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You have heard it a hundred times. Charge what you’re worth. Raise your prices. Know your value.
And then you put the price up, and nobody buys.
That is the moment “charge what you’re worth” stops being helpful. It gives you one lever, and both ways of pulling it feel bad: drop the price and feel like you failed, or keep it and keep waiting. You don’t have to give up on earning well. You just have to look beyond the number.
Your worth is not the price of one offer
Let’s get this out of the way first. You are worth it. Of course you are.
But your worth and the price of one particular offer are two different things. If you lower the price of a course, it can feel like you are saying “I’m worth less”. You’re not. You are saying this offer, in this shape, at this price, wasn’t right. And that is a very different conclusion.
So if you put a price up and it didn’t sell, that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you were wrong about yourself. It means you found something out about that offer, and that is useful to know.
And if you have lowered a price, or you’re thinking about it, that’s okay too. Most business owners price something wrong at some point. I certainly have, and I’ll tell you how in a moment.
Prices aren’t set in stone. You can try a number, see what happens, and change it. That isn’t failing at pricing. That is how pricing works!
Worth also includes something people forget. It’s not only about how much you earn. It’s about whether the work makes you feel good in all senses. Being paid well for something you don’t love, even if you’re good at it, still isn’t charging what you’re worth.
I see this with a client of mine. She is brilliant at a kind of work that takes real skill, the kind people happily come back to her for. But she is paid little for it, and she doesn’t love doing it. At the same time, she struggles to see how she could charge enough for the work she does want to offer. My read is that money is part of why she is unsure what she wants her business to be. She’s not short on talent. The offers and the prices just haven’t been designed around the business she wants.
So where do you start? Not with the price of one offer, but with the number underneath all of them.
Know your floor
That number is your floor. The minimum your business needs to earn so it can pay you a real income.
You want a price that helps you survive and thrive. That number isn’t the same for everyone. Someone in one country needs a different hourly rate than someone in another because the cost of living, taxes, and business costs differ.
It also depends on what you do. If you stucco walls, your hourly rate might be lower than mine. Much of what I do is specialised, and it involves a lot of learning and admin, so my rate is higher. That doesn’t mean I earn more, though. Most of a plasterer’s hours are billable and a lot of mine aren’t, so over a year they might well end up with more.
Either way, both of us have a minimum. Under that floor, you are not making a liveable wage.
Here is how to find yours:
- Add up the income you need, your business costs, and your tax.
- Work out how many hours you can realistically bill in a year.
- Divide the first number by the second. That is your minimum hourly rate.
The part people get wrong is step two. You are not billing forty hours a week, every week of the year. You take holidays. You get ill. You answer emails, send invoices, update your website, market your business, and learn the new version of the tool you use every day. None of that is billable, and all of it is work!
So be honest with yourself when you fill in that number. If you divide by too many hours, your floor looks lower than it is, and you end up earning less per hour than you think.
This floor is about what comes in. What you do with it once it’s there is a different conversation. For nine years, I paid myself one month and then nothing for the next three, even with clients coming in. Profit First finally gave me a steady income, so if that feast-and-famine pattern sounds familiar, have a look.
Pick the pricing model that’s honest about your work
Once you know your floor, you need to decide how you charge. There are a few ways to do it, and each one suits a different kind of work.
Hourly. You charge for the time you spend. That could be per hour or in blocks of hours bought upfront. It’s simple and fair when nobody can predict how long the work will take, but your client never quite knows what the final bill will be.
Packages. You set one price for a defined result: a website, a strategy session, an audit. A good package isn’t your hourly rate multiplied by a guess. It’s priced on what the result is worth to your client. Then you check it against your floor, so you know the hours it takes still pay you properly.
Retainers. The client pays a set amount every month for ongoing support or a set number of hours. It gives you steady income, and it gives them someone on hand.
Most of the time, a package is the best option. Your client knows what they will pay, you know what you will earn, and nobody is watching the clock. It’s easier to sell too, because “this result for this price” is a much simpler decision than “this many hours, probably”. Because the price is tied to the result rather than the time, getting faster pays off for you. With hourly pricing, getting faster means earning less for the same job.
