic body products. I’ve been doing a lot of custom projects lately where I’ll create signature scents for small businesses. I’ve been struggling with pricing and what I should be charging for these special, custom projects and also what I should charge for wholesale items, as well…”

Where do you start with pricing?

• Local Competitors – Make sure they are actually competitors in the same market
• How do you want to Position Yourself? Quality, Convenience, Price  
• Are you offering Quantity or Quality?

What do you base your pricing off of?

• Hard Costs per product/service
• Hard Costs of running your business
• Your TIME
• How much you need to make to stay in business vs How much you need to make to live a healthy lifestyle

Charge For Your Time

A huge mistake business owners make is not charging for their time. This happens because when we start out we often start with “sweat equity.” This is a great way to start your business without incurring a bunch of debt, however – it can’t last forever. You NEED to charge for your time because your time is valuable and you’ll never be able to grow without doing so. Plus, it’s too easy to start feeling run down and resent your own business if you aren’t getting paid for the time you put into it. It’s also pretty easy to charge TOO LITTLE when you don’t account for the time you spend.

Think about how much do you need to charge for your time so you can live your dream life, hire someone else, utilize software to make your job/life easier, etc.

Example: If you want to make $1000/week and only want to work 25 hours/week, then you need to charge at least $40/hour for your time.

Confidence In Selling Your Price

Once you have an idea of your costs, value, and time to figure out your price you’ll have more confidence in your pricing.

• Do the work to decide your prices and make a price list/sheet for yourself
• Possibly create packages
• Stick to your pricing
• Decide if and when you’ll offer discounts
• Put it on someone else to make it less uncomfortable
• Act like YOUR hourly rate is a hard cost – you wouldn’t mind paying someone else for their time, so treat your prices the same way
• Start where you are comfortable and grow from there

Your Pricing Should Change Over Time

• Start with introductory rates that help you build your confidence
• Note that it’s an early rate when you start out so you can easily raise prices later and avoiding having that bite you in the butt
• Change your pricing as you gain experience and confidence

The way I felt most comfortable raising my prices was:

1. Start by saying here is our “Introductory rate” so it’s clear this is special pricing for early customers
2. Give a heads up to existing clients that prices are changing and act now to save
3. Schedule a pricing review and plan to change pricing on an annual or bi-annual basis
4. Review your numbers regularly to make sure they are actually working for your business

Next 3 Steps:

1. Figure out your hard costs (both per products and as a business)
2. Determine your hourly rate and start charging for your time
3. Create a pricing sheet for yourself based on that info

STICK WITH IT! And feel confident in your sales pricing!

Recommended Resources

• Leave a voicemail HERE
• Learn more about Cyrinda’s Luxury Candles here: https://www.emandro.com/

The post How To Be Confident in Your Pricing appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Episode Summary 

When a potential client comes to your website, what do they see? Are you talking about you and all the things you know and offer? It’s so easy to talk about yourself too much. You feel the need to explain your services, your story, your background experience, etc.

But that’s not what people want to see or read when they land at your website or social media pages.  

We get it, as a business you feel like it’s your job to talk about yourself so others understand your credentials and why you could be a great fit for them…but the harsh truth is – no one cares!

What’s more important is getting down to the nitty-gritty psychology of your client. Address The Pains That Your Audience Is Experiencing instead of defining yourself and your services. Meaning, talk about the problems your potential client is having and how YOU can SOLVE those problems for them. Get emotional.

Describe a transformation: the solution to their problem from their perspective. That’s where you want to spend 80% of your efforts in your marketing.

• Think about yourself when you’re hiring someone or buying something.  
• What are your habits?
• What are you looking for in your research?
  • Immediate solutions, vetted opinions, testimony, brand value

Be a resource to nurture your audience. The only way to nurture a lead into a client is by engaging with them and providing value. You need to have something that your potential clients want. You might think that people want your product or service, but more often than not, what people really want is WHAT your product or service can provide them.

Landscaping Example:

People don’t wake up wanting to hire a landscaper, they wake up wanting a beautiful yard. Spend your time describing your client’s problem yard. Use your knowledge to become a trusted advisor on the topic of landscaping and how if they hire you they’ll spend more time with their family and less time mowing the lawn.

Wedding Example:

Brides don’t have the desire to hire a hairdresser, they just want to look good for the wedding.  

This kind of thinking is really powerful because oftentimes your potential clients don’t even know to look for your services.  They are just living their lives and find themselves needing a solution…market the SOLUTION, not a general list of what you offer.

