Aaron Hoos

As entrepreneurs start up their businesses, they quickly learn one of the most challenging aspects of business ownership: How to price a product or service so that it is attractive to customers but still profitable for the business.

Pricing is like a tug-of-war: All customers want to pay as little as possible for a product or service; all businesses want to charge as much as possible for a product or service. Somewhere in the middle is the right answer — a price that is attractive and fair to the customer and a price that is profitable and fair to the business.

Here is a collection of some of my best advice on pricing.

HOW TO PRICE A PRODUCT OR SERVICE
Understand how prices and pricing works: One of the first things you’ll need to do is understand how pricing products and services actually works. It’s not a matter of randomly assigning a dollar value! There is an actual science to the creation of a product’s or service’s price. There are two key elements that go into any price, and there are three kinds of price-based businesses. Read more about it in my blog post Prices and pricing strategies: How to price your offerings more effectively. (Don’t miss the pricing tactics at the bottom of that post).

How to monetize digital content: If your business is selling digital content, it is critical to understand how content monetization works. The web has enabled new business models to be developed so that people can earn money in various ways, but not all of these business models require pricing services or products. There are 5 ways to monetize your content and only 2 of them require pricing. Read more about the 5 levels of online content monetization.

Competing with low-price providers: One problem in many industries is the problem of low-price providers who enter quickly and undercut your prices. It’s a problem for everyone because most of these low-price/low-cost providers will only compete for a short time before they run out of money and have to fold. But along the way, they may potentially do a lot of damage to your business. If you find yourself competing with low-priced providers, check out my blog post: Pricing your sales funnel: How to avoid competing with low-cost providers.

A competitive analysis tool to find the best price for your product or service: What entrepreneurs need most is a way that they can use to find the best price for a product a service. By doing some simple competitive research, business owners can find the best price for their products or services in comparison to their competitors’ offerings. I’ve developed a tool for entrepreneurs to find the best price for their offering. Read about it at How to easily discover the best price for your product or service.

A customer-based, needs-analysis tool to find the best price for all of the products or services in your sales funnel: I’ve also reated another tool to help you know how to price your products and services while you are developing your products, based on what your customers are wanting to buy. By mapping out your products and services against customer needs, you’ll easily see how to price your products and services in the context of your sales funnel — pricing “entry” products for brand new Customers and then pricing follow-up products or existing Customers. In my blog post, you’ll read how product development, pricing, and sales funnels all work together to create a very profitable business! Read more about it at Product development, pricing, and sales funnel strategy made easy.

In yesterday’s blog post, How to be a lazy serial entrepreneur (part 1), I talked about a client of mine who has started or is starting 8 businesses that are taking a lot of his time and attention.

I used the following time-and-attention demand chart to demonstrate where my client’s trouble-spots were.

Near the end of the post, I mentioned that the goal of every business should be to move toward passive administration, marketing and deliverables. I don’t think many businesses can achieve completely passive levels in all three functions but it’s a good goal. And, if you like to start businesses or you initiate a lot of projects in a single business, this is a good way to force yourself to manage the amount of time and attention you give to each one. Ultimately, your goal should be to maximize your return while you minimize your effort.

So, how can you achieve increasingly passive efforts in your business? Here are some ideas:

Administration

• Outsource your administration. (Not sure where to start? Go visit my friends at ContemporaryVA). Get them answering your phones and email, and pinging you with only the most important stuff.
• Use software to automate your delegation. Zoho and GoogleDocs are both ideal for this. For example, create a spreadsheet with your staff’s names down the side and the tasks you want them to do across the top, and have them update a pre-defined percentage-complete as they do so. Zoho and Google let you invite your staff to view the file and make changes.
• Use accounting software to keep your business’ books. IAC-EZ and Kashoo are my favorites.

Marketing

• Delegate your marketing. Guru, Elance, and Odesk are my favorites… and Odesk has a collaboration/delegation desktop interface that seriously kicks ass.
• Automate your marketing with marketing software. There are lots out there (too many for me to give a comprehensive list, and depending on what your needs are, the software will vary). Some examples: Automate your email marketing with ConstantContact; automate your keyword advertising with AdWords; automate your digital product sales with Clickbank, automate your social marketing with Hootsuite.

Deliverables

• Delegate the delivery of your products by using a dropshipping company or a “middleman”. Or, if it’s a simple as running to the post office to attach stamps to a package, hire your kid to do it.
• Delegate the delivery of your services by hiring and training associates or licensing your proprietary techniques. You can even delegate part of the delivery of your service by getting someone to do the initial work while you provide the value-added work.
• Sell more digital products, such as ebooks, ecourses, toolkits, subscriptions, exclusive access to networks and information, and more.
• Write a book.
• Host a seminar.

Turning your administration, marketing, and deliverable functions into passive activities doesn’t mean you can sip martinis on a beach, but it is an intentional effort to reduce the amount of time and attention each one requires in order to operate successfully.

Starting businesses is fun. Growing them is also fun but it’s hard work too, especially if you want to grow them profitably.

