” Don’t let fear decide what you charge.” Natalie Bullen
About Our Guest:
Natalie Bullen is a wealth and money mindset coach from Mobile, AL. As the owner of Unapologetic Wealth LLC, she teaches financial literacy, money mindset work, and sales training for ambitious female service-based entrepreneurs so they can step into the wealth they deserve and desire. She is also a flat fee financial planner who e shuns traditional personal finance values rooted in shame, guilt and fear and encourages followers to dream bigger, increase their prices and magnify their gifts. Natalie’s best gift is her voice, and she uses it to speak plainly and boldly about wealth creation, especially for communities of color.
Episode Summary:
This episode is powered by the Move to Millions Method
If there is one thing that I have learned in 15 years of entrepreneurship it’s that you have to learn how to become unapologetic about your ability to create wealth if you want to actually create it. Forget what you have been taught (easier said than done, I know) BUT wealth is your birthright. You came into the earth realm full abundance but then you were introduced to anchors that shifted the way you saw wealth and therefore yourself. Let’s change all that. In this episode, I sit down with my client Natalie Bullen a wealth and money mindset powerhouse and we have a real, relevant and raw conversation about what it takes to experience unapologetic wealth. Grab your tissues (yes, you’re going to need them) and pen and paper so we can unearth what is keeping you from the wealth your soul desires and deserves.
Listen in to discover:
- How to detach how you feel about you from what others think about you
- Why low-ticket pricing repeals ideal clients and what to do to start attracting your most ideal clients
- How to set your pricing
- And so much more
Powerful Natalie quotes from the episode:
- “If you’re convincing people, you are on the wrong side of the buying journey.”
- “If you anchor to a small number that is what you’ll get.”
- “When we project our “broke” story on others, it affects our pricing.”
- “If hard work works, why hasn’t it worked yet?”
- “Mindset is greater than skillset.”
- “Work does not equal wealth.”
Last Book Natalie Read: Atomic Habits by James Clear
Quote: If you hang around 4 broke people you will surely be the 5th
Tool Natalie Swears By: Trello
How to Connect with Natalie:
- Website unapologeticwealth.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unapologeticwealth/
- Twitter: @FiscallyMinded
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Ladylricist06
Incredible One Enterprises, LLC is not responsible for the content and information delivered during the podcast interview by any guest. As always, we suggest that you conduct your own due diligence regarding any proclamations by podcast guests. Incredible One Enterprises, LLC is providing the podcast for informational purposes only.
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Natalie Bullen: Unapologetic Wealth
Wondering what it is going to take to make a move to a million dollars in your business? Learn now by visiting MoveToMillionsGuide.com. In this episode, I sit down with my client, Natalie Bullen. First of all, we have such an amazing conversation talking about pricing and pricing yourself into poverty. Let me take a quick moment and read Natalie’s bio. She is such a powerful woman.
Natalie Bullen is a wealth and money mindset coach from Mobile, Alabama. As the Owner of Unapologetic Wealth, LLC, she teaches financial literacy, money mindset work, and sales training for ambitious female service-based entrepreneurs so that they can step into the wealth that they deserve and desire. She is also a flat fee financial planner who shuns traditional personal finance values rooted in shame, guilt, and fear and encourages followers to dream bigger, increase their prices, and magnify their gifts.
Natalie’s best gift is her voice, and she uses it to speak plainly and boldly about wealth creation, especially for communities of color. We had one of the most spirited conversations I have ever had on the show. Money is one of the things you know about me. I love to talk about it every chance that I get because we have to normalize it. It still has such a terrible stigma because of the trauma that we have experienced around money. While we did talk some about the money mindset, we also talked about pricing. I want you to grab a pen and paper and join me for my conversation with Natalie Bullen.
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Welcome to the show, Natalie. I am so happy to have you here.
I am elated. Thank you for having me.
This is going to be such a good conversation, I already know. Before we jump in, take a quick moment and tell everybody who you are in your own words.
I am Natalie Bullen. I own Unapologetic Wealth, a coaching firm that helps women ambitious service-based entrepreneurs step into the wealth they deserve and desire. To get visible so they can get paid, increase their prices, and live the life that they deserve. For me, that is going to be a life of risk and ease. Whatever your dream life looks like, it takes more money to get there. I guarantee it.
I want to stop at the name of your company. Can we talk about Unapologetic Wealth? How did you come up with that name? Where does it come from? Are you unapologetic about your wealth?
I wish it were a sexier story. I struggled. I wanted the company to be named Meticulous Money. Everyone hated it. My mom said, “No one is going to be able to spell that, darling. They are not that smart.” I wanted something money or something wealth. I went through thousands of acronyms, Powerful Wealth, Challenging Wealth, Exceptional Wealth. It was either taken. It was cumbersome. I cried. This business got delayed two months on a name. I went to sleep one night and I was like, “This is it. Tomorrow, I am naming the business. It is going to happen.”
Someone sent me a DM because I was still in my 42 DM outreach. Another story might get to. Someone wrote, “I heard you on Clubhouse, and I loved how you were so unapologetic about wanting to make a lot of money. You do not hear people say, “I want to be rich. I do not care how people feel about it.” I was like, “That is it. It is Unapologetic Wealth. I am sending you a care package.” I named it, and then the rest is history.
What I love about it is everything that the person said in your DMs but wealth is unapologetic. It is the definition of wealth. We could go all the way back to whatever century definition that talks about health and wellbeing. My good friend, Patrice Washington, talks about that all the time on her podcast, Redefining Wealth. Shout out, Patrice. We can go all the way back to health and well-being as a part of wealth because wealth is not money.
No matter what wealth is, it is absolutely unapologetic. If you are afraid to have the money, if you are afraid to stand in the posture of having the money, you are not going to have it. Your actions are always going to follow your beliefs. There is no way that it is going to be possible for you. I feel like it is an omen of sorts for people that they have the possibility to step into that unapologeticness. I know I might have made up a word right there. They are able to step in and learn how to become unapologetic.
