Ep #209: Pricing for Income

You are listening to episode 209 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you’re actually going to price to create personal income. Oh, this is the good stuff. Let’s go.

Welcome to The Confident Coaches Podcast, a place for creating the self-confidence you need to do your best work as a life coach. If you want to bring more boldness, more resilience, and more joy to your work, this is the place for you.

I’m your host. Amy Latta. Let’s dive in.

Hello, my coach. How are you doing? I just love you. I just love you so much. We are in mid-November already, and we are continuing the work that we’ve been doing in the Elevate Your Income series. I’m going over today what we do in week 5 inside my Elevate Your Income marketing intensive because I’m wanting to share with you what we’re, yes, what we’re doing behind these closed doors, but also, you can go do this work.

Like, are you ready to do this work? Is this work that you want to be doing? And also, to just open up in your mind some ideas that maybe you haven’t heard of. I can tell you right now, this conversation that we’re getting ready to have, damn, do I wish somebody would have had this conversation with me earlier.

Now I had heard about the book Profit First, conversations about profit did come in, but they were like, after I was already making hundreds of thousands of dollars. I wanted to hear this conversation way earlier, and instead the conversations I heard was you need to be investing at a high amount and a high dollar, or you don’t believe enough in yourself.

And I just think that’s shitty advice, guys. I’m just going to be honest with you, and we’re going to talk a little bit about, a little bit more about that, but this is an episode to grab pen and paper. This, come, lean in. This episode’s going to involve math. Some people are like, bring it on. Some people just hit, nope, I’m out.

I promise you this is fun math because this is math that shows you what kind of income you can be creating with your business. Here’s what I want to offer to you. You are a business owner. You need to know your numbers. You may not love your numbers right now, but I’m going to talk to you about a couple of concepts that are going to help love where you are right now.

The thing is, is that your numbers don’t look any different if you don’t look at them, right? Like pretending that they aren’t what they are doesn’t help them be better. But knowing what they are. What I hope that this work does, again, is elevate your income. Yes, we are elevating your actual income.

We were actually elevating how we do business. We’re elevating ourselves and our audience, right? We need to know what our numbers are. We want to be combat, be, if you are not already become that empowered business owner. This isn’t a hobby. This is what you are doing. This is going to be what pays for some or all of your life.

Would you go get a job and never ask them what they’re going to pay you? Would you never ask them when you get paid, would you never look in your bank account to see this is what my rent is, and this is what my income is? No, don’t do that in your business. You, and some of you are like, obviously I would never do that.

Some of you are way on top of this. And I think this, for those of you who have a good sense of where your numbers are, I just want to share that. I hope that some of today just gives you a little bit of, huh, I never thought of it that way because that’s what happened for me for sure. That is what happened to me.

So again, for the first four weeks of this marketing intensive and in the first four episodes of the series, we’ve been talking about the more market-y pieces. Who are you? Who aren’t? You, who are you for? Who are you not for? How do you, how do you start new relationships and how do you turn those relationships into clients?

And how do we put all of that together into a super simple marketing strategy and a content plan that you as a solopreneur or somebody like maybe it’s just you and one or two team members can implement yourself. We can get more complicated later when you have the money. To pay for those extra people to help implement that again, part of what we’re going to talk about in this conversation, but the marketing intensive isn’t four weeks.

It’s eight weeks because the rest of our four weeks, we’re still implementing those marketing pieces where, you know, you’re putting more content out into the world. You’re testing that messaging that we established, we are tweaking, we are modifying where we’re like. Ooh. You know, I really thought this line of messaging was going to land, but now that I’ve put it out there a couple times, it doesn’t quite feel like it.

That’s why there’s a second four weeks. But we’re also now shifting into. The business overall, elevating your overall business, pricing that pays you income. What are you spending your time on? And are you enjoying that time? You know, business practices that elevate you, that elevate your audience, which elevate your bestest clients, removing anything that’s depleting or extracting.

