Premium pricing is a MUST for your services

Show Notes

It's time to get real about undercharging our clients and underpaying ourselves.

If you find yourself awkwardly talking with clients about your prices or pricing your services based on what you think clients can pay, this episode is for you.

I break down how you should evaluate your worth and what should go into your pricing structure. I also tell the story of how I came to accept a job far below my value (never again!) and the daily tasks I do to make sure it never happens again.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Overcoming Underearning by Barbara Stanny
• Savvy Sales for Solopreneurs

More on Khalida

Khalida DuBose is a business mentor specializing in sales strategy. As a previous crowdfunding coach, she supported more than a thousand crowdfunding campaigns and project creators in their quest to bring their dreams, passions, and ideas to the world. Now, she focuses on helping women of color who are early-stage online business owners as they navigate the entrepreneurial journey. For more information on Khalida, visit khalidadubose.com.

Follow Khalida on Instagram @khalida.dubose. You can email her at [e-mail].

The Black Girl Business Bar is produced by Zuri Berry (@ZMCPodcasts). Music by Vincent Tone and Die Hard Productions.

Creators & Guests

Host

Khalida DuBose

Business + Mindset Coach

Producer

Zuri Berry

Principal Producer at ZMC Podcasts

What is The Black Girl Business Bar?

The Black Girl Business Bar Podcast is for Black entrepreneurial women who crave practical information to implement in their businesses and careers. They want tips and tactics that work and they want on-the-go mentorship that will make a difference in their businesses, projects, and lives.

Hosted by business coach and crowdfunding expert Khalida DuBose, the Black Girl Business Bar is all about letting Black women know what's possible for them in their entrepreneurial journey.

Hey ladies, today's chat is going to offer you some tough love about premium pricing in your business. This might not be the most pleasant conversation for some of you, depending on where you're at in your journey and how you feel about pricing and money and asking for money. But it is definitely something that we need to figure out how to tackle and why not start sooner rather than later.

I've heard a lot of chatter in the online space about having accessible pricing for people. And this can get a little bit confusing because you really need to have a strategy in place before you start to try to deploy accessible pricing. So today we're going to talk all about that.

Grab your tea and let's get into it.

Hi, welcome to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. This podcast is for women of color who crave practical information that they can apply to their businesses and lives. I'm your host Khalida DuBose, and I started this podcast because I want to help women of color thrive in their businesses, their careers and their lives.

That means first figuring out what is possible for us, and then making it all happen. Today, we're going to talk about premium pricing and your business and why you currently aren't charging enough for your products and your services.

I just want to say that a hundred percent of the women that I talk to online, whether that's my clients, it's in sales calls and strategy sessions, or as colleagues who shared their pricing with me: they are undercharging. Or they were undercharging at some point, and I'm no different in this.

I definitely went through a period where I was undercharging in my business because I didn't understand pricing structure. And I was thinking, you know, hourly is the way to go, and this is what I need to do. And so I wanted to have this conversation because even with the women that I talk to offline who have businesses, women in my family, some of my friends who reach out to me for advice, the main theme that I notice is that people, women in particular, have a very, very hard time charging the price that they need to charge to make their business even sustainable. And of course, yes, I'm sure that we have some gentlemen who are listening to the podcast as well, and they go through the same thing.

But I will tell you what I've noticed from some of the men who come to me, you know, like friends, who know me and they come and they might ask my opinion or get some advice about their business or around pricing. What I've noticed is a lot of times their issue is that they don't understand the pricing structure. They haven't sat down and thought through what they need to be charging to get profitable, to make the business run.

With women, a lot of times they also haven't gone through that process. But sometimes they struggle with even knowing what they need to run the business. And not charging it and just thinking, you know, maybe I can add on hours or something like that.

Right. So I think as we get more mature in our businesses, we realize pretty quickly that you cannot just keep adding more hours. You can't just keep doing more and more and more so that you can make the money that you need to make. And the answer to not doing that is learning how to structure your prices correctly and you have to charge a premium price.

