The Unstuck Sessions Podcast

Beyond the Numbers: The Strategic Role of Pricing in Business

• I Sell Words LLC • Season 1 • Episode 6

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Ever wished you could crack the code of pricing strategy? Prepare to rethink everything you know about pricing, as we delve into its significance in business. We're about to prove that pricing isn't just a numbers game but a signal of the value you provide. And, if you've ever grappled with striking the right balance in your pricing, you're not alone - we discuss the dangers of undervaluing your offerings or being pegged as the 'discount' option.

Switching gears, we explore different pricing models - cost-plus pricing, value-based pricing, and skimming prices. But it's not about choosing the 'best' model; it's about understanding how elements like the true cost of a product or service, corporate entities, and market research influence pricing. We bring this to life with real-world examples, such as Fat Joe's bar and high-end steakhouses, showing how people invariably pay for experiences over products or services.

Finally, we uncover how to construct a pricing strategy that aligns with your business needs. We illuminate how your unique value proposition affects what clients will pay for your services, and why compromising your moral principles for pricing can be detrimental. As entrepreneurs ourselves, we always emphasize the need to recognize the value of your offering and to price it justly. So, whether you're a new entrepreneur or a seasoned business whizz, this episode is brimming with insights and advice to aid your entrepreneurial journey.

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Speaker 1:

Your price is a signal that you're sending to the world about how much your services are worth, how much you are worth, how much your time is worth, how much your effort is worth, how much your staff's time is worth. It's a signal that you're sending out there into the world, and so you need to take your price seriously and how much you're charging, and stand on your square and not chase customers. And this speech is for me, as well as everybody else out there who runs a small business. Stop chasing people that want you to undervalue or undermine what you're worth, or they wanna dictate to you what you're worth or say I can get it down the street for X, y and Z. Go down the street, go to them. Don't come here. I don't need that. I don't need to devalue myself and devalue what I'm offering to you to solve your problem, just so that I could say that you're a customer, because you're not a good customer. If you're doing that and yes, I want you to have the thing that satisfies your needs, and sometimes your needs are a lower cost. So if you need a lower price and I can't meet that need, then you can go somewhere else. All right. So I condensed the nonsense On today's episode we're gonna talk about price strategy and I'm gonna give you some real world examples.

Speaker 1:

So that's what we have on today's live stream. We will get to you after the credits roll. Okay, so before we commence with all the festivities, one of the things I realized on YouTube is heavily entertainment based, and so your educational content has to have a strong width of entertainment based, and so your educational content has to have a strong width of entertainment based, and that's not really what I'm into. I'm here to inform, so I'm here to make this value statement. This channel isn't entertainment. This channel is me giving you the nitty gritty about running a business and marketing and things along those lines, and that's what it is. Today, we're gonna get into talking about pricing strategy, and the reason why we're getting into talking about pricing strategy is because your price determines the heck of a whole lot of what you can actually do. I say price is positioning and I mean it.

Speaker 1:

If people think you're the discount option, they're gonna have discount option expectations of you, and even if you're offering a very high quality service, the problem with that is they're always going to equate you to some kind of deal or steal that they made. That was the danger that a lot of businesses encountered when they started doing the Groupon thing where they're giving away Groupons and their restaurants. Now that I enjoy it, I will not go back to without a Groupon. I'm not paying full price for this and you business has got a little bump in business from Groupon but they ended up finding out they're bleeding out money because the people they brought back low quality customers and that's the problem with services like that. That's the problem when you leave your business like that. That's the problem when you lead with the discount, where people instantly automatically see you as a discount option, you have hard it's a harder time retaining clients. They're always shopping for higher quality experience or what they think is a higher quality experience, even though in a lot of times when they're saying they're pursuing a higher quality experience, what they're looking for is somebody who charges them what they think the service is worth. So there's no real benefit in you being a cheap option.

