An astonishing number of business owners would rather reorganize their entire digital filing system than ask someone to buy something.
Ironic, don’t you think? Every business owner I know wants to make money.
We want our work to be valued, our bills to be paid, our businesses to grow, and enough left over to enjoy the lives we’re working so hard to create. We want to make a difference, support our communities, and have the resources to do something about the things in this world that piss us off or break our hearts.
We love the work. We believe in the transformation it creates. We can talk for hours about the people we’ve helped, the problems we’ve solved, and the possibilities we see for the people we haven’t met yet. Give us an opportunity to share our expertise, and we’ll happily pour everything we know into a conversation.
Ask us to name our price, and suddenly we’re very interested in whether the dishwasher needs unloading.
We’ve all encountered the sales tactics that make our skin crawl. The unsolicited direct message that begins with a compliment and ends with a pitch. These days you don’t even get the compliment first. Or how about the stranger who pretends to be interested in your life long enough to steer the conversation toward their offer. The countdown clock that resets tomorrow. The salesperson who treats every objection as an invitation to keep pushing.
We’ve seen people manufacture inadequacy, exploit insecurity, and turn someone’s vulnerability into an opportunity to close a sale. We’ve watched perfectly reasonable questions get reframed as limiting beliefs, and financial hesitation treated as evidence that someone isn’t sufficiently committed to their own transformation.
Of course we want to distance ourselves from that behavior. Especially those of us whose work is rooted in healing, service, advocacy, creativity, and meaningful change. We care about the people on the other side of the transaction. We want them to feel safe with us.
Somewhere along the way, though, many of us began confusing the discomfort of being unethically sold to with the act of selling itself.
And that confusion is costing us.
Let me tell you a story about Emma. She’s a composite of women I’ve worked with over the years. Strong, independent women who’ve spent years “doing the work” to “get their heads straight,” as actual clients have described it. They’ve examined their beliefs, challenged old conditioning, learned to set boundaries, and grown into capacities they once couldn’t imagine. And they’re still growing. Aren’t we all?
Emma believes deeply in the value of her work. She’s witnessed what becomes possible when people receive the support she offers, and she wants to reach more of them. Yet when the conversation turns to pricing, she finds another layer of herself asking for attention.
She worries that raising her rates will make her greedy. She worries that people will leave. She worries that the people she most wants to serve can’t afford what she needs to charge to support herself. So she softens her prices, imagines objections before anyone voices them, and sometimes withholds the invitation altogether.
Her concern for other people is genuine. So is her discomfort with naming the true value of her work and making the ask. The two have become so entangled that she can no longer tell where her compassion ends and her assumptions begin.
The question I ask in conversations like these is simple: Who gets to decide what another person can afford?
Because Emma has been making that decision herself.
She doesn’t know what resources a prospective client has available, what they value most, what they might willingly rearrange to pursue something important, or what other opportunities they’re choosing between. She knows what she imagines their financial circumstances might be, and she lets that imagination determine whether they’ll ever hear the offer.
That’s playing God with their sovereignty.
It’s a provocative thing to say to someone who is trying to be kind. But kindness can become complicated when we begin making decisions that belong to other grown-ass adults.
We cannot know someone’s entire financial reality from the outside. A person with an impressive income may be carrying obligations we know nothing about. Someone with modest means may have savings earmarked for precisely the kind of transformation we provide. Someone might decide our work is worth saving for. Someone else might have the money readily available and prefer to spend it elsewhere.
Each of those decisions belongs to them.
When we assume someone can’t afford our services and withhold an otherwise appropriate invitation, we substitute our judgment for theirs. We quietly appoint ourselves the authority over their priorities, their resources, and the possibilities they’re allowed to consider.
Isn’t that curious? A business owner who wants and, let’s be honest, needs money, choosing not to make the ask because that feels more dangerous than the deprivation they’ve become used to.
Perhaps we grew up believing that people with money were selfish, or that asking for money made us demanding. Perhaps we learned that being helpful meant being available regardless of the cost to ourselves, and that sacrifice and suffering make us good. Perhaps we have become so practiced at earning approval through generosity that receiving full compensation feels disingenuous.
Those stories are remarkably convincing when they borrow the language of compassion. We tell ourselves we’re being accessible. We’re being considerate. We’re protecting someone from discomfort. Meanwhile, we’re reducing prices nobody has questioned, offering discounts nobody requested, and deciding that the people we most want to help probably can’t afford us anyway.
