6 Critical things every OBM should consider when setting your price

How to set your prices confidently, build a thriving business, and create a lasting impact

 

6 Critical things every OBM should consider when setting your price

 Hello. Hello. Welcome to another episode of The Audacious OBM. I’m Leanne, and we’re going be talking about six things every OBM should consider when setting your price. The reason I wanted to talk about this is because I know as OBMs we can struggle with pricing, knowing what to price, knowing what to include in our pricing, knowing when to talk about pricing, where to put our pricing.

 

It can get a little bit icky and we can feel a little bit confronted. So I thought it might be a good idea just to start having some more conversations and make it easier for each other to price better and price profitably. 

 

In the last episode, we talked about the different kinds of pricing structures, success factors, challenges, considerations when setting your price, and that’s what we’re going to dive in a little bit deeper today.

 

So, there are six things I wanna talk to you about. And these are the things that I think it’s worth the investment of time to think about before setting a dollar figure on your services. So those six things, are you, your expenses, the experience you create, the people you’ll need, the profit and the impact you wanna create.

 

Now, I’m gonna go through these in a little bit more detail each, and hopefully by the end of it, it’ll make sense and it’ll make your pricing journey a little bit smoother.

 

You’ll know what to include even if you don’t know exactly what your price should be, at least you know you’ve got your bases covered, and then that can make you feel heaps more confident in itself. 

 

All right, so the first one YOU. Since I started my business, I have always paid myself. I built a business to support me and I didn’t want to wait a really long time till my business could finally afford me.

 

So from the beginning, I paid myself and my business would have to pay me and pay everything else it needed to, for me to see it as a success. Now things don’t always go to plan, so please don’t feel bad if you don’t pay yourself or you’re still trying to get there. This was just the approach that I took, and it was always that even if it was a small amount, I wanted to consider me first.

 

I didn’t want it to be something where I waited a year or two and then went, oh, I can finally pay me now. I wanted it to be front and center, as front and center as something I was going to do. This was going to happen. Otherwise this business wouldn’t survive and I wanted it to, this is what I wanted.

 

So I factored in me first. 

 

Then I factored in my expenses, which is number two. Now. I was a bookkeeper, so. I know a little bit more than some about expenses and the different distribution of expenses and the types of expenses, and I know that it’s easy to get lost in the detail. So for the sake of this episode, let’s just say expenses is everything that your business has to cover to operate and keep growing.

 

And I want you to consider those in your price. When you’re setting a price, you need to be able to cover all different kinds of expenses, little ones and big ones. So if you are having a really great month, your expenses shouldn’t change too dramatically or the amount that you’ve allocated for expenses shouldn’t. 

 

You might find that some months you don’t have to pay for a lot of things. This month. I just had to pay for, my monthly Zoom fee. But then you might get to another month and you might need a new laptop, and that’s a really big expense. And so all of a sudden you pause a little bit on the really big expense. And it’s not astronomical.

 

I’m not saying go out and spend millions on things you don’t need. It’s always things that you need and are practical. But I want you to build them into your pricing so that then it doesn’t matter when in the year you are or what month it is, you have already thought about and allocated some money for those expenses because you are not in a situation where you can just go, okay, this month I’m going to quadruple my prices and charge all my clients four times as much because I need to buy a new laptop.

 

And the next month I’m gonna reduce it again. That’s just not good business sense. If you can make that work and people go for it, then by all means, please share your secrets. But I’ve not seen anyone successfully do that yet. So an easier way around it is to building your expenses to your overall price.

 

Then, the third thing we need to think about when setting price is experience. Now this is something that dawned on me once I was in business for a few years, and that was I like to make people feel good, and I didn’t want it to be a battle of “Can the business afford it? And can the business afford paying all of its expenses and doing this nice thing, this thing that’s gonna make my clients feel valued?”

 

I didn’t want it to be that constant tension. I wanted to be able to show people that I appreciate them in all different ways without it tipping the ship over. So then I thought about, okay, what would those things look like and how much would it cost? I just brainstormed a little bit and went, okay, so I built a buffer.

 

That is my experience factor buffer. And so it can be big and little things. It might be a card, it might be a chocolate bar, it might be a birthday present, or it might be sympathy flowers. It can be all different things, but I’ve built it in to my price so that when it comes to it, I don’t have to hesitate.

 

I don’t have to go, oh, do we really have the revenue to cover this because it’s built into my pricing structure. So then it just becomes about following the process through and creating that experience. That experience becomes a given. And that was just something that I really like. And now that I’ve built it into my pricing structure, makes me happier, makes my clients happier, win-win, right?

 

Which brings me to people. So the fourth thing we should consider is people. And the main reason I wanted to talk about this was because it might just be you in your business right now. But I want you to think about the future a little bit and what happens if you’re really successful? What happens if you finally get to the point where you have leads, upon leads, upon leads? Then what? Because chances are you won’t be able to do it all. And what happens when you won’t be able to do it all? You are going to have to pay other people to do it. And that means that every time you add more people into your business, it’s not just the people that you have to pay, it’s the systems to facilitate it as well.

