It’s okay to love making money.

You’ve probably heard lots of talk about “money mindset.” It’s the idea that your attitudes, beliefs and feelings around money have a real, tangible effect on how much you make, earn and keep.?

You don’t have to subscribe to the Law of Attraction or the power of manifesting to appreciate that pervasive thought patterns play a huge role in running and growing a business. Your own money mindset will for sure influence your pricing, for example, and show up in how confident you are in sales conversations.?

As a seasoned coach for business owners, Debbie Adams, Business Strategist and Founder of PeopleCan Training, knows the importance of mindset in business, and believes most entrepreneurs are charging too little.

A reluctant entrepreneur herself, Debbie admits she found it painful to set fees, partly due to learned attitudes she carried forward from childhood, partly because of beliefs she held about her clients’ ability to pay, and partly because of an initial lack of confidence.

“It was extremely painful to separate myself from the people I was serving, because I started out serving people that were like me. Later on, as I developed the chops and the confidence, and some might say the arrogance, I started to serve people that were affluent. One of my big aha moments was, we were taught that it's easier for a camel to fit through an eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven, And then now you're starting to accumulate wealth and all kinds of stuff will come up on the inside. I had to debunk all of that internal stuff.”

Which is why money mindset is a core element in Debbie’s business coaching and entrepreneurial training.

Please charge what you’re worth.

The most common money mindset issue Debbie sees among entrepreneurs is a reluctance to charge what they’re worth.

Sometimes, we just use the wrong math and model.

“I have a friend who's a mechanic and they earn 30 bucks an hour, which is nice. But you can imagine the business owner, if he only charged what he was going to pay an employee, how would he ever get a nice shop and all of the bells and whistles that you need to run a business? We get stuck thinking like an employee in the early days.”

Or we dither on pricing, sliding up and down depending on our mood or the circumstances of the person in front of us.

“There are a lot of people that flip-flop on pricing. They don't have standardized pricing. They have a price for this person and a price for that one, and they want to know ‘how much are you making? I'll charge you this much’. That's not businesslike.”

And sometimes we get stuck comparing ourselves to others in our industry and telling ourselves we come up short. It takes time to see all the client benefits of our work and align pricing with those benefits. It takes time to build that confidence. But confidence to charge what your work is worth is a by-product of, never the catalyst for, action.

“I have to say, when I first started to raise my prices, I didn't feel confident doing it. The confidence came later.? Confidence is a by-product of bold action, and it came later. I knew intellectually I needed to raise my prices. I knew intellectually that I knew enough to be able to compete toe-to-toe with people at certain level. I just needed to do it, and the confidence would come. And it only took a few times. It is a process.”

Business owners need to set a price and stand by it. The confidence will come. That’s why the mindset piece really is important, especially when you’re pricing your ideas, experience and expertise. Because after the hard costs of running your business, you need to put a price on all that value you add.?

“I think we all come about our biases in different ways, but the way forward is the same for everybody. It's about, you know, starting small and then growing into it. I get judged because I love making money. I think that people who say money can't buy happiness have never been poor. Because you know, it really makes me happy if I can let my daughter go to school or join volleyball or whatever it is, or buy groceries! That really sends me right over the moon, if I can feed her and stay in my house. So I think it's okay to love making money.?

“What I do know is that having money in and by itself, is not going to make you happy. It's the wealth of your friendships and community and the things that you do and the way you're inspired and fulfilled in your business. And then it doesn't hurt if you have lot of zeroes on the end of your bank balance.”

I agree that zeroes at the end of your numbers are good. And that, along with all the other things we work so hard at doing well (like planning, marketing, communication, client service, etc.,) we need to be conscious and intentional about how we think about worth, wealth and making money.

Listen to our full interview with Debbie Adams, Business Strategist, from the Real Bottom Line podcast with Wendy Brookhouse from June 25th, 2021.