So, think about the marketing and content you’ve been making and ask yourself…Am I just talking about myself here? If the answer is YES, it’s time to flip the script and re-work your marketing messaging.

These are the things you should be utilizing in your marketing to really connect and engage with your audience.  Think of how you can provide value for your potential clients and speak to the things they care about – themselves. 

We like to keep a Google Doc with these ideas on it so that whenever it’s time to write some marketing content, we can refer back and double-check that we aren’t just spending all our time talking about ourselves.  Hopefully this is something that you can all start to implement in your own marketing to make it a little more effective and a lot more engaging for your audience!

Quick-Wins

1. Start by listing the BENEFITS your potential clients would enjoy if they hired you or bought your product/service.  
2. List the CHALLENGES you help your clients solve.  
3. Think of the PAIN that causes your potential clients to look for your service. 
4. Think of what your potential clients might be SAYING or THINKING.

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses.  

Recommended Resources 

VIDEO: Why You Need A Brand Guide
BNI

The post Quick-Win Episode 8: Stop Talking About Yourself appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Episode Summary 

I know what you’re thinking; “Never finish your To-Do list is bad advice.”  But hear us out!  You always need to have something on your list to keep you moving forward. If you have completed everything on your list and have nothing left to do, this means you aren’t working towards anything.

In order to be successful in your business, it’s extremely important to eliminate stress, be efficient, and make sure you are always moving towards your goals. We’ve noticed that things that generate a lot of stress for self-employed business owners are often related to their To-Do lists.  

Three common To DO list stressors business owners struggle with are:

1. Unrealistic To-Do lists
2. Not knowing what to do next
3. The “Getting Ahead” Myth

How to Overcome Stress from Unrealistic To-Do Lists

We’ve all been guilty of creating To-Do lists that go on forever and are impossible to complete. We think that writing everything down on an epic list is the perfect way to relieve the stress we have of keeping everything in our heads.  The reality is, these impossible To-Do lists end up adding to our stress because they are impossible to complete!  This means we end every day with a never-ending list of things we didn’t get done and it’s deflating.

The way to fix this problem is to focus on making different To-Do lists.  Your Daily To-Do list should only include tasks that you can actually complete that day.  Force yourself to really consider how long something will take you to complete and make sure you are breaking down your tasks into their smallest form so you can easily check things off as you go.  It’s not helpful to have giant tasks on your To-Do list that require multiple steps.  This means that as you complete each step you have nothing to check off so it never feels like you are making progress.  This can lead to stress!  After focusing on your daily To-Do lists, think about breaking things down into different categories and making different lists to work off of.

Tips on Making Different To-Do Lists:

• Weekly Tasks

These are things that have to be done no matter what, like housekeeping.  It’s not exciting but it’s got to be done.

• Client Tasks

These will constantly change as weeks go by, but if you’ve got a good client workflow process and a project management system in place, it should be simple to manage.

• Internal Business Tasks

Any time an idea pops into your head of something that you want to do or SHOULD do for your business, you need to write it down.  Not on a sticky note, but in an organized place for your business tasks.

How to Overcome Stress from Not Knowing What to Do Next

When you don’t know what you should be doing for your business or your current clients/projects this can be really stressful.  We use WRIKE to manage our projects and when we come up with things that need to be done, we create the task and keep it in a folder that we can pull from when we begin to make our next week’s agenda.  Think of this as your “Backlog” that you can pull from whenever you aren’t sure what to do next or you have extra time.  Believe me, when you properly plan a daily To-Do list, you’ll sometimes have “extra time” and this Backlog will come in really handy to keep things moving forward and avoid time-wasting.

If you have nothing on your list to do, it’s impossible to keep moving forward. For example, I like to always be reading a book so I keep a list of potential books that I can always pull from.  A few months ago, I finished the book I was reading and realized that I didn’t have any more books on my Reading Wish List, and before I knew it an entire week had gone by without me reading!

How to Overcome Stress from The “Getting Ahead” Myth

I used to work tirelessly in my business to try and get EVERYTHING done so I could get ahead and relax.  The reality is, it is impossible to “Get Ahead.”  Think about it,  if I ever actually finished EVERYTHING that needed to be done for our business, it would be the day we were no longer in business.  Finishing your To-Do list means you are out of business. 

There is always client work to do, bookkeeping, business development, organization, etc.  If you actually finished everything, it would be because you had no work and no money coming in and effectively, NO BUSINESS.

