The Tennis Approach: Pricing Your Alternative Offering With Integrity
For therapists launching a group offering or workshop, one of the most sensitive parts of the process is pricing the event.
Most therapists want to find the balance between making a workshop financially accessible, while still communicating and honoring value in the offering.
Like most Flourish strategies, there is a pricing strategy my clients and I developed rather organically. It’s earned the name: The Tennis Approach.
Before I walk through the sequence of The Tennis Approach, there are few terms I’d like to define:
The goal of a workshop is to be able to make more than your hourly rate, while charging less than your hourly rate for each client. Pretty straightforward, right?
So start with your hourly rate. And multiply your rate by the number of hours your workshop will be. And then divide this total number by your target number of attendees.
This will be your Financial Floor for the workshop.
Calculating the Event Value and Cost Per Attendee using your hourly rate should be the Financial Floor of the event, or the first step in this process.
We started this exercise from the Facilitator Lens, now we have to hit the ball back over the net, and look at this event from Attendee Lens.
After giving this a moment of thought, letting it sit, and putting yourself in the shoes of your attendees: $75 for a 6-hour workshop is considerably below market value. Think about yourself as a consumer of workshops:
What other intensives have I attended?
What would my financial boundaries be?
How does my offering compare with other intensives?
Is it in lieu of a day retreat? A training?
Pricing is marketing. The price of your event is a big signal on how individuals should view your event. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ price. The Tennis Approach exposes the subjectivism in this process, exploring the perspectives of both the facilitator and attendees.
From the Attendee Lens, start to explore how much a 6-hour intensive could cost. Break it down even further if you’d like. Individuals are paying for 6 hours of value. Would attendees paying $50 per hour of their time fall in line with the value you are delivering?
Remember, we are still viewing this from Facilitator Lens. Start to consider this new data:
Is 4x my hourly rate where I want to land?
Are there administrative or other costs to consider?
What margin or ROI could I really reach for here?
Would I want to offer pricing options: early bird pricing, price tiers, discounts, deposits?
Play around with the numbers here again, then hit the ball back to the Attendee Lens to see how that impacts Cost Per Attendee.
The Tennis Approach explores the subjective nature of price setting. Starting with calculating the revenue implications from the Facilitator Lens, then switching to the cost implications from Attendee lens, you are able to create price points with empathy and intentionality that consider both sides.
Pricing is an inherently grey process. Give yourself grace and flexibility. Explore your feelings around value and remember that processes like this are learning experiences above all.