Mindful Productivity Podcast

I'm Changing the Entire Pricing Structure of my Business

April 20, 2023 Sarah Steckler Episode 203
Mindful Productivity Podcast
I'm Changing the Entire Pricing Structure of my Business
Show Notes Transcript

Business changes, they gotta happen when they need to happen. In today's comeback episode I'll be sharing:

  • The burnout I'm still coming out of and what it's been like
  • What I no longer want to be a part of in the online business space
  • Things I'm changing in my business model moving forward
  • How I'm changing my pricing structure and how I notified students
  • How I'll be shifting the support level I provide
  • The importance of building a business around your energy capacity
  • A reminder that we're all always growing, learning, and adapting through all of this. No one gets it "right" the first time through. 

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You're listening to Episode 203 of the Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and I'm so glad to be back. This is the longest break I've ever taken from podcasting, and there's a lot of updates I have to share with all of you. Some juicy details, a cozy conversation. But ultimately, my goal in this podcast episode is to get the podcast back up and running and to also tell you about some big business shifts and decisions that I have made that will impact the pricing structure of my business and all of my courses and programs moving forward, along with the burnout that I have found myself in that I'm still working myself out of as I learn more about myself. So stick around if you're interested in all of that and all of the updates. I can't wait to share this with you. And if anything, I think it's also going to be really validating in a way that we can show up how we need to, and we can truly honor our own energy capacity and still do things that we love. Let's get into it. Welcome to the Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this is the place to be to live a more mindful and productive life. If you're ready to turn daily chaos into calm and start your days with intention, then get ready to join me as we dive deep into mindful living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live. And it all starts now. So where do I even begin with this? There has been so many things that have happened in my life and business. If you listen back to Episode 202, you'll hear the details about the move and how difficult that was. But I actually put together a presentation for my students that I shared with them about a week ago, and that outlined all the details because I wanted them to be the first to know about all these updates, the changes in my business, the pricing structure, all that stuff. I wanted them to obviously know first. So they got that presentation and there's a lot more details in there that I shared with them, the ways that those things will be impacting them as students. But I also wanted to do a formal announcement podcast episode and also share a little bit about what's going on. Not because you necessarily care, but I think sometimes it can be helpful to share behind the scenes of our business and what's going on. I am a pretty transparent person and I just have never bought into the only show the good side of things publicly. I don't know how to show up any other way than just showing all my weird, unique quirkiness. And if you follow me on Instagram, you know that because I'm always sharing all my weird hobbies and planners and squishmallows and everything. But I'm going to use this presentation and these slides I made as an outline for today's podcast, and then I'll get into all of the juicy details. So the overall agenda for the podcast today is that I'm going to take a little bit of time to reflect on what's been going on in the past year, what has led me to making some of these bigger decisions, what the actual changes are that I'm making to my business model, and how those are going to roll out. And I will share a little bit about how I've handled this for my students. I won't go into all the details, but I will share what I'm doing for my students with this pricing structure change and how that's going to be impacting them. And then just expectations, not only for my business model moving forward, but also for myself and really just taking a hard look at all of that. So my goals moving forward specifically in this next year, in the next quarter of my business, moving forward are threefold. One is energy management. I really need to better honor my own energy capacity, my capacity for what I am able to do in general in order to run a more sustainable business. And this ultimately, too, reflects on the amount of availability that I have to show up for live calls and live things. And I think this is really interesting because this is not a new theme. Way back when I started my business in the end of 2015, beginning of 2016, I started out doing life coaching. I went to school, I got a Masters in Health and Wellness coaching, and that was my goal was to do coaching and coaching alone and run my business that way. But I quickly found out that I just couldn't do that. I loved working with all my clients, but the energetic drain put on me to be that focused for those calls. At the end of those, my brain just couldn't do anything else. And I've been learning more and more about that. In general, my social battery is very limited, and it's been that way my whole life, but I have always pushed through, mask that. And now after this move, if you've ever went through a huge move or a huge transition in your life, you quickly realize what you're able to push through and what... Well, I should say you're actually not able to push through as much. And you're quickly faced with the reality of what your real capacity is, especially when you're really drained, what can you actually do? And I'll get more into this in a second. But my main goal moving forward is that energy management. I have to honor my energy