Ep #37: Price Accessibility for Your Clients

Episode Summary

Jenna dives deeper into a common question faced by purpose-driven entrepreneurs: is it really right to provide services that aren’t financially accessible to everyone?

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Show Notes

What are the ethics of an offer that is only accessible to a select few? How do you want to move through life as a responsible business owner in a society that has some severe equity inversions? The truth is, there will always be more people in the world that need what you offer than you can give, and I’m diving deeper into the topic of price accessibility in this week’s episode.

So many of my clients come to me with reservations about charging what they believe to be high quantities of money. They know that their work is much needed in the world, but due to how it is priced, it is not accessible to everybody, and this causes them to experience some shame and guilt around their offerings. But is it really wrong to charge for something good? Even though you are righting the wrongs of society and creating a better future, does that really mean you should do it for free?

In this episode, I share how I talk this through with my clients as well as my perspective on the topic of price accessibility as someone who offers packages that are inaccessible to many people. I give you some things to think through as you implement new ideas in your business around pricing and accessibility and show you how to get clear on what you want to create.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• How this internal conflict can be expressed in unintentional, unbeneficial ways.

• The problem with black-and-white thinking.

• How you may have internalized patriarchal conditioning and how it could be affecting the way you operate in your life and business.

• Some examples of ways you can make your packages more accessible.

• What you have to do to have the impact you want to have.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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• We Should All Be Millionaires: A Woman's Guide to Earning More, Building Wealth, and Gaining Economic Power by Rachel Rodgers

• Ep #17: The Power of Decisions with Ale Garnica

Full Episode Transcript:

What are the ethics of an offer that is only accessible to a select few? How do you want to move through life as a responsible business owner in a society that has some severe equity inversions? And what exactly is your role in creating change? If we do want to make change, what would that even look like? What do we need to think through to make sure we're making sound decisions? We've got some thinking to do. So, let's get into it.

You're listening to The Uncommon Way Business and Life Coaching Podcast, the only podcast that helps you unlock your next level in business and life by prioritizing your clarity and your own Uncommon Way. You will learn to maximize your mindset, mission, messaging, and strategy in order to create a true legacy. Here's your host, top-ranked business coach, and reformed over-analyzer turned queen of clarity, Jenna Harrison.

Welcome back to The Uncommon Way, I am so glad to have you here. I'm just back from my Charleston trip with my husband, where we were seeing whether or not this might be the next place for us to move to. And it turns out, it is not our place. That's okay. Now we know.

It's so similar to what happens with entrepreneurship, right? Like, well, that didn't work. Now, I know. I only had the information I had at the time. I formed this hypothesis that was unsuccessful. But hey, failure is the path to my dreams, right? We're either winning or learning.

As a quick example, one of the things that we became aware of while we were there, is that there's a long list for people that want to get in, for instance, to see pediatricians or health care. It's all backed up because so many people are moving there. So, this is a question that just never would have occurred to me to ask. You don't know what you don't know. But now, I do.

Is the population explosion here having enough of an impact that it's affecting basic services, like health care, education, and infrastructure? And to what extent? It's such a great question, right? We will definitely ask people about that when we go to Charlotte, in June.

But you can't fault yourself for never having thought to ask the question. And so, I just wanted to share that as a little metaphor for any of you that are like, “Ah, I wasted this time. I should have known better,” or any of the things. Of course, you shouldn't have, right? We're all building businesses from scratch. We're all figuring out how to do this as we go along.

So, right before we went to Charleston, we got word that my son was not thriving in his school. And in hindsight, this was not the right school for Dylan. But because it was kind of this free-range model where there's not much communication between teachers and parents, we really didn't know what was going on.

We were supposed to be asking our child about the day-to-day. The same child who tells me he's already been to outer space is supposed to also give me an accurate account of his trials and tribulations at school. He was obviously in over his head. They just had very high expectations for what children can do.

It was a mixed-age schoolhouse. He was the youngest, he was in the youngest group. So, everything came to a head, and within a week, we had to withdraw him. Frankly, he was picking up a lot of bad habits from older kids that he just doesn't yet have the discretion to manage. When are we joking? When are we not? When is it appropriate to say this? When is it not?

And even though it was free range, they had really strong ideas about safety. So, when my son's all activated, because he's been wrestling with eight- and nine-year-olds in the rough play area, and then says something like, “If you do it again, I'm going to poop on your head,” he thinks it's all a big joke, or it's him standing up for his boundaries, or who knows what goes on in that little head?