Now I'm not going to get into, you know, exactly what your coaching business should be priced at or exactly what your web service should be priced at or whatever you're doing in your business, because that does warrant a personal conversation between us. So if you are struggling with this, and this is something that you really want to work through, send me a DM on Instagram @khalida.dubose.

So send me a DM. If you are interested in learning a little bit more about this and having a conversation about what's going on specifically in your business.

All right. So let's hop right into the first point here of why I know you're not charging enough and that's because you really don't understand your value. A lot of women don't know how to look at what they've done and then really embody that and that show up in their prices.

So if you're not that person who just has a pricing structure problem, but you're a person who's really feeling like I can't charge this. Who am I to charge this? Or, ah, you know, what, what are people going to think when they hear my prices? Or you just feel queasy when you get on the phone and you're telling somebody, like, to join your mastermind or to join your one-to-one coaching is going to cost them a certain amount. And you're just, you know, kind of feeling sick to your stomach. Or you love the call up to that point, but then after that you're like, you know, kind of freezing up a little bit. I think that the problem here is that you have not assessed your value.

So I want to talk about this a little bit. Number one, I think people get stuck in stories. We get stuck in stories about what other people can afford. So I've seen this, I've done this myself-- I'll be honest-- where I've thought, well, maybe my adult client can't afford that. And the truth is is that, you know what my coach said to me when I yeah, you know, it was bringing this to her, is that's not your business. It's not for you to determine if your client can afford it. And I agree with her.

She only had to say it to me once because I'm a person, if you know me personally, then you know that I really like to have my autonomy. I don't like people telling me what I can and I can't afford. I really like to make those decisions on my own. And we should, really make sure we are allowing our potential customers and our clients to make their own decisions.

We're there to guide them. We're there to help them, but we're not there to make the decision for them. So you could be having variations of that story. Like my ideal client, because I pick these clients, don't have the money. You know, I was doing market research a few months ago. Um, Actually, it was probably closer to the beginning of the year.

And I was doing market research for my program, my one-to-one program, savvy sales for solopreneurs, because I started really realizing that a lot of women don't like sales. They don't like having sales conversations. There's a lot of resistance when they have to put together offers and start charging money.

There's just a lot of baggage that goes along with that. So I was talking to a woman who lived in New York and she was explaining to me that the expense of living in New York city, which, you know, we all can imagine. And then she told me her prices. And like, I was very shocked because she had been working, you know, when she told me her prices and she also described to me everything that she did for her clients.

And I was just thinking, oh my God, she's bringing so much value. And she's charging so little bit. So I was, I was pretty shocked by that. Um, but I was shocked in a good way because I was, I wanted to share with her that like, yes, actually you can, you have so much room to grow hearing. And the story that she was telling herself was I want to work with people of color.

I want to work with a certain group of people and I don't think they can afford it because that's her belief about people of color or about those people. Right. And so we need to make sure we're checking the stories that we're telling ourselves before. We just automatically believe nobody's going to buy from me. Nobody's going to spend this amount of money on me. We can't count other people's money for them. We can't make assumptions of what they can afford.

And I would say next, you don't believe that you deserve to make the money that you really need to survive. You know, there are a lot of people who will say, I can, I can live off of this.

This is all I need to live. Right. I was reading a book by Barbara Stanny. I think it's called overcoming under earning. Yes. If you guys are interested in more on the topic of earning and you know how to start to own your value, look up the book by Barbara Stanny called Overcoming Underearning. Really good. You will definitely love it.

But in that book, one of the questions she asks is, are you proud of yourself for being able to basically just make enough money where you can just live.

There. There's no wiggle room. There's just, you can just live. And if you were proud of yourself, if this was something that you identify with, she was telling you that you probably are an under earner. So, you know, a lot of times people don't believe that they need to make, or they should make any amount of money over what they need to survive.

And that doesn't really make sense. And so you will price based on your beliefs.

So ladies, I want you to think about what is your background? What knowledge do you already have that you're going to be bringing to the table? A lot of times we think about what we're doing in that moment. And that's the only thing we can charge based on. So that's one thing that I want you to keep in the back of your mind.

