Today we're

diving into one of the toughest topics for coaches

or any entrepreneur for that matter.

Raising your prices. We're gonna unpack the mindset

strategy and confidence it takes to

charge what you're really worth

so stay tuned

welcome to the 6 figure Business Mastery podcast

where every week Kurtel and Jeannie

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welcome to our latest episode everyone

we're grateful that you are here today

and we are grateful to have an amazing friends

and an amazing business owner

Mark Mcwinney

and Mark is the owner of Natural Born Coaches

and today we're gonna talk about raising your prices

so welcome to the show Mark

it's lovely to have you here

thanks for having me guys

Mark before I even ask you to tell us about you

and your business

I'm gonna give you a shout out right off the bat

so Mark has an awesome Facebook group

coaching jungles

and he also has a VIP program within that group

so if you guys

are looking to join an awesome Facebook group

we will definitely put the link in the show notes

he has fostered just as

really warm community of people

that truly wanna help each other

so if you're coaching

you're looking for that kind of group

we'll definitely recommend Mark's group

so Mark

that's how we met you with through your Facebook group

tell us a little bit about

your journey into coaching

and helping people with their pricing well

thank you for being in the group by the way

and for contributing a lot

so I appreciate it

it's always tough to try to condense

a lot of years into a 32nd here

here's my deal my background was in real estate

I did that for about 10 years

coming right out of university

I've been in the coaching world since March of 2014

so

I just celebrated 11 years of helping coaches recently

with it

that's a lot to condense some 20 some years into

but the interesting thing

which is I guess

relevant for this topic today

is a lot of what I've Learned about charging my worth

and increasing coaching fees and stuff

actually came from my background in real estate

because in real estate

you're constantly trying to defend your commission

of course

sellers wanna beat it down and they are all they go

real estate agents are greedy and they're just

they're getting paid way too much to open a door

and put a sign up and whatever

and but I've

transferred a lot of those lessons over to what we're

gonna be talking about today

and I really hate to see coaches struggling

and I find far too many coaches or charging peanuts

or charging nothing in some cases

which is shouldn't be what they're doing

so I'm all about them charging

and now it has to be a fair fee

of course as much as I would love to say

I'm charging $10 million today

for a year to work with me

here's my Paypal you gotta feel good about it as well

so there's win win yeah

I think in the coaching space

you have people who

are very confident to charge very high prices

but often don't

have the ability to deliver the transformation

and I think that causes a lot of coaches to be afraid

of their own pricing because

you know they hear you know coaching is such a scam

there's so many people out there

they'll take your money and not help you

so is that balancing act of making sure that you are

delivering that transformation

that you can help people get

but also earning enough money to have a

a good life and to be a successful business owner

what are some of the things that you help people with

as far as

when they're struggling with their pricing structure

as a whole it's funny

we're talking about this today

because I had a call

with my Natural Born Coach program

I do live weekly support calls

and one of my clients was on that call yesterday

she is in a nutrition space

like really good knows her stuff

if you ever look at her content

oh my God

she's just a walking encyclopedia and stuff um

but with her packages

she was charging very low worked at the $50 uh

call with for I think was 6

8 or 12 calls and I just said

you already said that

you gotta get that way up for what you're doing

and I'm not picking on her

a lot of coaches are in that place

and it could be counterintuitive

if you're not selling much at $50 as a call

oh jeez well I'm gonna

I'm gonna sell even less than

if I'm at 3,000 or 5,000 for coaching package

but what you have to remind yourself is that

low fees aren't helping you

cause you're gonna be burned out

frustrated dealing with bills being unpaid and so on

I always say you can't coach on an empty stomach

but it's not helping the client either

cause if they don't have much skin in the game there

they're not gonna treat it very serious

I'm sure you guys have hired a lot of coaches

I've invested in programs

the ones that I've paid more for

I'm definitely putting more into things like Jeez Mark

you paid X thousands of dollars

versus if I bought something for 50 bucks

it could sit there collecting virtual dust

I don't really care as much