and make those accommodations for myself. The second goal moving forward, and this has been a goal for a while, but I haven't been sure how to really implement it. I've also had a lot of external noise in my head, and that's the third goal I'll get to in a second. But the second goal really is accessibility. I say this lightly because that's never going to be something that's all encompassing. I think no matter what you charge in your business, it's not going to be accessible to everyone. Even if you were to make everything free, which at that point you wouldn't really be running a business, there's still going to be something that's not accessible to everyone. So while the ideal would be accessibility and a pricing model that is affordable and available to everyone, I'm also aware that that's just not possible. There's just always something, resources, circumstances, whatever. But I think as business owners, our goal is to always do better. So my second goal moving forward is I really want to have my business model feel more accessible to more people. I'm not just talking about accessibility things like transcripts and all those. I'm also talking about monetary accessibility, all those things. I've really just been thinking about that more and more. And I'll get into the details of some things I see in the industry that have been giving me the ick a little bit. And that's not to like pooh pooh on people that are doing things certain ways. But this just was a goal. I was like, I want to steer off like, Hey, guys, everyone seems to be heading to the left there. I'm just going to veer off a little bit and do more of my own thing. So that's what I'm working on. And then the third goal is really, and this is more of a personal goal, but I really want to stop letting as many external things influence my business. Now, I think I've been pretty good at this most of my career in my business, but I definitely still feel the pressure to do things a certain way. There's a lot of external pricing trends, and those things are going to come in waves, too. I think we're going to see seasons where people are like, high ticket offers or one on one or group or low ticket or whatever. That's never going to change. There's going to be waves of those. And there's nothing wrong with being a part of any one of those categories, like your offers and how you price them and the amount of support you give, that's all going to influence the price and your business model. But I have just found, especially in times when I am at a low state of energy capacity and I don't have the same confidence or access to my brain or my individual thoughts, I can find myself really getting sucked into those things. Especially when it's like you find yourself talking to other business owners that you really like or your friends with and they're doing things and you're like, Oh, maybe I should do. And it's, again, it's not that any of those people are doing anything wrong. It's just you feel influenced. And I really want to do a better job of being like, Okay, you heard about this thing that's trending and you've seen other people do it and have success, but does it feel good to you? Does it make sense to you in your business? Do you have that same capacity to do that? You know what I mean? A great example of that is VIP days. Very cool. I love that idea of helping people get something done in a day. But that was never something that I knew I could deliver on. I feel like it was a year and a half ago, I saw those being really big and a lot of people doing them, whatever you want to call them. And I remember I did get some questions like, Oh, could you do that with planners or something? And I thought about it and it's just like, no, I can't do that. So again, that's just an example. But I also, too, because of this burnout I've been in, have really been taking time to look at the lessons I've learned about business sustainability. So really trying to acknowledge the difference between the ideal of how I can run my business versus the reality of what I'm capable of sustaining over time. A great example of this will be how many live rounds of calls I run in publish with purpose or any live round I do in a course. How much I'm promising there and then how much I can actually deliver because right now I'm a one woman show and I don't have plans to hire a huge team in my business. And it's not a mindset issue. It's not this. It's like I just t's what feels good to me. And also, I think that we need to stop pressuring people to try to explain all their business decisions as I make a podcast explaining my business decisions. But I think that if you want to run a business as a solo person, that's great. If you want to hire a team or a VA, that's cool. If you want to scale it into oblivion and run a Corporation, cool. But you aren't any less than if you decide to take things slower or do things a different way. What's also really interesting is I made more money in my business. Well, I should say, yeah, I made more, but I also grossed the most I've ever made in my business last year, which is really fascinating to me considering I got extremely sick for months last summer with back to back illnesses. I had a no sales month in July, no new sales coming in. And I did a podcast episode on that. And then there was a chunk of time I really haven't been able to work much in my business from November of last year until probably beginning of April this year. I did run a live round in published with purpose. We did a pocket planner round, but I had everything already in place, and so that felt doable for me. But it was really interesting to look back because I didn't even do... I did my taxes last minute this year. I'm talking, turn them in on the 14th and they were due on the 18th. And it had been six months since I'd really looked at all of my financials and stuff. I feel so weird to admit that, but that was the state I was in. Nothing was getting done. And I was like, mind blown. I was like, how? I