Four months from now will mark the three-year anniversary of my biz, Paperback Kingdom.
Over the past two years I’ve shared growth lessons at each annual milestone (read a recap of year 1 here and year 2 here).
However, today’s a little different. With the upcoming launch of my brand-new business program, Creative Biz Academy, I wanted to get a little more tactical and share three mistakes I STRONGLY encourage you to avoid if you’re a fellow service provider with a biz helping authors.
Ready to dive in?
1) Undercharging
Did you know that in my first year of biz, I was charging a mere $99 for a coaching session?
YEP. For real. Nowadays, my 1:1 is a $5k investment, and I’m still on the cheaper scale compared to a lot of coaches out there.
But here’s the thing about charging less than your worth—it means you attract non-ideal clients who don’t respect your time or service.
The reason I wasn’t signing clients was because at $99, people were STILL complaining that the price was too high, which went on to negatively affect my mindset and confidence, and created a vicious cycle of self-sabotage. It looked a little something like this:
1) My mindset = undercharging.
2) Undercharging = attracted the wrong clients.
3) Wrong clients = no one was benefiting from my offers or having transformational shifts and wins.
… all of which would impact my mindset yet again.
I used to believe that I couldn’t charge higher, and that nobody would ever pay me higher amounts for my services. But I didn’t realize that my ideal client can always afford me, and that if they see value in the offer it becomes a no brainer for them to invest.
The same goes for you, too.
Nowadays, I’ve developed rock solid beliefs in myself and my biz. I charge well into the thousands for my group programs, and people actually pay me that—and they get results, too!
Undercharging won’t get you anywhere—it’s simply not worth it. So if this is something that you struggle with, work on your mindset! Trust me, mindset alone can be a gamechanger in your biz.
2) Self-sabotaging beliefs
Stemming off of the whole mindset thing, everything in biz is deeply rooted in your beliefs.
If you believe you can be your own boss, earn a certain amount of income, then you’re sure to get there.
If you don’t, however, you’re likely to self-sabotage.
Confused? Let me explain—let’s say you create an offer, but you’re constantly doubting whether it’s good enough, whether YOU’RE good enough, whether the price point is right… and as such, this impacts how you show up to promote it.
Without the rock-solid belief that your offer is lifechanging, that your price point is on-point, and that you’re the ideal person to deliver the offer? Your confidence will be off, you’re likely to avoid showing up as much as required in order to sell the offer, and then your mindset will take a toll as a result of you NOT getting the results you desired.
This is why before doing anything in your biz, working on your mindset and developing some foundational rock-solid beliefs is crucial.
Of course, this is easier said than done for some—how does one even develop beliefs? How do you uncover the beliefs already sabotaging your success?
Luckily, this is something we cover in Creative Biz Academy—AND, it’s why there’s a huge emphasis on mindset work in the program. In fact, there’s a whole module dedicated to it broken into different categories of mindset issues that I identify in a lot of new biz owners. So no matter what limiting beliefs you might be struggling with, you’re going to know exactly where to look and what to shift to start seeing results.
3) Starting with a low tier offer
Just to recap the previous points…
> Undercharging will get you nowhere in your biz
> Self-sabotaging beliefs will negatively impact all aspects of your biz
And that kind of explains how a lot of business owners start out with a low tier offer and then wonder why they can’t hit consistent income months.
You see, if you’re a new business, and you don’t know how to market yourself, or retain and nurture leads, you might be stuck with something like 10 – 50 people in your audience for the first month or two—and this is likely to build slowly.
And it’s already been proven that only a small percentage of that audience is ever actually going to buy from you—which further complicates things.
So if you’re trying to hit, say, consistent $5k months in your biz… but your main offer is only priced at $100… you need to sell that offer 50 times a month to hit your goal!
Which, you know, is fine if you have an offer that can be consumed time and time again, and you have 50 people lined up to buy it each month.
But not if you’re a service provider who can only handle 1 – 2 clients a month and doesn’t have 50 people on their waiting list!
Which means you need to be charging higher. And you need to be thinking strategically about how your offer aligns with the resources (e.g. time, energy and audience) you have available.
Plus, if you want to go to higher income months, you need ways to scale without only giving clients your own time and energy—because there’s only so much of you to go around!
But the big thing here is, it IS possible to start hitting consistent (and high) income months within your first few months of business—just not if you’re undercharging and letting your limiting beliefs run your biz instead of you.
YOU are the CEO.
YOU get to decide how to run your biz.
So decide to run it in a way that serves you!
Written by Pagan Malcolm
Pagan is a copywriter and business coach helping writers understand the business side of publishing so that they can become serious authors.
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