but if I paid $5,000 or more for something

I'm gonna putting more into it

so you're hurting yourself and your client

if you're not charging very much

it's funny because with my one on one coaching practice

pricing is one of the things we talk about a lot

and I feel without naming the person

I have to share a story

because I've got an interior designer

and she is fantastic you know

her website's fabulous her content's fabulous

just like you're talking about this the health coach

I mean this woman is just

she's a walking billboard frontier design

she looks apart she's amazing

and it's just so funny

every time we talk about raising her prices

she is 100% sure no one's ever gonna hire her again

and so

we had to really go up and like 25 dollar increments

it took us like

three years

to get her to where the market average is in our area

and it's really funny no one ever walks away

like nobody bats it at the pricing

we did a lot of role playing with it

so she feel confident

like delivering what her pricing is

but it was interesting like psychologically

there was always this meltdown around if I go up $25

no one's going to hire me

I'm not gonna have any business

and so it's fascinating because if anything

her business has grown

every year that we've got upon her praising

so I think that's something for people to realize

it may feel that way to you

and yeah you may miss a client or two

because you're not the right person for them

and the pricing point for them

but there's someone else out there

who can take that work and there's clients for you

who are more in line with what you do

and how you do it in your pricing structure

well one tip

I give clients who hesitant on raising their fees

is to remember that you're improving every day

every year as a coach or you should be growing

and you deserve to be reflected in your fees

you're a much better coach than you were 365 days ago

so sometimes people justify the increases of well

with inflation cost living and stuff like that

which I get but it's much more powerful to go

I think the other way is supposed to say new client

I mean you could technically did plenty of businesses

you see restaurants everything

hey we're increasing this because of current situation

but I would approach it that hey

I'm good at why doing much better than I was a year ago

five years ago

it would be silly to stay at that same fee

just keeping that in mind with it

that could help people get over the hump

yeah there's also a perception

you know sometimes you look at

there can be two coaches who are equally qualified

but the one that cost more

you perceive is being more valuable or more experienced

or whatever so there is a perception point to that

yesterday I said

if I was in the market for your services

I didn't know you and I saw $50 a call

I'm thinking Gee

how good is she even though I know that she's excellent

one of my favorite pricing stories

I won't say who it's from

but it's a fellow coach in Jungle VIP

who I know you guys know him

he was telling me

when he first made a huge crease with his fees

he was very nervous

cause he never charged anything like this new price

and he had a call with prospect

luckily it was not a video call

it was just audio cause you see what I mean

so when they got to a point where they're talking

working together and the guy said

so how much do you charge for this

and the coach said that he send the price

I forget what it was it was just

probably 10 times what he previously charged

and he said he had to put his fist in his mouth

to keep from saying something

because human tendency would be

you'd say the huge price and then you justify

but you get this and then you also get that

you get this or that

that's why he put his fist in his mouth

and he said it was probably only 10 seconds of silence

but it felt like 10 minutes

and the guy said great

how do I pay like that

so there's a tip

if anyone's having trouble turning your video off

just fill your mouth so you cannot say anything

and talk yourself out of a sale

and you should be fine

I love that yeah

it's fascinating

just find the psychology of sales like interesting

and we are our own worst enemies

and I think it's like

I love the point where you're talking about

how we get better every year

I was talking to a client yesterday about

using the software that we use

and it's really interesting

the perception when you are well organized

and you have your emails going out

you look very professional

you have great book of call

finals and things like that

I feel like those types of things

can also help us raise our prices

because

you just come across as so much more professional

and that's what she said she said

I'm so looking forward to this

because anytime I book something with you or Genie

she's like I'm always just so impressed with

the process of the technology

and I that so I guess are there other things that

you feel like people can do

to help them have the confidence