One client of mine, who is a serial entrepreneur, has a handful of businesses in various stages of start-up and operation. But they were running out of time and money, worn ragged by demands of each business and unable to eke out growing profitability because they couldn’t focus on a single thing. Although I was initially focused on their sales funnel for two of their businesses (obviously), we ended up looking at the bigger picture of ALL of their business(es) to find ways to make them all more profitable.

Here’s a chart I put together to help my client analyze the demands of his time and attention on each new or existing business.

UNDERSTANDING THE TIME-AND-ATTENTION DEMANDS CHART
Across the top, the chart lists three key functions of the business: Administration, Marketing, and Deliverables. The three functions are divided up into 5 segments with “P” for passive on one side and “A” for active on the other. Down the left, are the businesses, business ideas, or projects/initiatives that are being analyzed.

For our purposes, let’s use the following broad definitions:

• Administration includes the various “housekeeping” functions that keep a business running.
• Marketing includes all of the sales and marketing efforts to move your contact through the sales funnel to the point of purchase.
• Deliverables include the things a business does to provide the products or services it sells, such as manufacturing, assembling, shipping, analysis, etc.

(Yes, there are other ways to divide up the business but this provides a quick-and-dirty thumbnail sketch that is suitable for our purposes.)

An example of a passive business:
A business might be passive in the Administration section if everything is outsourced and automated. A business might be passive in the Marketing section if they have a lot of word-of-mouth marketing or advertising that is running without much input from them. A business might be passive in the Deliverable section if they sell digital content.

An example of an active business
A business might be active in the Administration section if it requires a lot of hands-on delegation and management. A business might be active in the Marketing section if they have a lot of social media marketing that requires constant participation and engagement. A business might be active in the Deliverable section if they provide services that require the full attention of the owner – like consulting, freelance writing, or graphic design

I’ve created the above 2 fake examples below:

Now that you know what the chart is about, it’s just a matter of figuring out where the time is being spent for YOUR business. (Or, in the case of business ideas, it’s just a matter of figuring out where the time is GOING to be spent).

These are just estimates to get a general idea of your time. This isn’t an exact science but it is still revealing. Think of each of the five “P” to “A” segments as something like:

ANALYZING THE TIME-AND-ATTENTION DEMANDS OF MY CLIENT’S BUSINESSES
First we drew the chart for his 8 businesses (actually, businesses 1-5 exist and businesses 6-8 are in progress). In the example below, I have removed the names of my client’s businesses and just numbered them.

Then we went through each business and figured out how much time he was spending on Administration, Marketing, and Deliverables.

Administratively, he’s getting his business in order by trying to consolidate and automate his administrative functions. Unfortunately, it’s his marketing and deliverables that are killing him. He’s marketing almost all of these as separate brands with little cross-over or overlap. That means 8 different identities on Twitter, 8 different Facebook pages, 8 different identities in other marketing channels. And on the deliverable side, he’s spending A LOT of time delivering his services, with each business demanding his full attention to provide paid services.

This amount of active administration, marketing, and deliverables might be fine for a business that employs several people or is able to outsource more, but my client is an entrepreneur with some outsourced administration, but he loves to market his businesses himself, and it’s his expertise that is being hired. That means a lot of HIS time in marketing and deliverables.

I’ve highlighted the two key problem areas – he’s spending so much time trying to market and deliver services for 8 different brands.

No wonder he’s feel like he’s running around, and no wonder his profitability is suffering!

Of course, this time-spent is only one side of the equation. Cash flow and profitability should also be taken into account. Businesses that provide more cash flow or profitability to the business owner should be allowed to take more time and attention than those that do not.

So, here’s what we did to solve it this serial entrepreneur’s problem:

Businesses 1 and 2 provide the most cash flow and profitability. Those ones are going to be the key. We also determined that Business 4 could have a positive impact on cash flow and profitability in the near future.

Our goal there was to find ways to reduce the active demands of Administration and Marketing. (You can see our results where I’ve grayed out the previous demand and put the new one in blue. It’s not always possible but it can be done.

Next, we explored some ideas about consolidation. Business 3 is closely linked to Business 2 so there was an opportunity to combine them together. Both Business 2 and Business 3 had a lot of deliverable demands, and my client was worried about losing the income, but since he didn’t have a lot of time to provide the deliverable anyway, we don’t think he’ll see a significant drop. I think he’ll actually see an increase income because he can focus. Business 8 could also be consolidated into the Business 7 brand.

Then, we had a brainstorming session to explore how his new businesses should be focused more on passive administration and passive deliverables. And even if they required some initially active marketing in the beginning, the goal should be in the near-term to make the marketing as passive as possible, too.

The result? My client has gone from 8 businesses that were requiring a lot of his time to 6 businesses that are requiring moderate amounts of his time. This is not a perfect picture but it’s a step in the right direction.

The goal for every business is to move toward the passive side of each of these business functions. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the perfect business requires NO effort for administration, marketing, and deliverables, but rather that these are managed in a way that take less and less time and attention with the goal of providing greater profitability.

Tomorrow, I’ll give some ideas about how your business can increase the “passivity” of each of these three business functions.