How Much Should I Charge In My Spiritual Business? Your Business Owner Type Influences Your Answer

6 days ago
11 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

How much should I charge in my spiritual business?

It’s very common for service business owners in wellness, holistic and spiritual fields to be unsure about what to charge
Generic pricing advice for traditional businesses doesn’t make as much sense for these types of spiritual work because of the energy and ethics involved
Knowing the sort of approach you take to financial decisions as a business owner helps you find more practical and specific solutions
Service business owners in these fields can be split into four types depending on their approach to pricing and finances
Each one has a unique way of thinking about money and unique problems
By diagnosing your type you can find more appropriate solutions and choose pricing frameworks that work for you and your business
Diagnosis can be quick and easy, and from that you’ll already be able to make adjustments in how much you charge in your spiritual business

If you're struggling with pricing the services in your small business, something to remember is that pricing problems look different depending on who you are, what you care about most and what you're building. Identifying your ideal type of pricing and the type of service business owner you are is the fastest route to understanding where your pricing is breaking down and how you can fix it.

Why Generic Pricing Advice Fails Wellness & Holistic Practitioners

Generic pricing and service strategy advice fails a lot of small business owners, particularly small business owners who are in the wellness, holistic and spiritual fields. One size fits all pricing guidance is built for a much more general business owner, often someone who has started with a bricks and mortar store, perhaps more product based or they're offering a service which is more widely known than a tarot reader, massage therapist or reiki healer.

This generic pricing advice doesn’t fit these sort of businesses because you're operating in your business with a very specific set of values, a very specific approach to your client relationships and a very specific series of ethical commitments, both on the human level and on the spiritual level. Most mainstream pricing advice just does not account for these things.

While there are lots of things we can learn from that generic business advice, when it comes to pricing, you need something that's geared towards who you are as a spiritual practitioner and the sort of business that you want to run.

From my experience as a personal transformation coach, I’ve seen all sorts of service business owner in these wellness fields pop up over the years, and I’ve worked out there are four categories people tend to fall into. Each one is unique with a unique approach to pricing and financial decisions.

When you read the description for each one, think about where you might fit into these types and which one most aligns with where you are now in your business, because understanding that is going to help you diagnose and fix some of the pricing problems that you're having.

Type 1: The Income-Focused Practitioner

The first type of service business owner is the one who is income-focused. This is you if you are driven by a desire or need to reach a specific financial goal. Perhaps you have what I call a ‘magic number’ in your head: that's an income level that would make all of your work seem worth it, or reflects a current salary you’re looking to replicate as you transition into your business.

I recommend that everyone has financial goals, even if they're quite broad, because they’re useful in helping you making pricing and sales decisions. But the struggle that the income-focused service business owner often has is that they rarely work backwards from that goal to the rate and the prices that make it possible. They rarely think to themselves, “OK, I want to earn £50,000 this year. How many services or products will I need to sell at a certain price to make that specific financial goal?” Instead, there's a lot of worry and focus on reaching for that big number without it being broken down into steps.

And because it hasn’t been broken down, it’s hard to know where you are in the process of getting to that magic number. I often find with this type of business owner they are so focused on the goal they end up overcommitting, working too many hours, and trying too many new things in their business because they are desperate to hit their goal. But they haven’t done the basic maths to work out how to do that properly!

It's important to have your goal, but it's really important that you work backwards and think about how the individual services you sell fits in with your bigger, annual goal. If you can’t get those two to align, you're going to struggle and have pricing problems.

Type 2: The Profit-Focused Practitioner

The second type of service business owner is the profit-focused practitioner. Before you worry about the word profit and start feeling like it's a big scary capitalist word, let's break down what profit is. Profit is the difference between your income and your expenses. If you earn £100 and your expenses are £50, you've made £50 profit. That's it!

Profit-focused business owners understand that income - the money you have coming in - isn't the same as profit. Rather than have a financial goal to hit for the year, they have a profit focus or goal. They're trying to understand how they can make the most money out of any particular service they offer.