Speaker 1:

One of the issues that businesses really do encounter is this fear that if you have a price point that's too high, people will turn away from you. And yeah, some people will turn away from you. But the quality of your service or offering matches what the pricing expectations are or exceeds what their pricing expectations are. You're going to have clients and if they're paying what they feel like is enough, psychologically they're going to be more pleased with your service than if they got it on the discount. There are very few people that are actually wired to understand actual when they're actually getting a value for the money that they're paying, and more people than not will pay up for something they perceive to be higher quality, even when it is not higher quality, and I have a couple of real world examples that I will not go into because I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, not on this live stream at least. But price determines where your position is in the marketplace. If you make yourself the bargain basement price, people will treat you like a bargain basement place, bottom line. You got to think about that kind of stuff. Some other considerations are what your ongoing recurring costs are. So do you have a lot of variable costs, where it can cost X amount or Y amount or can cost S amount or A amount, and do you have fixed costs which are pretty much the same every single month? You have to determine what your fixed costs are versus what your variable costs are, and you fit your price in to comfortably cover that spread, because you got to understand that your price point is also going to determine how much the minimum amount that you can make in a month versus the maximum amount, and so you need to make sure that you're charging enough for a baseline. If you have a slow month, you're still bringing in enough that you can cover your fixed and variable costs with the money that you're bringing in.

Speaker 1:

Competitor pricing and I'm different when it comes to competitor pricing. I think that using competitor pricing as a foil in most cases, if you are not a commodity, that means if you aren't a business or service that people can go find literally anywhere I don't necessarily believe in trying to match or beat your competitors. I think that's a bad business proposition and it's just this big race to the bottom of pricing, and so I don't necessarily believe that you need to always sweat what your competitors are doing. They can't duplicate you and your efforts and your skills and everything, and so as long as you add stuff into your offering that distinguishes you, or things that they can only get from you, or you add a higher quality service to the offer. I don't necessarily worry as much about competition prices, because at the end of the day especially if you're selling a product at the end of the day, you're still all competing with Walmart. Let's keep it up and you're not going to win a pricing war with them. You're never going to be able to undercut Walmart or Target or Amazon. They're going to be able to charge less and sell more than you always. So you have to sell on a quality proposition and your price has to demonstrate that you're a quality product or service. Otherwise, people are going to go look somewhere else. Let's keep it buck.

Speaker 1:

Customer willingness to pay Now, this is a small consideration, because you need to make sure that you're not pricing so exorbitantly that a customer isn't willing to pay it. If you have a high quality service or you feel like you have a higher quality service, don't feel like you have to be the cheapest option. The right customer will pay your price. But if you're keep finding the fact that your customers are not the right customer, then you need to go back to figure out what your marketing strategy is and what message you're bringing. What message is bringing people to you? Because it's not bringing the right customer to you. That's a big thing. You need to make sure that your marketing message aligns and it's bringing the correct person to you, Because when you are getting the right client for your project or service, the price piece isn't that huge of an issue.

Speaker 1:

I'm not saying gouge people. I don't want you to go out there and absolutely gouge people, but I do want you to get what you worth, especially if you're in the creative space, because creators are typically the ones that they're critical of their. We're critical of our own work. I'm saying they are like I'm not in that space. We're critical of our own work and we tend to undervalue what our offering and what our experiences are. It's very difficult for us to stand on our square and say, no, this is my price.

Speaker 1:

I know, specifically for videography and stuff and this conversation I just had people think my phone can do X, y and Z, so I don't need a photographer, I don't need a videographer. Can your phone teach you to edit? Can it teach you to color correct? Can it teach you to adjust the sound? There's a lot of other aspects of it. Can it teach you framing and the 180 shutter rule and all these other things? That are considerations that people who have experience in the field know. Can your cameras teach you how to tell a story with your video or photo? If it can't do it, then you probably need to pay a professional to do it.

Speaker 1:

But the reality is you need to make sure that, especially as a creative person but anybody with a business make sure that you're not allowing your personal judgments on yourself to impact what your value is. You have to shut off the consumer part of your brain and focus on I'm the owner part of the brain. What you would pay as a consumer isn't necessarily what you should charge as a owner, because, as the owner, you're aware of all the overhead costs that it takes to make that thing valuable or give it quality. Hey, y'all, it's Brian. If this video is giving you some insights that you can use, why don't you go ahead and drop a like? It tells the algorithm hey, this video solved a specific problem for me and it lets it get recommended so more people can see it. That's all I'm asking. Just leave a like back to the program.