And I want you to also sit down and think to yourself how much time and effort you have put into your craft. How much does it cost to actually create a transformative service or a product for your clients. These are things that you really need to think about.

A lot of my inspiration for entrepreneurship and a lot of my early exposure to entrepreneurship was my mom being in different types of businesses and trying different things and trying to figure out how she can get her independence from. You know, working for other people.

And so my mom has done a lot of stuff, but one of the things that she's still currently doing is she runs her own body care line. That's what I'll call it. And for the time being, she has it on pause because she's dealing with some medical issues, but she runs this and we I've supported it for several years. In many people support it.

I have never agreed with her prices. Love you so much, mom. Cause I know she's going to listen to this. I've never agreed with her prices. She knows this. We've talked about all the time and I'm always the one who is quadrupling my mom's prices. Quadrupling, sometimes 10 X-ing, her prices because what I don't think that she's done a good job at is sat down and thought about all of the effort she is putting in.

She does an amazing job at ordering top quality ingredients. She is certified in formulating these types of products. And so she knows what she's doing. She's putting so much effort, she's gone to school for it. She's forced herself to become a designer, designing like what the labels and the bottles and things like that are going to look at, look like.

But the pricing is not there. Right? So we're going to get it there. I've talked to her about this, but the point that I'm trying to make is, is a lot of times we just look at the finished product and then, or the finished service and say, this is what I'm going to price off of. Or we make the decision that other people aren't going to pay us because they don't know what we put into it.

So I want you to just keep that in mind, think about all the things that you've done and remember those things, because those should show up in your pricing.

All right. So the second part of this that I want to talk about is why you should start charging more now. And there's a lot to unpack here because some of it's mindset and then some of it's like practical. So the first point that I want to go to is I want you to think about when you buy something, when you go to the store and you make a purchase. And that purchase costs you 20 bucks. If you bought like a blouse or something like that, or a pair of shoes for 20 bucks. Right. And then I want you to compare that to going and buying a similar item for $500. Right? So you might be thinking, I would never buy a shirt for $500. I'd never buy a pair of shoes for $500, but I just want you to like, you know, take this moment in, like, imagine this with me or use your own object that you would spend that much money on.

When you spend less money on something, you don't value it as much. And the same is true with our clients. I'm not saying that we should charge our clients just so that they can value it. But I'm saying to you that I'm assuming that you're putting together programs, you have products and services that are in the premium range.

You are putting a lot of effort in, you're doing a lot. You are trying to create transformations or experiences for your clients, for your customers. And so you have to charge based on that. Number one, you have to charge that you can be able to afford to do all those things, right. That money has to come from somewhere. That time that energy has to come from somewhere.

Number two, if the person doesn't, if the value is not there. If somebody says, Hey, you know, come coach with me for a whole year. And it's only going to cost you, you know, like a thousand dollars. Six months in, two months in probably less way, less than six months in two, three months in the person has forgotten that they spent a thousand dollars.

That's not really as painful. And here you are asking them to show up in a really big way and asking them to pour their hearts and souls into what they're doing and shift their mindset. All these really uncomfortable things. And they only spent a thousand dollars on it. Now compare that to a person who's going to work with you for a year and they spend $10,000. Or $15,000. That's a little bit more, they have a little bit more skin in the game, a lot more skin in the game. And so they're going to be like, okay, you know, that the mindset of that customer is going to be, I just spent $15,000. I'm going to make sure I show up. And I put in the effort and I do the work.

And when I get blocked, I work through those blocks and when things aren't going great, I turn to my coach. You know, they're going to make sure they do everything in their power to show up. So that's one thing that I want you to keep in mind when you're pricing something premium. When you're trying to create a transformation for somebody, when you have a wonderful product that whether it's for vanity or it's actually helping somebody in their life, in a more meaningful way, you want to keep in mind that needs to be priced properly.

When a person has to invest in something, they tend to take a little bit more care of it. So I think we all understand that point pretty well.

