Most women in business set their prices the same way. They look at what their competitors are charging, pick a number that feels about right, and hope it works. Some discount it slightly because they are not quite sure they are worth the full amount. A few round it up when they are feeling confident.
None of that is pricing. That is guessing. And guessing is costing you more than you realise.
Pricing is not a feeling. It is not a comparison exercise. It is architecture. It is a financial structure built on what it actually costs you to deliver your service, what your business needs to sustain itself, and what return you deserve for the very real risk you are carrying as a business owner.
Get the architecture right and your business becomes profitable by design. Get it wrong and you can be fully booked, working constantly, and still wondering why there is nothing left at the end of the month.
After more than 35 years in finance, including three decades as a Certified Financial Planner, I have seen both versions play out more times than I can count. This article is about making sure yours is the first.
The Mistake Most Women in Business Are Making
Before we talk about how to build your pricing, let us talk about why most women get it wrong. Because the mistakes are consistent, they are identifiable, and once you see them you cannot unsee them.
The first is not believing they are worth what they should be charging. This is not a mindset issue to be solved with affirmations. It is a commercial problem with a commercial cost. When you underprice your services, you do not just earn less. You attract clients who do not value what you do, you over-deliver trying to justify the gap between what you charge and what you know you are worth, and you create a business model that cannot scale because the margins were never there to begin with.
The second is not knowing what it actually costs to deliver the service. Most women in business are pricing their visible time and forgetting everything else. The preparation, the administration, the follow-up, the tools, the professional development, the tax, the insurance, and the unpaid time between clients that is still part of running the business. When you do not account for all of it, you are subsidising your clients out of your own pocket without realising it.
The third is not reviewing pricing. Ever. Or reviewing it by looking at what competitors are charging and adjusting accordingly. Your competitors may be just as lost as you were before you read this article. Pricing to the market is not a strategy. It is a race to the bottom dressed up as research.
The Principle That Changes Everything
Here is the reframe I want every woman in business to sit with.
When you invest money, you expect a return. You would not put capital into an asset that gave you back exactly what you put in and called it a success. You expect a return that reflects the risk you took, the time your money was tied up, and the opportunity cost of not putting it somewhere else.
Running a business carries risk. Real risk. Financial risk, reputational risk, personal risk. Every day you show up and operate your business you are carrying that risk, and your pricing needs to reflect it.
If your pricing only covers your costs and pays you a wage, you have not built a business. You have bought yourself a job. A job with longer hours, more responsibility, and none of the security of employment.
A profitable business pays you for your time and generates a return above that for the risk of being in business. That return is your profit, and profit is not a bonus or a leftover. It is a non-negotiable component of a correctly structured price.
How to Build Your Pricing from the Ground Up
Step one: Know your real hourly rate
Before you can price anything correctly you need to know what an hour of your time actually costs your business to deliver. Not what you would like to earn per hour. What it costs, fully loaded, including every overhead, every tool, every minute of non-billable time that goes into running the business that supports that hour.
This is the foundation of everything that follows, and it is the calculation most women in business have never done properly. Our True Hourly Rate Calculator inside the FEMPIRE Academy will walk you through it with precision, accounting for every cost category so the number you arrive at reflects reality rather than optimism. Join the Academy here.
Step two: Apply your profit overlay
Once you know your true cost base, you do not price to that number. You price above it, deliberately and structurally, with a profit margin of between 20 and 30 percent built in as a minimum. The True Hourly Rate Calculator inside the FEMPIRE Academy lets you set your own margin within that range depending on your business model, your risk profile, and your growth goals.
That margin is not padding. It is your return for the risk of being in business. It funds your reserves, your reinvestment back into the business, and your reward for carrying the financial and personal risk that every business owner carries. Build it into every price you set as a non-negotiable component of your pricing architecture, not something you add on if there is anything left over.
And here is where it gets interesting. Once your pricing is structured correctly and your margins are real, you have options that under-priced business owners never get to consider. You can outsource the tasks that are not the best use of your time, absorb that cost within your margin, and use the capacity you free up to take on more clients or build additional revenue streams. Correct pricing is not just about earning more from what you do now. It is the foundation that makes growth possible.
Step three: Price the outcome, not the hour
Once you have your cost floor and your profit margin, you have the minimum your price needs to be. Where you price above that minimum depends on the value of the outcome you are delivering, not the time it takes you to deliver it.
A client who works with you and doubles her revenue has received a result worth significantly more than the hours you spent with her. A client whose business structure you help clarify in a single session may save herself years of expensive confusion. Price to the value of that outcome. The more clearly you can articulate what changes for your client as a result of working with you, the more confidently you can price at the level that reflects it.
Step four: Build your offer with delivery costs fully visible
Map every single thing that goes into delivering your service. The sessions themselves, yes. But also the preparation before each one, the notes and follow-up after, the email support between sessions, the tools and platforms you use, the professional development that keeps your expertise current, and the administrative time that keeps the engagement running smoothly.
Most women in business price the visible part and absorb the rest. That absorption is where your margin disappears. Make the full cost of delivery visible to yourself before you set a price, every time.
Step five: Review your pricing. Regularly
Your costs change. Your expertise deepens. The value you deliver grows. Your pricing needs to reflect all of that, and it needs to be reviewed at least annually, more frequently if your business is growing fast or your cost base is shifting.
Set a date in your calendar right now for your annual pricing review. Treat it like a board meeting. Bring your numbers, your delivery costs, your market position, and your profit margins. Make a decision based on commercial reality, not comfort.
And when you increase your prices, do not apologise for it. Communicate it professionally, give existing clients appropriate notice, and move forward. The clients who respect the value of what you do will stay. The ones who leave because of a price increase were never going to be your best clients anyway.
What Profitable Pricing Actually Looks Like
A correctly priced service offer does four things. It covers every cost of delivery without you having to absorb anything. It pays you a salary that reflects your expertise and experience. It generates a profit margin of between 20 and 30 percent above your true cost base, with room to stretch beyond that as your business matures. And it leaves you with enough capacity to deliver at a standard you are proud of without burning out to do it.
If your current pricing is not doing all four of those things, it needs to be rebuilt, not adjusted. The difference between tweaking a broken price and rebuilding it properly is the difference between a business that survives and one that actually performs.
This Is Not About Charging More for the Sake of It
Profitable pricing is not about being expensive. It is about being accurate. It is about knowing exactly what it costs you to deliver your service, building in the return you deserve for the risk you are carrying, and pricing with the confidence that comes from having done the maths rather than made a guess.
When you price from that position, everything changes. You attract clients who respect the value of what you do. You deliver your service without resentment. You build a business with margins that allow you to grow, to invest, and to sustain yourself for the long term.
That is what pricing architecture gives you. And it is available to every woman in business who is willing to do the work to get it right.
Ready to Build Your Pricing Properly?
If you want to work through your pricing with someone who understands both the financial architecture and the commercial reality of running a service business, this is exactly the work we do inside FEMPIRE coaching.
Trudy Heins, CEO and Master Coach, FEMPIRE
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As the owner of Fempire and Trudy Heins Business Coaching, Trudy’s mission is to help women create strong, strategic, and financially resilient businesses, the kind that support the life you really want.
With over 35 years in business and finance including 30 years as a Certified Financial Planner. Trudy has built and sold multiple businesses, led high-performing national sales teams, and coached hundreds of women to achieve lasting success.
She knows what it takes to go from idea to income and from coach to company owner.
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