Pricing Your Doula Services 2.0

What's commonly heard among birth worker circles is, "You deserve to be paid your worth," and "You have to be paid a living wage."

Okay… so what does that even mean?

What are you worth?

Does this question bring up any mental and emotional baggage? If your rate is too low you're accused of not personally valuing yourself or devaluing the work. Too high, with too little experience behind it, and people are crying, "Who do you think you are???"

This makes it all about you and your self-worth. To your core.

Then there's the living wage argument. If you think about it, there's still can be a lot of mental and emotional weight on your own perceived value. There may be stress around exceeding a certain number of hours as that eats into your hourly rate. When you do some calculations based on covering your personal and business expenses, taxes, and profit, you may hyperventilate a little when you see how much you'd need to charge to meet that number.

This makes it all about you too… your beliefs about money, and again, your self-worth.

So how do you take that mental/emotional YOU out of the equation when you're pricing your products? (or at least take off the edge…)

Don't make pricing about you.

Remember, marketing is communicating to your BBF (Business Best Friend) what's in it for THEM.

The YOU in all this is the vehicle that gets them over or through the GAP —> Getting them from where they are and don't want to be, to where your service takes them.

So how can you feel really good about your pricing?

Take a look at each of your offers.

What's your goal of the offer?

Is it a monthly meetup or introductory class to generate leads (attracting your BBFs in to learn more from you and possibly hire you)? Then the price might range from free to less than $50. If you were pricing based on "your worth," is it wrong to not charge anything if you end up with 10 new leads? You may be giving away information for free or close to it, but one of those leads may end up paying $1000 for your signature doula service.

Let's move on…

You may have mid-priced offers that give more value and a little more access to you, while your premium services get clients extreme personal service from and interaction with you, and would naturally cost quite a bit more.

Think of your offers as a pyramid, where your lowest-priced offers would have a large number of people interested and buying, your mid-priced offers will have fewer buyers, and your signature service would have the least number of buyers.

So when you first think of your offers, think about how much effort and access they get to you.

Now I want you to look at your signature offer – your highest priced offer.

What are the pain points – the problems that your offer solves?

A service saves a person time – sanity – and money.

Let's take a moment and examine each one.

Sanity – What's stressing your BBF out about pregnancy, birth, and becoming a parent? What fears are causing insomnia and anxiety? These are your pain points.

Next, consider this…

What is your BBF currently doing or may do to eliminate or mask the pain?

Time – What actions are they taking a lot of time to do to ease their pain and regain sanity – in productive (eliminating pain) or unproductive (masking pain) ways?

Money – What are all the products and services they are buying to eliminate or mask their pain and regain sanity?

Make sure you tally up how much time and money they are currently or planning to throw at this problem of theirs.

Stay with me now…

What does your service do to eliminate your BBF's pain?

What would they rather feel? How does your offer replace all the things that they have or might spend time and money on?

How much time and money are you saving them?

Keep going…

Name the benefits of your offer

Make a list of 50-100 ways your BBF's LIFE is going to change by investing in your services. How will your offer affect their health, their most precious relationships, and the way they start their journey into parenthood? How will the way they birth change their outlook on life, themselves, their children, their partner, the future?

Now.

I want you to sit for a minute and take in everything you just did.

Then answer this…

What's the first price that bubbles up into your mind for your signature offer?

If you were to communicate everything you just laid out to your BBF, would they see the value in your service? [on your website, blog, email list, social media, live streams, free and intro level offers – hey, this is marketing, you know.]

How does it feel to give this price versus the one you struggled to come up with or pulled out of thin air because it's based on your "worth"?

How does this price compare to where your rate is currently at?

Does this help you to communicate WHY people need your services? Does this help you realize the value that you are giving? The lives that you are changing? And not just the lives of your clients, but the ripple effect this will have on who they know and the children they will raise, not to mention the effect on their care providers and the future of birth in our society?

There's more to pricing your services, but I really want you to do this exercise today because it will help you see the VALUE of your services and the CHANGE you can be in others' lives.

I also want to be clear and point out….What you feel your worth is IS valuable, and I want you to "charge your worth" and make a living from this work. But I hope this exercise will help remove YOU out of the equation long enough to help you see through your BBF's eyes and that they would say, WOAH, if I buy this signature service, I'm getting ALL this and saving so much time, money and stress.

Stop charging dollars for hours

You're a business owner now, not an employee. Stop obsessing about charging dollars for hours, and base your pricing on the value your clients will receive and how ALL of your offers will contribute to your desired income. Build in policies and boundaries that help you set expectations and give the best service to your clients. And, pay less attention to what others are doing, and more attention to your unique gifts that qualify you to serve your BBF.

How did this land for you? Leave a comment or connect with other birth professionals in the Inspired Birth Pros community on Facebook.