Speaker 1:

Listen, you need to set your price strategy up so that you make enough in your on-seasons that your off-seasons don't sting as much If you're not charging enough in the on-season, you're going to hurt in the off-season. That's just hot flows, bro. So you need to make sure that you're covering slow periods by charging enough during your periods when you have business. A lot of times, the only time you figure that stuff out and I'll be honest with you, the only time you figure that stuff out is that comes from testing and that comes from being in your business and monitoring your financials and knowing this is when things are moving fast. This is when things are moving slow and picking your place in there, because I think the biggest issue is especially when you're dealing with something seasonal. People think that there's a cap on how much they're supposed to make and they enforce that cap upon themselves and they're not planning for it. When things slow down, we're still going to need cash reserves and it's understanding that if there are boom and bust seasons, then during the boom season you need to be charging as much as you can for your service without driving your clients away. That's just it. So that's a lot of words for make sure you're charging enough, all right, so there are lots of different pricing strategies.

Speaker 1:

I'm not going to get into all of the gory details with all the different price strategies, but I'll give an overview of them and then give you a quick synopsis. So we have cost plus pricing, that's, adding a markup to the cost of a product. That's one of the ones that you see commonly and I know we get into it, like all those shoes only cost five cents to make and they're selling them for $50. I get that. I understand how insidious that is, but at the end of the day, the cost of a product isn't just the cost of them, the materials of that product. There's a whole list of costs about manufacturing, shipping, landing that product, paying for shelf space and other things that you need to worry about that go into the price of that final cost of a product. Services you have overhead expenses you got building to pay for, you got rent to pay, insurance, staff fees and salary and things along those lines. So there's a lot of costs that you got to consider when you're selling a product.

Speaker 1:

And, yeah, people can offer like Walmart can offer rock bottom pricing, because the reality is they make so much money and, to be quite honest with you, they're not exactly known as fantastic. They're not exactly known as I hate to say this they're not exactly known. Well I don't really hate to say it because it's the truth they're not exactly known for taking care of the workforce. Yeah, it's a big cost for them, but that's not the priority on their brain, and so that's something that doesn't necessarily always get factored into the price consideration. They wanna make sure that they're paying enough to keep staff, but they don't really care if it's great for their staff to be there, and that's a sad reality of when you're dealing with a corporate thing. But the markup is important and it's a necessary piece you can't sell.

Speaker 1:

If you bought this let's see this water bottle I have. If you bought this water bottle, at the cost it costs to create and produce it, you're probably paying maybe a couple of pennies. But shipping it, landing it, all the other stuff, all those other fees go into it. Plus the store has to make money on it too. So everything that you buy is marked up. Everything you buy is marked up. I don't even care if they're saying, oh, there's a factory special and we'll do with this end. The third is still marked up. This is keeping buck, value-based pricing.

Speaker 1:

This is one that hangs around a lot of creative spaces. A lot of consultants try to run with this one. I've even played around with it. Here's the reality. It sounds really great on paper. It really does. There are some people that have been able to completely pull off their model and make it. Value-based is how much perceived value that the end customer is getting. So your price is based on what value you're bringing to the table. So if I create a video for you and you put on your website and this video generates X million sales, then I'm just asking for 1% of those sales and you're paying me relative to the value of what you think that this video is gonna do. And that sounds great on paper, but we're finding more and more businesses pushing back against that because they don't want some kind of movable piece for it.

Speaker 1:

And you have to really be in your sales kung fu bag to sell the value-based pricing model. I'm just being honest with you. You can do it. It requires a little bit of sales. Kung fu Christo on the future is really good. Blake Ennis I think it's Blake Ennis who wrote the when without pitching manifesto Go check that book out if you wanna learn more about value-based pricing. And there are agencies that do it. There are marketing agencies and other creative agencies that do the value-based pricing model and they have a good success with it. But you have to really be on top of your salesman game to do that.