So today let’s talk about Pricing for Income. And this week I want to make a couple of call outs, shout outs because this work comes from a few places. First of all, just my general understanding. Again, I’ve shared it a few times. My first business class was when I was a senior in high school, you know, and economics and business was something that I studied as a teenager and this It’s work that I learned, you know, taking accounting classes in college, running budgets for large marketing campaigns for large events.

Like I have an understanding of accounting and numbers and knowledge, like there’s not a well put spreadsheet, well put together spreadsheet that I don’t love. Okay. I love like, like working like, okay, here’s where we want to be. How do we work backwards from that? So, a lot of what I’m getting ready to share with you is just.

The fact that I’ve been doing that since, you know, that first business budget I put together and my senior year of high school project, I still remember the project. It was this really cool, kitschy clothing store that me and my best friend were going to operate call. Her name was Melanie, and my name is Amy.

So, it was Mel, Melanie. Mel and all me, I can’t remember exactly. It was like Mel and Amy put together and I had to put about it, and I had to put a budget together and I had to figure, I had to like show where all of my expenses were. So, like I’ve been doing this stuff since 1991 and I just told you how old I am.

As for what you didn’t already know. So over 30 years of my own personal understanding of accounting and numbers and knowledge, but I would be bereft if I didn’t share with you that the pricing for income, where your dollars should be going, some calculations that I hadn’t previously considered much of that came from two sources, technically three, but two sources over a year’s worth of conversations with my former CFO, Mark Butler.

You have met him before, unless this is your first episode. We’ve talked a lot about these conversations in two podcast episodes that I did with him, episodes 170 and 202. You do not have to go listen to those to understand this conversation, but those are my two most listened to podcast episodes.

So, if you haven’t listened to them, I strongly recommend that they become episode 170 and episode 202 that are your next listens. And then lastly, I took a good money course. That’s what the course is called. Good money with Kelly deals and Daniel Cohen. And some of the computations that I hadn’t previously considered that I’m going to share with you here came from working with them.

Overall, I learned a great deal from Kelly and Danielle, specifically around. This idea of no elevated business, elevated income comes from me, but just the idea of Kelly has a quote that is if the feminist running the business isn’t thriving, then it’s not a feminist business, which I have said a variation of that, you know, if the person running the business isn’t thriving, then the business isn’t thriving.

I don’t care for business is making a ton of money. If you are drowning, if you don’t have enough money to pay your bills, your business is not doing well. Even if you could be making 500,000 a year, but if you don’t have enough to cover what you need to be covered, you are not thriving even if the business on paper is.

And this is something that I understood, and Kelly simply articulated it in a way that I hadn’t previously heard before. So, I want to give out those acknowledgments. Because this episode doesn’t exist without them, it would be, it would be similar, but not nearly the impact and power that I think you’re about to experience.

And this conversation is so important because so much of what we hear, again, it’s not that no one is having these conversations, Kelly’s having these conversations, Mark is, Danielle is, there’s certainly other people who are, but it is not the predominant conversation. We hear all about revenue, record sales.

Go make as much money as possible. The highest week in sales ever. My client just signed 10K, right? I just had my first 100K week, month, year. Which sounds really sexy, but I’m going to actually disagree because what I think is sexy is a business that provides you, the business owner, with personal income, right?

So first of all, I’m throwing out some terms here. Let’s clear up some terms. I’ve shared this on the podcast before, but I’m going to share it again. So, sales is what you’ve sold, whether you’ve collected the money or not, right? So this is often why you will see business coaches who don’t recommend you take payments because they want to be able to have you collect the money that you’re selling so you can say you had a 10k week and not, well, I sold 10,000,but I have a payment plan that’s 2, 000 for five months just because it makes for fancy marketing doesn’t mean it’s a great business practice.

Now we’re going to be talking more about feminist business swaps. That’s going to be one of them right there. So, sales is what you’ve sold, whether you’ve collected the money or not. Revenue is money you’ve actually collected. Your business, it’s actually hit your business bank account. And your profit is your business revenue minus any business expenses.

Right? So that’s business profit. But no, that’s your income. Your income is you, you, the person, the human being running the business, the money that hits your personal bank account, whether you get that from payroll, whether you get that as an owner’s withdrawal. And again, you and your accountant are going to set that up the way that you best need to set that up.

