163. How to price your services and offers (a step by step system to price for profit)
Grab a pen & paper or better yet grab the Plan 2 Profit Blueprint because I’m putting you on game with exactly how to price your offers. You’ll learn my system for how I price my offers.
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Here’s the thing, a lot of people are randomly pricing their offers and then wondering why they’re struggling to hit their revenue goals.
Or, you sell your offers and don’t feel confident about the price because either it’s too high and out of integrity, or it’s too low and you’re over working.
Today I’m going to share my proven strategy to help you price your offers.
This is my system. I share a complete spreadsheet and guide to calculate everything for you inside the Plan 2 Profit Workshop and I expand even more on how to price your offers and how to create a profitable offer and pay yourself inside the BecomingCEO METHOD.
Read on to learn more about my system and how you can use it to confidently price your offers.
Take your emotions out of it.
First, when it comes to pricing you have to take your emotions out of it.
At first, there’s a place for our feelings and for us to put a price tag on our work, but it’s not at the beginning when you’re trying to figure out how to price your new offer. You need to look at the numbers in your business.
The numbers we will focus on today are:
- Cost of Doing Business (CODB)
- Your salary
- Taxes
- Company Profit Margin – if you care about this
- The number of hours you want to work, and number of clients you want to serve
- Your hourly rate
- The number of hours you spend delivering your service
Once you know all these numbers you’ll be able to price your services with ease.
Let’s break it down.
CODB: This is all the expenses pertaining to your business (NOT your life expenses). It’s things like Dubsado or other CRM tools, monthly subscriptions, education, team, business savings, and more.
- First, add up all your expenses for your business.
- Write it down.
- Let’s say for example your CODB is $500/mo, that means in a year your expenses are $6000.
Your salary: First calculate all your life expenses. Bills, groceries, travel, savings, emergency fund, all that. Once you have that number you know that’s your MINIMUM. Now decide how much you want to make each month.
- Let’s say your life expenses are $3500/mo. That means in a year you need a minimum of $42K/ year.
- You desire to make a bit more, so let’s say $5500/mo which means your salary is $66K/yr.
Taxes: Disclaimer, I’m not a tax professional so don’t quote me on this, but a good rule of thumb I like to use is to save 30% of revenue for taxes. You may not need to spend all of it, but at least you got it saved so when it’s time to pay taxes you have it and don’t need to go get it. For this example we are going to pay taxes on the $66,000 that we pay ourselves so 30% of 66,000 is $19,800.
Company profit margin: Up until this point we have been breaking even with any revenue you make. A lot of folks like to say they are making a profit after they subtract their expenses and taxes from their revenue, but forget to also deduct their salary. If you only make the numbers we mentioned to cover your expenses, salary, and taxes then you haven’t made a profit YET. Your profit is extra. Your profit can be used for tons of things. I like to use profits for bonuses, education, or reinvesting back into the business or savings for biz.
- Normal profit margins for a company is 20%.
- You don’t have to have a business that makes a traditional profit. Breaking even is more than enough when you’re able to pay your expenses, pay yourself and your team fairly, and pay your taxes. This is for my folks that wanna go above and beyond.
- If you care about having a profit margin decide on what percentage you want. A average is 20% so add all the previous numbers together and multiply by .2 and that will give you the number for your profit margins. We won’t worry about that for this example but I wanted to mention it if you are focusing on profitability.
So let’s add everything up: $500/mo (or $6000) for expenses, $5500/mo (or $66,000) for your salary, and $19,800 for taxes. That’s a yearly Cost of Doing Business of $91,800 and the income you need to generate of your business.
Nearly a six figure year, but now you have a reason WHY your goal is what it is. Too often we set income goals with no real rhyme or reason. Now you know why your yearly goal is the goal and what your exact revenue goal should be and you’re not just guessing at your number.
Decide how much you want to work.
We aren’t done with the math.
Now that you have this income goal you need to decide how much you want to work.
If you need to make $91,800 in your business, divide that by 12 to get your monthly goal (obviously some months you’ll make more or less but this gives you a ballpoint number to reach each month).
That’s $7,650 a month.
From here I want you to answer the question:
In a perfect world, how many clients do I desire working with at one time?
And I mean big, juicy, ideal clients. If you’re a coach this would look like your 1:1 or high ticket group program. How many people are in there and how many people do you want to work with each month? If you’re a service provider, how many people can you realistically serve in a month?
