How to create and sell your signature offer without overthinking it

From $300/month to $3,200/month: This episode contains lessons from my trial-and-error offers over the years. 

If you’ve been quietly tinkering with your offer for months, waiting for the perfect logo, the perfect website, and the perfect moment… this is your sign to just sell the thing.

I’m Jenna, and in this episode of Shiny New Clients, I’m breaking down how to craft and price your first (or next) offer without the overthinking and perfectionism that stop most small business owners from ever making a sale.

From starting as a reluctant social media manager at $300/month to building a multi-writer agency with offers over $3,200/month, I’ve learned a lot about the trial-and-error reality of entrepreneurship. 

Today, I’m sharing some unglamorous truths:

• Your first price will probably be “wrong”—and that’s okay.
• What is "Scope creep"? (and how and it’s your job to notice it before the resentment kicks in).
• The fastest path to a validated offer is to get brave and sell to your existing network first.

We’ll talk marketing, business, entrepreneurship, and social media strategy in a way that actually gets money coming in— even if it's a bit bootstrappy.

📌 Links Mentioned:

• Episode with Stacey Brass-Russell: https://episodes.fm/1697523148/episode/QnV6enNwcm91dC0xNjcyMjUwNA
• Strategic Stories: The 5-Day Instagram Challenge ($10): https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com/strategic-stories

If you’re ready to craft an offer, price it without resenting your clients, and finally start selling, this one’s for you.

✨Tap here to watch a FREE masterclass on “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

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Tap here to get your free Posts That Sell Template (This caption got us 10 sales calls in 3 hours)

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/10-sales-calls-new

🎉 Tap here to work with Jenna inside Magic Marketing Machine (or MMM+)!

https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

Welcome to the episode where we oversimplify crafting your offer, pricing it and getting it out there into the world.

If you're new here, hi I'm Jenna. a social media management agency owner, starting as solopreneur and then growing it into a full-fledged agency with multiple writers and all these moving parts, I've had offers anywhere $300 when I started to $3,400 a month.

a lot of trial and error that comes with this sort of thing. So in this episode, I'm going to share a bunch of the mistakes I made, the things I learned, the things I did well, so we can fast track you creating your next offer and selling it

because I think this is something that too many people are like keeping behind a paywall or acting like it needs to be really difficult or like when you create an offer, you need to stick to that for the rest of your life. And meanwhile, I grew a massive business on trial and error.

because of that, some of the things that I'm going to say might surprise you and might not be the most common advice, but here we go. Starting at the very beginning, when I first started in social media management, I fell into it. I didn't want to do it. I was an actor and a bartender and kind of in a mess of a life, I was volunteering at a yoga studio and the owner,

kind of forced me to run the socials. Like he wouldn't let it go. And sometimes I wonder if he had a bit of an intuitive nudge because he really wouldn't let it go. I'm like, there has to be someone else. One day he didn't give me a choice. He said, Jenna, when's a good day this week to come in and discuss your rates? Like he just was jumping. I had said, no, I don't want to do the socials many times over. And he just didn't give me a choice. So I came in, I told him I would do it for 300 bucks a month.

How did I come up with that number? Well, when I was bartending, if I made 300 bucks in a night, that was a great night. I was really happy to go home with that cash. So I think that's probably how I chose 300. To me, that was a lot. That felt good. felt fair.

we had some loose parameters, I think, on what was involved in running the social media because ever having done that for a company before, I didn't really know what was involved. All I could do is guess, which is probably the same as you. When you're making your first offer, you're making a new offer. All you can do is guess at what's going to be involved at first. And then once you start getting your feet wet, you realize, ⁓

I promise too much or there's other elements here that I never considered when I chose that rate and part of that is just going to be part of the game.

the number you choose first is probably not gonna be the right number. And it is most definitely and certainly not gonna be the number, the price that you stick to for the rest of your life until you die. You're not marrying this number. think that that's important to remember. So I started getting really excited and I started loving this job, doing the social media. So next thing you know, I am schlepping lighting equipment across the city on a streetcar that I borrowed from my friend who's a photographer.

and bringing it to the studio and contacting all of these yogis from around Toronto and inviting them to the studio and taking their photos in exchange for shout outs on their platforms. And I'm running a contest at the front desk where if you like us on Facebook, you get entered into a draw. Like I'm like doing all of these things.

creating designs, learning how to make things look pretty for the first time ever. Like I'd never done any graphic design or anything. So I started getting really into it. And then all of the yoga teachers are communicating with me. This is the one that I could never have seen coming. All the yoga teachers communicating with me, wanting their stuff promoted on social media and sending me materials that don't work for social media. Like sending like a flyer or something that doesn't match our branding. And I'm trying to make it all look cute. And then having to correspond with all those people.