Maybe he's even heard it from a bigger kid who was smart enough not to say it right in front of a teacher. But when it is said it's considered a threat. Yeah. Right. It's an unkind phrase. Now, Ben was talking to a friend of his and he heard that the saying, that has really kind of sunk in with us, which is, in schools we’re treating boys like failed girls.

Because of the fact that they can't sit quietly, and they are so agitated, and they are rough and are playing at things, that can be considered a failure. And they internalize a lot of shame because of it. In this instance for him, what I saw there, I kind of I agree.

I was the mom, who made sure to dress my son in a variety of colors. I wanted to give him little dolls to play with; everything I could to not condition him with socially expected masculine choices. So, I'm not the one to say ‘boys are different than girls’ as a blanket statement. But this kid has just been pure boy from day one. I had a client who referred to her sons as a “little Vikings”. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, that lands, he is my little ball of yang energy.

So, the last week has been… We've had several sleepless nights. We've had a lot of time not working, where we've been running around trying to find childcare at a moment's notice. And really talking things over every evening and making decisions and plans. How are we going to respond to this letter from the school? Is this really the red flag that we've maybe been thinking about, and it is time to withdraw him? And then, where are we going to put him, and all the things?

So, I know that Ben, right now, would be like, “Why are you talking about this to people we don't know.” And first of all, I feel like I know you, right? Because I know enough of you that I assume the rest of you are just the same. And we're all just a bunch of women hanging out and being real, right? Except that I get to do all the talking, of course.

But seriously, I'm sharing this for a reason. Number one is because we sometimes think that at some point in our business, we just won't have problems anymore. And, that's not true. I think it's really helpful to be very transparent about that. It was always helpful for me when I heard people talking about that.

And, you know, we have human brains. We interact with other humans with brains, and we have a bunch of circumstances we can't control. And so, life will always have challenges, and grounding into that has helped me more fully enjoy the stage that I'm in right now.

There's not so much of this, I need to get there kind of desperate energy. And when you're not in that desperate energy, when you really are enjoying more of where you're at, of course, that always serves you. That always ends up serving you, in your business and life anyway.

So, if I can do that for any of you, and any of you are like, “You know what? I'm just going to kind of sink into where I am right now. Jenna’s right, there's always going to be issues. And you know, right now is pretty good. There's some good stuff going on with my business. And this is kind of fun,” then I would love for you to take that away from this.

I'm also bringing it up because I see a lot of you really get sidelined by events in your life. And I just want to show up as a model of someone who still gets her podcast out, still talks to clients, still hops on sales calls. I acknowledge all of the privilege that allows me to do that. My mom lives nearby. And we do have the means to hire sitters to get us through a challenging phase like this; we are very lucky.

And also, I have spent years building a business that lets clients come to me on autopilot and that gives me free time during my week. I've also spent years building a brain that can compartmentalize and talk myself down off the ledge, and a nervous system that can tolerate an upset in my life.

This all would have been a really, really big deal to a prior version of myself. I probably would have made a whole bunch of stories and meaning about the whole circumstance and my choice to send him there in the first place, and all the things.

But I have so much trust in me, trust in the universe, and trust in the ability of humans in general, to be super resilient, even after going through hardship, that I know my family and my son will be fine. Right? And we tend to think that mental toughness is all about this “Hooah”, brute force, willpower, squelch those feelings, just push through, and make it happen. But it's not.

It's really about equanimity. Which Google defines as “mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.” We don't need to suppress what's going on because we can tolerate and handle whatever's coming up for us in our body and in our environment. It's about seeing the human side of you have real fears and freak outs, but not attaching to them. Allowing it to blow through the house of your mind, like when moving through screen doors.

Some of us can get really hung up on what we're not able to do when there's an upset in our life, when life happens. I found it very helpful to just shift and focus on what I can do. There's so much less friction there. So no, I am not releasing the episode this week that I had planned to release this week. And, that's okay.

But I can still show up and drop a little nugget that might still be super helpful for someone. It might still be what they needed to hear this week, rather than what my agenda was to put out to y'all this week. So, you'll be the judge, right? Let me know in the DMS or wherever if this episode was helpful for you.

But today, what I want to talk about is kind of that icky feeling a lot of us have about selling services that we believe are really needed in the world. But then, because of how they're priced, they aren't accessible to everyone. I've had many clients come to me with reservations about charging money, specifically, what they perceive to be high quantities of money.

Because they really want to be able to help people of all sorts of financial situations, and they really see that as necessary for righting so many of the wrongs in our society and creating a better future. And, I respect that. It's something that I've thought a lot about, as well.