However, there's often a lot of hidden costs eating into their profit that this business owner hasn’t seen. What then happens is that they will start to feel frustrated and irritated every time they look at their accounts, because the money that's coming in seem to be enough - but the money actually in the bank account after expenses never seems to quite cover everything.

This business owner assumes a healthy profit margin but haven’t properly looked at all the costs that go into providing their service to their customers, and so are ending up out of pocket without even realising.

For example, a massage therapist delivering one hour or two hour massage sessions needs to think about:

The cost of all your products that you use, such as the oils, the aromatherapy products, if you use crystals or hot stones
The rental of a room or the space that you need to do that therapy
The investment in your training
Non-consumable equipment like a therapy bed, towels, longer-lasting products
The cost of the video conferencing software you use if you do online consultations, or your phone bill
The cost of your travel - whether it is bike, bus, train or car
Not to mention the cost of your time

There are so many things that are expenses when it comes to running a business, and if you haven’t dug into the specifics of them for each of your services, you will find that each month what’s coming in versus what is in the bank account will not quite add up.

Even if you are putting all the numbers down, but you’re not taking time to examine where you can decrease costs and increase income, you’ll find that things don’t quite work in reality - even if on paper everything feels neat and tidy.

Type 3: The Community-Centred Practitioner

The third type of service based business owner is the community-centred practitioner. This is someone working in the holistic or wellness sphere who is committed to accessibility and inclusivity. They want as many people as possible to access the services that they offer, and that's a fantastic thing - we know the world needs more healing!

But community-centred practitioners are often so committed to accessibility that they end up burning out because they haven't thought about how to make their pricing sustainable for them and their business. They've only thought about making it accessible.

For example, a community-centred practitioner might use a sliding scale model where different people can self-select the amount they pay, opening up their work to a wider audience. But if at the lowest level of that scale, they are undercharging, it is not a sustainable model.

These service business owners also bring messaging into their marketing which ends up attracting people who are only interested in free or low cost products or services - which would be fine, if the lowest cost sustained the business. And I’ve noticed that these sort of business owners often struggle to say no, and are more likely to offer something for free. They are incredibly generous, but their generosity doesn’t have a framework - instead it becomes a pattern that burns them out and causes them to feel resentful that they are giving continuously and not getting what they need to feel financially secure.

If you recognise yourself in this type, it’s important to recognise that just because you want your work to be accessible for people in different financial realities, it doesn't mean that you should martyr yourself in the process. Any sliding scale, any flexible pricing that you offer has to sustain you and your business even at the very lowest price. If everybody came to your workshop or your sound bath and only paid the minimum ticket price, if that income would not sustain you, then it is not sustainable overall - meaning you will no longer be able to offer your amazing gifts to those who need it.

A good question to ask yourself about your pricing is “Where am I sustaining others at the cost of myself? Where am I taking myself out of the equation?”. If you are not fed, you cannot feed anyone else.

Type 4: The Perception-Driven Practitioner

The fourth and final type of service business owner is the perception-driven practitioner. This is someone who maybe has been in business for a while, perhaps with a few years of experience or even well-known in their field. These are the people who offer genuinely transformative work - you only have to meet them and your life is changed. And there's actually a lot more of these service business owners in the holistic and wellness fields than you realise; in fact, they don’t even realise it!

It's something that I've seen quite regularly, particularly with service business owners who are women or assigned female at birth: their awareness of their own expertise is very, very low. They're providing incredibly transformative work, but they’re not aware of how good it is. These are the people who chronically undercharge and worry about whether people will be able to afford them, and often end up falling into the community-centred practitioner group.

But the people who do know how good they are have a different issue. Business owners in this last category are struggling to price because they're so used to pricing based on time and energy expended, rather than pricing for the result and value they are providing.

This is why it's perception driven, because you realise as this perception-driven service business owner it's not about the time you're spending with a customer. It's about the result they are getting and the impact it's having on them for their lives. You might be able to do in five minutes what it would take someone at the very beginning of their career five hours to do!

So how do you price for that? That can be challenging, awkward and uncomfortable. What I see happen is the discomfort of pricing your work ‘truthfully’ - that your five minutes is worth five hours - keeps you stuck at a price that doesn’t reflect your expertise or the depth of result you provide. Your work might be genuinely transformational, but your pricing does not yet reflect that.