I’m not going to give; I don’t give that advice. We are talking about creating personal income, dollar bills that pay for your personal needs for your life that is outside of your business. And again, I’m not the only one talking about this. Damn, are we, we are in the minority of the business coaches out there talking about personal income that affects your personal life.

Like those business coaches that are talking about making a hundred K in sales this week. Okay, cool. But what did you have to spend to make 10 K? What part of that 10 K is your personal bank account going to see, right? So, if you got a 10 K week, that’s amazing. Do not get me wrong. It’s astounding. Way to go.

Even if you’re spending 10,000 to make 10,000, your personal bank account is not seeing that money. That’s what I want to talk about. And notice a couple of things. It focuses your energy to become so much more personal, right? Your motivation, your inspiration, your why you’re going to get up and do this work every single day becomes much more personal.

When you think about what is this business paying for in my life? It’s like, no, your why? Sure. But your why becomes like, what? What am I, what’s happening in my personal life that I want taken care of? Like maybe, maybe you’ve got that big, giant, audacious goal to lead that luxurious lifestyle, money, freedom, be able to run, you know, run your business from an island or travel with your kids around the world.

We aren’t knocking those dreams. I am not discriminating against anybody’s dream. You might actually be in a place where you’re wanting to pay for your kid’s college tuition, you’re wanting to make sure your elderly relatives have their medical costs covered, and you want to be able to take three months off of the year so that you can spend that time with those relatives.

Or maybe this, this coaching income or this business income that you’re creating is about purchasing that home that you’ve wanted to. Moving out of that neighborhood into this neighborhood, it could be a thousand different things and it’s going to be so personal to you, but when you define that personal thing to you now, imagine you’re not going to work just to go help people.

But you are going to work to provide a service that changes people’s lives. That’s also changing your life based on what you are personally looking for. It’s so good. It’s so fun. So, all dreams are welcome. And you can hold that big, hairy, audacious dream. Absolutely. You can have that sky in the pie, world domination dream, high up on the wall that you keep your sights on.

But also, what’s your dream for the next year or two? Let’s find out what that is. We’re going to find those, define those numbers in this episode. So, notice, we’re not talking about should I raise my prices, should I not raise my prices? The conversation isn’t about charge your worth, right? By the way, your worth is like infinity.

So, it’s, it’s not, it’s a flawed question right out of the gate when you say charge what you’re worth. My love, you are worth the cosmos infinity. You can’t pass, there’s not a dollar amount that can be attached to your worth. It’s not, it’s a dumb question.

It’s not even a good question. Like you can’t charge what you’re worth. You’re worth, you’re, you’re worth astounding. How do you charge astounding? Right? Or even like, well, just double your prices. I mean, maybe you should double your prices. You’re going to do some calculations and find out, but that in and of itself, is that really what you should do?

Is that going to cannibalize your business? Does it make sense to do that at this point? Like maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Do you have the demand to do that? Do you have the people asking for your services at that level? Let’s find out. Okay. So, what should you be charging to create income for your business?

First caveat out of the gate right here is that we’re going to end up calculating an hourly rate and to be really clear I am not recommending that you charge by the hour and since that’s what we’re calculating I know a lot of minds are going to go to that place first, and I’m just going to tell you right now No, I’m not recommending you charge by the hour.

What I’m recommending is to start seeing the value of your time What is an hour of your time? And then we can kind of see when we put your coaching packages together, where, where is that number falling in alignment with instead of just, it’s 10,000, it’s 25,000, which is what a lot of the business coaching is.

Just go charge that number and believe that you can do it. This is just an entirely different, it’s not even a different doorway. It’s an entirely different room for this conversation. And you’re going to be able to see, am I close? Am I far off? Am I in the ballpark? Where am I? What is the value of this work?

What do I, what do I think about this number that I’ve computed? And is it matching the product that I am selling? Now, if you’ve been doing the work of the past Four weeks, which technically is five weeks in the podcast, because we had that interview with my ADHD coach. If you’ve been doing that work, and you are bringing more clients through your coaching program and coaching with you, you are learning more and growing more.