I want to share how I talk this through with my clients. And also, my perspective, being a person who does offer some $25K packages that are obviously inaccessible to many people on this planet. But the thing is, I can see sometimes this internal conflict in women. I can see that expressed sometimes in ways that are unintentional or not beneficial.

So, they'll maybe make a choice that because of that, “Because I don't want to feel that way, I'll just start with a lower priced program, like a little course or something.” And that may not be the best business decision for them, for their personality, even for their market at that time, right?

Or “I will change my niche because I'll be a better person if I choose this niche.” Or they just carry around a lot of guilty feelings and it really interferes with how they're selling and how they're speaking and what they're doing.

When we make business decisions, we want to try to move towards something rather than reacting from something that we think we should probably do or something we're trying to avoid. We just want to get really clean in our thoughts, to get clear about what we do want to create, and then get really creative about how to make that happen.

The first thing that I would recommend that you think about, is just to avoid black-and-white thinking. We sometimes have this belief that either ‘I'm a full-on capitalist serving only the wealthy,’ or ‘I'm a do-gooder selflessly helping all the people.’ There is so much room to be, in between those two extremes. And to move in between those two extremes, at different times.

Just because you make one decision now doesn't mean that that's how you're going to run the rest of the business for the rest of your life. Right? So, I do encourage people to just think through: What do they want to move towards in the world? And really, reverse engineer that. Get very strategic about how they want to really make their big goals happen in the world, rather than focusing just on the next six months, or just on the next year.

That will allow you to make a plan, and hopefully, really like your reasons. Do you feel that you want to offer a scholarship spot right now, or a pro bono spot? Do you want to do that now or do you want to do that later? At what point in your business will you start doing that or will you implement whatever thing you're thinking about implementing?

Does it have to be right now? What are the pros and cons of doing it later versus doing it now? What are the reasons? And can you really like your reasons? Are they really clean reasons, like I said before?

Some people may choose to build a really large business. It's almost like a Robin Hood thing, right? They are maybe working with wealthier clients and then they're generating wealth and they're funneling that back into charity. Those are decisions that they get to make as business owners and as humans on the face of this earth, and that may be perfect for them.

Other people like to offer some sort of tiered access. You may want to be volunteering your time outside of your business. You may be building a business, and this is kind of the route that I went…

It was very important for me, in my thinking, to break generational paradigms, and to create a level of wealth for myself before I started offering scholarship spots. I just had a very clear focus that this was something that needed to happen, really in my family lineage, and that I needed to get very clear about. Still doing everything within integrity, of course.

And really, then what I was going to be doing was, I was going to be giving away so much for free to the people that would never even work with me. Right now, this last year, that is what this podcast has been about. The money that I've earned in my business allows me to have a team that can edit my podcasts for me and social media people that can get it out and make it accessible to people that can hopefully benefit from it.

I do give, I believe, a lot of value in these episodes. And I often give you just a lot of straight-up how tos. Like, this is exactly how I think about it, this is exactly how I do it. That was a decision that I made long before I ever created this podcast. It was, I really want to build to this level of income and safety and security for myself and my son, heaven forbid, we are on our own.

And then, I want to be able to just fully give back, first by way of podcast. Or if there had been some other technology that I preferred by that point, I would be using it. But I knew that I would transition from a place of really keeping my head down building my business, to a place of sharing without even an expectation of seeing a return on that investment, so to speak.

This may not make a lot of business sense, but when I moved forward with my podcast, I thought of it as, “Of course, there will be people that find a fit and come to me through this.” But I really did think of it as, “This is an expenditure I'm making for me, for the world. This is my giving back. And even if it's not generating income for me, it's my choice to still go forward with this and to make this investment every month, to get this out there to y'all.

Okay, so as you are making your plan, and as you are avoiding black-and-white thinking, you also want to bring in a healthy dose of realism. Because the truth is that you cannot help everyone. There will always be more people in the world that need what you offer, than you can actually help.

So, what is the best way to help? Is it by filling up your coaching slots with scholarship clients right now? Or is it to spend a few years building a very well-funded business or even a marginally… I guess that's all relative, right? What is well-funded? Building what you consider to be a well-funded business, and then having the resources to reach more people and affect greater change.

If you haven't read, We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachael Rodgers, I recommend that book for every woman on earth, basically. She goes into business building at the end, and I have some differences of opinion there. But the first chapters, where she's talking about the ways women have been conditioned to keep them from generating wealth, she paints the vision of a world where more wealth is in the hands of women. You've got to read this.

