HOW TO WORK OUT YOUR INCOME GOAL AS A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER
In this series, I'm sharing with you my A-Z guide of pricing tips to help you price your services with confidence and feel more confident charging what you need to support yourself. Here are letters G-I:
G is for Go All In
Now this doesn't mean hustling.
That doesn't mean overworking and overwhelming yourself.
This is about you putting in the energy, effort and passion into the clients that you’re working with. When you go all in for a client, you’re so focused on them for the time that you’re working with them, that you’re able to get better results for them.
You become a part of their brand. So rather than just being a freelance Social Media Manager, you become their brand too. You adopt their desires and have the same drive to see them succeed.
And this is why it's really important that you say yes only to clients that you believe in. Don't work with anyone who you don't feel really connected to. There’s no point in working with a client who isn't a full “Oh my god, hell yes!” because when you start working with them, you’ll end up feeling resentful.
You end up feeling overwhelmed and you'll find that you're not putting your all into your work for them. And when you're not putting your all into something, you'll stop feeling worthy of the amount of money that you are receiving.
And that's not good for anyone.
It's not good for you, it’s definitely not good for your clients and it's not good for your reputation.
So make sure that you work with clients you absolutely love and go all in for them.
H is for Hanging out with people who charge more
What I see quite often - and this isn't a terrible thing - but I see a lot of people who have done a social media course and they're hanging out with the people who've just taken that course as well but all the people they're hanging out with are charging really low prices.
Because no one feels like they can charge much yet as they’ve only just qualified.
As the common phrase goes, you’re the product of the five people that you spend the most time with.
So if you’re surrounding yourself with four other people who are charging really low prices, who are needing to hustle, who need 15 different clients to hit their income goal, chances are that’s going to be your reality too.
When you immerse yourself in a group of friends who are charging higher prices, who are running their business on their own terms, who are saying no to things that don't serve them, you then feel like it’s acceptable for you to do that too.
Empowered women empower women.
So it's really important that you look at who you're hanging out with. And I’m absolutely not saying that you can't hang out with people that aren't charging high prices or you have to stop speaking to your friends. But you also want to put yourself into groups of people who are one step or two steps or five steps ahead of you so that you can see what is possible for you.
This will help expand your thinking into what you could do and it helps you step up more in your business.
I is for Income Goal
Now we touched on this briefly when we talked about letter F, the formula.
The pricing formula was income goal / max no. of platforms you want to manage = your platform price
But I want to dive a little bit deeper into your income goal, because the way I do it is split it up into four different categories.
So you have your personal expenses, your business expenses, profit percentage, if you work on a profit first basis (which I’ll cover later on) and you also have a tax percentage so that you can factor in the amount of tax that you're going to have to pay, into your income goal.
What this means is that, when it comes to your tax bill, you've already saved some of your tax in advance so you're not met with a bill and no money to pay it.
In each of these four categories, you need to get really clear on everything that you’re paying out every month. And you can even factor in the things that you want to pay for.
So if you want to save up some money for a holiday or you want to put an extra £100 in savings every month, factor that into your income goal.
The clearer you are on your income goal, the better it's going to work in the formula and the easier it's going to be for you to hit your income goal because you’ll be pricing right.
If you don't get your income goal right, your platform price is going to be off and then you could end up not making the money that you need. Which leads to getting stuck in that hustle. And you don’t want that, do you?
Catch the next episode in this series here: Why you need to keep things simple to convert more clients