But a package only works if you can estimate the work. Whether you can depends on your work.
When I started out, I was scared to charge “too much”, like so many business owners. So I priced projects as fixed packages, even when the work wasn’t really fixed. A website is quite fixed. Email marketing is a lot less. Those projects always took longer than expected, and the extra hours came out of my time, not the client’s budget.
After that, I tried package pricing for my tech work a few more times. It never held. When you build things with tech, there is always something new coming up. Sometimes we can do a job in three hours. Sometimes we estimate ten and it becomes twenty, because there is so much more difficulty than anyone could see at the start, or because halfway through we realise we also want to do X, Y and Z. Nobody did anything wrong. The work was just impossible to estimate.
So I split it. Website builds are packages, because a website can be scoped. Tech work is sold in blocks of hours, because it can’t. If a job turns out bigger than expected, the client buys more hours. Nobody has to guess, and nobody gets stuck with the difference.
Pick the model that is honest about how predictable your work really is. If you can’t estimate it, a package means either you lose money or you inflate the price so much that the client loses money. Neither is great.
And if you do charge by the hour, a higher rate doesn’t automatically mean a higher bill. I charge a higher hourly rate because I work fast and I know what I’m doing, so my clients need fewer hours. Someone at half my rate who needs three times the hours costs the client more, and it takes longer. So if you are good and fast at what you do, a higher rate isn’t greedy. Your clients get more done in every hour they pay for.
Feeling unsure about what your next step is? Don’t worry, you can Pick My Brain! 😊
Price the web, not just one offer
So far we have talked about one service. But most businesses don’t have one offer. You will often hear this called an offer ladder: something cheap at the bottom, your biggest work at the top, and clients climbing up one rung at a time.
I don’t really believe in ladders. In a real business, offers are connected more like a spider web. There are levels, but people move between them in weird and wonderful ways. Someone can be ready to buy from you on one topic and still be getting to know you on another. People rarely walk through your offers in the order you planned, and that’s fine. A client came to me for a website, but what she really needed first was to sort out the foundations of her business.
What helps is knowing what each offer is for. You might have something with a low, set price, like a course, a template or a workbook. Then set-price services. And your higher-priced work, which might be packages or hours, depending on what we just talked about.
When you look at your offers that way, pricing gets a lot less scary. Not every offer has to carry your whole income. A lower price on one offer is a decision about that offer. It says nothing about you.
I lowered the prices of my own courses on purpose because I want them to be accessible to people who can’t pay me for 1:1 work. That isn’t a discount, and it isn’t desperation. People who buy a course want to do it themselves. People who hire me want me. They are different buyers who need different things, and the prices reflect that.
So look at your own offers. Who is each one for? What job does it do in your web? Is the price doing that job? A cheap offer that brings people in is great. A cheap offer that is quietly eating half your week is a problem!
When the offer is the problem, not the price
Sometimes you look at your web and one offer just isn’t working. Before you touch the price, check what that offer is really doing.
I often see clients call one thing their core offer, but it barely sells, while a byproduct quietly brings in most of the money. Price the offers you actually have, not the ones you think you have.
And when an offer isn’t working at its price, the answer is rarely to just drop the number and hope. Change the offer along with the price. It might need to be smaller, so it fits a smaller price and still pays you properly for the time it takes. It could become a package, or split into two offers. The price and the offer move together.
If you suspect the offer is the problem rather than the number, investigate that before you fiddle with the price again. Business Detective is my self-paced course for exactly that. You look at the evidence in your own business, and decide what to change from there instead of guessing.
And if there’s one specific pricing question you keep going round in circles on, that’s what a Pick My Brain session is for. You bring the question, we look at it together on a call, and you get the recording afterwards so you can go back to what we decided.
A price that lets you thrive
So now you know pricing isn’t about the perfect number. You need a floor you know, a pricing model that matches how your work really goes, and offers that each have a job, however they connect.
And you need to be doing work you love, at a price that feels good. Not just good enough to survive. Good.
So, look at the offer you are least happy with right now. Is it the price that’s wrong, or the offer?