She backs up everything she's saying with data. She's linking to different research reports. I found it really eye-opening, and I have been studying these topics for years. So, I haven't met anyone that didn't find some nuggets in there that were just like, whoa.

You definitely want to make sure that you are being realistic, as you're making your plan, without being a cynical pessimist, of course. You want to allow room for you to get to your highest level of creativity while being grounded in reality.

Because another harsh reality is that we are in business to make money. My friends who have done a lot of work in the nonprofit sector or are in traditionally female service roles, like teachers and social workers, y'all can sometimes have some friction with this concept. You learning to receive wealth and abundance is a big part of your journey.

So, this is another thing that I would say, the answer to these questions is not the same for every person, right? There's no blanket statement. And you really need to know what some of your work is, and also what change you want to effect in the world.

Again, for those of you that have come from a background where there is a moral prize for earning less and giving more, you understanding that a lot of your thoughts are actually internalized patriarchy is also a big part of your journey. You understanding that just because you've grown up witnessing a world that is temporarily wounded from a toxic masculine energy paradigm; that same paradigm that has told us that the only way to accumulate wealth is through selfish and cutthroat practices.

Just because you've been conditioned with that, does not mean it's the way the world needs to be, or the way you will operate in the world. And it's your job to get creative about what the new paradigm actually looks like, and how you want to be, really, a trailblazer in this area, while living within the current economic system that we have.

Something else to think through: Our clients are humans. As you implement your new ideas, you just want to pay attention to how that is serving them or not serving them. We tend to think that people will be very, very happy with lower prices, and that they will have more favorable outcomes because of our lower prices.

But because humans have brains, sometimes actually, higher prices, are what encourages them to really, really commit and dive in, in a way. And obviously, again, that is very relative; what's a high price for one person is not a high price for another. All I'm saying, is use this as your laboratory to test, because what you assume will happen is not always exactly what will happen.

And you just want to be open to the fact that you're learning, you're evaluating, you're taking the pulse of this, and you're really looking to see what truly does get your people. And your people are going to be different from someone else's people, so there are no blanket statements here. But what really does get your people the best results for them.

And at the same time, you are human. So, you have got to be real. If you're bringing on a lot of low-price clients, but then your nervous system is all activated with scarcity, and maybe you even start falling into resentment, then you won't really be helping anyone.

If you're noticing that that could be something that would actually happen for you, then I encourage you to listen to my podcast with Ale Garnica, my client; the first one, where we were talking about powerful decision making. Because she was working through a lot of these exact questions. And making powerful decisions around them had a direct effect on her business.

The act of just not making the decision and kind of feeling the cognitive dissonance or the inner turmoil around these questions, she didn't realize it was having a pretty dramatic effect on her business. And so, just becoming clear on this, making these decisions for herself and how it was going to play out in her business, removing the shame and the guilt from the decisions that she did make, turned out to be very, very effective in a very short amount of time.

My therapist always says, “Put on your own gas mask before you turn to help someone else.” And that's not what we are taught to do as women in this culture, right? But that's what we have to do to have the impact that we want to have.

And I think there's room for us, even as we're putting on our gas mask, to still lend a hand to some extent. But we want to make sure that we're doing it from a place of our own safety in doing so. It's not going to keep us from getting the oxygen that we need, and it's not going to, in any way, interfere with or misdirect or keep us away from the grand vision that we have.

We are learning to really keep our eyes on the prize. To really hold the vision of something that does not even exist yet. And then, like I said, reverse engineer. Get very smart and methodical about how we're going to build into it and manage the thoughts and the feelings that are coming up as we do so. Because there are so many external influences at play, that grounding into what really is right for us in this moment, tuning in to where we want to go, and giving ourselves the latitude to create that.

It doesn't all have to happen today, has been something that has been very helpful for me and for my clients. I absolutely wish that it sparks something for you, that helps get you to resolution. Because I want all of us doing our best work in the world. And yes, increasing our capacity to give our sisters and our brothers a hand up that are not in a position to hop into that without some assistance.

Okay, my friends. Thank you for joining me here today. And just remember, deep down, you know who you are. And, each day, you're stepping further into what you are here to create.

Hey, if you're a coach who wants true clarity about your secret sauce, your people, your best way of doing business, and how you talk about your offer, then I invite you to join us in the Clarity Accelerator. I'll teach you to connect all the dots, the dots that have always been there for you so that you can show up like you were born for exactly this.

Come join us and supercharge every other tool or tactic you'll ever learn, from Facebook ads to manifestation. Just go to TheUncommonWay.com/schedule and set up a time to talk. I can't wait to be your coach.

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