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Thoughts on inflation and addressing the concern of raising prices on your products and services in these times.

Transcription

Inflation and your prices.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I want to talk about your business. And a common question that I’ve been getting lately is, Should I raise my prices, especially with inflation going through the roof?

So what’s inflation?

Okay, so first off, let’s just all get on the same page, when we’re talking inflation, when we’re talking about is that the value of the dollar is being depressed, and which makes everything go up in price.

So everything all at once is going up in price. So most things are going up higher, you’re just paying more for a whole lot. And there’s a whole lot of reasons about what goes into that I’m not gonna get into the economics, or all the arguments about what causes it, but it is happening, we are paying more for everything.

So should you feel guilty about raising your prices, because aren’t you going along with the process, if that’s the case if you can go along without raising prices, and it doesn’t make a big deal to your bottom line?

Fine, go for it, that is not an argument. But if you’re feeling the crunch, really bad, and it’s going to come down to laying people off or doing a whole lot of other things that you just don’t want to do that maybe even cutting back on the quality of your product or service.

That’s not a negotiation. For me, it is things are prices are going up, prices are going up, you can’t take responsibility for the fact that prices are going up.

In the end, it comes out to be a very simple conversation. And this is one of the things that as I started parsing this out, in my mind, I’m like, you know, this really comes out to the most basic concepts.

But it’s one of those things that we don’t talk about, especially in America, if you’re in America, these types of things we usually don’t cover. Because it’s not seen as good to be raising prices, like we should be really fighting, raising prices.

But you know what, here’s how you got to see it as a business owner, and we’re going to talk about the consumer. But as the producer, as the person that has something for sale, your job is to make the most amount of profit for yourself, for your investors, for any other owners that you have involved anybody that you owe money to or what have you, your job is to make that money and as much of it as possible for as little resources as possible. resources include time, it includes capital, it includes time for others, and includes employees, all these things, all the things that it takes to make whatever it is that you’re selling, your job is to get the most for the least.

And you say, Wow, that’s really rude. That’s really slimy capitalism and so forth.

But flip it on its head. Okay, let’s look at it from the consumer standpoint, nobody ever says that the consumer is greedy, because they want the most amount of resources for the least amount of money.

It’s the same thing. It’s only in reverse. There’s no difference between the people. Because I’m a consumer, in some cases, and in some cases, I’m a producer. In some cases, I’m selling in some cases I’m buying.

And the same with most people, most people are producing something. Now they may not be producing it on a retail level. Most people aren’t business owners, they’re not producing stuff on a retail level, but they are producing usually time, they’re giving time, effort, mental energy into a job, they are selling their time for a certain amount of money.

In that case, also, if you look at it from that perspective, they are looking to give the least amount of resources, their time, their effort, their mentality, their hopes, dreams, and life.

They’re looking to give as little up for as much money in return as possible. You see, no matter which situation you get, and the same thing is true.

I don’t care if you’re talking about a politician. I don’t care if you’re talking about a movie star. I don’t care if you’re talking about a person that’s working for charity.

The same thing is true no matter what people want the most, for the least as much as possible.

As long as we’re all doing that at the same time and we all realize, and we don’t act like that isn’t the case. If we all realize that’s the case, and we all balance each other out.

We all have to meet part halfway or what have you unless we really come up with a very high-end product or service for a low number of resources.

But when you’re going out to get a product or service, you don’t care if it’s a high-end if it’s something that you really want, and it’s the only thing that can do it, then the amount of money does not matter as much.

You and you don’t, you certainly don’t care what type of resources it took to create it when you matter. What matters is that it does the job.

If it took one person to go in their garage, and toss a bunch of things together and create a car, but this car is guaranteed, it won’t. It will last you forever. When it gets in a car accident, it won’t even dent a debt, you just take the most absurd scenario, just the absolute perfect scenario when it comes to a car.

How much more are you willing to pay for that car than you would any other car if you had the resources. And the plain fact that you don’t care whether one guy made it, or 10 guys made it, or 100 people made it, you don’t care how much money it took to create it. What you want is the end product.

We’re getting way far off of here from inflation, so forth. But if you understand that what matters is are people going to continue purchasing what you’re offering for whatever price that you’re putting it at.

And in most cases, I have found that if you’re offering a high-quality product, it doesn’t have to be the highest quality.

But if you are offering a high-quality product or service, and you in most cases, you’re not you are new do not have your prices high enough.

Because we usually pull our prices out of thin air, you could say we just base it off of nothing. And we never really test the high end, how far can you push the price up, which we should, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t, because, on the other end, they could always decide not to buy and that’s okay.

And then you can always offer a money-back guarantee, if you’re really concerned about people, you know, not liking the end result of giving you a bad review or what have you.

So if you layout everything, in general, I tend to be for high prices, as long as you’re offering high-end products.

If you’re not, maybe find ways to beef up your product, and then offer an even higher price or offer a different version of your product or service, that’s higher-end, while still keeping your main product at a baseline that you know people can afford.

That’s just a little tip don’t take on inflation as if it’s your fault. You can’t decide how much how valuable the dollar is you can’t decide how valuable things are. You have to go with the flow you we’re all in this together.

And we kind of all has to do our own thing. At the same time. While we’re in it together, we all have to look out for ourselves. So go out there, raise your prices, see if it works.

In most cases it will because if inflation grows slowly, hopefully, people will wake up eventually and do the things necessary to make it come down because an in a truly free market.

What you end up having is lower prices, higher quality and that can go further and further and further to the point where things start making it appear that things are free.

And we’ve done a whole lot of that in the past and we’ll talk about that in the future sometime. But that’s all I got for tonight. Hey, if you’re looking for strategies that you can use in your business, not just these principles that are very basic.

Go check out my blog, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business you can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com that’s all I got.

You have a great night. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.