The Life Giving Project
Dunya started her business The Life-Giving Project in 2021 to provide Eastern and African holistic practices for women and girls and to offer women a nurturing space. Its activities include collaborating with local authorities, community organisations and businesses to deliver yoga and Longo dance classes.
The challenge Dunya identified she was facing was how to talk about money, and about charging clients for the services being offered.
The ALS began by exploring the hesitancies she had in increasing prices and the impacts she thought this could have on existing customer levels. This then gave members ideas about how to combat these issues, such as doing market research to find prices offered by similar services elsewhere, and trialling a price rise for a short period of time to see if any negative outcomes were observed.
A major factor in Dunya’s challenge was a lack of confidence in talking about money which made it difficult to approach existing customers with a price rise. This led members into a strand of questioning around the value Dunya placed on her own experience and services, and how creating a price list may mitigate the stress of having the conversation as everything would already be transparently set out.
“When the business is all on your shoulders, it feels like am struggling to keep up and it is very helpful to be with [others] going through the journey and having [their] views.”
Dunya, The Life Giving Project
Many actions emerged from the discussion and Dunya was able to take away these and try to implement them in her business, such as:
- Creating a price list and presenting it to both old and new clients.
- Benchmarking her rate with the market rate and increasing it accordingly to best value her services.
- Remarketing her business to highlight Longo dance as a unique offer.
- Making use of Google reviews for feedback and using that to increase her profile.
- Creating and issuing more formal contracts to clients.
- Reflecting on the position she holds and the value she brings to have confidence in increasing her prices.
Reflections from the session were very positive, with all members finding something they could try implement in their business from the actions. The challenge of how to increase prices seemed to resonate with the members, and they found that actions such as benchmarking prices and exploring Google reviews could be very useful ways to address the hesitancy.
One of the main values this ALS showcased was that a safe space for sharing is vital, allowing all participants to be open about their challenges and supported with them.