Speaker 1:

Skimming prices, setting a high price on a new product and skin maximum revenue. Now I've seen people have a lot of success with that one where they're like, hey man, if I set my price point high enough, we don't need to sell a heck of a whole lot of these things. We out of a lot of money to dump into the marketing of these things so that when we catch a whale we can absolutely convert that. And we're not trying to sell a heck of a whole lot of these things, but a lot of our money goes into market research and marketing and really making sure that this thing is worth every penny that they're paying for it, so that when we do get a high value customer they're happy with the product and they'll be willing to pay again for that same service in the future at this super high rate.

Speaker 1:

Psychological pricing there's setting and I'm guilty of it. My wife absolutely hates the fact that I do this. Looking at the numbers, the specific numbers you're using, I know what I've seen. Walmart use numbers that ended 63 or 67. You'll find a lot of things or something $100 or $99.99. There's psychological kind of general research about what these price points actually do in terms of conversions, and so there's a lot of research on it. But that's why you see a lot of things at these odd price points. To be honest with you 99 cents Whereas it's 10.99, why isn't it 11? Because, for whatever reason, people will pay more readily pay for 10.99 than something that's $11. That's the thinking behind it.

Speaker 1:

And then dynamic pricing, where you price based on market demands. And you're gonna find that in a lot of people that have to deal with suppliers and things like that, where you have to adjust your price relative to what they're charging you, otherwise you'll be out of business, and that's a tough game. People that are at home improvement things or age back or roofing or fences and stuff like that, where there's this cost for materials that escalates at different points in the year and so instantly, the quote that they make to you in one month is only good for about two weeks and then you gotta go get a new quote because the price done change and so that's a very difficult place to be, especially when you're dealing with those kind of products and services which are going all together. So we're gonna talk about some real world examples of pricing strategies and the one that's most top cause this is the one I just most recently spoke about. We're gonna talk about the Planet Fitness pricing model and what signal the Planet Fitness pricing model sends to its clients. So buckle in on this one.

Speaker 1:

So Planet Fitness's pricing model is really interesting because the pricing model is we don't want you to come to the gym, we don't care if you come or not, we'd rather you not show up. And so they do everything to make that gym experience as uncomfortable as possible. Now they say they make it comfortable for people that are just getting into fitness, but it really isn't. The alarms and the lack of equipment, lack of things outside of machines and David are on you for water bottles. You can't bring in a water bottle that's too big in some places and blah, blah, blah. They make it very uncomfortable. And then they charge you $10 a month. What that $10 a month is. They're hoping that you forget about that $10. And you're like, yeah, it's too much of a headache to go to this place and it's only $10. And they hope that you keep that $10 running and definitely they disincentivize you for coming to the gym. They don't make it a rewarding experience.

Speaker 1:

Now you see all the commercials and everything where a whole plan of fitness is great and they welcome you in and blah. That's how it feels walking in there, and so their model is really based on getting as many people to pay $10 a month, typically as New Year's resolutions come around. Well, the plan of fitness is only 10 bucks a month. It's a small commitment that I'm never gonna follow up on and they know that you're not gonna follow up on it. And, in fact, you being in the gym is a bigger headache for them, because now they gotta pay extra employees to monitor you and make sure your water bottle isn't too big it all kinds of other stuff, and so their pricing model is built to have maximum signups and minimum people utilizing their memberships.

Speaker 1:

Because think about it like this think about the plan of fitness that is in your neighborhood. Think about what that gym would look like if everybody that had a membership used that membership. The gym would be packed all the time, all the time, and it wouldn't necessarily be a great moneymaker, because they have to pay extra staff and there's a lot of other things that go into staffing a place 24, seven Nope, they'd rather just take your 10 bucks and you stay at home. You're paying them to pretend like you wanna go to the gym and that's the truth and unfortunately it's a hard and bitter pill to swallow, but that's the game and they disincentivize you from coming. That's their pricing strategy and it's work. It's really effective. Man, there's a lot of people that will pay $10 a month to have the psychological the opportunity. If they wanted to go to the gym but never quite going to the gym, hey, we're gonna give you some pizza. You can come at work out and then eat a slice of pizza and immediately feel guilty and either break your diet and stay home for another six months. So that's what their model is. It's not really built to bring you in.

