124 | Pricing by the Client's Hourly Rate: A Sliding-Scale Variant

0:00 Hi there, welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman, and this podcast is for herbalists and nutritionists who are in clinical practice. I am just popping in here today to do a really teeny tiny episode about a concept that I heard about recently that clicked some things in my brain, and I thought, oh, it might be useful for you, too. So here's the deal. I was listening to the Death, Sex, and Money podcast, which I really appreciate and enjoy, and they did an episode recently on pay-what-you-want pricing. And, of course, pay-what-you-want pricing is a little bit different from a sliding scale in the sense that a lot of times it starts at zero and goes up to however much you might want to pay.

0:40 And in this podcast, it was really more in the context of retail environments such as a coffee shop and a musician and that sort of thing. However, as clinicians, of course, we have lots of different models for how we can make our pricing accessible, and lots of people work with a sliding scale model where we try to help people place themselves on the sliding scale. I've done separate episodes before about my experiences with that and some of the different pricing models that I've played with, so I'm not going to go into the full thing right now. One of the things that they shared in this podcast was the idea of pricing things based on the customer or the consumer or the client's hourly rate.

1:24 So however much they would get paid for an hour of their time, that you could adjust your pricing based on that. And I thought, oh, that's such a smart idea. Obviously, it's not going to work for everybody in certain populations, etc., etc. But in terms of giving people a benchmark for what is this worth, like an hour of your time, feels like a very accessible number for people. Like most people have a good idea of approximately how much they get paid per hour. And I think it feels very equitable to me. So I could see something like pricing your consults at one hour or two hours of the customer or the client or the consumer's hourly rate.

2:08 That seems, in some ways, cognitively a little bit easier than a sliding scale. Now, I know there are problems such as what do you do when somebody is retired, when they don't have a job, etc., etc. Like that, you know, there may be a minimum price or something like that. But anyway, I love this idea of the unit of time kind of being the anchor as opposed to the actual dollar value, because I do think it puts us in the realm of... Of exchange and commerce as opposed to capitalism. It gives people a sense of like, oh, okay, I actually have a quite high hourly salary, which means I probably need to be paying about that much or, you know, half that much or double that much or whatever it is that you decide on.

2:52 Anyway, it struck me as a useful concept, something to think about. The other thing that came to me is I'm pretty sure that I've heard that concept presented in other places before, but something about hearing it this week landed and made a lot of sense to me. And the other times I've heard it, I think I've just glossed it over. It hasn't really clicked in my mind. So I also wanted to just put in a little plug for sometimes when you think that, oh, you've explained things before, or people have heard this concept before, everybody knows you're supposed to do X, Y, Z. There are times when the way that you say it, or the time that you say it, or the moment in time that you say it, that that is the time that it clicks for people.

3:34 So I also just want to put in a plug for this idea that sometimes when we're in a place to hear something and receive something, that is when we hear it. So I think the same is true for our clinical recommendations and our advice. And also for us as people who are moving through this world, sometimes you just hear things in a different way at a certain time, and then it makes sense. So anyway, when the timing is right, the message makes a lot more sense. And sometimes you're the right person in the right place at the right time to share the message in a way that a client understands it or it clicks in their mind. So anyway, just a little plug for the work that we do and also sharing this idea of pricing things based on the client or consumer's hourly rate, might be an interesting thing to play around with if you have been trying to figure out a pricing model that works for you that takes into account different people, who have a spectrum of what they can afford.

4:34 I'm going to leave it there for now. I'm getting ready to go teach a deep dive class on omega-3 fatty acids. So I wanted to get a podcast out there for this week, but also I need to ground myself a little bit before I teach. So I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. Thank you so much for the work that you do, and I will see you back here next week.