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Most tutors know their pricing needs to change. The harder question is why they keep putting off doing anything about it. This episode gets into the specific fears that keep the decision stuck and what it actually costs you to leave it there.

In this episode, you will discover:

The fears that keep tutors paralysed around pricing and how to work through them

The overcharging and undercharging loop and how to break out of it

What not making the decision is actually costing you

Why raising your prices is not always the answer and what to consider instead

You might also find this useful:

Episode 195: Money, Let's Talk About It

Episode 209: How to Set Your Tutoring Prices

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👋🏽 Hello! I'm Sumantha McMahon, and I've supported over 100 tutors and education business owners.

As a teacher 'dropout' turned professional tutor, combined with my 20+ years as a business owner, I'm in it with you! Yes, I'm qualified too :-)

My training leans on tried-and-tested methods that are completely tailored to our niche.

Work with me to breathe life into YOUR definition of success:

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High-touch 6-month programme for tutors who want to make their business more lucrative, in a sustainable way for the future, while protecting the impact they make.

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The leading membership for tutors that combines tailored training (live and recorded), a community of like-minded business owners and exclusive discounts.

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Sometimes, I share links to resources and apps that I recommend. They are all based on my experience - if I don't love them, I don't recommend them. In some cases, I earn a small commission for my recommendation, at no cost to you.

© 2024 Sumantha McMahon

Today I want to talk about the pricing decision that most tutors keep putting off. And the reason why I've come back to this topic a few times is because pricing is one of those levers that can make such a difference to how sustainable your business feels to run. In theory, it's one of the quickest wins that's available to you, and in practice, it's one of the hardest things to actually do anything about. If we haven't met, I'm Samantha McMahon, and I work with tutors and education business owners who want to build businesses that are more lucrative.

And sustainable. And this episode is not about how to set your prices because I have a whole episode on that. It's called How to Set Your Tutoring Prices, and I will link it in the description. This episode is about what happens before that, the thing that paralyzes you, where some where you know something needs to change, and you keep finding reasons to leave things as they are. Most business decisions feel hard because you don't know the answer. But with pricing, it's really weird because the difficulty is usually something else.

Most tutors who are struggling with their pricing actually have a sense, sometimes quite a clear one, of what needs to change. So the challenge here is not the knowledge, it's everything that sits in the way of acting on it. And part of what makes this so loaded in this profession is the cultural narrative that surrounds it. And I want to talk about that because I think it can do real damage to tutors who are trying to build sustainable livelihoods. I see a lot of virtue signalling in the tutoring world, especially online, around price. There are these public narratives about how education should be accessible and how tutors who charge too much are exploiting families and how the good ones do it for the love rather than the money.

You will have seen it in parent forums, in tutor communities, in the way certain conversations play out online. And for tutors who are running professional businesses where their livelihood, you know, their income supports their life, that narrative creates a layer of guilt around wanting to earn wealth from the work that they are actually very skilled at. And that produces real results for the students that they work with. Wanting to earn a sustainable income from your tutoring business is not in conflict with caring about your students. The two things are not opposites, and internalizing the idea that they are will actually cost you in ways that go well beyond your bank balance.

So, what specifically keeps that pricing decision in this kind of holding pattern for so many of us? I think going deeper on the fears rather than just acknowledging that pricing feels scary, that's when things start to change. I think it's important to have that conversation. So here's what I've learned from my own experiences, but also from working with so many tutors. The first is this fear of losing clients. And this one's really worth understanding properly rather than just trying to push through it and to get over it. I talk about it in some of my other episodes, but I'll talk about it today as well in case you missed it. There's a really well documented psychological pattern. And I talk about it specifically in Money, let's talk about it, which I'll pop the link in the description. And it explains why the thought of losing something feels far more significant than the prospect of gaining something. So when you weigh up raising your prices and the possible loss of a client, that feels enormous, even if the potential gain of income and sustainability is objectively bigger. Now that's not a weakness, it's how we are wired to think. So understanding it as a psychological pattern rather than a personal failing actually changes how you relate to it.