Speaker 1:

Now let's look at a high-end steakhouse. What we got here locally is mahogany and mahogany's prices are prohibitively high. They charge you everything and everything is a la carte, so they can charge you more. And the reason why is, for some people there's the psychological thing the more I pay for this steak, the better it tastes, and they know it and they are really pushing it, so they do go out of their way to make the steak taste as good as it can. Is it the best steak you could ever buy? Probably not. If you learn how to cook a steak at your house, you probably could match some of the techniques that they have and then use a lot of butter, because that's always the secret for fancy restaurants is they use more butter than a human probably should consume, one's saying. But they really take a lot of time and hire the best chef so that they can give you the best tasting meal that you can have, and then they charge you through the nose for it, because you're not paying for that steak.

Speaker 1:

You're paying to eat at Mahogany or Ruth, chris or whatever expensive steakhouse or moderately expensive steakhouse is in your hood. That's what you're paying for. You're paying to eat there. You're not paying for the meal. You're paying for the memory and the ability to say that you can eat. You ate at a fancy restaurant and so they can charge more for the experience and it disconnects you from the actual. The steak doesn't really cost anywhere near this much. It might charge you 150 bucks for this steak, but the steak doesn't isn't a $150 steak. It's not cheap, but it's not a hundred. The steak doesn't in and of itself cost $150. And if you took that $150, you probably could cook a steak dinner for four people, with sides and all the other stuff, and still have a little bit of money to spare. But you don't wanna do that. You wanna go out and see and be seen.

Speaker 1:

It's the bar pricing strategy, where a bar could sell you a shot, and I think Fat Joe was the one that put this over. This is a weird place to get this information from, but Fat Joe was talking about opening a bar in house hustle. A bar can give you a shot of a drink that's unfiltered, not mixed with anything, and charge you $8. Or they can take a smaller portion of that shot, pour it over some ice, put some juice on it and stir it up with a straw and they can sell it to you for $20. You're getting less, you're paying more, and people do that every single weekend. It's amazing. That's the concept of it. And so people aren't paying for the drink, they're paying for the experience of being out and having drinks while being out with friends. So the hustle here is people will pay for an experience, they'll pay for an experience.

Speaker 1:

Right now Paris is in the middle of a massive bed bug and infestation. Where it's in the subways, it's in the airport, it's in all the hotels, anywhere you go in the city. That's a common place. There are bed bugs there and people are still paying to fly out to Paris for the experience. Now, what are you gonna do with the bed bugs when you get there and how many are you gonna be taking home? Is it worth the price For them? It's worth paying this airfare and stuff to travel over to Paris and paying the Parisian prices for stuff, while there may be other places in France that you can go and I don't know if there are any other airports. There has to be one other airport that's left to go but where you could probably avoid the bed bugs. But people will pay that extra money.

Speaker 1:

Same thing with Vegas. You go to Vegas. Everything costs a lot of money on the strip because that's where all the tours are. You go off the strip, things are a little bit cheaper, but when you're on the strip, everything is expensive and they know that they can disconnect you from how expensive this thing is because you are in Vegas. When we were down there last year, we were at the hotel and the dude at the front desk said hey, you pulled us aside. Hey, don't drink those water bottles in the room. If you drink those water bottles in the room, it's gonna be like another 80 bucks on your bill. There are other places that get water. You don't need to drink those water bottles that are in your room.

Speaker 1:

But what he's basically saying is you can get the same experience for cheaper somewhere else. But some people are really disconnected with it and they're paying for the experience of being in Vegas and they'll spend insane amounts of money for experiences that they could have at their house or have in their home in their city of origin, and also experiences that they can get off the strip for a lot cheaper. So people pay for experiences. Is what I'm saying. I'm trying to think of other pricing strategy models, but I'm looking at my time and I probably need to get moving on.