And, every minute that you coach, every hour that you coach, your coaching is becoming more valuable. So, grab some paper because you’re going to take down some notes and probably outside of this episode, you’re going to whip out a calculator and do some computations or at a minimum, just listen and just kind of see what this conversation brings up in your mind.

So right out of the gate, let’s start with, remember what I said before, where do we want to end up? Let’s start at the end so that we can work backwards. And that is what do you need for personal expenses? Again, this question is personal. I have a situation where my husband has a full-time job, a union worker with fantastic benefits, built in retirement our, our healthcare is taken care of.

We have, you know, all of those things taken care of. So, I don’t have to put any of that. I don’t have to put what his salary covers on my personal expenses because my coaching business isn’t going to cover those things. What is my coaching business going to cover? It’s going to look different for everyone.

So, you want to think about your home expenses, rent, mortgage, electricity, gas, utilities, phone, internet. You know, home expenses, insurance, anything that covers the home, anything that covers transportation, car payments, gas repairs, insurance, maybe you take public transportation eating, groceries, dining out, eating out, any, any kind of culinary experiences.

Again, very different if you are a single person versus me, where I’ve got two teenage boys. My numbers are going to look very different than yours and me deciding whether or not I want my personal I’m sorry, whether or not I want my business to be paying for that or is that coming out of my husband’s numbers?

We’re just playing around right now But I’m just giving you some categories health insurance your physical health doctor’s appointments mental health Anything any health costs any family costs daycare kids needs extended family needs Maybe this might be where you stick clothing under You know, think about what your family needs and what you pay for or what you want to pay for.

Think about debt. Do you have loan payments? Do you have credit cards? Do you have student debt? Some of you have been debt free forever. Some of you have not been. And you want to figure out how much of your coaching business do you want to help pay for your debt? Same thing with education, loan payments, tuition anything educationally speaking on the personal side of things.

This is not business education because that’s going to come out of your business expenses. Entertainment, play, taking care of you. You want to think about shows, events, travel, hair, gym, beauty, all of your play, entertainment, fun time. What do you want your business to cover? You want to think about future plans, vacations, retirement, home remodels.

What do you want your business income to pay for? Okay, do you have a rough idea? Now let’s go to your business expenses. And if you listen to my episode, particularly 202 with Mark, we’ve had a big conversation about this already. Because you can spend as little or as much as you want. And the best way to decide is, like, what does this expense accomplish for me?

So instead of just throwing your money and be like, oh, it’s a write off. So instead of just throwing your money and being like, oh, it’s a write off. It’s a, it’s a write off. Okay, but like it’s still coming out of something. I remember that episode of Schitt’s Creek where David is talking to his dad, Johnny, and he’s like, oh, it’s a write off. He goes, yeah, but it’s, where’s, where’s you write it?

He goes, where are you writing it off of? You just write it off. And he’s like, do you understand what that means? You’re still spending money. He goes, yeah, but it’s, it’s this whole back and forth. Yes, your business expenses are tax write offs, but they, it’s still real dollar, dollar bills coming from the sales that you make.

And the conversation that I’ve, conversations that I’ve had with Mark, I’ve really shown.

It’s not whether or not you believe high enough in yourself, or if you have a CEO mentality, you just really want to consider what your dollars are spending. On this doesn’t mean you don’t invest in that amazing coach doesn’t mean you don’t spend five figures on a coach if that’s what you need, but to be able to see where that money is coming from and how it affects your personal income, you might be willing to forsake some personal income for that time with that mentor, because you know, it’s an investment in your future, you may not be willing to, but when you see it on paper, In the marketing initiative, we actually take these numbers and we, we plug them into a spreadsheet and it, you know, does it all for you.

Then you can just, it becomes a more objective decision. What does this pay for? Do I want it to pay for that? Is that a good use of my time and money? And this isn’t like a critical being negative. Is this a good use? Prove yourself. It’s simply just asking the question, right? So, you want to think about business support, virtual assistant coach, podcast producer, any contractors who I think about software and tech website fees, teaching platforms, zoom your schedule, Google workspace.