had no idea I made more money. And anyway, my point in sharing that was I kept getting down on myself so much for taking time to rest last year. And then I just couldn't do anything. I didn't have access to different parts of myself this year so far. And lo and behold, everything was okay. And when I think about what it means to be sustainable in my business, I'm like, I need more of that, more rest and honoring all of that, but not because it's necessary. I don't want it to be an afterthought, like, Oh, I'm really sick and now I can't work. Okay, I'm resting. I want it to be a, No, we don't do things on the weekends unless we really want to, and we take time off. And maybe we take a month off in the summer. Maybe we take December off in the winter to recoup and stuff, because running a business is really hard. And I think a lot of times I got down on myself because I felt like so much of what I do in my business can't be seen. It's so intangible. It's decisions I'm making in my brain. It's thought processes. It's curriculum development that I'm writing on a in my brain and I'm booking on scratch paper when I'm in the car and it's all these things that doesn't necessarily look like work externally. And this is me projecting. And because of that, it was like I never truly would let myself rest in a deep way. I would say I'm taking the weekend off, but in the back of my mind, I'd still be working. I'd still be thinking about my business. I wasn't unplugging as much as I needed to. And I had that realization, I can't remember what podcast episode it was, but I did a whole episode on creative nesting and slowing the hell down. And that was the beginning stages of me realizing how to do that. But I've got to be honest, I'm still learning those lessons. And I feel like I need to backtrack here and explain a little more. I know I'm all over the place and I apologize, but this podcast episode was not going to get made unless I just hit this mic and did it. So I'm really realizing that if I'm looking at the slide right now I created, if my business model was a pie chart, at least 75 % of that has to be honoring my energy capacity. You have to build a business model that allows for you to exist however you need to exist. If you're building a business model that requires so much of you that's constantly draining you, it's just not going to work. And I'd say the first at least three years of my business, I hustled like crazy. And you've heard me talk about that. You've heard me push that. You just got to hustle and be consistent. And while that did get me to where I am now, it also got me to where I am now in terms of burnout and exhaustion. So if I were to look back at my business, I would not have pushed myself so hard, and I would not have worked those 14, 18, sometimes 20 hours days where I'm not sleeping, I'm hyper focused, I'm drinking coffee all night, I'm go, go, go. And in the back of my mind, I think I'm this little digital warrior when really I'm just not spending time with my husband or my family and I am draining myself and not actually moving the needle in my business. I'm just busy. And I had to make all those decisions. I had to learn all those lessons so I don't regret them. But all that is to say, the move to California this year completely drained me and it was a burnout. And I've had these before. I've had these every time we move. And there's some big reasons why I think that is, which will have to be a whole other episode on how I want to talk about all of that. But it's really just made me realize, like I had to put it into perspective over the past few months, especially because we moved here, we got our keys to our house in early January, and my husband had to leave because he's in the military and he had to go back to wherever he was going. The day after we moved in moved in. So I'm sitting here exhausted after driving through these floods in California. And I have an air mattress. That's when I recorded my last podcast episode was on that air mattress and on my phone. And I've got my pets with me, and I've got everything I need. So I'm grateful. But we're still waiting for our household goods, all our stuff. And I had, I think it was 10 days, which is not that bad. We've waited much longer for our stuff. Ten days without our stuff, ten days of sitting on an air mattress and watching the office on my laptop because it's my comfort zone, it's getting me through. And then we got our stuff and I really was worried for a while because I lost the ability to do so many things. I could feel myself getting emotional thinking about it because I could not make decisions. Thank goodness that DoorDash exists and that I had the funds to make that happen because I probably DoorDashed almost every other day for a month, which led to not eating the best food that made me feel so great. But I couldn't make a decision. I couldn't think of what to do to grocery shop. If I did have groceries in the kitchen, I would walk in there and be like, I can't even figure out how to put these things together. It truly was like a skill regression. And it was really frustrating. And if I couldn't even do that, imagine how I couldn't do anything in my business. The idea of podcasting or even speaking felt incredibly draining. And I was also experiencing these intense migraines. And if you experience migraines, you know that you have to be careful with taking like, Excedrin or any pain medication because you can get those rebound headaches that suck a lot too. So it was really just managing all of that, managing my health, and then just the emotional devastation, really, of just being apart from my husband once again in a new place. And I'm someone that I do not adapt to change quickly. People are like, Oh, you're in this beautiful new place, blah, blah, blah. And I'm just sitting here like, Yeah, but I would do anything to be back in the Pacific Northwest where it's cold and raining and not so bright outside. That's what I want. And it's hard for... I think my family