And then let's think about if you don't charge enough, then you won't be able to keep your business operational. You won't be able to grow it. Meaning you can't hire. And again, you can't create the experiences that you want for your clients. When was the last time you really sat down and envisioned what you wanted your business to be?

When you were doing that, did you dream about your business being just you forever? Just in the solopreneur stage forever? Or just having, like, one or two people who can help you forever?

I'm going to assume that you didn't because really, what you really really want, is something that's going to grow over time. And in order for it to grow over time, that means that you have to price correctly. You have to be able to give people an experience. You have to be able to give them transformation.

Secondly, what kind of quality of life do you want to live? Because I think this needs to go into there too. And again, I'm not telling you to charge clients based on what you want to do, because you want to jet set around the world. I'm telling you that in order for you to show up and give your clients a premium experience, you have to be a premium human being. You have to be able to show up in all of your glory. You have to be rested. You have to be making sure you're well fed that your bills are paid, that the business isn't falling apart at the seams. And part of that is bringing money in to the business. So it all has to kind of balance itself out.

What are the things that you actually need to make your personal life happen, which come from the job that you're doing? None of us would think that it was crazy for us to go to work, go work for somebody else, and we expect them to pay us a living wage. We expect them to pay us, you know, an amount of money based on the work that we're doing. Most of the time.

We're underpaid at work as well. But this is a whole nother story. If you were owning your own business, and you're still underpaying yourself, there's something really wrong there. It's something that we need to work through.

All right. So the, the final point that I want to make about why you should be charging more now. When we work for other people, we make a certain amount of money. So I want to give you an example. Okay. My sister worked for the big four, which is in accounting. If you're familiar with accounting, you know what big four is, right? So she worked for big four. She was a auditor. And as a new associate, she would routinely tell me how much the company billed for her. So she would go out to a client site. She would be doing an audit and the company, based on her job, like her level experience, they would bill the client a certain amount. Now I can't 100% remember the amount that she told me, but let's just say for argument's sake, they billed the client $250 an hour for my sister's work. They billed the client $250 an hour my sister was a beginning associate.

So for everybody out there who wants to discredit themselves by saying like, you know what, I don't have enough experience yet, or I haven't done enough in my life yet. My sister was out of college and she went into this job and this is what happens. We're learning. So if you're even a new coach and you think you can't have premium prices because you're just learning, that's not true.

Now, clearly she wasn't being paid $250, but that's how much that client was being paid. And of course, yes, my sister was a rockstar at what she did. But she was still learning. And it's the same for you. Why aren't you pricing your clients at a premium when you know you're going out there and you're being a rockstar and you're doing the absolute best you can for them.

And you're going to continue to learn and so on and so forth. Why are you still under charging?

All right. So the third part of this is what is the solution to, if you're in this moment, listening to this, and you're still feeling like, yeah, but you know what, Khalida, I still have a problem, like even thinking about raising my prices. So I want you to just sit and envision yourself right now, whatever your price is today for your product or service, whatever that service is, whatever that product is. I want you to think about, I want you to just close your eyes and envision yourself doubling that price, tripling that price, and then ask yourself how that makes you.

Do you feel queasy? Do you, does your heart rate start to increase? Are you thinking, oh my God, this is crazy. Or she's crazy. Or I want you to like, take notice of how uncomfortable that makes you feel or on the flip side, do you feel really invigorated when I tell you to triple your price? Is it something that makes you feel empowered?

Are you like, yes, finally somebody has given me permission. If that's the case, it's time for you to start giving yourself permission. And in either of those scenarios, it's time for you to start giving yourself permission.

But it's important for you to understand, sometimes the reason why we don't do the thing that we need to do, in this case pricing properly, is because we're just afraid. There's something that we're battling. So it's important for you to even recognize that. That's the first step. Recognizing that you're not doing something because you, you feel you have a fear. You've been telling yourself stories, you know, there's a lot going on there and you need to unpack it once again, super happy to help you with that.

Make sure you reach out to me. You can email [e-mail] or you can DM me on Instagram and we can talk about it. That's @khalida.dubose. And that will be in the show notes.

