Escape from Cubicle Nation Podcast
Advice, support and encouragement to stop being a corporate prisoner and start your own business

To round out the pricing series, I talked to my fellow business coach Sherry Garrity from Corporate Fugitive who illuminates some of the specific pricing challenges faced by corporate employees transitioning to entrepreneurship.

The three main challenges she talks about in our interview are:

  • Under-dreaming: thinking too small about the vision of what your business could be, and simply trying to match your salary as an employee
  • Under-pricing: not valuing all your experience, and using ineffective measures like billing by the hour
  • Under-billing: underestimating all the time and effort it takes to effectively deliver your products or services, or not charging the client for all the work you are doing

You can find Sherri at CorporateFugitive.com

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I hope you have enjoyed this series!  I have never done anything like this on my blog before (long-time readers are probably shocked to get six new posts in one week since I have been slacking on my writing lately!). If you enjoyed it and want to see more intensive discussions on particular topics, please let me know what you want to learn about.

Thanks for following along, and thanks to all my wonderful guest experts (links go to their interview in this series):

John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing
Mark Silver from Heart of Business
Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach You to Be Rich
Andrea J. Lee from Thought Partners International LLC
Alexis Neely from Family Wealth Institute
Direct download: EscapePricing_SherriGarrity_09.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 8:32pm MST

"There are a lot of business owners out there who are giving their stuff away for free because they don't know enough about pricing. That was my story," says Alexis Martin Neely, our next guest in The Price is Right Interview Series.

Alexis is a lawyer and founder of two million dollar businesses.  She is also the author of Wear Clean Underwear: A fast, fun, friendly and essential guide to legal planning for busy parents.

After quitting her job as an employee in a prestigious law firm to set out on her own, Alexis learned the hard way how not to run her solo practice. From these good lessons, she developed a very effective way to price and structure services, which parlayed into a whole new business line teaching and coaching lawyers.  Her current business, Family Wealth Institute serves both lawyers and small business owners.

In this interview, Alexis walks through some specific pricing structures for independent service professionals, as well as discusses her passionate views on charging what you are worth.

You can find Alexis at www.alexisneely.com.
Direct download: EscapePricing_AlexisNeely_09.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 3:52pm MST

Andrea J. Lee, CEO of Thought Partners International LLC has been a huge influence on my approach to business since I read her book Multiple Streams of Coaching Income in 2006.

She is one of those rare individuals who combine clear business intelligence with wit and humor. Her coaching is said to be a combination of tenderness and bite. I could not agree more.

In this edition of the pricing series, Andrea will talk about Guerrilla Pricing Tactics including:

  1. The concept of free, which she terms a "pink spoon marketing." This is creating a business on the concept of generosity (much like you get with free tastes of ice cream from pink spoons at the ice cream shop).
  2. What too much free looks like in business, which can involve going to long at free and getting kickback when you start to charge for services.
  3. What too little free looks like in business, i.e. too little blog content and a quick sale of products.
  4. What is a product funnel and how do you use it to design your product offerings? The pros and cons of starting at the top or the bottom of the funnel.
  5. The why and how of market comparison in pricing.
  6. What are your values and brand in business and how does that impact the price points you choose?
 I hope you enjoy the conversation!

And if you get inspired to learn a lot more from Andrea, check out the live event she is hosting in Vancouver, Canada in March, 2010 called The Wealthy Thought Leader. (I will be there, and would love to see you!)
Direct download: EscapePricing_AndreaJLee.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 2:20pm MST

So much of what you learn about pricing focuses on the external market.

But in the daily practice of being an entrepreneur, much of the confusion and angst about pricing comes from an inner feeling.

Mark Silver, co-founder of Heart of Business, has a very unique perspective on the inner game of pricing which is specifically tied to the spiritual side of business. In addition to being a long-time business coach, he is also a Sufi teacher and healer.

Listen to our 40 minute conversation here.

Mark covers a very interesting exercise which he terms "resonant pricing." My good buddy Havi Brooks wrote a wonderful post about this exercise where she gives a specific example of how she applied it to a particular program she was launching with Naomi Dunford from Ittybiz. Read her example here.

Even if you pride yourself on having an extremely well-formed left-brain muscle, I invite you experiment with some of Mark's wonderful teaching.

Mark explains resonant pricing in a detailed post called The Wackiness of Resonant Pricing which includes a PDF with instructions. I used in on a group coaching call for KickAss Mentoring the other night and we got a lot out the exercise.

Find Mark at HeartofBusiness.com.

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Up tomorrow for the pricing series: Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach You to be Rich who will share all kinds of juicy lessons for moving from totally free blog content to well-priced products and services.

Direct download: EscapePricing_MarkSilver.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 4:51pm MST