The second is something that I think that I think of it as this overarching and undercharging loop. And this is this one's particularly paralyzing because it can feel like there's no safe place to land. Here's how it goes. If you go too high and people say no, you feel exposed. If you go too low and people say yes easily, there's that sense that you could have gone higher. But you'll never quite know by how much. The line between the two feels impossible to find because you don't know it until you've actually crossed it in one direction or the other. And once you've crossed it, the feeling is that, well, it's too late to do anything about it now. I want to push back on that because I think it keeps a lot of us stuck. If you go higher, then the market will bear, and people say no, you can go back to them with a revised offer. You're not going to lose face. Because how you handle that conversation is what matters here. You're not retreating, you're refining, and that framing makes a huge difference. If you suspect that your current prices might be lower than the market would actually support, and if you just want to test it before fully committing to it, then there are ways to do that as well. Easy ways like framing it as a launch price or an early bird rate or a loyalty price for existing clients. This gives you

valuable information about where your market sits and you have room to move higher if the response tells you that you can. The third fear is the one that probably is the most almost it's like this silent thing that runs through is this undercurrent, but it does the most damage, and that is the fear of what will people think. I worked with a client not that long ago who knew she needed to do something about her prices. She wasn't undercharging as such, but she was burning out. Trying to earn what she wanted to earn with the volume of work she was taking on. She totally understood the maths. It wasn't that I needed to convince her of that. She could see what needed to change. But she worked in quite a small, tight knit niche where everyone kind of knew everyone, at least that's how she felt. And she was completely paralyzed by the thought of what her peers would think if she raised her rates. Interestingly, she didn't think about her clients, she thought about her colleagues. The judgment of people in her professional circle felt more impossible to face than the practical reality of her unsustainable workload.

Now I've heard so many versions of that. I've experienced it myself. Sometimes it's colleagues where you're afraid of their judgment. Sometimes it's the fear of being talked about in parent groups. Sometimes it's the wider cultural narrative sitting in the background. The worry that things like raising your prices makes you one of the tutors that people talk about online or warn each other about online. I remember this moment really early in my tutoring career that really knocked my confidence around this. I was doing some research in a parent forum, it was a Facebook group, and I came across this thread where a parent was complaining that entrance exam tutors raised their prices the minute they heard the words entrance exam, that they were there to exploit people. And it was a long thread.

Lots of parents were agreeing, and then someone came in saying how cheap they were and how those parents should come to them instead. Now, because I wasn't very experienced at the time, it actually really got to me. I worried that if I raised my prices, then that's how I would be perceived as well. But then I had to pull myself back. I didn't have a business coach at the time. I didn't really understand the value and investing in myself, so I was kind of on my own. Fortunately, I was able to pull myself back and kind of ground myself. The reason I was considering raising my prices was because I had demand. And I had demand because I'm good at what I do, and the results speak for themselves. So the parents who valued that work, they would pay for it.

The parents who are looking for the cheapest option, they were never going to be my clients, regardless of what I charged. And the right client would value what I brought to the table. That reframe didn't make the fear disappear, didn't make the insecurity go away, but it did give me something solid to stand on, something solid to make the decision confidently. Now the risk of raising your prices gets a lot of attention. I mean, we've been talking about it today, but the cost of not raising them almost never does. And I think that cost is much higher than most tutors have properly sat with.

With my one-to-one clients, I give most of them this template called this called a timetabler earnings tracker. We do various things with it, but one of the things we do is we explore some what-if scenarios and we play around with the numbers. And I've done this, I discovered it because I do it in my own business. And I often realize how the smallest tweak actually has a really big impact on the bottom line. So you get to play around with it. And whenever tutors do this, they're always really surprised because they assume that they need something really dramatic to make that big difference to their bottom line, to the sustainability of their business.

Now, obviously, when we talk about the cost of not raising prices, the most visible cost is financial. If your prices are lower than they need to be, then you simply have to work more hours to earn what you need. More clients, more sessions, more of your time and energy going out than is coming back. Over time, that becomes a way of working that can weigh you down. And it can be hard to unpick that once you're really deep inside those patterns. But the less visible costs are perhaps the ones that matter more in the long run. The clients who you say yes to because you can't afford to say no, even when something about that fit isn't right. The resentment that builds when the effort doesn't match the return. The decisions that you can't really make in your life because your income doesn't give you the room to make them. Holidays that you can't really you don't feel like you can commit to again because your income doesn't support it, breaks that you just can't take. The list can be endless.

Now I want to share something here that's quite personal because I think that it really illustrates this, probably more honestly than anything else I could say. There was a point in my business where I was preparing to go through a round of fertility treatment. We're talking 2024 and it was my 10th year of trying for family. Was it 2024? No, it wasn't. It was the end of 2023 when I was actually preparing for this. 2024 was the 10th year, and that was the year I was going to be doing this year-long treatment. So I remember my treatment was going to start in the January. And then around November, I sat down and looked at what that would mean practically: the appointments, the physical and emotional demands, the need to protect my energy and my time in a way that I hadn't really needed to before. And I realized that the way my I was pricing my work was directly in the way.

