[00:00:00] Fiona Johnston
Are you making enough money from your business? And I'm not talking about, yeah, you're surviving. I'm talking about like, are you actually really making good money? Are you paying yourself properly? Are you building profit within your business? What's your answer? Are you happy with the amount of impact that you are creating in the world through your business?
If not, then I want to talk to you about the three reasons why you might not be making as much money as you could be.
Intro
If we want to be able to tip the scales towards the favor of marginalized people, we need to understand the secrets. To making money in small business, the more we talk about money and the secrets that usually stay at the golf club, the more likely we are to be able to make money.
My mission is to get more money into the hands of good people, specifically good business people like you. This is Money Secrets, the place to learn about the money secrets of successful small business owners. Let's go. [00:01:00]
Acknowledgement of Country
This podcast episode was recorded on the lands of the Wie people of the KO nation, and I'd like to acknowledge them as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and water that I live, work, and play on.I'd like to pay respects to elders both past and present, and note that sovereignty has never been seeded. This always was and always will be. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
The three reasons why businesses don't make enough money is usually comes down to one of these three things, your pricing, your business model, or your money mindset. And the really cool thing is all three of these things are fixable. I have worked with so many business owners to try to make their businesses more profitable, to get them paying themselves more and to have enough time and money to also be able to be creating positive impact on the world.
And you can do [00:02:00] it too. So let's talk about the first of these options, your pricing. So pricing is the lever inside your business that makes more difference to your finances than anything else. So I would say that of the, of all of the small businesses that I've worked with in the past, 99% of them or more were not charging enough for their products and services.
Now we could go on for days and days about why that is, and I'll give you a couple of the cliff notes. A lot of us who are in business. Have been sold, this idea that we need to be affordable or accessible. This is garbage by the way, and anybody who is trying to be affordable or accessible as a small business owner, it is just not possible to be both a small business owner and affordable.
The point of being a small business owner is not about being affordable, it's about being [00:03:00] valuable. It's about being able to provide products and services that are highly customized that your customers really need. It's about being able to go deep into somebody's problems or desires to be able to come up with a solution that absolutely meets their needs.
Nothing about that is affordable. I think one of the other reasons why we have a lot of trouble with our pricing is because it can be a little bit difficult to calculate when we don't actually understand how much of our work is. Billable as opposed to being non-billable time when we're not totally clear about the cost of producing our products or how long it actually takes to do X, y, or Z, it's really hard to work out with a sort of calculator or a money model.
It can be really hard to work out what your pricing needs to be. So if you are someone who is not making enough money and you're not happy with the amount of money you are [00:04:00] making, if you haven't looked at your pricing for a while, this is your sign to have a look at your pricing. If you have not increased it for more than a year, then you absolutely need to increase it, and not because of inflation, although that is one reason why we do need to keep increasing our prices each year, but also because you get better at what you do every year.
I am of the philosophy that trying to be better in business is much more exciting. Well, at least more exciting for me than trying to get bigger. I am always trying to improve the way that I do things in my business, and my clients benefit from that and so do yours. So it doesn't really matter whether you are pricing on an hourly rate, whether you are doing value-based pricing, your pricing projects or retainers or however your service-based business looks, or you're a product-based business and you have whatever calculation method you [00:05:00] use.
I want you to put it up at least once a year because you are getting better. Your products and services are getting better every year, and the better you get at product and service delivery, the higher quality client is going to be more attracted towards you. That takes us to the second reason why most small business owners aren't making enough money, and that is your business model.
So your business model is one of those kind of. It's difficult to explain things, but in essence, your business model is the foundation of how you do business. It talks about things like, what are your products and services? What makes you uniquely valuable in your market? Also known as your unique value proposition.
Who are your customers? What kind of relationships do you wanna have with your customers? What are the revenue streams that you can build in your business while you service those customer [00:06:00] segments? What do you need to be really great at doing? What are the costs that are going to be associated with delivering these revenue streams?
And what are the resources that you need inside and outside of your business to help you be able to do all of these incredible things? Your business model is the foundation of your business strategy and your business strategy is essentially what do I wanna achieve and how do I think I'm going to get there?
So when you skip. Working on your business model, you are kind of blind to all of the different ways that you could be making your business better and more profitable, and ideally also making a bigger impact on the world. So one of the things that we would look at in your business model if we were working together is what makes you uniquely different from your competitors?
You'll note that I didn't say better. Because there's no such thing as [00:07:00] better in business, and there's no such thing as being the best in business because it is subjective. What is possible is to be different, and that is the, what I am always striving for, for myself and my clients, is how can we position ourselves as being different from our competitors?
Is it that we research more than others? Is it that we have deeper expertise in a particular niche? They're our competitors. Is it that we specialize in something that is really unique? Maybe you have a particular communication style that makes people want to work with you. What makes you different might be that you have a huge Rolodex of contacts and your customers benefit from that.
It might be that you have a really unique product or that you deliver your product in a really unique way. So we wanna focus on what makes you as the business owner and your business and the [00:08:00] way that you do things, what is different about how you do things compared to how your competitors do things.
Then we wanna start really thinking about who are your customers? What customer segments are you targeting through your business? Because going back to that first topic of pricing, your price is really dictated by who your customer is, and I see so many small business owners making the mistake of keeping their prices low and being really frustrated that they are not getting the kind of clients that they want to work with.