You want to think about professional development, your coach might. You might consider your coach under professional development. It kind of depends on what kind of coach you’re using. Any memberships that you pay for any group programs, books, classes. You want to think about customer service. Is there any money that you put towards customer service, gifts, materials, any way that you nurture those relationships?

Is any of that nurturing involved? Money that needs to be spent, you might think about accounting and security, so like bookkeeping, tax accountant, insurance, password managers, any cyber security that you want to invest in to keep your business safe. And then you want to think about social causes, donations that your business makes.

This is not what you personally make, but like, do you want your business to make any? Donations right now, you want to think about your personal expenses and your business expenses on a monthly right now. We’re just guesstimating about per month. We’re going to extrapolate it out to a year. But right now, those numbers are just your monthly numbers.

Once you have those, there are three more numbers under business expenses that I need you to consider. The first one is reserves. Reserves are business savings. So, any cushion you want to keep. Inside your business. You’re not pulling that money out and putting it into your personal bank account. You’re keeping, like this might be profit your business makes that you keep inside the business.

Right? Because your business has a bank account, and you personally have a bank account. You’re going to keep it in the business account. Do you know how much cushion you want? There’s no right or wrong answer. There’s no, people have said this is what the minimum should be. I mean, maybe. You get to decide. How much cash would you like to have on hand that lets you just breathe?

Is it 500? Is it 5, 000? There’s no right or wrong answer. It can be anything that you want. But is there a dollar amount per month you would like to build into your pricing to allow for that? Same with social justice allocation. So, what do I mean by social justice allocation? Do you want to offer scholarships, reduced rates, sliding scales in your business?

That shouldn’t come at your expense, right? That shouldn’t be something where you’re sacrificing yourself. This is something I really learned from Kelly is that our social justice work shouldn’t be pulling out the foundation that we are standing on. You can actually build that into your business. I’ve seen it calculated as a percentage.

I’ve seen it calculated as a dollar amount. So, 100 worth of coaching? Do you want to give away 250 worth of coaching? Right. Do you have a, do you want to do one coaching hour a month? What’s, what’s the approximate value of that? And of course, we’re going to calculate a little bit. So right now, you can just kind of enter a number to see how that feels.

And then the other number, you better make sure you’re paying your taxes. Now, you for sure want to make sure you are consulting with your tax accountant, because this depends on whether or not you’re a sole proprietor, whether or not you are an LLC. It also depends on whether or not you live in a state that has income tax.

So, I live in Missouri, and I am an LLC, so I need to calculate 25 percent for my taxes. You’re right. Maybe lower, maybe higher, but for an LLC in Missouri, that’s what I need to plug in there. So, I want to make sure that whatever my, my personal expenses plus my business expenses every month, I need to add an additional 25 percent to cover.

A tax to cover taxes. And again, your tax accountant, your bookkeeper will be the best person to help you guesstimate that number. And the it’s, it is guesstimated. This is where we’re talking about paying quarterly taxes. You may or may not be there yet, but it’s an estimated tax payment, and that’s really what this number is, is it’s an estimated tax payment, but you want to make sure that you’re factoring that in there, right.

Okay, so you have your monthly costs, right? You’ve got your personal expenses, you’ve got your business expenses, you’ve got those allocations. This is all, these are your monthly costs. And now you’re just going to multiply them by 12. And that is your yearly income goal. Circle that number. Because you’re going to need that in a bit.

That is your, as of right now, that is your guesstimated revenue goal for a year. You might have some thoughts and feelings right now. Is it higher than you expected? Lower than you expected? Really interesting, right? Either way, it’s just really fascinating to see what your mind does. But now we’re going to break this down to an hourly rate and that basically comes down to like How many hours in a year do you actually work?

So, I just want to share that in the marketing intensive, we do a more nuanced version of this. It is a bit more accurate, but it relies heavily on that spreadsheet, and we don’t have that spreadsheet. So, we’re going to do a simplified version here on the podcast, but I promise you it’s a close enough number.

