How much would you pay to see santa?

I'm here to share with you actionable tips, strategies, and real life examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level. If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business doing what you love, then you're in the right place. Let's get going with today's episode. Way back in March this year, I made a decision.

That decision was that I was gonna invest a crazy amount of money to take my family to go and see Santa at Lapland uk. I'd heard some amazing things about it. I talked to my friends about it, who'd been, and I'm realizing my children are getting older, and if I don't make the memories now, it's never gonna happen. So I did it. I went, I joined the. And I booked. I'm so glad I did.

It was the most incredible experience when we visited last week, and I was lucky to get a ticket because those tickets sold out in March. Yes, you heard that right? Tickets to go and see Santa sold out entirely. In March there were 60,000 people in the queue. Now, whether or not you would've paid that amount of money to see Santa is kind of irrelevant because what it has done is it's done wonders for my money mindset, and that's why I wanna talk to you about it.

After I booked those tickets, I kind of felt a little bit sick. Was it really worth spending that amount of money, 350 pounds to take my family to go and see Santa? Would it live up to expectations or was it gonna be a massive ripoff? Well, I can tell you that it definitely was worth the money. It was the most incredible day out, and I made memories that I will never forget. I'm glad I saved that money, and I'm glad I was able to.

But what amazed me more was being there on the day and looking around and realizing how many other families had been willing to spend that much money to take their children to see Santa that is sold out across the year. There must have been a hundred people in my group, and that was only for a half an hour slot. They were running them every half an hour through the day from November, right through to Christmas Day. So I'm sure they're making a fair amount of money from their.

But the point was that if other people were willing to spend that much money to see Santa why wouldn't people be willing to pay me for what I do? And that's the same for you as well. So many of us are held back by our money mindset and our beliefs around money and what we would or wouldn't spend our money on that we lose sight of the bigger picture. And that is not everyone is the. As us. So in today's episode, I wanna talk to you a little bit about money and about pricing your services.

I wanna challenge you to think about why you charge, what you charge and whether or not you should be putting your money up. So let's get started. The first thing I wanna ask you is how are you actually going about setting your prices? How did you decide on the prices that you charge in the first place? I'm gonna ask you some quite personal questions. So have a think about the answers to these in your own. So first of all, when you look at your business, are you making a profit?

Are you making any money or are you spending all of the money on running your business and the ingredients or the materials that you need to make? Are you basically working for free? If you're not making a profit in your business yet you are working, then there's a problem with your pricing because you're not charging enough to make that money back. We're not in a position where we can run our businesses at a loss. We're not big corporations.

Ultimately, if you don't charge, you are not getting paid. I know it's hard looking at your numbers, but numbers are fundamental to running a business. So you need to sit down and look at the figures on paper. What are you charging? Are you making enough money? How much money do you want to be making in your business? And is it possible to get there with the price that you're charging right now? Or are you basically working for free?

If the numbers don't add up, then that's probably a good sign that you need to put the price of your services. Up. Don't be afraid to do it. The next question I wanna ask you is, are you valuing your time in your calculations, or are you basically working for free? I've met so many wedding business owners who feel like they're turning a profit, which is great in their business. But then when I ask them about the amount of.

Hours they're spending and we work out how much money they're making per hour. Sometimes when we have those conversations, we've realized they're not actually making hardly any money at all, and they'd actually be better off going, getting a job and being paid minimum wage, which isn't what any of us want. So if you're not accounting for your time and you're not valuing your time, when you work out your pricing, then again something needs to shift. You only have so many hours in the week.

Your time and your creativity are valuable, and that's what people are paying for. So make sure you're valuing. Time and not giving yourself away for free and basically working for nothing. The third thing to consider is whether you are just pricing yourself based off of what other people are charging. Now, quite often this is what we do. We start our business and we go and look at what our competitors are charging, and then we just charge in the same region.

Now, I think this is quite funny because actually. Why are we doing that? Why do they know what to charge and we don't. So we are looking at what they do and basing on what they charge, but they might have just been looking at what someone else was doing it and basing on what they charge. So we're putting all of our trust in whoever came up with that original number whenever it was, and whatever they did. So we're actually just basing it on nothing.

You're much better to ignore in part what's going on around you and just work out the value that you can bring to the table, the cost of the materials, and work out whether or not your. Is right. If you're just trying to compare yourself to everyone else or trying to do the worst thing you can do, which is undercut everyone else, then that's not really a great strategy.

If you always just try and be the cheapest and come in lower than everyone else, some reason we think that that's gonna give us more business, but actually it can be detrimental. Ultimately, you're never gonna be able to be the cheapest, and if you are always the cheapest, you're gonna run yourself ragged and you're not gonna make a profit. So that is not a good pricing strategy to come in lower.

Also, people are savvy and they know that paying the cheapest price doesn't mean that they're gonna get the best quality. Sometimes they'll discount you because they think that you're too cheap. Now, why won't we ever be the cheapest? I'm gonna tell you a story about something I did a couple of years ago.