Speaker 1:

So, challenges that people run into with pricing a lot of your challenges, especially the small business owner your challenges are gonna be ego-based, because it's hard to charge more than you think a service is worth. It's hard If you don't think your service is valuable. It's hard to ask for the right amount for it. If you don't believe in what you do, it's hard to ask for a fair price on it. And a fair price is a price that covers all your overhead, pays all your staff, provides you enough of a margin so that you can have a check to take home, and pays all your business expenses, all the other costs that go into running your business. That's a fair price because you have to you actually have to make all these other things happen. You have to make sure your employees are well taken care of. You have to make sure that you have a roof over your business and a roof over your head. You have to make sure that the quality of materials don't degrade and blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And I've actually experienced it where a restaurant appreciated the quality of the food they were serving and I stopped going to the restaurant. You have to make sure that you're asking enough upfront to make sure that you can maintain and improve sometimes even improve the quality of what you're offering.

Speaker 1:

And it is a psychological thing because you're sitting there looking at God. I wouldn't pay that much for this, but then you got to pull it apart. Would you actually if you could buy something that solves a problem for you indefinitely. How much would you pay for that? How much would you pay for tires that never go flat, that never get punctures and never have to get repaired? How much would you pay for it? How much would it be worth to you? You have to think about those kind of things. How much would you pay for genes that never fray or rip? How much would you pay for a car that you can drive for 15, 20 years and only do regular maintenance on it and never have any major issues? How much does that stuff work to you? It's worth a lot more than you actually think it is, because if you can buy a solution that will solve problems for a while to come, you'll pay up for it.

Speaker 1:

And so my thing is increase the value of what you're offering. Increase the value. Specifically, say and I'm just pulling one out say you sell used cars. Okay, if you have a mechanic on your staff when you sell those used cars also sell packages for oil replacements, entire replacements, tire rotations, regular maintenance, and you put a subscription under and say you pay this amount every single month and all you got to do is just show up at your schedule regular maintenance thing and you don't have to worry about anything. You have to come out of pocket. I've seen dental offices run with that same practice where you don't pay at the point of sale. You pay throughout the year so that you can come in and get your regular checkups and things like that. So there are ways to absolutely do that piece of it and make sure that you're meeting future needs and you're enhancing the purchase after it's bought. So that's a good way to navigate that and make sure that you're getting what you actually feel like you're worth.

Speaker 1:

But there are consider because here's the thing a lot of times people struggle with can my clients actually afford this? And the only way to know if your client can afford it is charge them and see who pays for it. You shouldn't be charging and I'm gonna be honest, here's my moral dilemma that I put out there. I don't think that you should be charging. You shouldn't be gouging people. You absolutely shouldn't. That's just my take on it. But there are people out there that don't have any problem having markups that are that high and people still buy them and pay for them. So at the end of the day, is valuable enough to the consumer to pay that amount, so go get it Now.

Speaker 1:

I'm big on fair pricing and I don't want to have a service that I think isn't worth what I'm selling it for, and so I won't sell a service to a product that I don't think matches the price I'm asking for. I just won't. Morally I have a problem with that. Some businesses don't. I think most small businesses are on the opposite end, where they have a problem charging enough Because the day to day of doing business they're not getting enough from every purchase and every transaction and so they're struggling in other areas because they didn't take into all the consideration of all the overhead and all the other stuff that goes into running a business on a day to day basis and they came up with some price point that doesn't necessarily meet their needs. I think a lot of small businesses out here, especially in the creative space that's when I do lean on photographers, videographers, florists, people that create stuff for the people and require creative input writers constantly undercharge and under bill what they're for, what their services really are, and I think it's a dilemma.

Speaker 1:

On that end of it, I don't think people are charging too much. I think they're charging too little because they're still struggling to make ends meet and a lot of it is just a function of inflation, and inflation hits all of us but at the end of the day, you can't stand firm on your price point when your other costs are going through. The roof was better to charge what the stuff actually costs. That's just my. That's my two cents on it. So there are plenty of platforms that allow you to research pricing. I don't necessarily like using your competitors pricing to frame what your pricing is. I think you offer a high quality, higher quality version of what your competitor is selling and then sell on that.

Speaker 1:

I don't like the anchoring principle, anchoring yourself to a price of what other people are charging, and I also don't believe in this person's charging $99. I can come in at $89 and poach all their customers. No, you're not. It's not going to work. What you're going to do is get a bunch of customers that you can't stand, because the only reason they came to you the literally the only reason they came to you is because you are the cheapest option.