It at least gives you an idea. And For ease, what we’re going to do is how many hours a week do you want to work total? Cut that number in half for actual client hours. So, if you want to work 40 hours a week in your business, assume 20 hours are client hours, you know, 30,15, 20,10. There’s no right or wrong answer.

Just know, assume half your hours are actual client facing hours and the other half are administrative planning, scheduling, all those other things. Now, a competition I had never considered before that I learned from Kelly and Danielle is, we should probably assume that you weren’t fully booked. I know. I was like, I never factored that in.

 

They used a computation of 70 percent that 70 percent of your time will be booked. I was like, I mean, it’s kind of a random number, but it’s also a semi accurate number, right? That you’re average over the course of the year, about 70 percent-ish booked. Right. Let’s assume that we’re doing this marketing intensive work.

That’s where we’re going to be on average. All right let’s calculate that. So as an example, let’s say you want to work 30 hours a week. Half of that being Klan hours is 15 hours a week. That’s pretty industry standard, by the way, just plus or minus. Is it made up a little bit, but that’s I mean, in every room I’ve ever been in, that’s been the general consensus.

Let’s assume half your hours are actually with a client. So, 30 hours a week is 15 hours of client work. Assuming 70 percent capacity is 10 and a half. Let’s round down. So, 10 hours of actual client work a week. You’re going to circle that number, okay? Because then, how many weeks a year? Again, we do a more nuanced version of this inside.

The marketing intensive, but for ease, there’s 52 weeks in a year. How much time are you taking off? You want to consider vacations and holidays and family days, self-care days, mental health days, sick days, business travel, business meetings. You aren’t working all five days a week, every single week, right?

So, let’s be overly generous and let’s assume 40 actual weeks a year. Once you factor in all of the time off for do, for doing all of your non regular business work. Also, I’m going to assume that because it’s going to make the math easy.

We’re doing easy math here on the podcast. We’re going to let the spreadsheet do like the complicated math inside the marketing intensive. But for us here, we’re going to do simple numbers, right? So, if we’re working 40 weeks a year at 10 hours of client work a week, that’s 400 hours of client.

Work a year. By the way, isn’t that astounding? Right? Like 10 hours a week. You’re like, that’s not very much, but 400 hours over the course of a year is a lot, right? And your personal income with your taxes and social justice and reserves. Poops and giggles. Let’s just make that even round 100K number, right?

Hopefully your personal income is at least two thirds of that. By the way, let’s hope at least so 100,000 a year divided by 400 hours a year is 250 an hour. First of all, did you freak out? That’s your minimum billing rate is 250 an hour. How do you feel about that? Are you feeling weird? I don’t know.

Let’s play around with that number. Okay. So, if you’re selling six months of coaching, let’s say 24 sessions, 250 an hour, that’s 6, 000 for a six month one on one package. Is that way more than you’re charging? Is that way less than you’re charging? Going rate for group coaching, let’s say you’re offering group coaching, the going rate is about 50%.

That’s pretty industry standard. I’ve seen that in lots and lots of coaching rooms is that you know, if you’re one on one is this, you’re what you charge for group is about half. So that would make a six-month coaching package of 3,000 for a group. Are you freaking out? Are we in line? How are we feeling? If you do a membership, I had never really considered how to calculate this before Kelly and Danielle suggested a membership is about 30 percent of your base rate.

So that would be 75 an hour. So, if you figure out four calls a month in a monthly membership. It’s about 300 a month for a membership. Is that high? Is that low? Remember, these numbers are neutral. It is interesting to see what you start thinking. Where’s your current package pricing in alignment with these numbers?

And again, these numbers were based on what we’re guesstimating we want our personal income to cover and what we’re guesstimating our business expenses to be and taxes and all of that. It’s just really interesting to see what comes up, what you start to identify. What looks good, what feels weird.