to build their business

and and grow their pricing and things like that

that's gonna sound really common sense

but it's something has to be said

because I'm noticing something in the coaching world is

there are a lot of coaches who show up late

for calls and you guys are like me

cause we are both early for this call

if you're not early you're late

that probably comes from my past life in real estate

I was so paranoid that if I showed up

and I was 5 minutes after the scheduled appointment

I'd be a big commission and it would be awful

so I always factored in okay

even though I'm in not a huge city in Canada Atlanta

Canada

I would factor in traffic as if I'm in New York City

just in case and get there

so you have to treat it like a business

and I'd say otbb that's on the ball

I can't get over how many times

like mention someone will show up

2 or 3 minutes or 5 minutes pass the hour

I just had a situation couple days ago

where I got a booking request

for someone who wants to hire me as a coach

and I thought Gee

that name sounds really familiar

I think he was a no show recently

so I looked through my calendar and sure enough

about a month ago he didn't show up for the call

and I wait 5 minutes and then I'm gone

if you're not there within 5 minutes

I'm not gonna wait 30 minutes for you

I and I just rejected the request with the

the scheduler and I said sorry

you no showed on this date

I can't accept this call if you're not able

to manage your calendar and show up

on calls when you're supposed to

then you're not gonna much luck

increasing your fees and charging high prices

cause it's at professionalism

same thing

like you guys talk about with all your systems

which I know from booking this interview

and everything else

you're on the ball with all that stuff

sounds like common sense

but I would say that twenty percent of coaches get it

the other 80% are way too nonchalant

and they're not professional with their business

I I yeah I'm like you

I'm running late for anything

my anxiety is through the roof

and it's fascinating because life happens to all of us

if that guy had sent you an email

or just even a minute or two ahead of time

I said I am so sorry I'm not gonna make it

this just happened in my life

or something just happened

it's catastrophic I

I'll just up to you

just a little bit of effort to be able to say

I'm sorry we had it's funny

we had someone booked today for a 12 o'clock interview

and we send like we send out message

email messages we send out text messages

so she's got plenty of messages up until today

and she just her message to us was

I've got a 12 o'clock appointment today

this was not on my calendar

that's all she said to us like not I'm really sorry

like as if we had

snuck in and booked her on our podcast

without ever telling her right

she filled out the form she picked out the date

she applied to be on here

and I like I told Genie like

if she applies again to be on

I'm gonna do exactly what you did

I'm just gonna cancel and say no

we guess who are actually going to show up

we we call these interviews

because we have lots and lots of interns

in our intern program

that we're training for our clients

and we need content for them

so we need people who value our time

and appreciate the opportunity to be on a podcast

but yeah that was crazy to me yeah

strange I guess in the online space

you're gonna run into people like that

I always

like the ones that refuse to book into my calendar

I'm gonna have to get up at 3:00am

my time to talk to them

because don't you know who I am

those type people I don't run into them often

but you do sometimes in your travels

so yeah it's the

the same with our businesses

is we can choose who to work with

and who not to work with

and I get the life gets in the way

if that fellow had emailed me a day later

two days later Mark

I'm so sorry my kid was sick

I was late getting my car to get the oil change

and just a crazy day

I really shouldn't ask you

of course I would have been like

no problem

just book in to just assume that I'll reschedule

cause you put in another request and no

I won't do it so there's nothing wrong

I would say to coaches with

if someone books into your calendar

if you're not sure about it

you can send a quick message

hey what were you looking to get out of this call

I wanna make sure that I'm prepared for it

I don't know you so how can I help

and if they don't answer that

that's telling you

you're probably saving time by rejecting the schedule

yeah I think that's a good point

most coaches will bend over backwards

like I will work

as hard as you work to make your business grow

like I know that's the way you are too

like I am committed to helping you

and I'll do anything in my power

if I see that you are also trying

to make your business grow

but it is important to have those boundaries around

our time and how we're spending our energy

and letting people know like