When you find yourself deciding someone can’t afford you, what information are you working with? Have they told you what their budget is? Have they asked about alternatives? Have they even had the opportunity to decide whether they want what you’re offering?
Whose discomfort are you trying to relieve?
And let’s not forget, you, the business owner, have financial sovereignty, too.
You have the right to decide what your work costs. You have the right to build a business that supports your life, compensates you well, pays its obligations, creates reserves, and generates profit. You have the right to establish boundaries around your time, your expertise, and the conditions under which you do your best work.
Your desire to serve does not obligate you to subsidize everyone who wants access to you.
You know the value of your work. But when it’s time to name your price, can you hold the number without flinching?
That is exactly what we work through in the Prosperity Breakthrough Call. One conversation. Your pricing, your patterns, and a clear path forward.
We’ve inherited a peculiar expectation that people doing meaningful work should demonstrate the purity of their intentions through financial sacrifice.
The more important the cause, the more suspicious we become of the person who expects to be well compensated for advancing it.
That suspicion has a cost. Have you been paying it?
Healers are supposed to heal. Advocates are supposed to advocate. Artists are supposed to create. People who care deeply about others are expected to keep giving, even when their own businesses are struggling to survive.
And when they finally acknowledge that their work needs to pay for the lives they’re living, they’re encouraged to keep their prices reasonable, whatever reasonable happens to mean to the person making the suggestion. And whoever is making that suggestion brings their own money stories to the conversation, healthy and disempowered alike.
I’ve seen what that bargain costs.
I’ve seen brilliant business owners work far more hours than they intended, delivering extraordinary value while quietly wondering how they’ll pay themselves. I’ve seen people whose generosity has become so deeply embedded in their business model that they can barely distinguish service from self-abandonment.
Eventually, the numbers have something to say about it, and they don’t care how generous you’ve been.
Your business has expenses. Your work requires time, skill, attention, and energy. Your future requires resources. Your life deserves to be funded while you’re living it, including the parts that have nothing to do with serving another person.
The price of your work needs to account for those realities.
This is why I spend so much time with business owners looking at the actual math. We examine what they want to earn, how much they want to work, what it costs to deliver their services, and what their business needs to retain in order to remain healthy. We explore the assumptions they’ve been using to set their prices and whether those assumptions can support the lives they say they want.
Sometimes the numbers reveal that an offer is dramatically underpriced. Sometimes they reveal that the delivery model needs to change. Sometimes they show that a lower-cost offering is entirely sustainable when it’s intentionally designed and supported by other revenue streams.
Financial sovereignty includes the freedom to be generous.
You can choose to offer scholarships, sliding-scale pricing, community programs, or pro bono work. You can decide that serving a particular population is important enough to build an entire business model around making that service accessible, with the financial foundation to sustain that choice.
Prospective clients have the same right to decide what they do with their money.
A person who wants your services does not suddenly acquire the authority to determine what you should charge. Their financial circumstances shape what they can or want to buy, and you may decide together whether an alternative arrangement makes sense. You are each free to propose possibilities, establish boundaries, and decline an arrangement that doesn’t serve you.
Neither person needs to surrender their agency for a transaction to be ethical.
This is the part of selling I wish we talked about more often instead of endlessly bitching about bro marketers and treating money like a spiritual contaminant.
Consent belongs in commerce.
I believe in consent in all things, including making the ask. It’s why dropping uninvited into someone’s direct messages with a sales pitch feels so gross to me. Someone accepting a connection request, commenting on a post, or sharing something vulnerable does not automatically mean they’ve invited us to sell to them.
An invitation has a context. A relationship has boundaries. And a person’s attention belongs to them.
We can make our work visible, communicate what we offer, and create opportunities for people to express interest. When a conversation naturally opens the door to discussing our services, we can ask whether they’d like to hear more. We can make an offer clearly enough that someone understands what they’re being invited into, what it costs, and what they can reasonably expect.
We can answer their questions, explore whether we’re a good fit, and give them the information they need to make a decision they feel good about.
Then we give them room to decide.
We don’t need to turn their uncertainty into an objection to overcome. We don’t need to manufacture false urgency or imply that declining means they don’t believe in themselves. We don’t need to keep following up after someone has clearly told us they’re uninterested.