When, when tasks keep growing like that and the job is getting bigger and bigger than you ever could have imagined, that's called scope creep. Kind of hard words to say on a microphone, but scope creeps. So the scope of the job starts growing and growing and growing. And if you didn't price properly, which you probably didn't because that's the nature of the beast, you start resenting the additional tasks that you have to do because you feel like you're not being compensated. But when you are a contractor or you're self-employed,

You chose the rate. So at the end of the day, you have no right to be mad at the clients. And if you can clock that moment, you can clock that resentment and notice it and notice it's because there's a misalignment in the price, then you have the opportunity to fix it. You either set boundaries and pull back on what you're offering or you communicate, clarify.

ask how important those tasks are to the client. And if they're important to them, then they're going to need to pay more for them. And that's it. Honestly, there you go. There's $10,000 worth of business coaching for you. Just that. Even go back and listen to it again. there you go. That's the main thing you need to know.

Now, if ever someone comes to me and this goes for social media management, this goes for coaching, this goes for healthcare practitioners, this goes for...

any kind of service based business, when you're creating that offer, you need to be super specific about what's included and any people come to me a lot when they're social media managers and they're wondering how to price themselves. price yourself at whatever you can do without resentment. But what really matters and that you're probably, you probably haven't done is include all the tiny tasks and consider them and how much time they're going to take.

and find out if your client is expecting them. So for instance, if you say you're taking on someone's social media, are you also responding to their comments? you get a message and it's clearly a lead and an opportunity to have a sales conversation, are you now handling that sales conversation? If not, how do you pass it off? If you are handling comments,

within what timeframe will you respond to comments? Will you respond to all comments? Eventually in my business, we started telling people we would respond to 90 % of comments because sometimes you're like, I just don't know what state of this person or I know this is a bot or all they commented was a heart. So I can't tell you I'm going to respond to a hundred percent of comments and then we get a, you know, we get a post with 20 hearts on it. Like it's just, you know, and you have to experience those things and live them to know.

how it's gonna play out when you're delivering your service to people.

Man, there's so many angles to take this, because I immediately want to talk to you about selling your offer, because that is my main thing, marketing and getting people to buy it. But.

Right now on today's episode, I really wanna talk about crafting and pricing the offer instead because we did have another episode about that with a special guest, Stacey Brass Russell. I'll link it in the show notes and you guys loved it. So I'm trying to talk about those things again and give you some more of the nuance to them.

There are no rules regarding whether you're allowed to sell your offer or not. mean, don't practice medicine without a license. Don't tell people you're a lawyer if you're not. But I mean, if you're a service provider and you've got an idea for a service you think people will want, get out there and sell it to people. I'm listening to a book right now, ⁓ Ready Fire Aim.

And this is his big concept of selling things before you have perfected them and not in gross way. Like you're gonna do a good job.

but I see service providers, you know, buy the domain and get their business cards printed and join a local networking group and take all of these steps before you're actually selling the offer. And before you've tried to sell the offer, the only way to know for sure that your offer has legs and people are going to want it is to get out there and try and sell it to someone.

And it is totally okay if that someone is someone in your preexisting network, your friends, your family, people that you used to go to school with, somebody that you used to work with, a friend of your aunt's, like anybody like that. That's okay. It can be those people. You're still a business. It's still valid if that's the first group of people that you're selling to. And because I teach people how to get clients from Instagram, it's not just strangers. It's those people too.

