This Founder Shares How She Was Able to Attract Better Customers By Increasing Her Price Pricing isn't just about a number. It's about your value, what you're really worth and who you want to work with.
By Jason Feifer
Introducing our new podcast, Problem Solvers with Jason Feifer, which features business owners and CEOs who went through a crippling business problem and came out the other side happy, wealthy, and growing. Feifer, Entrepreneur's editor in chief, spotlights these stories so other business can avoid the same hardships. Listen below.
What are you worth? It's an easy question to answer emotionally. Like, What am I worth? I'm worth all the money! But when you're an entrepreneur, you have to go through the uncomfortable exercise of putting an actual, firm price tag on yourself -- or at least your products or services. You may think you're worth all the money in the world, but you have to come at the question from a different perspective by asking what others will genuinely pay for you. What do they think you're worth?
And if it's not a lot, well, how can you make yourself more valuable?
Sunny Bonnell has long wrestled with this question. She's the co-founder of a Dallas-based comprehensive branding agency called Motto. When it launched in 2005, it was selling one-off logo designs on the cheap. Today, it's charging hundreds of thousands of dollars per project, and working with huge brands like USA Today, Wendy's, the wine distributor E&J Gallo and more.
Going from one to the other wasn't easy, or fast. "We realized early on that we were almost pricing ourselves kind of cheap. And then we moved away from that and got a little bit more in the middle, and we realized that being in the middle is a very dangerous place to be as a new company, because you don't exactly get people who can't afford you, but you also can't get people that can afford you," she says.
In this episode of Problem Solvers, we follow Motto's evolution from a little design shop to a full-scale agency. Along the way, its founders were constantly forced to reconsider exactly what kind of work they do, how they structure their relationships with clients and even what kind of company they run.
Related: How DraftKings Survived And Made Daily Fantasy Sports Legal
Because as Bonnell and her co-founder Ashleigh Hansberger have learned, pricing isn't just about setting a number. It's about projecting what your value is, and what you're really worth. Listen below.
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