and some of my close friends finally are getting that about me now. You just need to hold space for me to get through this. I'm not going to bounce back as quickly as you'd like. But also, I really don't have a whole lot of people in my life that have had to do these things. So sometimes there's a part of me that's like, Well, it'd be interesting to see how this would go for you. It's easy to sit on the outside and say, Well, just go do these things and adapt. But when you're in a situation, it's completely different for how it hits you. And so I had a lot of time, a lot of time to wallow, and I did that. I had a lot of time to be like, I need to figure out what's going on. And I've made a lot of progress in that, and I'm feeling better and I'm able to use my brain again, which is nice. But I had a lot of time to think about a lot of things. At one point, and I shared this with my students, at one point I was like, Maybe it's time to not run my business anymore or really scale it back, which just it almost felt like if I was going to have to make that decision, it was close it up because running it at all, not running it the way I wanted to wouldn't feel good. And I definitely had these conversations with myself in my head, I could go back into working in higher education. That's where I used to do nine to five stuff. I could do that. I could go get probably a well good paying job. I would hate having to go back to a nine to five and be on someone else's schedule, but I could do it. I also had the thought, maybe I just need to go work at Home Depot and have someone else tell me what to do and work part time or whatever. I just had this really humbling moment because I think, and I share this to say, I think entrepreneurs, and this is probably not just specific to this industry, but whatever space you're in online, after years of being in that space, you find yourself in an echo chamber. You find yourself in a bubble, which can be dangerous. I think we find that politically happening, too. And we don't realize how on the same page, a lot of us can be about a lot of things, but that's a whole other tangent. But we find this echo chamber in business, and I just saw it for the first time from the outside because I've been in it for so long. And I was like, yeah, isn't this interesting that it's always like charge more, charge more, charge more, scale your business, know your worth. Excuse me, charge more, scale, charge more FOMO deadlines, all this stuff. The ethicality of all that, questionable. We've had those conversations. People have those conversations. I don't want to really get into all that today. But I just saw it. And then I was like, Wow, isn't that interesting? And then here I am, here I am here, like, most people are looking at what it would be like to work minimum wage. And I'm looking at the price of my courses and how I couldn't even make that much money in a whole month of working minimum wage. And I was like, This doesn't add. This doesn't line up. I just don't like it. And so I really was thinking about what I want to do and what I want to change in my business. And I was looking back at the history of published with purpose, which is my main signature offer. It doesn't have the most students of any course I run, but it does have the most ongoing support. It does take up the majority of my time in terms of support I give to my students. And I launched that program in 2019. And all of my students since then have had... I think the first time I did a second round, I was like, Oh, I'm going to charge my students for every new live round. So I think there was a minimal fee. And a couple of people joined the second round, and then we had a whole new cohort of students. And then I didn't like that. So then I was like, The next time, I was like, Hey, everyone is just going to get access to every live round moving forward. You don't have to pay me anything more. Let's just keep doing this. This is great. That feels better. And that landed well, not surprisingly. But I was running live rounds of that program in the first few years. I would say, I'm just going to do two live rounds a year, but sometimes it'd be three, sometimes four. And not necessarily a whole live round, but live something, like calls, office hours, Voxer Office Hours group, Voxer availability. At one point, I did one on one Journal Focus sessions for every single new student. And then I couldn't keep up with that when we had lots more students join. And so I decided to shift that. And then at one point I was like, I don't want the live rounds feel like a lot. Maybe I'll do a membership. So at one point, the pricing structure stayed the same. But I was like, I'm just going to do a live call every month. And then students were like, Well, that doesn't really give us the same support. So I was like, You're right. So we went back to doing the live rounds every year, at least two or three of them. And all these different things happened. They happened at different times. I was just like, Okay, this is the extent of this course. I noticed that when I run live rounds, I love them, but I still get really drained. I've just been thinking, Okay, what could I do? How could I change this? And the other thing that happened, too, is I launched Pretty Productive Life in 2021. And that's my probably second biggest course in terms of the curriculum and everything that's involved. It's basically like a notion ecosystem of all these templates I've created into one. And to be honest, it's like overly complicated. And there's going to be some big changes made to it to simplify it in a lot of ways. Things are going to be pulled out of it. It's going to be taken apart, blah, blah, blah, blah. But during that program, I had it all done and completed, like the whole notion thing. But then I did a live teaching round. I think it was maybe five weeks. I went live every Friday for an hour, two hours and went through here's how to set all this stuff up. And again, it was like, looking back, I'm