If you would love to charge what you desire for your services but are not sure how to go about this, then here are my five steps to charging what you desire and actually getting paid it:
- Calculate the actual monetary cost of your service
- Decide what income you desire to make from your service
- Get clear on the value of your service to your clients
- Work through your money blocks
- Just Do It!
Step 1 – Calculate The Actual Monetary Cost of Your Service
When considering what you charge for your services you need to start by looking at how to accurately price your services. Many female entrepreneurs price their services by guess work, without actually crunching those all-important numbers.
The logical approach to pricing your services has got to begin with identifying your expenses for offering your service to your clients. Typical expenses include your office rental costs, utility costs, insurance costs etc.. You will want to tabulate all your expenses into a spreadsheet, so you have your expenses listed out with the relevant amounts per month and per annum.
By completing this exercise, you will know exactly what your expenses are. If you have not done this before you might have a bit of a shock when you realise the costs you are incurring simply to provide the services you want to offer.
Step 2 – Decide What Income You Desire to Make From Your Service
Once you know what the break even figure is for operating the service you want to offer you can now start to decide what profit you want to make on top of your expenses so you can achieve your income goals.
If you are unsure what your profit needs to be to be able to grow your business successfully a rule of thumb I work to is that I make sure that I am making at least 50% profit on each of the services’ I offer.
So that you don’t settle for a figure for your income that is less than you actually desire, it is important to allow yourself to come up with a figure that is a stretch for you. It needs to feel as though you are stepping outside of your comfort zone (but not that so anxious that you are unable to say the investment when you tell prospects about your pricing).
The reason why you want to focus on the figure that is a stretch for you is because if you focus on a smaller more comfortable income goal, your business strategy will only lead you to achieve that figure.
However, if you focus on a higher, more uncomfortable figure, the business strategy you implement will potentially make you that figure or at least somewhere close to it.
Read also: Have fun in your business
Step 3 – Get Clear On The Value Of Your Service To Your Clients
This step is all about recognising your gifts and the true value of the service you provide to your clients.
If you know the value of your service to your clients, then your clients will be willing to pay the investment for your service.
Clearly communicating the value of your service will result in your prospects knowing how they will benefit from working with you and recognising that you are the person who can help them solve their problems. For your clients, having their problems solved in the fastest, less stressful way is priceless.
Women can often struggle with valuing their services because they are often encouraged to “give” rather than “receive”. So for you to get clear on the value of your services, you need to take some timeout to tune into your heart and really listen in to what your heart tells you about what you contribute to your clients.
Start with all the little things you do and offer that helps your clients. For instance really caring about your clients’ success, the support you give etc.. and write these down.
Then move onto thinking also about the bigger things you do, e.g. helping your clients to solve their problem that is causing them worry and stress, and take time to write about these.
If you are getting stuck with this exercise and don’t know where to start, hop onto a call with one of your best clients and ask them to tell you how they benefited from working with you, what they valued most of all, and how your work helped them solve their problems.
Step 4 – Work Through Your Money Blocks
When we open to charging what we truly desire for our services, we also open to our resistance and money blocks that have held us back and stopped us from taking this step up until now.
Common money blocks include:
- Difficulty Receiving
- Your Money Story and limiting beliefs held from childhood about money
- Thinking You Aren’t Worthy
In order to be able to receive the income you desire you will need to address these money blocks first. It can be very helpful to actively engage in therapeutic support with a coach who works with money blocks to support you with shifting any deeply held blocks.
Step 5 – Just Do It!
This step is about getting out there and charging the investment you desire for your services. Remember, money is just money and the price you charge for your service is just a price.
Your true worth bears very little relation to the price you charge for your services (if you go back to step 3 you will see we already evaluated that your services are priceless!).
So the investment you ask for your service is really simply a reflection of what you feel is a fair exchange in money, for giving your time, support and expertise to your client.
Read also: How to create a mastermind programme that adds revenue to your business