So a couple of years ago I went undercover, although my cover got blown fairly quickly, so it didn't work as well as I wanted it to in a Facebook group, uh, quite a long way away from where I live, where bride and grooms are, and where wedding supplies are. And I posted in there to ask if anyone would be willing to take photos for me for 500 pounds. And then in the chat I was trying to go lower and lower and lower to find out how low someone would be willing to do my photographs.

Turned out someone else would've agreed to do them for free for experience. So if you are trying to be cheapest, that's a ridiculous way to be because someone will always be cheaper than you, and unless you wanna give your services away for free, then being the cheapest isn't an option. So instead, why don't you put your prices up and become more exclusive rather than trying to be the cheapest in your area? People will pay for quality, just like I paid to go to Lapland.

The next question I wanna ask you is, are you basing your prices based on what you would personally pay and on your own economic circumstances? Now, it's really hard for us to break out of this habit because, well, we are living in our own heads every day, and we think, well, we wouldn't pay that much. So why would anyone else, well, I want you to break away from that thought, right? Because it may be that you wouldn't pay 350 pounds, just take your family to see Santa.

That doesn't mean no one would pay that. I mean, if I decided to set up my own Santa's grotto today and start thinking about pricing, my head probably would think, no one's gonna pay 350 pounds. I'll price it at a fiver. But ultimately some people won't even pay a fiver. And actually I'm missing out on the other 345 pounds if I'd have done it as well as they did. So if we are just pricing based on what we think we would pay, then we're missing out.

It's like when it comes to fashion or handbags, some people will pay 800 pounds, a thousand pounds, 10,000 pounds for a handbag, whereas it might be that you just prefer to buy your handbag from new look for a tenor, and that's as much as you're willing to. The same goes for holidays. Think about the last holiday you went on and how much that cost you as a family. Now some families will have a holiday budget of a couple of hundred pounds each year and go camping.

Other families will go to Disney World every year and spend 10,000 pounds, and other families will do even more and spend 20,000, 30,000, 50,000. The sky's the limit if they get a private jet. So you see, you can't just base your pricing based on what you would do because there will be people out there who have more money and are willing to spend more on your product and your service. Now I've asked you some difficult questions.

I want to challenge you to change your thinking around this subject. If you charge more, you can provide a better service. I'm gonna say that again. If you charge more, you can provide a better service. Why was Lapland UK so good and so worth the money? It's because they charged so much. They had enough money to make it incredible. They must have spent a huge amount of money on the set, on making snow on the trees, on the ice rink, on the 400 amazing staff that they had running it.

And they wouldn't have been able to give such a great experience if they'd have only charged five pound a ticket. It's a limited market. They can only get so many people in. No one wants to go and see Santa in July, so they have to make it work for them. And if they wanna give that incredible experience, then they have to charge in a way that means they can provide that incredible experience. And they absolutely did. It's the same for you.

If you keep working for cheap, you're gonna have to do way more work and lots more jobs in order to bring in the same amount of money. Whereas if you put your prices up, you can spend more time and attention on the customers you have because you have less of them. You can give them an incredible customer experience. You can be there for them. Each step of the way. You can give more of your time, and you are less stressed.

If you can charge more, you are able to give a much better customer experience. If you're sat there thinking, I can't raise my prices, I'm worried about charging higher, I don't think I'm worth it, then I wanna say to you, that's imposter syndrome talking. It's that voice in your head telling you you're not worth it, or you absolutely are. You're great at what you do, and you should be charging for it.

So if you are worrying about that, then the way to counteract it is to go above and beyond for your clients if you're charging a premium. Then just give them a premium service. Go above and beyond for your clients, which you probably do anyway, but if you go above and beyond for them, they won't even worry about how much they're paying. Now imagine when I went to Lapland UK that I got there and it was naff.

Do you think I'd be shouting about how great it was or how much value I saw even though I spent all that money? No, I probably wouldn't. But they blew me away so much that I could see where my money had gone. The customer experience was next level, and I will never experience anything else like that with my children. It was so, so good. So I didn't worry about the amount of money I'd spent because they gave me a premium service. And you can do the same for your clients too.

Go above and beyond for them. Give them incredible customer service and make sure everything they do is at a premium. So much of what we charge comes down to confidence. So there's one final exercise I want you to do. I want you to have a look around in your industry, in whatever it is that you do, and find people who are charging infinitely more than you are. Take a look at what they're doing and ask yourself, what is it about them that makes them better than me?

That makes them be able to charge that amount of. Because I guarantee in a lot of instances, they probably are no better than you. They've just got the confidence to charge that worth. Perhaps they've started building a network. Well, you absolutely can do that too. Perhaps their imagery is next level. Well, guess what? You could also do that too.

If you look around and look at what the people who are charging a premium are doing and then compare yourself to them, you'll realize that so much of it is about confidence rather than ability. So as we enter today's episode, I wanna challenge you to think about this. What is it that's stopping you raising your prices? Why aren't you charging what you're worth? And is there something you could do about it today to make that happen? You could do it incrementally.

You don't have to whack up your prices overnight, and you can give customers warning that it's coming. Tell them, I'm gonna be upping my prices in the new year. If you book me before then, then I'm gonna honor your rates. But as of the 1st of January, my price is going to. This, be bold, be confident, and remember you are worth it. I'll see you next week.