In fact, I was quite shocked because I looked, I took an average of the last three months and I realized that with my one-to-one tutor clients, coupled with some of my tuition, I don't tutor loads now, but put together, I was on average, I was on Zoom for eight hours a day. And I had to be on Zoom for eight hours a day because I was charging less than I needed to. It didn't match the impact that I was making. So it meant that I was taking on more and more clients. And that was kind of sustainable. Like I was able to manage that. But now that I had this, you know, fertility treatment ahead of me, and I say it was my tenth year because it was a real milestone, I decided that was it. That was the last time I was going to do it. So it's really high stakes. So it meant that I didn't have very much flexibility for that.

And this was something that mattered so deeply to me. So I had to make a quick decision. I had to respond basically. I raised my prices and I restructured my offer. It was quite a dramatic change, actually. I didn't see it as a long term strategic exercise. It was more of a necessity, but I still made sure that it was a win win situation. I didn't just kind of raise my prices for the sake of it. I made sure I also restructured things in a way so that I was working sustainably without compromising on the impact I was making on my tutor clients. My tuition stayed the same. Because in this situation, I had to respond because the cost of not doing it was something that I wasn't willing to pay. I don't think I could have lived with the guilt if I hadn't at least tried to do everything I could. It didn't work, you know. I'm not going to be a parent. But at least that's one thing I can say that I did. I gave it my all. I tried to make all the changes I possibly could.

Now, I'm not sharing that because you know that's what your reason is likely to look like or it might do, but you know, we all have different reasons. But the point here is that when you connect pricing to a decision that is some that's something real in your life, something that actually matters to you, it actually stops being this abstract business, you know, decision or something that's theoretical. And it starts becoming deeply personal. It's meaningful. And that changes everything about how you approach it. Because now it feels clear. You have some clarity. You have a reason why you're doing it. It means something to you. Now, I want to be careful here because I don't want you to give, I don't want to give you the impression that this episode is simply a case for raising your prices. I'm not trying to convince you to raise your prices here. This is about that point when you know that something needs to change, but you're feeling a bit paralyzed with making that change. Sometimes raising your prices is the solution, but sometimes the decision that needs to be made is actually slightly different.

Remember that client I mentioned earlier, the one who was paralyzed by what her colleagues would think. Well, we kind of worked through this together and arrived at a different conclusion because she just couldn't get past that barrier. Raising her rates in the way that she had been imagining just wasn't the right move for her situation. It didn't feel right, she just couldn't do it. So instead we looked at our her offer structure and we found a different way to make her business sustainable. She actually launched a new type of offer that totally changed the shape of her income without her requiring her to navigate that specific fear that was blocking her. So that outcome is not less valid than a price increase. The goal is a business that supports your life. And ultimately we're not going to achieve goals that we just can't bring ourselves to execute. That's the reality of it. Maybe we're not ready, maybe that readiness will come later. So sometimes we need to do a little bit of detour, but we want to get to that same destination. And there's more than one route to get there. So the right decision depends on your specific circumstances. It depends on your client base, your niche, and what you're actually trying to build.

Now, this is the kind of work that I do very closely with my bespoke one to one clients because these decisions are so deeply individual and the stakes feel really high that going around in circles alone, where you're caught between the fear of overcharging and the frustration of undercharging and all of those things. It's a very costly way to work. And you know when you're in your business it's really difficult to see clearly. It needs someone from the outside. It's you know it's what I use my business coaches for. So if you feel like this would really give you some relief and would just help you move forwards and you'd like to have a conversation about whether my support is right for you, the link to book a call is in the show notes. It's no obligation but it is designed for us to make sure that to see whether my support is right for you. And if it is, I'll invite you to work with me. So the link to Book of Call is in the show notes. Now, before someone can make the pricing decision that they've been putting off, usually they need to answer a more fundamental question first. So I want to share it with you in case you're in that situation. Naturally, the question that will be revolving around in your mind is what should I charge? What price should I settle on? But the thing that will unlock it is the question of what does my business need to support the life I actually want to live? That's a slightly bigger question. It takes a little bit of work. But it's so powerful and valuable because when you answer that question, and really honestly, not in a way that sounds acceptable and realistic or aspirational, a way that actually reflects what you need, the pricing decision becomes so much clearer. Still not easy, but it's so much clearer because you're no longer just plucking this number out of thin air. You're making a decision about what you're building and why you're doing it. And if you're ready to take that thinking into the practical mechanics of how to actually structure your pricing, you might want to listen to my episode or watch my episode on YouTube about how to set your tutoring prices. I go into that, I go into that in detail. Now I'm aware in this episode I have actually mentioned a few different episodes that could be worth watching. So I will pop the link to all of them in the show notes. So the pricing decision that you keep putting off is really about the number. It's actually about what the number means and it's worth taking seriously. If this episode resonated with you, then I would love it if you could leave a short review. Don't forget to follow and subscribe so you don't miss the next one, because as you can see, a lot of the episodes are interlinked. As always, thank you so much for your time and you'll hear from me on Wednesday.