So, this is a great opportunity to do a gut check. How do these numbers make you feel? Are you to the point of charging that level of number? You may not be, and that’s okay. So, a couple points. First of all, you’ll see why we say the lower the cost of your program, the higher volume you need to sell, which means you need to have relationships with a lot more people.

in order to sell that much higher number. Again, if you are selling 300 a month versus 6, 000 for six months, it’s a very different conversation. Yes, but you have to sell a lot less. of the one on one. Now you see why many of us business coaches do advocate to start at one on one because you simply just have to know fewer people and you need to, you know, sell fewer things in order to make a similar amount of income.

And now you can also see, particularly if you have this plugged into a spreadsheet, how you’re going to play around with some of these numbers. Maybe, maybe throw in, throw in that vacation home you hadn’t thrown in before. What happens when you throw that number in? What happens when we allocate a lot more towards social justice?

What happens when we throw in that high figure coach that you’ve always wanted to work with? That mentor who does charge five figures. Let’s throw that figure in that monthly rate in and just, let’s just see what happens, right? This is where the numbers can become fun instead of paralyzing. So, we just kind of play around.

Let’s add a little bit more here, a little less there. Maybe I want to save a little bit more for reserve. Maybe I want to save a little bit less. And it becomes not about whether you can afford high prices or, or, you know, our high prices are worse than lower prices. They’re just numbers. And we’re just looking at them and seeing what comes up and what we think about them.

And it’s about deciding, what do I want my money to do for me? What’s the purpose of this money for me? What is it, what is it going to, what’s the energetic flow of it? What is it providing for me? And it’s not making it good or making it bad. It’s just seeing what it does for us.

Money becomes a tool instead of this emotionally power packed thing that we are constantly trying to think better about, and it’s really interesting, like maybe you’re willing to forego personal income for the short term for that investment that, you know, is going to reap longer term rewards, or maybe you’re willing to accrue some debt for the short term because you’re, you know, you’re you can pay rent so you, you can carry that little extra debt.

And that might be a good answer for you, but for someone else, it may not be right. But when you can see it, we don’t have to hide from it. We don’t have to guess. And now I want to introduce this idea of price pacing, where we take those numbers and we stair step on it. So those are your numbers at a hundred percent.

What happens when that number is at 75 percent or 50 percent or 25 percent, you’re 250 an hour at 50 percent is 125 an hour. Well, what’s that group coaching rate? Right. Or I’m sorry, what, what is that? Yes. What’s that group coaching rate? But you know, at 125 an hour for that six months package, we’re now looking at a 3000.

And so maybe where you are now is at 25 percent of your minimum billing rate. And maybe that’s okay. But when you factor in price pacing and also again, why you can see what a spreadsheet is so handy because you can just see the numbers for what they are and you can be like, okay, here’s What I need to be charging in the future.

I may not be there yet. Right now, my expertise and my demand are more at the 25 percent level. But I can see how I can stair step it up. And again, see, it’s not about, Should I double my price? Should I raise my price? Where are we versus where do we want to be? It takes so much of this heavy emotion out of it, right?

I mean, when I saw this, I just kind of, whether I was at the price or not, and whether some of the clients that are inside elevate your income, the marketing intensive are there or not, they’re just this ease came over them when they could just see it. Oh, no, I’m not at a hundred percent, but I can see how I’m going to get there.

Right? And you can decide, okay, I’m going to take X number of people through my coaching program and I’m going to aim for 75 to a hundred percent of my clients achieving the results that we’d agreed on. And as soon as X number of people attain X percentage of results, I’m going to move from 25 percent up to 50%.

And then when X number of clients at X percentage achieve what they want. I’m going to move from 50 percent to 75%. This is what price pacing is. And you can pace these price increases and it’s just such a different conversation. It’s so much less arbitrary. And by claiming what you want in your business to pay for your personal life, right, you now have a path there.

Even if you aren’t there today, you can see how you’re going to get there. And now we can set sales goals based on those numbers. If I want to create this much income, and I’m currently in that 25 percent bracket, I’m going to do a 25%. Sales break, right? I’m at my pricing at 25 percent and I’m going to take what I want for my personal.

I’m going to cut those numbers down to 25 percent too. And now I can see how much do I need to sell? Now I’ve got a sales goal. That’s not arbitrary. I need to sell X of my coaching to meet these business and personal expenses. Now, the last note I want to add is this is totally opposite of how I was taught to sell coaching.

