By Nettie Owens, CPO-CD · The Sappari Group

Originally explored on Wake Up Women Leaders — Episode 22

You did not underprice your offer because you miscalculated. You underpriced it because charging more felt like too much to ask.

And before anyone even pushed back, you had already adjusted the number down. Added a qualifier. Apologized for the invoice before it was opened. That pattern, and it IS a pattern, is what Episode 22 of Wake Up Women Leaders was about. Pricing your work with confidence is not primarily a structural problem. It’s a mindset problem wearing a pricing costume.

Victoria opened the episode with a question that cuts right to it: “Did you just say I’m sorry before you told someone how much it costs to work with you? Did you have your knee jerk “I’m sorry” sneeze of the day in your business?”

If that landed, keep reading.

The Phrase That Has to Go

Before we can talk about pricing your work with confidence, we have to dismantle the phrase that is undermining the conversation before it even starts.

“Charge what you are worth.”

That phrase is everywhere. It is on every freelancer forum, every business coaching website, every article about women and money. And it’s doing real damage because there is no dollar amount that equals what you are worth as a human being.

“There is no monetary value that equals what you’re worth. You are a wonderfully and uniquely made individual that is here for a purpose, to serve, to change the world, to create something new. And there is truly no dollar amount that’s going to make sense here.”

This matters because when you try to find a price that feels equivalent to your personal value, the price will never feel right. It will always feel too high because no number is large enough to represent your worth as a person. So you lower it. And lower it again.

And apologize for whatever is left.

Pricing your work with confidence requires removing your personal worth from the equation entirely. The price is not about you. It is about the work, the outcome, the expertise, and the value delivered to the person receiving it. Once you separate those two things, the pricing conversation changes.

What Is Actually Underneath the Apology

Victoria introduced two specific patterns during this episode that explain why pricing your work with confidence is so hard for so many women leaders. Neither of them is about math.

The self-worth problem.

“Talking about charging your worth is less about dollars and more about self-worth. Having self worth means taking care of your mental health, your physical health, your sense of self-respect, having clear boundaries, and being able to communicate them calmly and consistently,”

When pricing your work with confidence feels impossible, it is often because the discomfort is not really about the number. It is about self-respect, boundaries, and the belief that asking for what the work is actually worth is too much. That you don’t quite have the credentials, the experience, or the standing to claim the number that makes sense.

Victoria put it plainly: “You don’t have a sales problem. You have a self-worth problem.”

The Ick.

This one requires more directness, and Victoria went there. There is a specific disgust response that some women experience around charging for their services; a feeling that putting a dollar amount on their work is somehow dirty, transactional, or self-serving in a way that makes them deeply uncomfortable.

“That disgust is actually coming from protecting your life. There is a sense of danger that comes from exchanging hours for dollars. And let’s not forget what hours are. That is your life. So you’re giving your life for dollars.”

That connection, hours to life, isn’t abstract. It activates something protective and primal. And for women specifically, Victoria noted, there are layers of cultural and historical conditioning around exchanging time, skill, and presence for money that can produce a genuine physiological response of disgust before a price is even named.

The path through it is not to push past the feeling by force. It is to reframe what the money represents. “Making good money could be spiritual. Making good money could be positive proof that you are helping people and having a good influence and impact in the world.”

That is not just a optimistic opinion. It’s a reframing thought worth building into how you consider pricing your work every time you sit down to name a number.

The Race to the Bottom

There is a third pattern worth naming separately: the reflex to look sideways rather than inward when setting a price.

“A lot of women will look to the right and look to the left to see what the people next to them are charging, and go with a price that can kind of hide amongst the other providers in her area, her industry. Instead of looking to the side, what you want to do is look inside, because that’s where the value, the gold mine, is.”

When your price is set by what the person down the street is charging, you’ve anchored to the wrong thing. You are not that person. You do not have their history, their client base, their delivery method, or their cost structure. Their number has nothing to do with yours.

And when the reflex is to go lower than the competition to win the business, you have entered what Victoria called the race to the bottom. “The race to the bottom is how much you’re willing to lower the price to beat your competition.” You will keep going lower until the price no longer covers the cost of delivering the work, and then you’ll be wondering why the business is not sustainable.

