Building a Pricing Portfolio
While lots of entrepreneurs believe you need one signature offer, you might approach your offers and pricing as a portfolio. Or, as a harvest.
Where it's not about each part of our business having the same purpose - but instead, about creating a nourishing meal for ourselves, our teams, and our clients and community.
So I’m going to reference a book that has stuck with me: Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Three Sisters Planting
In the Indigenous planting tradition of Three Sisters planting, corn, beans, and squash are planted together.
For millennia, from Mexico to Montana, women have mounded up the earth and laid these three seeds in the ground, all in the same square foot of soil. When the colonists on the Massachusetts shore first saw Indigenous gardens, they inferred that the savages did not know how to farm. To their minds, a garden meant straight rows of single species, not a three-dimensional sprawl of abundance. And yet they ate their fill and asked for more, and more again.
Corn sprouts first, and grows quickly. Then the beans rise, using the stalks of the corn to grow, taking advantage of the light and height provided by the corn. Pumpkins and squash then grow slowly but provide much needed shade and ground cover. And while it seems like the beans are taking a free ride on the corn and squash, their roots provide nitrogen to the soil, acting as a fertilizer.
These three plants grow more food together than they do separately. They provide defense against single-species insects and disease. Yet each plant serves a different purpose.
Thinking of your business as a garden of intertwined plants
When we often think about the elements of our business, particularly with pricing, we think “every element has to make money, has to be profitable.”
We’ve been schooled by the mass-market teacher/trainer businesses to have a single offer, with a single funnel, all geared to your ‘million-dollar scalable offer.’ Which, after reading Kimmerer’s book, sounds a lot like industrial farming. Sure, it might make you more money and harvest out of the gate - but might deplete the soil’s nutrients, rely on external fertilizer and pesticides (like say Facebook Ads and non-disparagement clauses), and be more susceptible to disease.
So let’s instead look at the elements of our business like a garden, where the sum is more than the parts.
Purpose in what you Plant
As you plant your business garden, it’s the time to consider the purpose of each aspect of your business.
Some services - especially high-touch 1:1 or Done For You services - are designed to be profitable. This is like the corn, providing the structure and the financial stability to fund the rest of your garden. (Side note, when I say “1:1” I don’t necessarily mean 1:1 coaching. This can be doing marketing/legal/financial retainer work, doing leadership training and facilitation for a company, working through a larger agency, or doing B2B consulting. Or having a job that's unrelated to your business but provides stability to a creative practice).
Other services might allow you to reach more people, like building group programs or communities. This is the slower-growth arm of your business, like the squash, because gathering people takes a larger audience and a consistent message delivered over time. But the act of gathering people might be the your preferred way to work long-term and a way to build deeper relationships with your community. These group programs might be priced lower to feed into 1:1 work or to just build a larger ecosystem you work with at a different level of access.
And some portion of your business garden might be explicitly to give back or support a community, where the purpose is accessible learning, providing signal-boosting for smaller businesses, or gathering people at cost. For example, a podcast might cost you money to produce, and may take a long time to generate clients. A community workshop or a retreat might not make you money depending on how it's priced. But in the meantime, you are providing free guidance to individuals who might not be in a position to work with you while also deepening relationships with your potential clients. And these programs might fill your soul's cup. Just like the beans, providing nutrients to your soil.
Portfolio approach to Pricing
So now that you see the different purposes of the parts of your business garden, it’s important to maintain the right balance.
And as your business grows, you’ll find that the purpose of each aspect of your business might shift. Maybe the squash, the slower-growing build of group or community programs, takes the primary financial position, while 1:1 work serves the purpose of keeping your hands in the work to create new curriculum, or providing ballast to smooth out launch cycles.
Just like over-indexing on growing beans without the support of corn would leave beans “an unruly tangle on the ground, vulnerable to bean-hungry predators”, we need an appropriate balance in our portfolio.
Do you have at least one core service or core funding stream that’s appropriately priced for you to make a sustainable income with your audience or network size? (This may not be as part of your business, but might be corporate sponsors, a part-time job, a partner’s income).
Can you release the need for any “slow grow” offers to make you money out of the gates, until the audience size is larger?
Do you have a portion of your business that fills your soul’s cup, that allows you to express your callings or your dharma?
Are you deciding very clearly up front the amount of your time, energy, and money you have for accessible offerings?
An example of a portfolio in your business might be doing high-end B2B consulting with companies on topics like DEI, but then offering regular low-or-no cost workshops and classes to educate and work with individuals who otherwise wouldn’t be able to access their service.
This principle is important to me - I’m committed to always having a reasonably-priced group offering and free classes in my business geared towards emerging entrepreneurs, BECAUSE I support most of my business through consulting with larger businesses.