like, okay, it's still overly complicated. I'm going to fix a lot of things in that. But I also was doing planning calls and I was like, I had this idea of doing a planning call every week so that we could all get together on Friday and do our Pulsepoint check in and it would be great and students would love it and get lifetime access. And I just couldn't do it. I couldn't keep up with it. So that fell to the wayside. And it's probably one of the biggest disappointments I have in myself running my business because I'm like, man, I feel like I'll let everyone down. And it's not necessarily something I promised. I wasn't like, we're going to have weekly calls forever. But I hyped it up for my students. And then I was like, hey, I can't keep doing this. And that never feels good as a business owner. But I was starting to realize the effect of the overall reality of my energy capacity. And I was looking at all the things I have to do, content marketing, business planning, email marketing, social media, student support, live calls, this, that, and the other. And I was like, I want to redefine this. And the other thing, too, I want to say is, and I shared this with my students also, because I was thinking about pricing and all of that, and I was thinking, Oh, well, anytime I've ever ran a live iteration of something, or the first round of something, before our course is super polished and refined, I'm like, Oh, I should charge way less for this because it's live and there's probably going to be some mess ups or things I have to edit later or changes I'm going to have to make inevitably and then updates. That just always felt burdensome, if that's the word, to my students. But then I was thinking about it from a student perspective and how many times I've been in programs where you're running through the first round of a program and sure, it's a little messy, but you also get more direct communication with the course creator or their team. And so more often than not, I feel like there's this benefit of being a part of the creation of it. So I recently joined... At the beginning of the year, I joined a program and it was a live round. And after every live call, she had tons of extra questions from everyone, myself included, were like, Hey, you talked about this, but it doesn't really connect to this. Could you add a resource or a video in there about this? And she'd be like, Oh, yeah, you're right. And so she ended up adding, I mean, gosh, probably 20 more videos, detailing things that weren't promised on her original sales page that wouldn't have happened had I bought the course later at a higher price. I wouldn't have been able to be a part of that. I was just thinking about that. I actually think it's interesting that people charge less in the beginning as an incentive to enroll when in a lot of ways I feel like there's a benefit to paying more to be the first ones through. It was just a thought I had. I've really been thinking about what it means to redefine scaling in my business because we all want to grow our business and grow is subjective. But I think we'd all like to make enough money, more money, whatever that means to you. And I've just been seeing this trend ongoing for a while where it's like... And I think we're all starting to taste this in our mouth and we're like, I don't like it. And maybe not, but I don't want to speak for all of you, but it's like this never ending process of raise your rates, raise your course prices. And I took part in this. I absolutely took part in this. I mean, published with purpose was $1,000 for lifetime access to the program. I think it's worth every single penny. I have tons of students who say that too. And I don't feel bad for charging that price because we had so much support and we still do. But I just thought it was interesting because I remember always being like, Oh, that's out of my comfort zone. But everyone's like, But you have to be out of your comfort zone. And if you want to invest in something, it needs to be out of your comfort zone. You're not going to be able to grow your business unless you spend more than you're comfortable with because that's how you get to the next level and that's how you upskill. And I was just like, it was leaning into some of this magical thinking stuff that I'm just no longer here for. And I didn't like it. And I also didn't like that some of the people that were preaching this way of scaling your business by just charging a lot more suddenly were also hiring people or paying people to do things, VAs or using Fiverr. And they were paying people to run parts of their business, vital parts of their business, but they weren't paying them a living wage. They weren't even paying them minimum wage sometimes, or they were like, Oh, here's how to hire people for cheap, or whatever. And it's like, How is that any different than all this capitalist bullshit we're already trying to battle? I just don't like the idea that in order to build wealth, you have to exploit other people. No, I'm fucking done with that. No, thank you. And that's just how I was like, You know what? I just feel... And again, this podcast episode is not about me being like, I'm ethically superior because I'm not. We're all learning this. I think there's a lot of things that are going to change in business. This online business space is still so incredibly new. But I just really didn't like that. And I also was realizing, sorry, I'm on my soapbox here for a minute, but I was realizing, not every business model is available to every person. There are privileges of running certain business models. And what I mean is, there are some people that have had the privilege of starting their business and then immediately being able to drop five grand for a mastermind or a course that gives them access to other people that do the same, that gives them access to other people that have more wealth, that can spend more money so that when they all scale their business, it can become this little ecosystem circle of