Pricing your work with confidence means anchoring to what the work is actually worth in your specific context, delivered by you, to your specific client. Not to what someone else is charging and not to a number that feels safe enough to hide behind.

What to Price From Instead

The practical question, once the mindset has been addressed, is: what actually goes into the number?

Here is what I consider when pricing:

What does it cost you to deliver? Not just your time but your overhead, your tools, your training, your business expenses. A entrepreneur’s pricing has to carry the full cost of the business because there is no other revenue stream absorbing it. If your price does not cover what it costs to deliver the work and pay you to do it, the business is subsidizing the client’s experience and you’ll eventually run out of the capacity to do that.

I worked with a client once who, when we mapped out all the factors, discovered she was bringing home less than $20 an hour. She was a well-established, reputable, highly trained professional. Nobody had ever done the math. The price she had been charging for years had simply never been examined against the actual cost of delivering the work.

What is the value to the client? This is the question most leaders skip, yet it is the most important one. What does solving this problem actually mean for the person on the other side? If the work saves them significant time, eliminates significant risk, produces measurable revenue, or solves a problem they have been unable to solve alone, then that value is part of the pricing equation. A price that does not reflect the value delivered isn’t humility. It’s a mismatch.

What is your expertise worth in this delivery? The years of training, iteration, study, and refinement that sit behind the work are part of what the client is paying for. When you price only for the time the work takes, you are disregarding everything that made you capable of doing it well.

How long does delivery take, and what effort does it require? All of it goes into the number. Not just the deliverable time, but the preparation, the follow-up, the thinking that happens between sessions.

The Discount Nobody Asked For

Pricing your work with confidence also means holding the number once you have said it.

This is where the pattern breaks down for most women. The client hears the price and pauses. There is a beat of silence. And before they have said a word, the discount is already being offered.

“If the person did not ask for a discount, you do not provide a discount. They may have in their mind that they were willing to pay you five times as much. You have no idea.”

The preemptive discount is not generosity. It is anxiety. It signals to the client, before they have even responded, that you don’t fully believe in the number yourself. And clients feel that.

Victoria put the dentist analogy to work here and it is the right one. When you need a root canal, you do not go looking for the cheapest provider you can find. The cheap dentist is not reassuring. It is alarming. The low price signals corners being cut, not generosity being extended. The client who is evaluating you is going through exactly the same calculation, consciously or not.

“Let them pay you at the level of the best rather than pay you at the threshold of your shame.”

If a client responds to your price by saying they cannot afford it in that amount right now, that is not an instruction to lower the price. It is an opening to explore how to make it work, either through a payment plan, a different scope, or a phased approach. “It’s not an invitation to make it less. It’s an invitation to provide a way that they can afford it.”

The value of what is on the table does not change because someone cannot access it all at once.

What Happens When You Say the Number and Hold It

Every time I have worked with a client through the pricing conversation, someone who has been charging a number that is clearly too low for what they deliver, the same thing happens when they finally say the number that makes sense.

The client says yes.

“Everyone that I’ve ever talked through this process, whenever they’ve said the thing that scares them the most, maybe they’ve only ever charged $200 for something and then they say it’s going to cost $2,000, the client has said yes without hesitation every single time.”

The number that scared you to say is often the number the client was already prepared to pay. The gap between what you have been charging and what you should be charging exists almost entirely in your own hesitation, not in the client’s willingness.

And once you say it and the client says yes, something shifts. The confidence that was missing is now built on evidence. The next time is easier. And the apology that used to precede every invoice starts to disappear, because you now have proof that the number holds.

Three Things to Do This Week

Remove the phrase “charge what you’re worth” from your vocabulary and replace it with a question: what are the factors that make this number make sense?

Run the full cost analysis on one offer. Time, overhead, expertise, client value. If the math does not produce a number you can live on, the price needs to change before the next sale.

Say your price out loud, alone, before your next pricing conversation. Say it without the qualifier that follows it. Practice until the number comes out steady.

What’s Coming Next

In Episode 23, Victoria and I are getting into productivity, specifically the system that works for how women leaders actually think and operate. The real version, built around you. Join us Wednesday at 3:30pm ET.

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Nettie Owens, CPO-CD · The Sappari Group · sapparigroup.com · © 2026