If You Want To Make More Money, Avoid These 7 Mistakes

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Codie Sanchez (0:30)

This is an intervention. When was the last time you raised your prices? Like your salary is a price by the way, your day rate is a price, whatever you charge for anything is a price. And if you can't remember the last time years went up, I'm going to rip off the bandaid for you. You're not overpriced, you're underconfident. Like listen, your price basically proves whether you believe in your offer or yourself or what you're doing. So we're digging into the seven deadly pricing sins, how to reappraise your value in the world, and maybe more importantly, to yourself. And today, you're getting marked up. I'm Codie Sanchez, this is the BigDeal Podcast. Let's get into it.

Before we get into it, my new book, Own Or Be Owned, is dropping September 18th. And to celebrate, I'm hosting a launch event and giving away over a million dollars in cash and prizes live. Links below if you want to see it and a chance to win. Okay, I want to open this episode with a story. So, if you go back to 1996, a 22-year-old art student dropout by the name of Jenny Britton opened this stand in a public market. She's in Columbus, Ohio, and she started making what some have now called the best ice cream in America. She used grass-fed milk way before anyone even knew what that meant. Her ice cream had like weird flavors, cayenne chocolate, goat cheese, real pie crust and actual like cherries. People would drive from out of the state for a scoop, but Jenny charged only $2 a scoop. Why? Because every other shop around her, that was the same thing they charged. For the next four years, she made, this is what she paid herself, $600 a month even when she sold out the entire weekend. There's a line out the door, but the bottom line was brutal. By 2000, she's like, I'm broke and Jenny's Splendid Ice Cream, but she's like, I'm shutting it down. I don't have this. I don't have it in me.

But the dream still chased her somehow because two years later, she runs one last-ditch effort on a business plan and realizes that her ingredients, the high-quality sort of chef-made ingredients that made her ice cream so good, well, they actually cost her four times as much as her competitors and what they paid for their ingredients. But even though all of her ingredients were so much more expensive, her price was the same. So she was selling like Michelin-grade ice cream at Dairy Queen prices. So what'd she do? She's like, I'm going to suck it up. Even in Columbus, Ohio, I'm going to open the same stall, but I'm going to double the price.

Lo and behold, today, Jenny's Splendid Ice Creams is everywhere, and they're doing $100 million a year in revenue, and everybody loves them and nobody's mad at her for raising the prices. In fact, they're thrilled she did so they can get it in more places. So why is this story so valuable? Because everything changed when Jenny's beliefs changed because she knew how to price right. So Jenny 1.0, let's say, was paying what I like to call the fear tax.

Her fear of raising her prices was basically starving her business financially. Now compare that to, let's call her Jenny 2.0. Let's go over fear, raises her prices, and does it based on math, but also on cost of goods sold, cogs, plus what her unit economics are, what the underlying business costs, and a little bit of value-based pricing, like what other people get out of this. She did this because her business needed her too. But I want you to apply this to you for a second. I want you to take a step back and I want you to really think to yourself, where are my limited beliefs holding me back? Am I paying the fear tax? Here's the truth, you probably are.

So when we were researching for the book Own Or Be Owned, I basically went through thousands of small businesses over the last five years and I analyzed all of their pricing. And I found that on average, most businesses are priced anywhere from 30% below or 300% below the price of what they should be selling for. And it led to this series of archetypes, so types of business owners that have similar problems and to Jenny, and they need the right solution. So likely, this might be you, like if fear is holding your prices down, your archetype might be the good guy. You can go to ownerscore.com and you can figure out what your archetype is. There's 12 of them.