If you’re a product based business (because it was recently brought to my attention that ion show y’all love!) I want you to think about your inventory. How much inventory could you create/order/ship each month? Remember, as a product based business your products are likely under $100 so you have to be willing to sell MORE volume in order to hit the numbers you want to hit, or consider creating bundles to increase your order purchase.
In this example let’s just say at maximum you can serve 5 clients a month and this is really fair – if you’re a coach you could do 1:1 calls on two days the entire month and also provide voxer support. If you’re a service provider like a photographer, you can work two weekends out of the month. As a social media manager with 5 clients you can work 4 day weeks and enjoy 3 days off or 3 day weekends.
Each client should be paying $1530/mo (that’s $7650/5).
Now let’s figure out your hourly rate:
How many hours do you want to work each week?
- Let’s say 15 hours a week is all you have.
- Then you want to divide how much each client pays by how many hours you want you want to work.
- $1530/15 = $102/hour this is your hourly rate.
Now we can calculate how you want to price your offer.
How should you price your offer?
When you think about your offer, the first thing you need to figure out is how long it will take you to deliver the offer.
- How much time will you spend working with this client?
- You have a group coaching program with a year of 2 coaching calls/mo that are 1 hour long. That’s 24 hours just in coaching, not to mention any curriculum, masterclasses, or content you create for them so let’s add one more hour each month which totals 36 hours.
- Multiply this by your hourly rate and you get 36 hours x $102 = $3672. At minimum, this should be the cost of your year long program.
- Now you can add a bit of razzle dazzle. Do you like repeating numbers? Perhaps you can price it at $3333 which means you’d need 6 clients instead of 5 to make up the difference, or maybe you raise the price to $4444.
- You can also simply price your offer at the rate we figured out earlier if you are a DFY provider.
- If it takes you less than the hours we used to create your hourly rate then you can charge folks that baseline value of $1530 which is 15 hours of your time.
This is just the minimum. You can always charge more. But this gives you a baseline so you know you are going to hit your revenue and money goals.
It also shows you just how close you are to a six figure biz if that’s what you desire. It’s easier to know you only need five $1500 clients and your business will make $90K and pay you $66K.
It also shows you that you don’t need to have a six figure business in order to be successful in business but that’s a whole other conversation.
So…
I break this all down and give you a template to easily calculate all these numbers inside my Plan 2 Profit Workshop for under $40, OR you can get this and sooo much more to set a strong foundation to your business inside the BecomingCEO Method.
There’s an entire course called The Profitable Business Blueprint that will give you clarity on your business from cleaning up your messaging and secret sauce so you can articulate your value. You’ll learn how to create and optimize an offer, which gives you access to this breakdown. You’ll also learn how to communicate your offers so you can confidently flex on ’em and not think twice about your pricing.
I’ll put all the links below for all the things but babe at minimum get the Plan 2 Profit Workshop so you can easily map out how to price things and know what numbers you need to nail in your business.
No one is ever able to talk about pricing your offers because it is different, but I truly believe it’s because no one creates a system for it. A lot of time you just create it from your gut, but usually we play ourselves and charge too little for our expertise.
That ends for you today.
Listen to this episode twice if you need to and let’s start pricing our offers strategically and with our revenue goals in mind.
IN THIS EPISODE, WE COVER:
- How to confidently price your offers based on my proven system.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- The BecomingCEO Method
- Plan 2 Profit Workshop
- Check out my last episode on Navigating Folks That Waste Your Time
- Follow me on Instagram: @mrskayhillman
- Follow the podcast on Instagram: @becomingceo
MORE ABOUT THE BECOMINGCEO PODCAST:
Podcast for Female Entrepreneurs and Christian Entrepreneurs to help you improve your marketing and social media strategy so you can make more money.
Every week your host Kay Hillman is going to share tips and tricks about social media marketing, mindset, and sales strategy. You’ll learn how to start, grow, and scale a service based or coaching business – God’s way.
From how to create a solid foundation for starting your business to how to strategically plan the next 6-months of marketing for your business – we will cover all things marketing, attracting more clients, converting sales, and more.
Sis,it’s time for you to up-level your mindset, marketing, and sales.
In this space we show up as our authentic selves – that means embrace being part of a community where we are low-key ratchet and high key saved – OKAY!!!