I did a VIP day. The client was a multiple million-dollar business. His business had done $2 million and desired to go to $10 million. We charted that whole thing out. One of the questions he asked me was because he was not yet there with being as vocal as I was about my wealth. We are sitting there, and we are having a conversation. I was like, “I have been a millionaire since I was in my 30s. I got into some great stocks early.” I always tell people I had Microsoft at ‘99. I have had it since then. I had Amazon when it was $258 a share. I do not walk around the street with a megaphone broadcasting that; however, I do not have a problem with it.
He was like, “I am not there yet. What do I do if I am not ready to talk about what I have earned?” I said, “We got to deal with the story behind it.” That is my first question to you. When you are dealing with clients, so they come to you, Unapologetic Wealth, it sounds cool. It sounds cute. It sounds like something I should want but they are the farthest thing from being unapologetic.
For my readers that are tuning in now that could get excited about what it could look like for them to be unapologetic about their wealth, walk us through the process. How do we get a person to the point where them being unapologetic is the way that they show up in every way as it pertains to their money?
It is all in mindset. The biggest click for me was that mindset is greater than skillset. How I grew up, the skill was everything. Having degrees, being articulate, being well-spoken, being polite, and being punctual to work are the things that I was taught were going to make the difference and earn me more money. That is what got drilled into me. What do you know, “Natalie, go to college. No one can take your education from you?” There was always all this talk. My whole life, I built up skills, degrees, and certifications. I have over 300 credit hours of college credits. My transcript is a novel.
It looks like I was trying to sample every department like I did not want to leave and had separation anxiety because that was the story I was taught. Work does not equal wealth. You will never work your way into wealth. That is not something that was told to me. It was years into working that I finally realized, “I am on a hamster wheel. This is not ever getting better. My bank account is not going up. I am at an income plateau.
I have worked this job for years.” What did everybody say? “Go get a new job.” I did. Every 5 to 7 years, I would cycle and get a new job at a new company. The same thing would keep happening. I would keep having an income plateau. I would keep working my butt off. I kept going back to college and would keep thinking to myself, “Why is this not working? Why is everybody making a six-figure bonus? I am the only person that never had a six-figure job.” You did.
I had never left a six-figure job. I never had one to leave. What am I doing wrong? You start beating yourself up then you are like, “I am so smart. Why am I not further ahead? What does everybody know that I do not know?” If you want to get wealthy, you got to do two things. One, you got to detach how you feel about yourself from how other people feel about you. Those have to be whole different continents. That has to be the furthest thing from your mind.
The best thing my mom could teach me was that others’ opinions do not matter. What she actually said was, “If they do not pay your bills, their opinions do not matter.” Mom was right. That was her line of demarcation. Unless they care enough about you to write a check, pay your Alabama Power or something like that, then their opinion does not matter. Many of us do not have, not because we do not want it but because we are worried about what somebody else will think about us if we do have.
Before we go on to the second thing, you said so much, and you were going. I did not want to stop you but I want to pull back on a few things that you said. This is the perfect place to do that. Work does not equal wealth. You will not work yourself into. My dad told me that I had to work hard to make money. You mean to tell me all the hustling, grinding, and FaceTime. I remember when I was in Corporate America when I became a Manager. When you are a regular employee, it does not matter but when you are managing the efforts of others, they expect you to stay there for a while.
Your 12, 14, and 16-hour days are common places. What you are supposed to do is you got to put in FaceTime. I was doing it because that is what I was supposed to do but then I got a whiff of the fact that I should not have to do that. I stopped. I realized that everyone around me thought the same thing. The first thing that we have to do is we have to detach from the way we see ourselves and what we think about ourselves versus what everybody else thinks.
I found myself FaceTiming because I was concerned about what my peers might say. Once I started getting promoted, I got promoted every nine months. I know they thought I was sleeping with someone. For the record, I was not but I know that is what they thought because it was not possible that a brown girl from the projects of Wilmington, Delaware, could be smarter, more agile, and flexible. As you talked about all those skillsets, picking up skillsets to be able to get to the next level inside of her career. I was so inundated with what people thought about me. Although I did leave at six figures, my income was impacted because I was so concerned about what other people thought about me.
It sounds good to say, “We got to detach.” What does that look like? What are the steps? How do I start the process of detaching? My whole life has been about Keeping Up with the Joneses and getting away from the Jones. That is my whole life and all I have seen. My dad is frustrated and pissed off because my neighbor has something that he wants, and therefore, he is evil. Everything is about health. Someone else is going to perceive whatever is happening in my life experience, so how do I detach? We will move into the second thing.
I would tell that person to first maybe write out, “What is the story I believe?” You got to go to the story. It sounds like the story that this person believes, maybe you believed at the time or maybe I believed that one time, is that, “I will be harmed if public perception of me is poor. Something bad might happen if people think poorly of me.” In your instance, if you did leave work to go spend time with your husband, instead of working unpaid overtime since your salary, if you left work at 5:30 instead of 7:30 at night, would that have impacted your ability to get promoted again? Would it have impacted how people network with you? Would people gossip? Would they rumor? Would they cut your pay? Would they fire you?
Whatever your dream life looks like, it takes more money to get there.
There is a fear response involved in whatever this story is that you told yourself. I would figure out this story, and then I would set it apart upon disproving it. You need to find examples of people who are disproving your theory. I read the census every ten years. When I was a child, I read the 1990 census. It had already occurred. I was born in ’88, and then I read the 2000 census when I was 12.
The census told me that all Black people were poor. Those are not the words that they used but if you saw the numbers, that is what you would ascertain. I spent most of my life thinking that Black people were poor, that was normal, and that that was what we were supposed to be. If I married a Black man, we would be poor together and would not be able to support me or provide for me.
I would have to marry outside of my race if I wanted to have financial stability because Black people did not have it. If we were going to marry, we were going to struggle together. Our children were going to go to whatever public school we could afford to put them in, bless their hearts, and eat what we can do. We are going to work hard. We are going to do the best we can. We are going to have hope we have enough strength to bathe and do a little homework. We were not going to be able to pay for a tutor.