them all making money off of each other. And again, it's not that that's necessarily inherently wrong, but I just think the idea of if you don't ride this wave, if you don't start your business at a certain point in time, or if you didn't start your business by 2018, then you've missed this wave of people charging a lot less for stuff, things that are very, very helpful to know for your business, and then raising their rates over time. I'm seeing courses that used to be$200, $300 now being sold for $1500. That's a huge jump with payment plans that are just like just for payments of 497. Again, it's not that people can't do that, but it's just not accessible to most people. And most people that I find in my audience, there's a mix, but I want people to be able to see my courses and products and be like, that's a little more within my reach. And so that leads me, it only took me 35 minutes, my goodness, to get to this place. But that leads me to my big business decision and my big business announcement. And that is that effective starting May 2023, I'm going to be drastically reducing the price of all of my courses and programs. And I can hear people's thoughts about this, but this just feels so fucking good to me. And the one reason why I announced this to my students first was I wanted to let all my students know, like, hey, I know that some of you paid the full original price for this years ago or recently or whatever. And here's what we're going to do to make that feel better. Because what I didn't want to do was retroactively change everything. I wasn't going to do this and then turn around and refund everyone and stop payment plans and all of that. Instead, I was like, because the value of... Because another thing I'm going to be changing is, and I should have said this first, in doing that is that I'm going to be changing the structure of all these programs. So for example, published with purpose, instead of promising two live rounds every year, I'm only going to promise one. And everyone that has enrolled in all my programs up until this point, they have had all those additional live iterations of support. So the value was there during that enrollment period. But I'm also reaching out to all of my students and making the announcement that there's upgrades coming for them. So for example, students that enrolled in published with purpose at the solo option are being upgraded to the full support option. So they'll have access to all live calls. And I'm actually going to be discontinuing the solo option for publish with purpose. It'll just be one thing again. And then any of the students that enrolled in the full support option, they're going to get either a day of Voxer with me or a week of access to Voxer support with me, and then a shop credit. So I'm going to be launching a digital product shop, hopefully in the fall, and really excited about that. But that's what I'm doing for them. And then similarly, my other program, Pretty Productive Life, that's going to be simplified. And so students are going to retain access to everything in there. But moving forward, all the stuff I had in there before, there was six different extra bonus courses, smaller ones, but those will not be included. So they're going to retain access to that as well as the new updated simplified Notion ecosystem. And they're also going to get a shop credit. And so this continues down the pipeline of those main programs. And it just feels so good. And it feels so exciting to talk about because while my courses are still going to cost money, I just was like, I don't want to continue to scale my business by continuing to raise the bar of how high people can reach. And that's just it. I feel like that's all I want to say about that. I'm really excited to... I think that there's a way to scale my business without having to constantly raise my prices. That's just where I'm at. And I also just don't see myself as easily investing in high ticket stuff anymore. I feel like this is such a controversial topic. I'm probably going to get some mad emails about this, but that's okay. It's more of a conversation and it's just truthfully how I feel. This is not to say that high ticket offers are bad. This is not to say that people shouldn't charge what they want to charge, but I just think that there are a lot of courses and programs and coaching and whatever that are wildly expensive that shouldn't be. I just think it's interesting. I think a lot of people are seeing that, too, or really looking at the value of stuff and being like, Wow, there was a lot of marketing put into this. There was a lot of promises. But then I get into a program and it doesn't even have a course platform or stuff's messy, or you've got to finish it in 30 days, otherwise you lose access. Or to me, I just think there needs to be a higher standard across the board for stuff. And if people are going to be charging thousands of dollars for programs, I don't think they should be taking away access or creating these environments that just really aren't that great. And I don't even have any one specific thing in mind. I know for me, it would take a lot for me to spend that money again. And honestly, there's only one program that I still am like, God, I'm really glad I spent $2,000 on that, and that's Wayne. I love that program. But they also deliver on that again and again and again. I mean, it's still going strong and their integrity is unmatched. