How to make sure your pricing fits your marketing

Julia Bickerstaff is a business coach who advises medium-sized companies and helps start-up entrepreneurs turn their vision into a real business.

She says that one of the things people starting small businesses get wrong is around pricing.

“Sweeping generalisation here but women really, really underprice. There could be a little lack of confidence – they sort of think “oh gosh, well if I can do this, well then anybody could therefore I will lower the price”. I’ve met so many women who say I feel bad charging them so I just did it for free.

“There was a lady I know that runs a business called Sara Jane Shoes and she imports shoes for ladies with large feet. When she first started doing it the cost of the shoes was let’s say $40 and she was selling them for $50 and nobody bought them. They were Italian shoes, beautiful leather, but nobody bought them because everybody thought that obviously they couldn’t possibly be genuine Italian shoes because they were so cheap. And she put the price up to something like $300 and her business changed overnight and she was enormously successful. And her thing was that I want people with large feet to afford the shoes but she had the marketing wrong. So I think that price is a very important aspect.”

Read our full interview with Julia Bickerstaff.