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Some pieces of advice really need to slide quietly into obscurity, but these three, for some reason, just won’t die. We’ve all heard these phrases thousands of times. While they sound empowering on the surface, they’re really just vague and meaningless, doing more to confuse than to clarify. Here’s the three sayings you should be ignoring, and what you should be doing instead.
Charge your worth. How do you define what constitutes your “worth?” How do you quantify it? Once you’ve quantified it, how do you calculate it and assign a dollar value to it? While I’m sure this vague, motivational tripe garners tons of likes and shares on social media and certainly sells seminars and webinars, it doesn’t do anything to actually educate professionals and salon owners.
The process of determining what to charge happens to be a relatively straightforward one, and subjective factors—like your “worth”—don’t factor into it much at all. Instead, we consider your expenses, local economy, target demographic, the time required to perform each service, and the material costs. Once that’s done, we evaluate the output and use those subjective factors—skill, education, exclusivity, technique difficulty, etc.—to determine whether the price warrants adjustment. Oversimplifying the pricing calculation process by encouraging professionals to simply append a value to their “worth” is irresponsible.
Furthermore, how does it affect a professional’s morale when they’re told—repeatedly—that their prices are too high? How does it feel to be told you aren’t worth as much as you believed yourself to be? Don’t charge your worth. You’re highly unlikely to be capable of properly measuring it anyway. Instead, charge what you need to charge to cover your costs and realize a profit.
Bring your business to the next level. Where is “the next level?” How do you measure the distance between levels? How do you determine what level you’re on or when you’ve reached the next one? I’m willing to bet the person offering to help you “bring your business to the next level” has no clue what “level” your salon currently operates at, which means they most likely have some “formula” (or “system” or “program”) they believe they can.
