Have you ever been out flying a big kite, way up high on a windy day?
There’s such a feeling of exhiliaration and freedom as the wind takes hold, and you let the string unravel and watch the kite soar…
It’s awesome. But let me get back to the kite in a moment.
As a business owner, you inevitably come to a point where you know you need to increase your prices… maybe your current prices aren’t really sustainable… But if you offer a service or product that is about making a difference in the world… about some kind of transformation for your customers or clients, it’s common to feel quite a bit of hesitance around pricing.
How do you measure “stress relief” or “inner peace” or even “satisfaction”?
It’s hard to price something so immeasurable. There can be a fear that because you can’t see it, other people won’t really believe that it’s valuable. So it’s tempting to steer on the safe side, and price lower than you know you’re services are worth… or lower than you genuinely need to charge in order to grow your business.
A ceiling on your pricing can feel like trying to fly a kite with a short string. You run and run, trying to get your kite to catch wind. But, no matter how fast you go, you have to keep running, because the string just isn’t long enough for the kite to really soar.
What many people do… is try to find a quantitative result to link their qualitative transformations too: “Feel more relaxed” (if there were a relaxation scale, you can be further along it), “increase your energy levels” (again, if you could measure it, you’d find you have more of it), even “increase your income”, (of course, we can’t say by how much, because transformation ain’t cut and dry like that… but it’s likely you’ll earn more as a result of this work). You get the drift.
This is actually great practice for marketing. It helps your customers to say “yes” to what you offer, if they know that it will make a specific difference in their life.
But it’s not the whole story…
The deeper truth is that transformation has no inherent value. It’s not that it’s not valuable. It’s just that it’s value is different for different people, which makes it hard to put a price tag on it. The tools that you use may work wonders for some people. Others, well, it’s just not their thing, right? (Again, good marketing means these people don’t even come to your door. But you must agree that they exist?)
Transformation is a relationship, not a product or service. It’s a complex interaction between you, your client, your skills, their issues, and, well… Life itself. So the value of your work really reflects the value of an experience that you co-create with your customers.
So how do you measure transformation?
See, here’s the funny thing: Money has no inherent value either. It’s absolutely no different. Just like transformation, the value of money reflects a collective (but ultimately arbitrary) agreement about it’s worth.
It may sound simple, but when I first realised this… Like really got it… I felt like someone had just cut the string that kept me close to the ground. I realised I’d been trying to base my prices on a direct relationship between money and the transformations that I facilitate. And both things have a value that is… potentially, infinite.
How long is a piece of string?
So, when you’re thinking about pricing your transformational product or service, it’s fine to consider what value it has in people’s lives, and how specifically it makes a difference, but it’s practically impossible to put the “right” number on it when money and transformation are both potentially infinite in value.
Instead, it may be most practical to just consider what it takes for you to keep your kite flying. What I mean is, if it’s priced too high for your ideal clients, they may have trouble continuing to pay. If it’s priced too low, your business can’t fly, and neither can you.
Then the “right” price is not really about value or worth… It’s the price that enables you to keep doing what you do, with joy and passion.
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PS – If you’ve got a slightly skewed relationship with money (and, honestly, living in this society – it’s pretty hard not too), you might want to phone in to the Free Heart of Money Teleclass that my friend Mark Silver is running next week.
It’s on Thursday 21 May from 1pm to 2.30pm, US (Pacific Time) which is 6am to 7.30am on friday 22 May in Australian EST. I’m pretty sure that if you register, but can’t make the call, there’ll be a recording you can listen to later. Mark is awesome, and his Heart of Money work is “just what the doctor ordered” in these uncertain times, so why not check it out.