I do not want to live that life, Natalie. I would have cut you off because somebody is depressed.
That is what I had to do. I had to disrupt that story and say, “Black people are millionaires. Black people can be millionaires.” I met people like you. I went out of my way to find people to disprove my theory that Black people are poor, that we have to be poor, and that there is something about us that attracts poverty. That is a lie from the pit of hell. It is not true. I am going to prove that it is not true.
Now, guess what my new story is? Logically, you must change your viewpoint. It is the scientific method. What is your theory? What did the scientists do? They prove and disprove. If it becomes a hypothesis, they prove and disprove. If they cannot disprove it, eventually, it moves into scientific law like gravity. They could never disprove it. Now, it is the law. There are still people trying to ensure that they got gravity right. I am not making it up.
There are still grant dollars allocated towards ensuring that gravity is the force that we think it is. Do not ever stop exploring your new truth. Make sure that you continue to surround yourself with people who disprove that story. If you got a story that tells you that what other people think about you is helping you in some way, start disproving it.
Start thinking about all the times that other people’s opinions hurt you, cost you money, and make you feel bad. They gossiped about you. They lied to you. They got you tangled up in some mess. They made you feel bad about yourself. Comparison is the thief of joy. Write down all the things other people’s opinions have done to you. I got a long list, and it is ugly.
It is good because you have to learn the skill of detachment from everything. Even as business owners and we are going to get into talking about pricing because I still want to go back to the second thing you have to do if you want to be unapologetic about your wealth. I want to parlay into pricing and how all of this mindset and detachment or even attachment is part of the reason why people are undercharging.
It is essential for the people who read this blog that have a desire to get their business to and beyond the million-dollar mark, to realize that it is not only tied to the 6 inches in between their ears but the habits and behaviors that they are following consistently. Before we jump into pricing and wealth that affects the entrepreneur and small business owner, let’s journey back. You said there were two things we needed to do. The first thing you said was detached from how you feel about yourself and your concern about how others see you. What is the second thing?
You need to detach your self-worth from your net worth. That might sound counterintuitive if you want to have money but if you have decided that money has a value other than what you can purchase with it. Money is a by-product. Let’s think about ideas. You have an idea in your mind. It ruminates with your values, your beliefs, your gifts, your talents, and you create something, a program, a project, a course, a good, a service, and then you sell it. What is the very last thing that you get? Money. That is the last thing. That is the by-product of all of the things that led up to it.
Your real value is in your problem-solving. Your value is in your ideas. Your value is in your beliefs. That is what you need to say, “That is who makes me. I am not Natalie the thousandaire. You are not Dr. Darnyelle, the millionaire.” You are the summation of your characteristics, your beliefs, your values, your ideas, and your thoughts. If you only see your value as a dollar amount, that is very volatile. That is like the stock market because that means when you are wealthy, you feel good about yourself, potentially. When you are broke, you feel bad. I was a bad thing even when I was poor.
I was at the bankruptcy court, and I was still amazing. I had to feel bad. My net worth was negative because of student loans. That did not make me a bad business owner. It did not make me a bad salesperson. It does not make me a bad wife but a lot of us are so attached to our financial mistakes. “Natalie, you do not understand. I have never had a lot of money and made so many mistakes.” If all you think about are your financial mistakes. Again, it is a story. If you bought into the story that you are bad with money, why would the money come to you? If you bought into the story that your net worth is negative and that means you are a stupid person. Why would the money come to you?
My husband and I were watching Margin Call, which is a movie from 2011. It was before the market crashed in ‘08. The person who owned it is the CEO, although they never talked about his title. He was the big guy. He is sitting at the table with Kevin Spacey at the end after they had unloaded all of their bad debt for pennies on the dollar but still came out with billions. He is sitting at the table and eating. He is like, “It is just money.” Flip it, and it is just an energy. What I have come to believe, I did not grow up thinking, “It is just money.” I know that money takes on whatever energy you give it.
For most of us, our pricing is off because of the way we see ourselves. If you do not see yourself as, like you said, your self-worth not being equal to your net worth, then you are going to struggle around money. It is an energy that takes on whatever you say. If you say, “I am bad with money and do not ever have any money,” then you will be bad with money, and you will never have any. If you say, “Money is available to me every time I want it,” then money will be available to you anytime you want it.
You get to decide that based on the way that you see yourself. All of that parleys into your pricing. I am not sure what your story was before we connected it. We did not talk about this but Natalie is a client of mine. I will talk about myself, and then I would love for you to talk about yourself. When I first started my business, I came out into entrepreneurship in 2007. I charged $97 an hour.
Seven because everybody was putting sevens on the end. They are still putting sevens on the end. Although, we have very few things that have a seven now. When you are marketing to an affluent client, you need a zero but that is a whole other episode. I was charging $97 an hour because that sounded like a lot. When I was in Corporate America, my hourly rate was $70 some an hour if I was paid by the hour but I was not. I had a salary. A hundred dollars sounded like a lot of money, except when you are self-employed, you have got your self-employment tax, which is 15%. You have got all of the things that were absorbed and are no longer absorbed. They are your sole responsibility.
You realize quickly that $100, once everything gets back out of it, is less than you made when you were working in Corporate America. We did not know that because I was employee-minded, trying to be an entrepreneur without realizing the impact of my pricing was going to have on my ability to get to the next level. It stifled me.
I ended up filing bankruptcy and going back to work to avoid living in my car because I was right on the edge of living in my car. I took a job, any job, a low-paying job, enough to pay my car payment, my mortgage, and my cell phone. Everything else had to go into bankruptcy because there was not enough money. There was no flossing. There were no popping bottles. There was no making it rain.
There were none of the things that, even though I can do them, I still do not do it. I am not a big flashy person. I want to drive a nice car. I want to live in a nice place. I want to take amazing vacations and fly first class. That’s it. All of that, all of my backstory, and many of the things that we talked about already hindered my pricing. It was the reason why I ended up filing for bankruptcy.