Speaker 1:

And once you get identified as the cheapest option, you will get clients that do not respect what you're offering and people fight against that and say, oh, I love a good value. I love a good deal. I can almost guarantee you that the people that are always looking, that are always couponing and trying to get every single deal that they possibly can get and are always making you fight for every square inch and every inch, are not customers that you want. You don't want to have to go in a hand to hand combat every single transaction. It's not worth it. You want customers that gladly pay your price, that even are shocked how low your prices are and say you need to be charging more for this. I would pay more for it. You want those people Because those are your rider dies and those are the people that will stick with you through good and bad, and I would rather have 50 people that gladly pay the price then 500 prospects who are looking for the cheapest value. It's just not worth it. That's what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1:

Your prices, your positioning is a signal. Your price is a signal that you're sending to the world about how much your services are worth, how much you are worth, how much your time is worth, how much your effort is worth, how much your time is worth. It's a signal that you're sending out there into the world, and so you need to take your price seriously and how much you're charging, and stand on your square and not chase customers and this speech is for me as well as everybody else out there who runs a small business. Stop chasing people that want you to undervalue and undermine what you're worth, or they want to dictate to you what you're worth or say I can get it down the street for X amount, x, y and Z. Go down street, go to them. Don't come here. I don't need that. I don't need to devalue myself and devalue what I'm offering to you to solve your problem just so that I could say that you're a customer, because you're not a good customer. If you're doing that and yes, I want you to find the value that meets your needs and find the thing that satisfies your needs, and sometimes your needs are a lower cost. So if you need a lower price and I can't meet that need, then you can go somewhere else. That's what it is. But if I can meet your need and the price is right, then we can do business, and I'll be glad to do that business every single day of the week.

Speaker 1:

But business owners, stand on your square. Your price is your signal as much as word of mouth and things like that. Your price is your signal to the value of the product you're offering. If you price yourself too low, thinking that you're going to get a bunch of customers, you're going to get low quality customers who have no loyalty to you and as soon as somebody else, lower price, comes along, they will trade you in and move on. You don't want that. It's a race to the bottom. So don't compete on price. Compete on the quality aspect of it. Compete on how this thing can solve problems for the clients. That's what you want to focus on.

Speaker 1:

Starting out business owners, your initial price should be higher than you think it is. It should be enough where you actually feel a little bit uncomfortable asking for it, because that's the price that's going to make sure that your light stay on and in those dry months, it's going to make sure that you're able to pay your rent on time. It's going to be the price that feeds your kids. Take it seriously. I'm serious. I'm trying not to be too stern on this, but I feel like I got to put that real talk in there, because some of you are out here doing this and thinking that you're going to get over by not charging enough or undercutting the whole world, and it's not going to happen for you. It's not going to work. You're going to get these low quality, tired, kicking clients that have no loyalty to you and they will allow you to undercut, undercut, undercut, to the point where you're begging for money. So get serious about your pricing. It's the signal that tells the market what you're offering, what your skills and talent and ability and passions are worth. That's what price means. It's the determining factor. So that's all I got.

Speaker 1:

I appreciate y'all's time. Hopefully I was able to answer some questions for you and if you have any questions or concerns, hit me up. I'm going to drop my website and social media Melodycel words. I'm moving into the consultation space 100%. I'm going to drift away from the done for you services as much. I have select clients that I do that for, but I'd rather teach you how to build your business into a profitable business.

Speaker 1:

I got one business that is done six figures under my belt, but that's doing six figures under my belt, and I'm building up another one, which is this and so I do know a little bit about a little bit. So hit me up if you want to pick my brain. We can schedule sticking points for meeting and figure out exactly where you're stuck and then start you on the pathway to getting unstuck. That's all I got. Again, I'm Brian. This has been the unstuck sessions live stream. I'll be chopping this into a podcast sooner rather than later. I had to take a little bit of time off for some sort out, some personal things, but I'm back now, baby, and so you're about to do this thing. Thanks for tuning into the live stream. I will holler at y'all later, be easy. Thanks for tuning in, be easy.