But let's talk about some of the solutions. So I'm like everybody else and when I was in my corporate career, I chronically accepted jobs that paid me below what I should have been accepting even out of college. And I would tell myself the story of, I just need to work myself up. I just need to get some more experience, you know? But inside, I always felt like I should be paid more.

You know, sometimes I read books or I listen to podcasts, and I hear statistics about how women always take lower paying jobs. Yep. That was me raising my hand. And I also hear statistics about how women don't apply for jobs where they don't meet a hundred percent of the criteria of that job.

For me, that was never the case. If I met like 50% of the criteria, I would apply for the job, that was just me. I was always thinking like, they can determine if they don't want to hire me, I'm going to go for that job. I always applied for jobs that made more money, even though it made me feel a little bit weird.

I'll be honest. I felt weird. And I would apply for the jobs.

One situation that I can remember that comes to mind is when I was taking a job in medical sales, and I remember applying for the job, it didn't make as much as I wanted it to. I was going to be living in Chicago. But I thought to myself, okay, I'll take this job and I will just work my way up. Actually, it made a pretty decent amount of money.

I went to the interview of flew into Chicago. I interviewed at the airport all day long. I remember having a slamming headache after that day.

And I flew home the same exact day. It was like a long, 12 hour day. And I felt like I was really nervous. I definitely sweat everywhere. Thankfully, I had a suit jacket on and you couldn't see it, but I was really nervous. And I thought, yeah, I think I, I did a pretty good job. You know, I knew my stuff. I was fairly confident, not 100%, but I was confident.

And when I got the feedback, when you know, the, the managers, the hiring managers reached out to me, maybe like a week and a half later, and they were like, yeah, we were pretty impressed because this industry is really hard. And I had gone through this, training, like the six months, super intensive, crazy. I've never been through anything like that and never want to go through like anything like that again, in my life kind of training.

And I had spent six months in Boston doing that. I have to tell that story one day. It's so crazy. But that's where I was at. And I was so excited and I have flown around the country, after doing that program for six months, I flew around the country for five months looking for jobs in this organization. And I wanted to work for this organization in particular. And they called me back and they said, we want to offer you a position. And I was so proud of myself and they said, we want to offer you this job. And it wasn't the job that I applied for. It was a lesser job. And they told me that it made roughly $30,000 less.

And so I was super disappointed. I'm not going to lie. I was very disappointed, but the feedback that I got from some of the mentors that I was talking to at the time was that I should just accept the position and I could work my way up. And so that's what I did. I accepted the position making $30,000 less, and I immediately got to Chicago.

I started rocking it. I started doing really well and I was still notoriously hard on myself because I still felt like I was not, you know, the best that I could be. Right. This was always me very Type A. But I was rocking it. In retrospect, looking back, oh my God, that girl was a rock star. And they immediately started noticing this.

I was getting reviews that were saying, wow, they were like looking for things to give me feedback on. They couldn't really find it. And so the crazy thing about this is they decided to up my responsibilities to the original job that I applied for, but told me I would not be getting a raise. So I went and did research and started talking to my colleagues.

And not the ones who, who worked in the same city as me, but some colleagues that I had met through the program and started asking them what they were making and based on what they were making. I put together a proposal, met with my boss, my regional manager, and I think we were at a Panera or a Starbucks and I proposed to him that I wanted this raise. The raise was nowhere is still wasn't as much as I should have been making, but I proposed, and he was like, are you crazy? I mean, he literally said, are you crazy? And I was like, uh, I don't know, but this is what I want. Chicago is a really expensive city. And he's like, well, nobody told you to live in the apartment you live in.

And it was at that point that I just realized. Nobody's going to ever advocate for you. They're not going to care about your living situation. They're not going to care about what your needs and wants are. You have to go for it. So I put up with that for another year, still doing really well.

Um, the job was hard for many different reasons and I put up with it and, and then they came to me and when they knew I was just frustrated and they said, well, we'll give you like a $15,000 pay stipend, but you have to sign a contract with us saying that you won't go anywhere for two years.