I have this one story I am going to tell, and then I want to know your story. I remember when I first became an entrepreneur, it was early. Someone was interested in hiring me. I had written some copies, and they contacted me. It was for a speaking engagement. He wanted me to speak for 30 minutes. I told them my fee was $500.
That sounded like a lot to me because I do not know anybody making $500 in 30 minutes unless they are swinging on a pole. I am like, “This is a lot of money.” Except, I did not get the job because he hired someone who charged $5,000. I was crushed because I did not understand money as it pertained to pricing. First, I want to hear your story about when you first started your business and what you were charging. I also want you to share how you flipped it. How did you start to see the correlation between the way you price yourself in the way you see yourself? How did that help to get you to the point where now you have a six-figure business and were able to walk away from your full-time job and all of that good stuff?
Mindset is greater than skillset.
Mine was more practical. I got some good advice early on, and that was to price yourself out of headaches. If I sold something at a price and that client was a headache, I raised that price. I would say, “That’s it. If I sold this for $1,000 and that one was a nightmare, add another $1,000.” Do you know the game show where they guess the number, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? You guess the case, and the case gets pulled off the shelf. That is what happened to me.
In the beginning, I was doing workshops, and I got burnt out. I could get people to come once, twice but every month, every other month, trying to get people to show up to these workshops, trying to pick a date, people would come to. They have kids, have vacations, do it during the week, go to work, do it on the weekend, and have a life.
I never could seem to get it right. I could never get more than 10 or 12 people in it. I am like, “This is a real slow way to get money. I do not know about this workshop thing. I am going to put something out there. I am going to do six weeks and charge $1,000.” That woman was a nightmare. I got three people on sales calls that week because there was nothing else. I can get you to book a call. One of them said yes, immediately. One said yes, but she could not start for a month. It ended up being two months, spoiler alert. The third said no.
The first one that said yes, put me in a tailspin because I realized I had no way to send this woman a contract. I had no systems. I get on the phone with somebody I know. She is like, “I will help you set up.” She signs me up for a year of it. It is 300 something books. She sets it up. It is so complicated. I do not even know how to use it. I had to pay somebody else to send the invoice for the contract. She never paid.
The second one that says she was going to pay next month, paid two months later. She missed 2 of the 6 calls. One week, she was at the beach telling me she had forgotten. We meet at the same time every week. “What are you talking about you forgot? Did you forget it on the plane too? You forgot when you got the email and the text message reminder too?” I realized my contract did not have no-show fees. It did not have anything for this nightmare. I was like, “I see what this is, Natalie.”
I realized talking to people, if you are a low ticket, you do not get good responses. You will repel people who wanted to work with you because they will make an assumption about the quality of the program because of the price. There are probably some amazing, incredible, life-changing programs that are under $1,000. They are mispriced but that does not mean they do not have value. People are not going to believe that they are high value.
It is not necessarily that they are mispriced. It depends on their pricing strategy because there is a time and a place for every price. Some people have no idea. They are entrepreneurs who used to be employees and are pricing themselves as if they are still an employee. They are charging by the hour. There are people who have $1,000 programs that are transformational that are doing billions of dollars a year. It depends on your strategy. I always say there are three different pricing strategies. You have your low pricing, and low pricing only works if you have a volume play.
I love to use Planet Fitness. They are $10 a month. I do not know if they are still $10 a month. They might have raised their prices because of COVID. They can afford to charge you $10 a month because they have got money to advertise. I used to have a Planet Fitness membership. I had that membership for a year and a half before I canceled it because it was $10 a month. They are banking on that but they have a whole strategy around that low price thing. You have high ticket pricing, which is exclusive. It is not for everybody.
You are not trying to get everyone to be your client. You are trying to get your idle clients. You can think about cars. You can think about Bentley or Maserati. It is not for everybody. Everybody is not going to be driving one. That is an exclusive high-end strategy. There are pros and cons to both the low and the high. You could be at a high price, which means you need less clients to hit your number. Especially, if you do not understand how to package, you could be over-delivering to justify the price, which is a mindset issue in and of itself. You have parity pricing. Parity pricing is where your pricing flip-flops based on specific conditions.
I like to use Macy’s as my example here. Anybody who knows Macy’s, and they are still a national brand, knows you never pay regular price at Macy’s. There is always a one-day sale and a preview day coming. That is parity pricing. In the coaching and online marketing world, it is the trip wire turned into the actual program that is going to be $10,000. We give you something that is a lower ticket to bring you in, and then we have got a clear strategy in place to get you to where we want to go.
There are different strategies, and they all work. You can get to a million in all of them but it is going to depend on whether or not you know it. What I feel like you are saying, though, Natalie, is people who charge low tickets, by and large. I would agree with this. They do not know about the volume play. They do not know that it is for.
I would go so far as to say they do not know about it. They think $1,000 is the most that they can charge based on the way that they see themselves. They are looking at the other person who is farther along in the industry than them that has a $1,000 program. They do not understand all of the things behind the scenes. They are like, “Such and such charges $1,000. I am going to charge $1,000.”
Except, such and such has a volume. She has got 35,000 people in her Facebook group. She has got 200,000 people on her list. When she throws $1,000 out there, she gets 500 people to raise their hands. Now, she is sitting on a nice load of cash. We do not often understand, which is why the comparison is the thief of joy.
It is the thief of profit in this case. This is looking at other people’s papers. I get people in the DMs all the time, “Have you heard about this coach? Have you seen what this coach did?” I never know the names ever. I did zero hunting and packing on Google before I launched this business. None, because I was not going to find me. What was the likelihood I was going to find a coach like me? With this mouth? With this weird, funny like me? It was not going to happen.
What am I comparing myself to? People in a different stage of business, a different demographic with a different ICA, and all the time I am spending and digging into their business and financials. I could be working on mine. If you are trying to buy stock, something is readily transparent, sure. Look at all the charts and do your due diligence. People are never going to let you see under the hood in their business. Most people are not putting their profit, loss, balance sheets, and cashflow statements out in public purview. Most of us do not even know how to read financial statement sheets.
