I consistently see service providers ask the same question, “How should I charge for this service?”

The advice I see them get, most of the time, is the exact reason so many service providers are struggling, can’t get ahead, wonder if they are getting paid enough, work too much and overall feel stuck around their business, their income and their life.
How you get paid for what you do is probably the single biggest influencer of how much you love your work and whether you can build a sustainable income while loving your life.

When you have a process in place for how to price and package your services in alignment , rather than you just picking numbers out of thin air or pricing based on what your competitors charge, you are able to confidently engage clients easily. And, if you work for someone else, you can negotiate your pay (plus future increases) from a place of empowered clarity.

Up until now, perhaps you’ve been pricing and packaging your services by looking around at how others in your market price and package their services. I’ll call this the competition model of pricing your services. This model usually results in a race to the bottom mentality; who can charge the least? And it doesn’t lead to a life you want, by any means.

Maybe you already price your services way too low, using what I’ll call the loss leader model of pricing your services. You charge as little as possible, just so you can get by and don’t have to be on the hook for doing that good of a job. You’re struggling to get by and wondering how you can possibly do more.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, perhaps you’ve been pricing your services by looking at how you can charge as much as possible. I’ll call this the suck as much as possible out of the marketplace model of pricing your services.

This model usually results in you feeling some level of incongruency with your pricing and you engaging a far smaller number of clients than you can actually serve, getting a lot of refund requests or push back on your fees. Perhaps you are also wondering if you are actually providing value, but you’ve got a lot of “face” wrapped up in your fees and you’re so focused on building a million dollar business that you feel like you’ve got to keep doing it the way you are doing it.

None of these strategies lead to pricing and packaging of your services that feels awesome. They lead to you struggling, straining, stressing out about your income and having a lot less to invest in your creative output.

So, what’s the better way?

Start with pricing your services based on the least you can charge for you to have what Lynne Twist refers to in her best-selling book the Soul of Money as sufficiency. Sufficiency means knowing what you actually need to have the life you want and then building your income to meet that need.

“Sufficiency is precise. Enough is a place you can arrive at and dwell in. So often we think of ‘abundance’ as the point at which we’ll know we’ve really arrived, but abundance continues to be elusive if we think we’ll find it in some excessive amount of something.”

So we begin there. Sufficiency. Enough. You earning what you need to have the life you want delivering a service you believe in that’s priced just right.

A service that’s priced just right for you to have the life you want must be built on a foundation of the life you want. This, my friends, is where most people get stuck.

We are deluded about the live’s we really want. We either do not acknowledge our true desires (and what it really costs to have them) because our true desires feel too outrageous, expensive or downright impossible. Or, we chase, struggle and strive for lives we can never possibly satisfy, always wanting more, more, more, more when the truth is, it will never be enough.

So a process of pricing our services based on sufficiency must begin with the truth about what we really, really, really, REALLY want, acknowledgement of what it will actually cost to have it and the real time we have available to create it.

Most of us are gravely underestimating the time we have available to invest in earning money without sacrificing our self care and relationships. As a result, we are either far undercharging for our services, deciding that self care and relationships aren’t that necessary or wondering why the heck we can’t make our lives truly work.

And if you are charging hourly for your services, forget it. Trading your limited time for any amount of money in 6-minute (or even 60-minute) increments simply sucks your life away.

When you come into right relationship with your time, putting yourself first, your family next and your income-earning activities last, you can price your services in right alignment with what you actually need to have the life you want.

Once you’ve built on this foundation, you increase your fees as you want to free up time and as you gain more understanding of the true value of the outcome of your services to the people you serve.

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January 2015 Issue