A founder in one of our cohorts told me she felt uncomfortable raising her prices. She said it did not feel Christian.
I want to take that seriously, because it is a real conviction and not a silly one. And then I want to say plainly that it is wrong, and that the discomfort is pointing at something else.
Scripture is not vague about price
“A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight.” Proverbs 11:1.
Read that carefully. The condemnation is of the dishonest scale, not of the price. A just weight is what delights him. Not a light one. A just one.
The same sentence that forbids you from cheating a customer also forbids you from lying about what your work is worth. Both are false balances. One robs the buyer. The other robs the worker, the worker’s family, and everyone the business would have employed had it survived.
“The labourer is worthy of his hire.” Luke 10:7, repeated by Paul in 1 Timothy 5:18. The apostles were not embarrassed to say it.
What undercharging actually does
It is worth being concrete, because the spiritual framing can float free of consequence.
A business priced below its cost of sustainability does three things.
It cannot employ anyone. Every job that business would have created does not exist. In a market where formal employment is the scarcest thing we have, that is not a private decision.
It cannot survive a bad quarter. So the founder absorbs the shock personally, which usually means family savings, which usually means the family carries a risk they did not agree to.
It cannot give. A business with no margin has nothing to tithe, nothing to sponsor, nothing to invest back into the ecosystem. The founder who priced low out of conscience has priced away her own capacity for generosity.
That is the part I want cohort members to sit with. Undercharging feels like humility. It functions as a decision that your work will serve fewer people.
The discomfort is usually about something else
When a founder says raising prices feels wrong, three different things are usually hiding underneath, and only one of them is a moral problem.
“I do not know what my work is worth.” That is an evidence problem, not a conscience problem, and it is solvable this week.
“I am afraid they will say no.” That is fear. Fear is worth naming honestly rather than dressing as virtue, because virtue that is really fear does not grow into anything.
“I would be charging more than the value I deliver.” This is the genuine moral concern, and it is the only one of the three that should stop you. If it is true, the answer is not to charge less. It is to deliver more, or to stop selling that thing.
Do the arithmetic before you have the feeling
You cannot know whether a price is just until you know what the work is worth to the buyer. Most founders have the conversation about price before they have done any of the measurement, which is why the conversation goes badly.
Five levers, and you need two of them, not one.
| Lever | The arithmetic |
|---|---|
| Time saved | hours saved per week × loaded cost per hour × 52 |
| Errors prevented | cost per error × errors per month × reduction rate × 12 |
| Capacity gained | hires avoided plus the cost of recruiting them |
| Conversion lift | volume × change in conversion × average deal value |
| Risk avoided | probability × cost of the incident × risk reduction |
Standard consulting guidance puts a fair fee at roughly ten to twenty percent of the annual value created, with ten percent where proof is thin and fifteen to twenty where the work is complex or specialised.
Notice what that band is. It is a rule that leaves eighty to ninety percent of the value with the client.
That is not exploitation. That is a just weight, and it is defensible in front of anyone.
A composite from our cohorts
A founder supplying school uniforms to three institutions was pricing on cost plus a small margin she had picked years earlier because it felt modest.
We did the work of measuring what she was actually delivering. Her schools had been running two weeks late on uniform delivery every term before she took over, which meant pupils sitting exams out of uniform and parents complaining to head teachers. She had removed that entirely.
Time saved for the school office: about six hours a week during term. Complaints handled: down from roughly fifteen a term to two. And one head teacher told her plainly that the delivery reliability was the reason her contract had been renewed without tender.
Once she could see the value, she raised her price by a third. All three schools renewed. One increased its order.
She now employs two people who were not employed before.
The price was not the problem. The measurement was.
Where this argument must stop
Three limits, because a teaching that only pushes in one direction is not teaching.
This does not license charging whatever the market will bear. A monopoly position, a desperate buyer, or an information advantage you created on purpose are all places where a high price becomes a false balance in the other direction. The test is not what they will pay. It is whether the value is real and whether they can see it as clearly as you can.
It does not apply to the poor in the same way. Scripture is not neutral about who you are pricing. Charging a school its full value and charging a widow the same are not the same act. Deliberate, undisclosed subsidy for those who cannot pay is not bad pricing. It is the thing the margin exists for. But subsidise on purpose, from a position of profitability, rather than by accident through underpricing everybody.
It does not fix a bad product. If the work is not good, the honest response to a low price is better work, not a higher number.
For the cohort
Before the next session, take your main offer and measure two of the five levers on one real client. Actual numbers, from them, not estimates you made on their behalf.
Then calculate ten percent of that annual value, and compare it to what you currently charge.
If your price is far below ten percent, you are not being humble. You are being imprecise, and the people who pay for that imprecision are your family and the people you have not been able to hire yet.
Bring the two numbers. We will look at them together.
Sources
- Value-Based Pricing for Consultants: The Complete Guide. ConsultFees, on the 10 to 20 percent band and risk tiering
- Guide To Value-Based Pricing for Consultants. Consulting Success, on the attributed-value range
- Scripture: Proverbs 11:1, Luke 10:7, 1 Timothy 5:18