What are you doing? You are comparing your backend business with what they are showing you on a sales page. You do not have enough data to even compare but I learned over and over again that when you discount people when you work for free and cheap, you harm yourself. Sometimes, you need to do it so you can feel the pain and never ever do it again. Put your hand on the stove once.
I have been burnt once or twice. It will not happen again. The respect that you get when you get on the phone with somebody, when you tell somebody your service is X, whether they pay or not, makes you feel good. We also give people charity when they do not want it. That is what makes me angry about the free and the discounted, especially when it comes to people of color women.
When they tell me my people cannot afford to pay it, I cater to single parents. I cater to Black mothers. “They can afford it.” It gets up under my skin because I am like, “You have stereotyped, marginalized, and oppressed your own people. You think I need your charity but you do not know is I paid five figures before. Unlike you, I have never had a six-figure job. I hired you when I was making $51,000 a year at the bank. I made $1,207 every two weeks. That is what I used to pay you with.” When I did not have the money, I put it on a credit card and made it happen. This whole, “People will not pay. People will not invest.” People do what they think they need to do.
Whatever we deem to be important is what we are going to invest in.
It is important to get in your orbit. If that was the fee, then that is the fee. The price is the price. I paid the price. I did not haggle. I did not want to sales call. I wanted to pay, and I paid, even though it was four months of my take-home pay.
I think of you often when I am talking to people about pricing. You are like, “Paying you is like buying a car.” I was like, “I never thought of it that way.” I love everything that you are saying. I especially love what you said when it comes to pricing. Often, we are giving people charity when they did not ask for it by discounting. I have people who ask me all the time, and I do not mind that people try it because if I am at whatever store, I am trying to see if I can get a discount too. I get it. Asking for a discount on a product is different than asking for a discount on a service.
If I am at the flea market, I am in the place where they are making deals. A lot of that is a big part of it but I know, personally, I had to get to the point because no one asked me. I gave charity. I will say that I do not know that I intentionally gave charity because I did not even realize there was anything wrong with my pricing until there was not enough money for me to live, let alone try to have team members. It was for me to live. I was like, “I am about to be living in this Chevy Equinox.” It was the car that I had when I sent my Mary Kay car back and came back into civilian life. I was like, “I cannot afford my Mercedes-Benz anymore.” I have to get rid of it.
You have to detach how you feel about yourself from how other people feel about you.
I have a Chevy Equinox because my dad worked at GM. I priced it at what I thought it should be. This was before I even hired coaches. I had early easy pain. No one told me, “Price yourself out of headaches,” which is great advice. It is not sound business advice but it will at least get you to not undercharge yourself if you are thinking about the possibility of headaches.
At least, It’s not a pain in the butt tax. You need some insurance because we price from a best-case scenario. If everyone shows up, if everyone gets transformation, if I sell all 8 spots on a max 8-person retreat, if the caterer can find food at the rate that we discussed, if the venue is this price, if best-case scenario, then this price works. When inflation is 8%, we are screwed.
When we only sold 6 spots instead that 8, that was the profit. The profit was between the 6-person and the 8, and you could not get them. I had a lady who was pricing retreat. I said, “Retreats are tricky. Tell me about your costs.” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Tell me your cost per person.” She could not tell me.
She did not know but yet she had set a price and a sales page. I said, “Where are you pulling this number from, ma’am?” You do not know if it is enough or not. You at least need to get a quote, Airbnb, the chef, and the venue but she was like, “This seems like what people charge for retreats.” You are going to be putting the rest of that retreat on your credit card.
I love what you said, “Do not price by if.” It is also pricing by committee. Whatever someone else is doing, we should not be pricing by committee either. We have to count the cost. You do not even know where these people are. When I go back to my $97 per month or whatever I was charging, it was because I went to three business coaches’ websites at the time. I took the average of what they all charged. I made the assumption, and we all know what assuming does but I made the assumption that they had all been in business way longer than me. I was starting.
I hate the pricing by, “I just started my business.” I hated when people told me that. Back in the day, I was starting. I was like, “I am going to take the average of their three prices. That is what I am going to charge,” which is pricing by committee as opposed to pricing by if. I love this analogy because right now, there is somebody who is reading that that is the way that they set their prices. I have an amazing pricing calculator. I will give it to you. I do not have it set up, so you are going to have to go and opt in. If you have been in your business by yourself, you want to go to the next level, you got to start to hire people.
It tells you the next five hires that you need to bring into your business. You fill in your name and your email. After that, you are going to advance to a second screen. That is going to ask you for a few more pieces of information. If you fill that second form in, I will give you my pricing calculator. I will make your life very easy because I will tell you what you should be charging based on the service. The way that I have it set up is the way that we teach our clients.
Whether it is an active service, which means that you are showing up and delivering, a passive service, meaning you have already done the work and you are selling the product or it is a leveraged service, meaning you are working one to many. There was a different calculator for each based on the things you needed to have. Like what Natalie was saying that her client did not even know her price per person. You have to know what it costs and then have to charge more than that. If you are taking notes, charge more than it costs.
That is how you have profit, and I am shocked at how many people do not want that. They have a gut reaction of, “I do not want to charge more than it costs. That is taking advantage of people.” I am like, “Let’s go back to this story again. Do you believe that when you charge people a lot of money, you are harming them?” They are like, “No.” “Then why is it when you say you want to help people, the help is free? Why can’t you help people with a $10,000 offer? You have done it. Why can’t you help people with a $25,000 offer?”
Whoever sold you that beautiful car that you were in the first day that you called me, it was so fancy. You could not figure out how to start it. They helped you. Maybe they should have helped you a little bit more. They helped you, still. I have a dental implant. It cost me $3,500 but it makes me confident when I open my mouth and smile. I am not self-conscious in photos like I have been since I was fourteen. He definitely helped me. At some point, we have financial trauma. We have a broke mindset and a broke projection. We project that onto other people. We think about a time when we were broke and that we felt harmed when someone asked us for a lot of money.