I'm here to support a lot of different people

and I need your commitment

your commitment

to yourself is what really is going to change

your life not me

like we're just a coach your commitment to yourself

and achieving your goals is what matters the most

but I am as committed to you as you are

as far as achieving your goals

good way to look at it

so if somebody were thinking yeah

I know I need to raise my prices

but I just don't know what to do I mean

I I obviously say hire a coach

because

you sometimes just need somebody to help you with that

backbone I know I did

but what would you say like would be their first step

we talked about some things

like making sure that you're on time

and that type of thing

but actually the your prices is it the percentage

is it figure out what the market is doing

what where would you start with them

so I think with

coaching is different than service

providers that are often constrained

but well take for example

you guys know my brother

he's a podcast editor and he does really well

he's got some big clients he's been at it since 2015

every September he sends a letter out hey

FYI in January the fee is gonna go up to this

now he's not doubling it or anything like that

he's keeping in mind I

I think he could probably even be higher

with his experience of what he's doing

but he might go up higher percent or maybe 10% a year

is nothing crazy coaching

I would go another approach

if you're charging if we'll just say for example

you've got a three month coaching program

and you're at $1,000 which I believe is way too low

but anyways I wouldn't say okay

I'm gonna pump it up to 11 hundred dollars

and then kind of go up

I think you're better off bumping up in that case

you know $3,000 as long as you can back it up right

of course with it as opposed to just going slightly

slightly slightly

and what I found is

when you get that first sale of the higher price

then it said it's okay that this concept

you shattered the glass ceiling another tip that I use

because like anyone

I'm human and something selling really well

like you do I wanna grab the bear and risk it

it's going well here

I shoot a really quick email off to my web guy hey

can you change your price on this program on this one

and I had send before I could change my mind

one thing to keep in mind is

it's not the end of the world

if you do bring your fees down a bit

so I had a program this was I don't know

five years ago was selling great at $5,000

it was just like hot cakes so I said

oh I'm gonna move it to 6,000

$1,000 more and I don't know if it's 6,000 and uglier

price of 5,000 or whatever

there was resistance there

and suddenly it wasn't selling like it was before

and I said

that's fine and moved it back down and then we're okay

but I wouldn't have known

unless I actually experimented with it

uh

you have to play a bit of a Jedi mind trick on yourself

the hardest person to convince is you

once you convince yourself that

you're worth every penny then the prospect is easy

I feel like

a lot of coaches haven't convinced themselves yet

and that's where they're running into trouble

you can tell energetically

they have a really good discovery call with someone

then it gets into that awkward shift

where you're talking about working together

and if someone says well

how much will it be to work with you

and if there's any hesitation

or if you're wobbly on that

you're like well

it's $5,000 that's not a very strong question you have

there should be it's $5,000

I can take Paypal or if you prefer stripe

just like that yeah

yeah you can probably practice it with them too

cause it might take a few times

for somebody to get comfortable

saying that bold and strong confident yeah

yeah I think one of our challenges are

my challenges since I take the sales calls is

you know our program is the flat 40 $900 however

once they hire the virtual assistant

they're paying the virtual assistant $250 a month

so I have to go over both of those pricing models

and I have to explain that

you're getting this trained virtual assistant

and you're getting all of our support

helping you build your YouTube

channel or your podcast but we're also

not marking up the labour of your virtual assistant

and I think for so many people

I've realized they don't know what that means

unless they've ever hired an agency

so I'm trying to get better about saying

if you were to go to a marketing agency

or an outsourcing agency

to get the same support that you're gonna

get from one of our train

virtual assistants

you're gonna pay an average 12 bucks a month

we're going through this program

and getting into the structure

you can have someone on your team for $250 a month

to $300 a month so it's interesting like understanding

I think

we understand what our clients know and don't know

because sometimes there's a great value there

but they don't have anything to compare it to

and then there you always have to remind them