Quick-Wins:

1. Organize your To-Do lists into different categories
2. Make realistic daily To-Do lists
3. Create a “Backlog” list with tasks you can pull from when needed
4. Forget about trying to get ahead and focus on always moving forward

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses. 

Recommended Resources 

Wrike Project Management

The post Quick-Win Episode 7: Never Finish Your To-Do List appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Episode Summary

If something triggers you to get into a funk or in a bad emotional space this gives you the opportunity to do a little bit of investigative work.

Hit the pause button and pinpoint the root of these bad emotions or experiences.

We hear a lot about business owners carrying a lot of stress around.  We get it, being a business owner is by no means a walk in the park and you’re going to have rough patches, but we’ve all got to realize that we’re not in business to cause ourselves stress.

Get to the core of the issue for any particular bad day. 

Are your clients causing you stress? If so, what’s it about?  A process that you control or something outside of your control.  

Are you stressed that you don’t have enough time? Do a time audit, figure out what’s sucking away your day.  Usually, it’s tied to a lot of inefficient processes that you can easily fix with a simple plan, automation or outsourcing.

Is money your main stress? If so, it’s going to be hard to become a successful business owner if you don’t have a good relationship with money.  Figure out the root of this – is it confidence based? Is your pricing an issue? Do you not have enough clients?

Is it something going on personally? Or your lack of self-confidence?  It’s easy to let your personal life bleed into your business when you are self-employed.  Sometimes when you really look at it, it’s personal stress of bills or a lack of time to spend with your family, or maybe even a lack of support or self-confidence that it’s eating away at you.  This is why personal development is so important for self-employed business owners like us…sometimes we are our own worst enemies!

Moral of the Story – Bad days put a magnifying glass on things that are inefficient and stress-inducing.  Once you know the problem, you can work towards a solution.

Quick-Wins

1. Target the cause of your bad day.  If you can do something about it, do it.  
2. Implement changes to your workflow or processes if you’re seeing work or client related stress.
3. Always work on your personal development to stay balanced and level-headed.

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses.  

Recommended Resources 

Time Audit Worksheet

4 Ways to Use Your Phone to be More Productive Video

You’re A Badass At Making Money

The post Quick-Win Episode 6: Bad Days Are A Good Thing appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Episode Summary

We hear it, I say it, and we all do it – but using personal time is not the way to “get ahead.”

First of all, getting ahead rarely leads to more free time or making more money and secondly, for most of you that terminology of “getting ahead” is hollow.  

Unless you have a strict schedule of work – but most of us just flow with what’s happening.

*NOTE: If you work in certain industries, your business relies on the weekends, which is not what we are talking about.  Maybe your “weekend” is Tuesday/Wednesday, but whatever it is TAKE IT OFF!

TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR SCHEDULE

If you find yourself working all the time it’s because YOU allow that to happen.  You are always setting expectations for your clients. If you are always available, that’s what they’ll expect and then you always need to be available.  If you set boundaries and tell your clients when they can contact you and when they can expect to hear from you, they’ll understand and expect that. The hard truth is, YOU are the one allowing your business to control your schedule and it doesn’t have to be that way.

YOU NEED TIME AWAY FROM YOUR BUSINESS 

-You’ll have more energy

-You’ll come up with great ideas

-You’ll spend time recharging your personal life and friendships

-You’ll resent work-time less when you allow yourself free time

-You’ll remember WHY you work so much

YOUR GOAL SHOULD BE TO CREATE A BETTER LIFE

-The whole reason you’re in business is to live your life!

-Take yourself seriously → this shouldn’t be work vs. life…this is just one big life.

-Weekend work is usually due to an inefficient work week or procrastination, which leads to stress.

STOP ALL CLIENT OR TEAM CORRESPONDENCE DURING ALL NON-WORK HOURS

-We’ve all been guilty of it, but DON’T DO IT…otherwise, you’re self-sabotaging your time and setting the wrong expectations

Quick-Wins

1. Commit to giving yourself time off
2. Create boundaries for yourself and your clients
3. Don’t check emails on your weekend

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses.  

Recommended Resources 

-THINGS TO HELP: Set SLEEP mode on your phone, use a scheduler for email correspondence, don’t reply to things during non-work hours.  Your dentist wouldn’t answer the phone at 8pm, neither should you!

The post Quick-Win Episode 4: Stop Working On The Weekend! appeared first on Learn It - Do It.