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you can look it up on my website. But I also think it's interesting that... And I am an affiliate for them, but I wouldn't be if I really didn't love what they do because I'm really not an affiliate for many people. And I haven't even hit pause on this recording. I am just rambling. This shows you how out of practice I am with podcasting. But those are the business decisions I'm making. And the questions I answered for students, the main ones was, all my students are going to continue to get access to everything. Nothing's being taken away from them. If anything, I'm giving them upgrades to things and they'll get future updates to everything. And while this does mean that I'm not promising two live rounds of publish with purpose every year, I'm still committing to one. I don't think it means less support. I think it actually means more in a lot of ways because I'll be able to more consistently show up. I mean, I've consistently showed up in our Facebook groups, and anytime people tag me, I go above and beyond. People have a question, I'll do a Loom video, I'll look at their canvas stuff. I will always make sure my students feel supported in my programs. And so I actually think that honoring my capacity with that feels good. And then I feel like some people might be like, this is weird. It feels like a step backwards. But I'll tell you that every time I've made a big business decision or shifted my business model, for example, when I was like, I can't do coaching anymore, even though some people are going to be disappointed or not agree or understand my decision, every time I trust my gut, it feels so good. And so I'm excited about this. And I think I'm more excited to sell my programs now and invite people in to being a part of them because it just feels better. And I also feel like... I don't know, I just feel so many ways about it, but it's positive and I'm really excited. And again, it's not like I'm dropping the price down of my programs to free. Things will still cost money and things will still not necessarily be available to everyone. But it's not like at least it'll be a little easier. And at least it will also reflect how I do things moving forward because one thing is when I relaunch Pretty Productive Life, I want those students in there, I still want to host planning parties and quarterly business calls or whatever. I want to do those things, but unfortunately, I can't promise that they're always going to happen. I can't say, hey, every month we're going to do this or every week we're going to do this because I can't do that. And I've had so much grief around that. So much grief. I wish I could just predict my energy and predict my brain working, but I cannot. It will not do that. And so that's the reality I'm facing. And it's like, okay, so how do I put that on a sales page? That's my thing is how do I tell people, hey, you're going to join this program and you're getting all this stuff. And sometimes we're going to have live calls or planning calls, but they're going to be infrequent. And I'll probably tell you about them the same week. I don't know. Maybe that can't happen, but maybe trusting in myself and knowing that that's what I can do and that's what's available, maybe the right people will find it. And maybe those people will also be people that are like, you know what? Even if you did host a call every week, I don't know that I could attend every week. I think we're all unique enough, yet somehow the same, where things are going to work out. And I'm not super stressed about it. And I'm not sitting here trying to make a million dollars, and I think it's going to be okay. So I wish that this had been a more structured episode. I feel like I was all over the place, and I'm excited to do some launches of my revamped programs that are going to be... I'm just excited. I feel like the price is just going to make sense and people are going to be like, Yeah, this really feels good. I would love to enroll for this price. It doesn't feel like a huge stretch and I can do it. And that feels so exciting. I'm really excited for that. I'm excited to announce those changes. They'll be rolling out slowly as I revamp stuff and move away from some of the FOMO tactics. I think there's going to be less of all that, too. I'm just pumped and if anything, I feel like I say this all the time. I just hope this podcast episode helps other business owners make decisions that feel good to them. And again, I feel like no matter how many times I say this, someone's going to take this the wrong way. But I think people should charge what feels good to them. But I think people also should be realistic about what they're charging and what value really means. I've been on so many webinars where a program is at least a couple of thousand dollars and they say, I could have charged so much more for this. And then everyone else says, Yeah, I totally would have paid more. But would people have? I mean, sure, I've said something like that before, but it's like, but given the option, I would like to pay less. I don't think that's unheard of. And also everyone's an affiliate for something, right? So I just think that there has to be more discernment. And as business owners, let's just get real with each other. Let's do better. Let's not build business models where we're exploiting other people. Let's not run sales and launches where we make people feel like they have to join now or else. And I've been guilty of that. And I want to do business better, and I want to move away from that. And I don't want anyone to ever join a program and feel like I've got to do it in this time frame, or if I get sick, or if a life circumstance happens, or I want to take time off to go hang out with my dog in the forest. I want people to be able to do those things and know that they can still access my programs, which is why I'm a big fan of lifetime access. I think lifetime access is an accessibility issue. That could be a whole other episode, couldn't it? Anyway, I better go because it's almost 50 minutes. Thank you for listening. If you want to continue this conversation, you totally can. I'm over on Instagram @sarahsteckler, and I love hearing from all of you. Have a wonderful day. I think I'm going to drop this today. I was going to drop it Friday, but I think I'm going to drop it today. I will talk to all of you soon and hopefully we'll get this podcast bumping again. We'll get back on a regular schedule, whatever that looks like. Toodle loo.

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