If this service business owner type resonates with you, that is where your pricing problem might be: you’re still thinking of yourself and the work you provide as minutes on the clock, rather than the positive, powerful impact you have on somebody's life. The key is to stop thinking about the time it takes and start pricing according to the powerful result that you bring into your customers’ lives.

Summary of the Four Types

Here’s a quick summary of the four types of service business owner:

The Income-Focused Practitioner who has a specific financial goal, but hasn’t quite worked out how their individual service prices will fulfil that goal
The Profit-Focused Practitioner who looks at the gap between income and expenses but hasn’t accounted for all their costs
The Community-Centred Practitioner who is committed to accessibility but ends up martyring themselves and the financial health of their business
The Perception-Driven Practitioner who offers truly transformative work but hasn’t yet made the transition from time-based to results-based pricing

Discovering Your Type

You’ll probably have got an initial idea of which category you are in from reading through this article, but being able to know exactly which type of service business owner you are will help you diagnose and solve pricing problems in your business more effectively.

I developed a quiz to help with this, the Ethical Pricing Strategy Quiz. It’s about 10 questions and works out which practitioner type you are along with your ideal ethical pricing strategy.

At the end of the quiz you’ll get personalised actions (online and via email) to put into practice in your business and solve those pricing dilemmas.

Take the Ethical Pricing Strategy Quiz here.

Key Takeaways

1) Whatever pricing problem you're having in your business is specific to the type of business owner that you are.

It's specific to the values that you have, the things you care about, and the way you approach the finances in your business. It's not just a ‘money mindset’ issue or a ‘financial setpoint’ issue. It is that you're a specific type of person approaching your finances and your businesses in a certain way. And if you can assess the type of practitioner you are accurately, you're going to be able to apply more specific solutions than general one size fits all business advice, which never really works anyway.

2) Every single one of these four service business owner types can end up undercharging in different ways.

This is extremely common with service business owners who are women, who are assigned female at birth, or who are working in spiritual, wellness and holistic fields. We have constantly been told, explicitly and implicitly, that we and our skills are not worth something to the economy at large. So we always end up undercharging!

When you recognise which type you are, you can recognise the undercharging pattern that's relevant to you and make practical, specific changes. Many financial coaches and business coaches on Instagram - the ones wearing pink blazers with sparkly gold bits - will be shouting at you all the time, telling you to just charge more, triple your rates, quadruple your rates. But that's not going to solve anything, because it isn't approaching the root of the issue of why you are undercharging, which is unique to the type of service business owner you are and your values.

3) Every one of these types can find a pricing approach to their services that fits which is ethical, sustainable, enjoyable and exciting.

Because the goal here isn't to become a different type of person. It's not to become this boss lady money coach, or a terrible greedy capitalist like Elon Musk. And it's also not to become someone who does everything for free and can't put food on their table because they've given all their wisdom away without receiving any compensation or reimbursement.

You don't need to become different to have your breakthrough. You've got to find the strategy and the pricing approach that works for who you already are in your deepest soul.

Because when you make decisions from that place - from your spiritual self - and cultivate self-mastery over pricing to stick to those decisions, that’s when you see the transformation.

The Pricing Self-Mastery Pathway

Pricing is one of the big areas of self-mastery that I coach people on. This led me to develop a pathway of resources to help you with this topic, including articles, podcast episodes, an assessment tool and a book.

If this article has been helpful, then you’ll find the rest of the pathway helpful too.

Step 1

Read Signs Your Pricing Isn’t Working: 5 Symptoms To Look For As A Spiritual Entrepreneur

Step 2

Read Why It Feels So Hard To Price Your Work: For Spiritual Healers, Wellness Experts and Holistic Practitioners

Step 3

Listen to The Real Cost of Getting Pricing Wrong

✅ Step 4

Read How Much Should I Charge In My Spiritual Business? Your Business Owner Type Influences Your Answer

➡️ Step 5

Listen to The Four Types of Service Business Owner (And What Each One Gets Wrong About Pricing)

Step 6