Pricing During The Pandemic
Pricing is hard at the best of times, and these aren’t the best of times! All this talk of unemployment and recession and depression is frightening and I’ve seen many business owners lose their nerve when it comes to pricing their services right now.
If you are struggling to know what to charge for your postpartum services, particularly if you’ve had to change and adapt your services to social distancing measures, this blog post is for you.
How The Economy Works
I’m not an economist, but I’ll do my best to explain, please feel free to correct me.
The economy is a strange thing.
We usually think of it as very practical and logical and mathematical, but in fact, it’s influenced largely by emotions, beliefs and behaviours. In many ways, economics is more of social science (like psychology) than a natural science (like chemistry). Whilst we might see economics as models and forecasts and mathematics, ultimately behind all of this is human behaviour, and when our behaviour changes the models and forecasts and mathematics must also change.
And that is happening right now.
The pandemic has pushed unemployment in Australia from around 5% to around 10% very quickly, with experts expecting it to increase in the coming months. This sounds terrifying, and it is. Recessions affect vulnerable people first and worst, we aren’t all in this together.
But what we must remember is that no money has actually disappeared. Every single dollar that existed in January still exists today. So where’s it gone?
If I had to sum up how the $74 trillion global economy works in one word it would be transactions. More transactions mean a stronger economy, and right now we are experiencing a massive and sudden decline in financial transactions.
Think of it like this.
Whilst many people have lost their jobs, many more people still have the same income during the pandemic as they did before but they aren’t spending it. In fact, some people have had increased income due to government stimulus programs or getting refunds for things like events or travel that they had already paid for. People with disposable income leave it sitting in their accounts because there’s currently less to spend it on. No more eating out, no more concerts, no more parties and no more holidays.
Then we read the news and get nervous about the economy and hold our money tight instead of feeling abundant and letting our money flow. People panic and sell their shares and withdraw their superannuation and the stock market collapses. Consumer confidence goes down…
So we enter a downward spiral where direct impacts of the pandemic shut down are exacerbated by the human behaviours that follow.
Many people who still have money have stopped spending it and investing it and that’s really bad news for the economy because one person’s spendings are another person income. Fewer transactions is a big problem.
So the moral of the story is the more money we keep moving through the economy the better, more transactions equal more jobs. The best way to minimise the impact of a recession is to keep spending money if you can and keep earning money if you can.
If you can work then you are increasing the number of transactions and boosting the economy. You should not feel guilty for charging for your services right now.
What This Means For Postpartum Work
Women are still having babies and are probably more overwhelmed and lonely than ever!
There is so much we can do to support mother’s during a pandemic, even from a safe distance, so in my opinion, for the sake of mothers and the sake of the economy, we should not feel ashamed of continuing to work and charge money, if we can. Read about working as a doula during the pandemic here and here.
The good news is that the same pricing strategy I always teach still stands right now. Figure out how much you need to earn, figure out how many clients you can work with, and do the sums.
But the temptation to cut prices in times of uncertainty is hard to resist. The hardest part of pricing, as always, is emotions!
If you feel shaky, focus on results. You are still giving the benefits to new mums so you can still charge the price. And if you ever doubt that online work can be transformative, consider how a blog or podcast or book or online course has changed your life. You can still support mums to get better outcomes without physically touching them.
If you want to you can have some kind of concession price for people who have lost their income, but only if YOU can afford to offer that. You could create a solidarity pricing system (where privileged people pay more to subsidise rates for others) if you already have enough paying customers to feed your family. But you are entitled to a living wage for yourself first.
The Only Time You Can Decrease Your Prices
If you do a breastfeeding consultation with a mum in her home, or a breastfeeding consultation with a mum on zoom, she can still get the same results and you will still spend the same amount of time with her. In this case, you still need to charge the same rate in order to create a living wage.
My usual pricing formula applies to any service where there is a limit to the number of people you can work with including facilitating intimate mother’s circles, where you have a maximum number of people that can participate, whether it’s online or in real life.
Working online you may save a fraction of money on the venue, catering and travel time and costs, but this is a probably a very small percentage when considered as part of your overall revenue goals. Plus you may incur extra expenses like software subscriptions, or the time and cost of professional development so you can learn how to deliver online.
The only time you can make your physically distanced work cheaper than face-to-face work is if you can leverage your time.
If you create a one-to-many program like an ebook or an e-course that could be sold to potentially hundreds or thousands of people without taking up any more of your time, then you can charge less. This is what leveraging your time means.
What I'm Doing With My Money During The Pandemic
Given I am privileged enough to have a home and my health and an income, I’m doubling down on my money mindset and choosing to make business decisions from an abundance mindset right now. I’ve actively decided to create new work and new income streams to counteract the fear and scarcity that is so prevalent right now. So my plan is to:
Creating a new premium-priced product (with a solidarity scholarship option)
Bring three new paid members onto my team
Create two new courses
Buy more from affected industries to support local businesses
This is the most important time to hold tight to your abundance mindset and set free your money if you have some. Let it flow in and out of your hands, knowing there is plenty more where that came from.
Learn More About Working As A Doula >>> Working Online As A Doula During The Pandemic and What COVID-19 Means For Postpartum Care Work.