what's gonna cost you to not make this move

it's not just monetary there could be health

sleepless nights and so on

one book I recommend actually in Movie 2

it's speaking of sales and belief and everything

one of my favorite movies is the founder

about Ray Crock who got put McDonald's on the map

and then he also has

the book was written in the late 70s

I believe called grinding at Ray Crock Road

and he in that book

he dives into a lot of sales things

so before he got started with McDonald's

everything he was selling

multi mixers to restaurants in the early fifties

in the States and I won't spoil it or whatever

but he was running into objections

because the multi mixers he had could do six

milkshakes at a time instead of just one

so he was telling restaurants hey

you could now sell way more

cause you're not waiting for the old one

that you have to do one next

and then maybe it's dirty

you gotta clean it and they would have a couple

that would still be a slow process

but the challenge she was having was

the restaurant owner was like yeah

but what if your multi mixer breaks

then I can't make any

so if I have a couple individual ones

or chances of each of those solo ones breaking or

and nil so I'd rather just sell a fewer whatever

and he talks about how he gets around stuff like that

but in the movie

you'll see how he listen to a record throughout

like in a hotel room and things

and I think it's based on Norman Vincent Peel probably

and it's all the power positive thinking type stuff

and just it's really motivating

and and movie and books so I

I recommend

anyone interest in this topic to check those out yeah

I definitely I think I saw the movie a while back

but I'll definitely check out the book

because it does make a difference for us to

constantly be reading about sales

and marketing and pricing

because we forget like

everybody who's gone before us

has had these same struggles

and we can learn from what they've done

and it empowers us to feel like okay

if they did it we can do it

yeah and turn the news off

I'm not saying

you don't wanna be plugged in and know what's going on

but especially nowadays

where you're hearing the terrorist recessions

all that if you're consuming that 24 7

it's gonna be very tough to feel

confident about raising your fees

cause you think

all these people can't pay their mortgages

or buy their groceries why would they hire a coach

or whatever service that you have

I'm very careful now curating my social media feeds

if there's someone in there that's negative

and they're constantly posting politics

five times a day and griping that

this and that I'm like

now I'm gonna snooze them or unfriend them

and it makes it much easier

so you wanna be careful those outside forces

same with the news

I'd rather listen to a good audio book than that

I love serious radio on the political

not list of political shows

but lately I've been doing more audio books

just to keep the negative stuff out of my brain

yeah I 100% agree with that

I'm not sure if it's true

but they say more millionaires are major in recessions

not that I want a recession

but the point is you can make money

in any given market if you're determined to

and I think you do have a huge advantage

if you're not listening to the news right

if you're listening to all the positive things

and I think that

that gives you a leg up against a lot of

your competition

because if they are consuming a ton of news

and they're in that negative

and they're in that fear mode

that just means you have a bigger opportunity to win

well another story from my real estate days

back when I was a young agent just getting started

I was 21 and I look 14 or 15

I didn't have a grey beard back then

and I don't know what I waited to be like

get this kid a sandwich wind would blow him over

but I remember talking with an agent in my office

who had been in the business for a long time

so this would have been around

two thousandish without get started yeah

2000 and she started

I forget when the late 70s or something

and I asked her a question

because she had lived through the crazy interest rate

times of like 1980 ish

where it would be 22% interest rates for mortgage

like a credit card and I said to her

so jeez did you find that hard or whatever

she said

those are some of the my best years because we did out

all the weaker agents

said normally they weren't selling whole lot

but if you have enough of them in the market

they're pulling away sales

and when there's something like that

tough economic times

it pushes those ones out and then the ones who are um

able to withstand it are gonna do better

they're gonna pick up that

and I see the same thing with the online space

so many coaches started around Covid

I thought it was busy in 2014

but after 2020 everybody's a coach and jumping in

well now they're going back to jobs and other things

because they just can't make it go

that that's gonna leave more for us