And I was like $15,000 extra per year? And they were like, no, total. And we'll pay you out seven, seven and a half, one year and seven and a half the next year. And I was like, you're crazy. That's not happening.

So I'm telling that story so that you can understand that we accept these things as women, and I'm sitting here telling you that you need to charge more and you need to own what you're making, and you need to, really start to get the mindset where you believe in yourself. I'm sharing this all with you. And I'm sharing my part of my story with you to let you know that I have been there.

Right. And the way that story ends is that I declined the stipend. They were very shocked and quite annoyed with me, but I declined the stipend and I started looking for other jobs. And four months later, I went with a competitor and I think I mentioned this in another podcast. They raised my pay so much. I think it, I can't remember what I said it was, but it was significantly more.

With bonus, I was making double my salary. So I have always come from a place where I believe that I deserve to be paid more, but I wasn't always in the mindset and I didn't always believe in myself enough to ask for it. So I did, like everybody else, I accepted things lower than what I should have.

I think that this happens to women because this is what we we're used to watching. We're used to seeing our mothers, our sisters, our aunts. And then we, like I said, I had mentors, most of which were men, who told me to just accept this. And so these are the messages that are given to us a lot. So anytime you know that you need to do something.

And in this case, we're talking about pricing, but you feel yourself resisting it or getting timid or just, you know, feeling sick to your stomach or your heart's racing. That is a message to you. That fear response is a message to you. That's telling you something that something needs to be resolved so you can kind of give up, get over that hump and go get what you need to get.

Right. Get the bag.

So what do I recommend for this and how did I overcome this and how am I still overcoming this? I journal, you guys have heard me say that I journal, I don't just journal and tell you about my feelings like I did as a 13 year old girl. I journal very intentionally about what are the things that I did well, what are the things that I'm doing well.

And I always go with the small things too. My mentor, really drove home this point for me, I was already really good at this before I met her, but she really drove home this point for me and how much it can change your business and how much it can change your life. Think about the things that you do well, and I listened to this wonderful podcast the other day, and she was talking about forgotten results, which I loved because it really, this is just something that I believe in so much that you have to really remember the things that you've done. Write them down in real time.

You know, writing them down in real time means that you won't forget them. And then you review those things over and over. So I know sometimes when we say journal, people get this idea in their minds of like getting a book and getting some tea and everything like that. You can have something on the side of your bed. And you can just jot down the things that you've done.

Take some time to celebrate yourself, start seeing yourself in a good light, and don't think of it as being arrogant. Think of it as I like to call it evidence gathering. You're just gathering evidence. You're going to always have those moments in your life and in your business where you're not feeling your best, where you're questioning whether you can do something, when you're questioning whether you can go to the next level. And you really need to have something there, if it's not a person, you need to have something there where you can review the things that you did.

You can write down in your journal. You know, this year, I created 150 Instagram posts. That means that you had 150 times to practice writing captions. That means that you're much better at writing captions than you were on day one.

You have to learn how to quantify what you've done and really reflect on it and celebrate yourself. Another thing that you need to do is get into the habit of, you know, this kind of goes along with it, is verbally congratulating yourself. I like to do this. And in fact, I have a nickname for myself.

I'm not going to tell you, you know what? I will tell you guys what that nickname is for myself. If you send me an email. And you ask me, or you DM me on Instagram. You asked me directly what it is. I will say it on, on the podcast, what my nickname is for myself, but I have a nickname for myself and I say it out loud when I'm proud of myself for doing something.

And every time I do it, it makes me giggle a little bit, you know, like when I call myself this, um, my family members definitely know what this is with this nickname is.

Also I like to sit in the discomfort of the compliments that other people give me. Sometimes it's just simply when somebody says, thank you for doing something and I, you know, I'm a recovering people pleaser.

And I I'm like, well, why did they thank me, you know? And instead of being like, oh, well, you know, it was nothing or, oh, all these other people helped your welcome. You're very welcome. And just sit in that and believe it or not, that can be uncomfortable for me. Sometimes I'm getting better at it, but you know, just learning how to take compliments, and when people appreciate you, just accepting that.