We think about how we could not go to prom or send our child to prom because we were too broke or maybe how we had a couple of Christmases where there were not any toys. We have internalized the idea that in certain moments, we were harmed. We were embarrassed. We were downtrodden because we did not have money to do something. We do not want other people to feel that way. We started doing things free and cheap to try to shield people from the bad feelings we felt when we needed more money. It gets real deep.
Everybody is not you. I have healed from my financial trauma. I do not think I fell into bankruptcy because I am a bad person or bad with money. I had a terrible set of circumstances and no cash cushion. Those are the two reasons. I also learned that Black people are steered into bankruptcy more often than our White peers, and then I thought, “Should it be?” Even if we have similar balance sheets, we are typically given the advice to file by the same attorneys that might tell other people not to file. I thought of it even better. I was like, “I got tricked into this. No problem.”
I did not get tricked into my bankruptcy. It was the only thing to do. There was no trickery. I made bad financial decisions. At that point in time in my life, I was buying affection. To keep people in my life, I would pay their electric bills. I would do whatever.
My thing is this. I did everything right. I had a budget. I had a 725 FICO score when I filed for bankruptcy. I lost my job, had a health scare, could not get another job, and did have robust savings because I was making $13 an hour. I ran out of money. This is why I like to tell people, “You need a cushion.” If you do not have $10,000, $20,000 or $30,000 that you could reach down and get, your business is broke. That is what we do not want to talk about. We like to coddle people and tell them, “It is okay if you do not have money. You cannot pay your taxes. That is fine. Everybody goes through a rough patch.” Let’s stop normalizing this struggle. I have never not been able to pay my taxes.
Not even taxes, just anything we do. I love what you said about broke projection. We are projecting our own broke story onto other people to make us feel better and try to help them wherever they are. It is none of our business what anybody’s story is and what they have been through. I love the fact that all those memes that are out there, “The price is the price.” It does not matter whether you work with me or you work with someone else, it costs what it costs. You cannot create a million-dollar business on a $49 thing. If you are, you need to stop.
It costs what it costs, and if you want value, as I believe, and a lot of people understand that you do get what you pay for. I have so many stories of when I was not priced right. Great clients, that I did not close because my pricing was off and they felt like, “There is no way I will hire you if that is what it costs because how could you possibly?” If you were coming to work with me and I was like, “I can get you on the trajectory first to 6 figures and then can get you to 7 figures. It is going to be $500.” I would hope that anybody would side-eye me massively and run in the opposite direction. It is like the coaches I hire. I would not hire them if it did not cost something substantial that is going to create a return on that investment.
It sets an anchor. A lot of times, with pricing, I tell you what people do wrong and what you have done well and what I am doing well. You start, and when people are new, you anchor to a low number. You anchor to $97 because you were thinking about your $70 an hour rich job. You were starting with a low number, and you said, “$97 is more than $70.” You were anchored to $70. Anything larger than $70 felt large but what if you had anchored yourself to $200,000 total annual compensation at your job? Maybe then your program would have been more expensive from the very beginning because you would anchor to a big, large number.
Cartier will do this. Cartier will sell $5,000 watches. They might have a $1 million, $500,000 watch but that is not the watch they sell every day. Jay-Z will buy that watch. Everybody is not buying a million-dollar watch but they make a million-dollar watch and put it in the case. They put armored guards around it with guns. You walk into the Tiffany store, the Cartier store. I went to Tiffany. I had never been. They had a broach, 6 inches in diameter. I had never seen anything like it. It was a monarch butterfly with expansive wings. It was stunning.
I saw it walking by and I was like, “I have to go in there.” I go into the store timidly. I know I do not have Tiffany’s money. I cannot afford a pen up in here but I had to see what was sparkling from afar. I go look and put my hands behind my back. I did not want to touch anything. She was like, “Would you like to see our broach?” I was like, “No, ma’am. I will not.” She said, “Let me at least tell you about it.” It has a beautiful plaque. She started reading. “How much is this broach?” It was $300,000, $400,000 for a broach.
By comparison, the pin that was for $1,000 started looking real cheap. I am not going to lie to you. I almost maxed out a credit card buying something completely unnecessary at Tiffany because I thought, “I cannot buy that but maybe I could afford a little $2,000 something.” I had anchored on that big number. If you anchor to a small number, to a small problem, to a small budget, then that is what you will get. That is what your clients will do too. You want to get your client’s anchor to a big number, maybe the expensiveness of their problem.
I have seen this in applications. “How expensive is the problem you would like for me to solve now?” The lowest range might be $100,000 to $250,000, the expense of the problem. When you get on a sales call, and it is $25,000, you are anchored to, “This problem is costing me $250,000 a year.” If you believe that this problem is costing you $25,000 a month, “Would I pay $25,000 to solve it?” It is a no-brainer. If they anchored you to something low, if they ask you, “What is your current net salary at your job?” “It is $3,000 a month.”
Now, your $25,000 sounds crazy. Using some psychology and anchoring ourselves to the value, the true expansiveness of our problems but is not how we were taught. Corporate America does a terrible job. It burdens and harms intelligent people, brilliant people like me and you. You did not make more money if you worked better, faster or smarter, if you did a great job or a mediocre job, as long as you did good enough, you got the same amount in your paycheck. You got discouraged, at least, I know I did.
Everybody goes through a rough patch.
I did not think there was any merit to doing my work. When I got into my own business, I started realizing I could solve people’s problems in no time flat. There is a lady who helped me who had been working through a problem for nine months. I solved it in an asynchronous DM conversation in fifteen minutes. She was like, “You have been more helpful than the last 9, 10. Do you know what I pay?” I charged you what I charged you because as soon as you told me you had the problem, I knew I could solve it but I was not worried about solving it quickly. I was worried about getting the value for what I was solving for her.