 

Like it’s just, it’s not really as black and white as it can seem. So I just want you to think about, now, if I had to bring on another person, whether that’s a contractor, an employee, a subcontractor, someone to build your website, a consultant, whoever it might be, factor into your pricing, that person might need to exist so that then when it comes to it, you’ve already got a little bit of a game plan so that every new client you get.

 

It’s not just covering like the basic, basic basicness of business. It has room to cover you, your expenses and more people. So I just want you to start thinking about that and building it in now so that when you get to the point where you’ve got lots of leads and you want to scale, you don’t have to be stopped in your tracks and go, oh, but now I’m not gonna get paid coz I have to pay someone else.

 

And I didn’t really think about that. Or I didn’t think about these extra expenses that would go with that, and then all of a sudden all your attraction and that awesome feeling that you get stops because you don’t quite know what to do, coz you didn’t expect it. But if you build people into your pricing structure, that won’t happen.

 

Okay. Awesome thing number five that we should consider when setting our price is profit. Now let me be clear, profit is not breadcrumbs. Profit is not the thing that is left at the end IF there happens to be anything left that you sweep up and put somewhere. Profit is what is there when you decide, okay, business is done, or I wanna give this business to someone else, what are you going to walk away with?

 

What has that business contributed to you and your family and your life and your wealth outside of, “oh, it paid me every week.” We want there to be some profit. We wanna build up that asset. And so it’s a little bit like with superannuation or retirement savings. We put some money away every single week.

 

Or our employers put money away for us every week that we don’t see and we don’t touch because it’s for when we are older and when we need it more. And all these years we’ve been. Building up this cache of money for when we are going to need it, and we don’t touch it. In the meantime, only under very extreme circumstances are we even allowed to access that money.

 

It’s similar for a profit to business. It’s the money that the business is putting away, putting away, putting away, and it’s so that when you walk away, you’ve actually got an asset. It’s going to make the rest of your life easier because it had existed, and that’s what we want. We don’t just want business to be a job where, yeah, we get paid, we get paid well, we have a great time. We want it to serve our entire life. And building in a profit percentage into your pricing structure will allow you to do that. 

 

And then, you know, okay, every new client I get or this type of service that I sell, I’m going to put this much away. That’s the profit. And that builds and builds and builds over time.

 

And then when you close your business, that bit, that asset is yours. It’s built in. And then the final thing that. I wanna bring to your attention when you are setting your price and determining how much you should charge and what it should include, please consider your impact. So what I’ve learned about people is very rarely do we just want something for us.

 

Usually we’re passionate about other things. Or, there are things in the world that we see that we go, I wish I could do something, or someone should do something about that. And you opt out. I can’t do it because I don’t have the resources. Or you’re stretched so, so thin that when it comes to contributing something that you think will make a really big difference, you hesitate.

 

But what if it didn’t have to be like that? And what if you built-in impact into your pricing structure similar to the way you do it with profit? And what if you really thought about, okay, if this business existed to solve this problem or to improve this system? Or to help these people pick something, something that is important, something that you can anchor to, and then build it into your pricing structure.

 

You’re going to change the world. You’re going to make an impact because with every dollar that you make, you are contributing to this thing, whatever it is. So that it doesn’t feel like you’re constantly scrambling for money so that you can finally make the impact that you want, but instead you are building that impact into everything that you do.

 

Can you imagine what that would be like? And then going to work every day and knowing that just doing what you do is.  ticking that box and helping the world in the way that you want to. It’s making a change, small or big. And so let’s take the hesitancy out because why not? If we can from the start, let’s do that.

 

Nothing’s stopping us. We’re the ones that get to choose and we can just start small. That’s the final thing that I just wanna mention is with all of these things, I think you will build a really good pricing structure if you can consider these six things. But I also know you might not be there today, and that’s okay.

 

It also doesn’t have to be overnight, and you don’t have to, start really big. If you don’t have one of these things included in the way you set up your prices at the moment and you know that you want to, just start with a really small amount and then increase it over time, because then it becomes easy, like easy to the point of if all you can manage is 10 cents.

 

Now 10 cents is nothing. You cannot even buy a Chupa Chup with that anymore. So if I was to say to you, just put 10 cents away from every transaction for your impact or for your profit or for your experience, could you do it? My guess is yes, it’s a starting point and then you increase it and eventually it won’t be 10 cents anymore.

 

It might be $10, might be a hundred dollars. It might be a thousand dollars. You don’t know what the future holds, but you can kind of control that pathway. And so I really encourage you that no matter where you’re at now, to think about your pricing and to remember that you are in control, you can make this work for you, and that there are things we can implement that makes pricing a little less stressful and even feel good.

 

So I hope that, helps. I hope that you have a little bit more clarity and a way to make pricing feel successful and less scary, less icky. Let me know how you feel about pricing or what your biggest pricing question is.

 

DM me on Insta @audaciousempires or send us an email or head over to our website, audaciousempires.com.

 

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