I was taught to dream big dreams, to visualize future me sitting in all of the possibilities and luxury of what I want and to charge based on my demand. And that’s not incorrect and also two things true at the same time, because some people will say, Amy, what you’ve shared is just so damn practical. And where’s the dreaming big part?

And I want to ask you, why not both? Why not have that big dream? And also, let’s get some of these more immediate wins and boost your confidence along the way. And sell based on where you are and create actual, let’s put 10 people through this. And let’s have at least 75 percent of those people create the results that they really want to create.

That is that that is a success story for them. And then when I have. More people lined up when I have, you know, when those, when that 70 percent capacity moves up to 100 percent and I start accruing a wait list, let me bump that number up. It becomes something that you can actually plan for and anticipate as opposed to just randomly going, I’m going to raise my rates because I’m dreaming big, dream big, dream the biggest dreams that you have.

Visualize yourself in that income that has all of the bells and whistles and social justice and everything that you ever wanted it to be, hold on to that, visit that place as often as you possibly can.

And where are you today and what can you sell right now? And let’s price for that. And let’s make sure that what your business spends money on and what you spend money on is what actually moves you towards that vision, not farther away. Let’s make sure that you are paying you, let’s make sure you are not throwing yourself under the bus in order to give money to other business expenses.

Don’t pay other people more than you pay yourself over the long term. Don’t undersell your, don’t undersell your coaching or your programs or your offers. Even if you were at that 25 percent price pacing. Point right now. I actually don’t see that as underpricing as much as this is where I am in this moment, and I’m going to make sure that my program does or my coaching.

It doesn’t have to be a program, my coaching, my product, my, my consulting does what I say it does. I’m going to make sure that so many people experience that, and then I’m going to price it. I’m going to pace it up again, and then I’m going to pace it up again. And this feels amazing, and it feels Like justice to you.

And it feels like justice to your audience. And it feels like justice to your bestest clients. I’d love to hear what you think. I’m, as you can tell, very passionate about this. And we have this conversation inside the marketing intensive. We have this conversation when we work one on one together for Free To Paid Coach.

When you are a brand-new coach, we’re not quite having this conversation yet. We’re just trying to get you into the process of just selling coaching and believing that you are a paid coach and getting into the habit of selling coaching and just getting into that rhythm. And then once that is underway, then we can start looking at, okay, where are we, where are we going?

We’ve got money coming in now. Let’s start thinking about, so we’re talking about by the time you’re hitting around 25, 30,000. Let’s start having this conversation, but if you are already there, the marketing intensive, we do this in a small group, 10 people sitting over the course of eight weeks, or we are doing this.

If you do work with me one on one. And if you want to dive more into this, becoming your bestest client magnet is an amazing downloadable free mini training in which you do some of this work that we talked about today, but it’s just a little bit of coaching from each of the eight weeks inside elevating your income along with a writing prompt or an offer prompt.

To go make an offer, write an email, go talk to your bestest client. You can download it for free at amylatta.com/ magnet. And you can go download it right now. It’s ready and waiting for you. I can’t wait to see what you do with this episode. What kind of questions come up for you? What kind of ideas do you have?

I can’t wait to hear, to see what you do. And I’ll talk to you next week.

Coach, it’s time to sign your first free client, your first paid client, your next client, and to learn how to do it consistently and having a hell of a lot of fun along the way. This is exactly what you’re going to do in Free To Paid Coach. It’s the only program giving you step by step what to do to become a paid coach and.

Step-by-step, how to handle the rollercoaster emotions that come with doing what you need to do to become a paid coach. If you know you can’t not do this life coaching thing, but believing that you can do it, handling rejection and remembering how to do all of those things shuts you down. The Free To Paid Coach community is waiting for you.

Find everything that you’re looking for inside. It’s only $1,000 payments are available and then you are in forever. Visit www.amylatta.com/ftpc to join us right now. See you inside. Let’s get paid, Coach.

Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coaches Podcast. I invite you to learn more. Come visit me at www.amylatta.com and until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.