You said a lot again, and I did not want to stop you because you were pontificating. There were some things in there that I agree with. There were some things in there that we needed to stop doing. Even as you were telling the story about Tiffany, back in the day, at whichever point. You went into Tiffany, you telling yourself, “I do not have Tiffany money.” Those are what I call casual covenants. You will have what you say. If you decided that you wanted that broach at $300,000, you would have found a way and made a way to get it. When we say things like, “I cannot afford it,” we cripple ourselves from the ideation to create whatever it is that we desire.
We do not know any better at that time. I am not standing in judgment of you but for the people that are reading, I wanted to pull on that so that they know the goal is to never out of your mouth say, “I can’t afford this or I do not have that money.” The fact of the matter is if you are reading this and you are an entrepreneur that solves a real problem, you have money whenever you want it. You can always solve a problem. I love to tell the story of when we were building our home. We need $50,000 for the deposit on our options. The money was in the bank, and I could have gone and taken it out but I said to my husband, “Let’s create the money.”
I came up with something that I could sell that would yield me $50,000. I gave myself two weeks to do it. I did it in seven days. We can always create money but it does not change until we realize that about ourselves. Where I was going with this interjection is all of that and understanding that we have the power to charge whatever it is that we want to charge on this side of the equation.
Looking back at the versions of ourselves that undercharged and thought that it was completely okay, it is nice. I am excited for those of you who are reading because you can learn the progression of how we got to this point. When you desire to make millions of dollars inside of your company, you are going to have to take the limits off of what it is possible for you to charge and earn at any one particular point in time.
I remember you had put a post on social media and you were like, “What is the most cash you had ever made in a day.” For me, it was $750,000 as of the most cash I made in one day in my business. I am excitingly waiting for my million-dollar cash day. I have done more than a million dollars in sales in a day but cash on hand in a day is what we are planning for.
Why is that even possible? Exposure creates expansion. When you open yourself up to the possibility, to what you have thought and what you have been taught about money, that it is not the only reality. I am going to take you all the way back to earlier when Natalie said, “Write the story. Disprove the story.” The way you disprove the story is you find real-life examples of people who have accomplished what it is that you are endeavoring to do because God is no respecter of persons. If He could make it happen for them, He will absolutely make it happen for you if you show up fully and take the actions that must be taken.
What I cannot do is a desire to have a million-dollar day and put forth no effort in order to create it because I can think about a million-dollar day all I want. If I do not put a product out on the market that is going to lead me to a million dollars in a day, there is no way that I am going to make a million dollars in a day. It does not have to be hard. Ten people enrolling in a $100,000 program, 50 people enrolling in a $20,000 program.
I hosted so many rooms. I have done so many lives. You have stumbled upon the root issue right there. Most people do not believe they have a talent, a skill or a gift that has the value of $100,000. They do not believe that fully. I did not believe that until I met you. That is when they start doing what I call raggedy businessmen, “How many $97 can get me to six figures? How many $47? How many $27?” That wide business model, they got a $3 opt-in, a $27 eBook, and a $97 self-paced course. They got a $4.97, $9.97, $19.97.
By the time you ever get to anything resembling $10,000, people burnout. They do not bid through trip wires and traps. They got lost on the sales page. There are three CTAs. What do you sell? What is this? What people do not realize is some people are ready to buy. We have conditioned ourselves that sales have to be hard. When I meet women, “I suck at sales. I am terrible at sales. Sales have to be hard.” Since we think sales is hard, we think sales is slimy and icky, and it is harmful to ask people for money. We have already stumbled upon that. They believe it is harmful to ask people for money.
They also believe that the problem they solve is a minor problem. They also believe that the value of their offer can’t be nearly $100,000. You put all these things together, you get this person on a sales call and some real interesting results. You get no offer being made, proactive discounts. As one of my services to my top-tier clients, I will get them to send me their sales calls. I wish I could release that as a movie. It is interesting, and you can watch it. They are excited. They are talking. They are getting along like me, and you are, and then that light bulb is over their head like, “I got to ask them for some money.”
They create a diversion is what I call it. Suddenly, they need to clear their throats or their kid is calling them or something comes up.
The husband walks into the house. The rain has started. The internet is going out. If they can get a number out, is not the number they wanted. The inflection in that voice and I think to myself, “If you do not heal that.” I am on this mindset kick. This is something I have learned. You have helped me learn this. I am learning. I am growing every day. You do not have to make your offer more complex. You do not have to keep doing more, adding, and amending. It can be what it is. Does that mean that everyone’s offer is worth $20,000 or $40,000? Maybe they have not put that value in, and maybe they need to review and hire you.
If you have gotten people results, you know you have a process that works, it is working. It does not have to be cheap. You can tell people what it is. I have gotten to a point where I do not have to beg people to buy. Selling is not convincing. If you are on the phone convincing people, you are in the wrong part of the buyer journey. I need you to have gone awareness, consideration, and intent by the time we get on the phone. I do not want to be on the phone with you as you are now realizing in your awakening that you have an income plateau, and that may be because of your money mindset.
I do not have that time to convince you. You need to have been through awareness, consideration, intent, and me. That is where I insert myself at the point that you want to hire me. That is why my close rate is high. That is why do not have stress on these calls. The more I raised the price, the easier it was to sell. I started thinking to myself, “Why would I make this hard on myself by lowering the price back down?”
You said a lot as per our whole conversation, and I agree. I say all the time, “If you have to convince them, you will not close them.” Sales is not about convincing. That is very true. It is the same energy, regardless. It is way easier to sell a higher-end program than it is to sell it lower. At least, that is what has been my experience and the experience of many of my clients. They have that $1,000 thing out there, and they cannot get anybody to buy it. They put a $10,000 thing out there, and everybody wants it. It is all mindset. That is the moral to the story, ladies and gentlemen.