Price is one of the indicators of value, and if you are looking to work with a higher quality client who values what you do and how you do it, sometimes your price needs to guide them towards you, and you may find that you have been trying to price yourself as affordable or accessible. And [00:09:00] unfortunately what that's doing is actually keeping the really awesome clients away.
Because a savvy buyer knows when something is underpriced, and they will assume that that price indicates that either it's poor quality, perhaps you are inexperienced, or that there is going to be some kind of disadvantage to working with you as opposed to one of your competitors because you are indicating with your price that it is lower quality.
So the most important part of your business model to get started with is who are the customers that I want to work with and what makes me uniquely valuable for them? How is the way that I do things really valuable for that particular type of client? We have some amazing on demand training within our product suite.
There is a program called the Business Model Design Mini Program you can purchase at any time, and we will put the links in the show [00:10:00] notes, so there's nothing stopping you from working on your business model anytime, but if you just wanna sort of touch the, the surface of it, start with who are my clients and what makes me uniquely valuable to them.
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Now, I wanna [00:11:00] get to the third reason why you may not be making enough money in your business, and that is your money mindset. Now, I usually use the term money psychology, but I've used the term money mindset here because it is a. It's a starting point. So a lot of people now have heard of this concept of money mindset.
I think of it as more than just what's happening in your mind, and I think even the word mindset is a little bit confusing because your money mindset or how you think and behave with money is something that ebbs and flows through your life. It's not. Set. And that is the really cool thing is that when you actually have time to go underneath the way that you are thinking about and behaving with money, you can change it.
It's not as simple as just saying, Hey, I wanna change the way I think about money, and then automatically you just change it. But it is absolutely possible to improve and interrogate [00:12:00] the way that you think and behave with money. Money mindset is essentially the beliefs that you have about money, and those beliefs come from things that other people have told us, either explicitly or implicitly.
It's from the conversation you had with your mom, dad, auntie, caregiver, best friend when you were seven or 14 or 29, about something to do with money and it's. Stuck so deeply in your mind that you believe it to be true. And unfortunately, a lot of the sentences that we pick up around money are just things that people say, but we have thought them over and over so many times that instead of thinking of those things as thoughts, we have now turned them into beliefs.
So your money mindset is formed on what you experienced around money, what you see and saw. What you heard people saying, what you've read about [00:13:00] money, but generally it's sitting at an unconscious level in your kind of thinking. Not everybody is able to access their money mindset. Um, really simply, some of us need to actually look to our behaviors with money in order to understand what our money beliefs are.
So if you are somebody sitting there thinking fee. I have no idea what my money beliefs are, like. I just have no idea of understanding or tapping into what they are. Think about how you behave with money. What do you do in situations like when it's time to pitch yourself, um, and tell somebody about your business?
What do you do when it's time to send through a proposal to a potential client? What do you do when somebody asks you for a discount on your product? At the time of recording this episode, it is actually Black Friday this weekend, which I have a lot of big thoughts and feelings about. [00:14:00] Unfortunately, it does seem to have become part of the Australian kind of business landscape, whether we like it or not.
So I want you to think about, especially if you're a product based business, how do you think about things like discounting and Black Friday, cyber Monday style sales? What do you do when you have a lot of money in your bank account? What do you do when you have very little money in your bank account?
When you can access how you behave with money, that might start to help you work backwards to understand, well, if this is the way that I'm behaving, then that must be that this is what I believe about money. And sometimes we can even work out where that thought came from because the sentence will pop clearly into our mind and then we can think back to that time when Auntie Joan said, blah, blah, blah, and it's somehow stuck in our mind.
Okay, so I call it money psychology, which is. [00:15:00] Encompassing your money, thoughts, your feelings about money, the way that you behave with money, the actions that you take and the results that you therefore get. It might sound complicated, but once you understand that the thoughts you have about money impact the results you get with your money, everything in your business can change.
So I hope this little conversation has been helpful for you, especially if you are someone who doesn't feel that they're making enough money for the amount of effort that they're putting into their small business. I want you to consider, do you need to make any changes to your pricing? If it's been more than a year since you've put up your prices, then this is the sign.
Please put them up from tomorrow. Do you need to review your business model, particularly which kind of clients you are targeting and making sure you are communicating? What makes you uniquely positioned or [00:16:00] uniquely different from your competitors when it comes to delivering on the problems or the desires that that client has?
And the third thing that I want you to be thinking about is your money mindset or your money beliefs. What do you believe about money and how is that impacting the way that you make decisions in your business? Your money mindset is gonna hit you like a truck when you start thinking about your pricing.
So it's okay to feel a little bit weird and strange about putting your pricing up. You can still do it even if you are not sure whether it's the right thing to do now. I really hope that's been helpful. If you wanted to dive further into any of these topics, we have lots of free resources on the Peach website and we can also help you so much within Good Money Club.
So if you are interested in finding out about Good Money Club, you can go to the link in the show notes where it tells you where to [00:17:00] go to find out about how to get on the wait list for Good Money Club. And we will be releasing a few spots in the very late part of 2025 and we'll definitely be releasing some more spots in early 2026.
And the first people who get access to those spots are the wait list. So go and get yourself on it if you would like to. And um, yeah, I really look. Looking forward to speaking with you about how to make more money in your business. I'll see you next week.
Outro
Thank you so much for listening right up to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Money Secrets, where we talk about the money secrets of successful small business owners. If you enjoyed the episode, I'd love it if you subscribe to the podcast. But leave us a review or share this episode with one of your friends. I hope you learned something. I hope you got a new perspective, and I really hope you enjoyed the listening [00:18:00] experience.