so that's another way to flip it around and look at it

yeah we work with a lot of real estate agents

I didn't know your background was real estate

because it's actually mine too

so our two target markets are coaches

real estate agents but it's interesting

we're seeing a lot of

agents who are coming into the business

and their age doesn't matter

some of them are younger but some of them

you know second career later in life

and they are killing it because they're

they're beat down

they're not coming off this heyday of easy making money

they're just so excited to be in real estate

and they're leveraging video marketing

they're leveraging automations

they're going into real estate with a different mindset

and those people are winning

and it's amazing to me

so a lot of the agents who've been around

even if they survived tough times before

it's easy to beat down or to not want to try new things

it's it's gonna be interesting to see how

this market shakes out the real estate business

it's funny because for the first probably two

3 years that I was in real estate

I was the youngest in my marketplace of 300 some agents

and the most agents were the 60

65 year old types have been at it a long time

and I look at it now I've been out of it for 15 years

and I see just different things through social media

and stuff with agents

like dry humping or for sale sign

and doing dances around it

like a stripper pole and stuff

I'm like yeah

maybe I'm glad I'm not in it anymore haha

I don't think that's the kind of marketing

we're talking about yeah

there's some that's weird

it's kind of strange but then again

the coaching world's the same way

cause I've seen weird stuff like that too

so yeah it's okay haha

you left us speechless

I always try to pause to give JD a chance to talk

because I tend to jump in quickly

but I was also going to say it

in my county alone in Sarasota

there are like 9,000 real estate agents

crazy yeah

oh is it in my county

wow it's yeah

um but I think there

I've noticed a lot of similarities between

real estate and coaching

and I say overall

I'm happy as in real estate for so long

because

instilled a lot of good habits around discipline

work ethic maybe a little too much

cause I can tend to be a workaholic now with it

but I think anything that you're doing

whether you're selling real estate

coaching insurance

anything like that

a lot of principles are the same across the board

and I'm really glad we talked about this today

because I feel like a lot of coaches are

undercharging by a lot

and they don't even realize that

they're like that old parable

the elephant that was a baby

was tied to the wooden stake

and then when it grows up to be a big elephant

it could easily just rip it out

but it's been conditioned at the state where it's at

and I feel it's the same way with coaches

what you don't wanna do is

the coaching worlds in online space of Wild West

you don't wanna start comparing and say well

Joe is charging this much

Mary's charging this much

they're doing that you'll drive yourself crazy

there is a little bit more you gonna pull back and say

this is what I feel good about

I feel great about the results I can give

and it's worth it so

my main coaching program

for the Natural one coach program is 5 k

I feel good about it

because it's showing coaches how to get to a sex

it's finding the the title of this podcast

it to get to a sex figure business

and then they can rinse and repeat it every year

so not going out there say hey

you're gonna make $10 million your first year

pay me 5,000 but

if they're getting to a hundred thousand dollar

business and then

they're going to continue doing stuff in future years

it should be a no brainer $5,000

it'd be weird if I was charging $500 for that

there's a disconnect with the results and what

with one charging so I could probably charge more

I feel good with this and we'll go with it for now

but you just you there's a little bit of that gut feel

yeah you have to think about the

the gut thing and being afraid to

to take step in and bump it up a little bit

I've read two that they say

you know you should be

just a little uncomfortable with what you're charging

but be brave and be bold and be confident about it

well you have nothing to lose

if you're not selling anything

or you're selling very little

then you have nothing to lose

by rolling the dice and bumping it up

that's what I would look at

I love that

that is that's truth bomb right there everyone

you're not selling a lot you have no

there's no risk in rolling the dice

and bumping up your pricing

I think that is that true

I love that well Mark

this is always so much fun when we get to talk to you

you are a wealth of information

you are such a superstar you know

supporting coaches and entrepreneurs

thank you so much for joining us today

yeah thanks for having me

thanks for listening to the 6 figure

Business Mastery podcast

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