Your ability to price yourself, even though I will happily give you my pricing calculator but you are going to manipulate the numbers in there if you have not done your mindset work to be comfortable with whatever it is that comes out of it. It is going to serve you. I hate the statistics around small businesses. The reason why we have gone on this mission to move more companies to the million-dollar mark is that, in my opinion, six figures is not what it used to be. It is not the same. This is not the ‘50s, where six figures meant you were wealthy or you were well off if you made six figures in the ‘50s. Now, six figures are equivalent to small business property.
You cannot live the life you desire on six figures. We start working with people at six figures. I have clients who are in low six figures. My mission is to help them to get there, their strategy, their sales, their systems, and their support to the point where that number can grow quickly so that they can begin the trajectory to scaling their business. Scaling is about multiplication and replication. Most people are trying to scale without knowing and having everything in place. If you try, you will cripple your business. You will experience so many challenges if you do that.
We could keep talking on and on, Natalie. This has been such a rich conversation. I have so many amazing lessons that I have taken away. We have given some powerful nuggets around pricing but before I ask you our closing questions if there is anything else that you want to share specifically around the pricing piece for the people that are reading. I want to give you the floor, and then we will tie up with our closing questions, and then we will call it an episode. The floor is yours.
I want people to get outside of their own self for a moment, literally out of their body, and look down on yourself, and mentally, I can do that. If you cannot do that, then imagine. Ask yourself if what you are doing is working. Your coach is going to stretch you. Your mindset work is going to stretch you. Your inner critic is going to tell you, “No one is going to buy from you.” Every time you level up, it is going to be an onslaught of negativity.
Your brain is going to tell you that what you want is not possible. While you are building up some mindset, while you are learning to rewrite this story, while you are in therapy, working through things, there is a transition period. That is painful but I need you to remember if hard work worked, why has not it worked yet?
You have been doing all the things. You have been serving people. You have been working full-time. You have been putting 3% in your 401(k). You opened the step. You convert it to an escort. You hire somebody. You have done all these things. Why has your income not doubled, tripled or quadrupled? It is not because of what you do not know. It is because of what you do not do. Bottom line, you are going to have to get uncomfortable. At some point, you are going to have to sell something at a price that makes you go, “I do not know who is going to pay it but I am going to put it out there.”
Black people are steered into bankruptcy more often than our white peers.
Give people the opportunity to say yay or nay. Let the market decide if you are going to be able to sell at this price point instead of letting your fear decide if you are going to earn money. I have done fear-based offers, “This is what people I think will buy.” Those same people who claim they did not have any money paid in full. They did not have money, whipped out a credit card, paid in full, and had me looking like a dummy because I had not set up payment plans and all kinds of old secondary options.
I want you to think about a time that you spent a crazy amount of money. It was scary at the time. I want you to remember how it paid off. I want you to remind yourself of an investment that works and convince yourself that it is safe for you to have money. You are a good judge of character. You do have discernment. You are a strong learner. You are intelligent.
The path you are on is the right one because the devil is coming for you. You raise your price, and the devil is going to come out. He is going to get in your mind. He is going to put a nymph on your shoulder, and he is going to tell you, “You are crazy. Do you listen to these women on this show? You are being a bad thing. You sell something for $10,000. It does not have to play up. Drop that back down to $19.99.” Do not listen. Let the market tell you whether you should get that $10,000 or not. Don’t not get it because of your own fear.
The only thing I will add to that is it is not going to be the devil. It is going to be you. It is easier to blame the devil but it is not the devil.
If they blame the devil, as long as they still listen and do the work, that is fine. I do care who they find the negative voice on.
Natalie, before I let you go, I always have the three closing questions that I like to ask. The first is what is the last book you read?
That is a good one.
I read it twice a year or so to refresh myself.
What is your favorite quote?
I do not know who said it first but my daddy definitely said it the best, “If you hang around four broke people, you are sure to be the fifth.”
The last is, what is one tool you swear by as you continue to make the Move to Millions?
I have started using Trello. It is the only project management something that has ever made sense to me. I am excited to start onboarding all of my new clients by using it where they can have their invoices, links, call replays, and everything in one unified place. That will be better for the onboarding, better client experience, and better for me. Praying for a good outcome but so far, I am enjoying Trello.
There you have it, good people. I hope this conversation was spirited for you. I am sure it brought up some emotion but I also hope that it has had you questioning some of the stories that you have been telling yourself. Until we meet again, know that you are deserving of having more money than you can give, spend, invest or save. We will see you next time. Take care.
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If you have any edges left at all, what did you think? Was it not a powerful conversation? I knew that you were going to enjoy this, especially if you have been struggling with your pricing. We got into quite a few things that gave you some hidden nuggets around pricing strategy and the way that you need to look at your pricing. Whether you are thinking about pricing yourself low if you do not have a volume play, skip the low and move right into the high exclusive pricing.
You need less clients to get you to that first or next milestone that is going to make the difference for you. Here’s the thing. As we said multiple times throughout the various stories that she and I both shared, it is all about the way you see yourself. If you can detach from the need to please other people, as it pertains to yourself and money, then you can charge more.
I want to pull on some of the other things she said because it was such a great conversation. Work does not equal wealth. You will not work yourself into wealth. You have to detach how you feel about yourself from what others think about you. I love this one, “Low ticket repels ideal clients, and you need to stop giving people charity when they did not ask for it.” That is what happens when your prices are too low. “Do not price yourself by if.” That is not a good pricing strategy to have. I also love, as she broke down how to detach. Two basic steps there, “What is the story that you believe? How can you disprove that story?”
There are so many powerful nuggets in here so that you do not set yourself on a low-ticket anchor and use that anchor to set your pricing instead, open yourself up to create an environment for people to understand the transformation and the value that you have. If you do set yourself on a low anchor, then you will be projecting your broke on them. I hope you read this episode over and over to learn the nuggets that were shared in between the stories.
This conversation has the potential to shift you on a trajectory to go to the next level. You are in the right camp if you finally want to do the mindset work that is going to allow you to price yourself for-profit and, ultimately, to make, move and leave millions to those who are going to be here when your sunsets. Keep hanging out with me. I promise you. I am taking you somewhere incredible. I will see you guys next time. Take care.