You know, I think when we can do that, we can get a lot better at, you know, starting to see ourselves as a valuable person.

Create affirmations. Now I know you guys have heard lots and lots and lots about affirmations, and you're going to hear them from me too. Because affirmations, and maybe you need to think of another word, that's what I had to do. But I'm going to use this jargon because it's out there and people understand it.

Affirmations are just a way of you reprogramming your brain. And the way I like to think about this is where we're allowing everybody else to send us messages. Okay. Whether you're listening to this podcast or another podcast, or you're watching television, or you're listening to music, that's all going into your ears. You're taking all of that in, and it's a programming of sorts going on.

And so you need to have some space in your own head too. And not the space of the, you know, that woman in there, who's like, you know, pointing out all of your flaws and telling you that you can't do it. You know, that critical voice that we have. You need to be in your head as well, telling yourself the things that you need to tell yourself.

So if you're having problems with pricing, for instance, you could come up with a affirmation that says my prices reflect the value of my service and my future clients are happy to pay me. Right. So that was kind of off the top of my head. You might think of something that resonates with you a little bit more, whatever your specific problem that you're having with pricing.

If you not, if you don't understand, again, reach out to me, let's talk about it. You can create affirmations around it. And I know it might feel a little bit nerdy at first. It might feel like this isn't going to work, but I just want you to understand that an affirmation is you. You being inside of your own head and you telling yourself something positive and reprogramming your brain to look for those positive things. We're already in there. There's already a critical voice in there telling us all the other things that we strongly believe in. And that's why you're not pricing your services correctly, and probably doing other things in your life that you really want to do, because we already have a voice in there. So why not introduce another voice that's positive. That's going to get us to the results that we want.

And if that's too geeky for you, you might want to think about that too.

So I would say, having that verbal and that visual, practice, you know, verbally affirming things to yourself. Visually, you can put these things in front of you. For me, I have my affirmations on my desktop. I'm not huge into the vision boards, but I'm, you know, I'm going to try it out. Some people really love vision boards. If you're struggling, write things down. So a visual for me, instead of it being like a vision board type of visual, I have sticky notes on my computer where I put down what my goals are. Like what, what's the big, next milestone I'm trying to get to.

Or, in this case, to make it more relevant to this podcast, write down what your price is. If it's really hard for you to charge a certain price and you haven't gotten there. Right down the price you want. So for all of you out there who did the exercise and you decided, you know, what your price was, and then you doubled it and it made you feel queasy or you tripled it, write that price down and stick it to your laptop or wherever your workstation is that you're going to see it often and get used to seeing it, get used to saying it.

That's another thing too, on the verbal, I like to practice and say things out loud. My affirmations are always said out loud, and I say them in a very enthusiastic way. And then my pricing is my pricing and anything else that I need to see that I need to keep in the forefront of my mind is on a sticky note on my computer.

I need to show you guys what my computer looks like. It's like full of sticky notes. I have to like take them down sometimes when I've moved past that. And then I start all over again.

So the solution is, is that you have to start to change your mindset. You have to start to do things, evidence gathering, affirmations, verbally, congratulating yourself, celebrating yourself, you know, writing things down visually, being very intentional about what you're going to create in your life, and what you're going to create in your environments that you see in that you put your attention towards.

So I hope that was helpful for you. I want you guys to let me know, send me a DM on Instagram screenshot this episode, if it was helpful for you and tag me at Instagram and let me know.

Thank you so much for hanging out and listening to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast today. If you haven't already hit that follow or subscribe button, so you never miss an episode. And if you found anything helpful in this episode or had any aha moments, I would love it if you would rate the podcast and review it so that other women of color can know what kind of content we have on this podcast, how it could be helpful for them. And so that the podcast grows and spreads to more people. Make sure you're rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcast. You can also reach out to me at [e-mail]. We're dropping episodes every Tuesday and we can't wait to see you back then.