And we certainly don’t get to decide that our belief in the transformative power of our work gives us special dispensation to override another person’s boundaries.
Believing in the value of your work creates a responsibility to make it available. It never creates an entitlement to someone else’s attention, money, or yes.
That responsibility does ask something of us, though.
It asks us to participate.
The creation of all that you desire requires active, willful participation, and that includes making the ask.
You can have an extraordinary offer, a beautiful website, glowing testimonials, and a library of generous content. You can spend years refining your expertise and building relationships with people who genuinely appreciate what you contribute.
You can become so good at giving people a taste of your work that they begin to expect they’ll always get it for free.
And you can tell yourself that anyone who wants to work with you will know how to find you.
Sometimes they will.
Sometimes they’ll read everything you publish, appreciate every insight, and never realize there’s an opportunity to receive more direct support. Sometimes they’ll assume you’re too busy, too expensive, or unavailable. Sometimes they’ll simply need someone to make the possibility explicit.
The invitation creates an opening that may never have existed otherwise.
Making the ask requires us to step beyond the relative safety of being appreciated and into the vulnerability of being considered.
Because someone might say no.
They might love your work and decline your offer. They might choose another provider. They might decide the timing is wrong, the investment doesn’t fit their priorities, or the particular service you’re offering isn’t what they need.
And if you’ve attached your worth to the answer, that no can feel devastating.
Suddenly the conversation becomes about whether you’re good enough, whether your prices are justified, whether you’ve overestimated your abilities, or whether you should have kept your mouth shut in the first place.
For some business owners, even a yes can bring its own discomfort. Now someone has agreed to pay the full price. Now the money is coming. Now there’s a commitment to fulfill, a relationship to honor, and an expectation that the work will deliver the value you’ve described.
Receiving can feel just as vulnerable as asking.
This is why I believe the inner work and the outer work belong together.
We can build thoughtful offers, examine our costs, establish sustainable prices, and learn to communicate the value of our work. We can also become curious about what happens inside us when it’s time to speak those prices out loud.
Does your breathing change? Do you rush to fill the silence after naming the number? Do you begin explaining all the reasons your work costs what it does before anyone has asked? Do you immediately offer to take something off the price because the other person paused to think?
What might become possible if you could name your price, remain present, and trust another adult to respond?
With practice, you can develop enough trust in yourself to hear the answer as information, without turning it into a verdict on your value.
A no might tell you something useful about the offer, the timing, the audience, or how clearly you’ve communicated the transformation you provide. It might reveal a genuine gap between what people need and what you’ve created. Or it might simply be one person’s decision about how they want to use their resources.
You can examine that information without turning it into an indictment of yourself.
You can celebrate someone making a decision that is right for them, even when that decision doesn’t produce revenue for you.
That is the kind of selling I want more of in the world.
If you recognized yourself somewhere in this article -- the Emma in you, the one softening prices and swallowing the ask -- that is not a character flaw. It is a pattern. And patterns can be worked through.
The Prosperity Breakthrough Call is one conversation where we look at exactly what is keeping you from charging what your work is worth and making the ask without apology.
Ready to stop negotiating with yourself?
Imagine what changes when business owners stop treating the ask as something vaguely shameful. Imagine the work that becomes possible when people who are deeply committed to their clients also become deeply committed to the financial health of their businesses.
That means sustainable practices, well-compensated expertise, and resources available for innovation, generosity, community investment, and the causes that deserve our attention.
Selling as a service means believing deeply enough in the value of your work to make the invitation, and respecting the other person’s sovereignty enough to let the decision be theirs.
What might change if you trusted your work enough to offer it, yourself enough to receive compensation for it, and the person across from you enough to honor their answer?
There are people who will genuinely benefit from what you have created. Some will be ready. Some will be interested later. Some will decide that what you’re offering belongs in someone else’s life.
You won’t know which is which if you keep the invitation to yourself.
Make the ask.
Let them choose.
And keep participating in the creation of the life you desire.
Your job is to make the ask. Naming your price confidently is part of that ask. Your business survives and thrives when you keep asking.
If you’re ready to stop avoiding the ask and start building the financial foundation your work deserves, let’s talk.
P.S. Profit is Protest, and so is selling from a place of sovereignty. A sovereign transaction leaves both people free to say yes, free to say no, and whole regardless of the outcome.