My first handful of clients came from my preexisting network. I just started talking about doing people's social media. I wasn't even taking my Instagram that seriously, but I started showing that that's what I was up to. And then a friend in a different country than me reached out because she had a friend who had a brewery who needed social media. So this was somebody that I met through doing improv.

and she knew someone and she passed that person to me. So that was my first international client, even if you feel like your network is small right now, the thing about your network, your friends, your family, people used to know is they want you to succeed, right? And a lot of people argue that. And if you heard a little voice in your head just now argue that.

I'm sending you love. But truly, I truly believe Please believe me. There are people out there that want you to succeed even if you don't see them. All right. So if you start talking about what you do and you start putting it out there that you have this offer and is anyone interested or do you know anyone that's interested? There are people out there who are going to have your back.

Sell the thing. Please do not create a course as your very first offer and create a course and then try and sell it and spend six months recording the videos and making the lessons and making the worksheets and setting up Kajabi and then try and sell it. Don't do that. Go and sell a service or go and sell your course, deliver it to people and go from there. I hate this illusion.

that people should be making a course and then go and try and sell it. That's not how the big people do it. That's not how I did it. I bootstrap-y, sold my service, based my course off of the service that I already knew how to deliver,

and then started crafting the course and started making the materials and then sold a beta round where we launched the materials week after week. And that first round of people, I already knew were interested in it. And then my materials were better because I was basing them. Oh my gosh, I'm on, I'm on such a tangent right now, but your materials are better because you're basing them on live feedback from real people. But you also avoid this really pickle of a situation where you've created a course that turns out nobody wants.

Because the biggest mistake people make with their service is you create something that you know that people need, but something that there isn't a market for or that you have no idea how to market. That's the biggest mistake. So that's why I'm saying there's no rules. Just get out there and sell the thing. Make sure people want it. Make sure you have money coming into your business, into your family, get people to buy the thing. And then that's going to validate it. And then we grow from there. You don't need business cards. You don't need a website.

I got a negative comment. If that was you out there who gave me my negative comment on like you don't need a website. I'm so sorry. I got a double down on it. You don't, you need money coming in. You need clients. All that other stuff can wait.

And this is coming from my lived experience. This is coming from my experience of having thousands of people all over the world by my programs, being behind the scenes in dozens, hundreds, businesses over the years, doing their social media on short-term and long-term contracts and through my agency.

Do I know it all? Absolutely freaking literally no, I do not. But I do know that if you have your head down creating a course right now and you haven't proved that there's a market for it, stop what you're doing and go and validate that there is a market for it and that you know the price point people are willing to pay.

Somebody messaged me in response to an email I sent out of my newsletter a couple of weeks ago and she was like, well that was a kick in the pants first thing in the morning. Like yeah, and I know...

It'll help you, but I also really love empowering people into making a change instead of like, you know, bullying you into making a change. So let me empower you into creating your offer. crux of my tangent is get out there and sell your offer.

and make that the most important thing that you do, even if it's not quite ready yet. All right. And I know that that's scary, but busy work like creating business cards or working on your branding, none of that matters if the idea itself doesn't have legs and you need to prove that it has legs.

any high level business book is going to tell you to get your offer out there first and foremost. And that is a

especially important for healers and helpers and the type of people that listen to the show teachers mentors all of that because You know what people need right? You know what they need and so you want to sell them something to fix what they need But in order to make money you need to sell them what they want And that's why you hear the phrase sell them what they want give them what they need It should be sell them what they want give them what they want and what they need, but that's too

long and not catchy so people don't use it. what I see people do is you know they put their head down for six months and create an online course and tell me that they're gonna sell this online course never validated the offer. were never certain that somebody was gonna buy it in the first place and I don't want you to waste all that time creating something when it's not perfectly in the pocket even if you know people need it. So that's why you see things like beta.

programs or introductory pricing.

And that's why one of the things that I did when I first started my offer was building my offer around what people wanted from me. And that led me to having different deliverables for each of my different clients. And that's not sustainable. And if you're trying to scale, the first thing you need to do is streamline what you're giving people. But when you're first starting out, you need to find out what's important to people and kind of look at it, like give them what's important to them, not what's important to you.

They want to pay for what they want to pay for and what's important to them. And your offer will succeed fastest and make you the most money if you're giving people something that they actually want to pay for.

go out there, contact your friends and family, contact your network, go onto your social media as it stands right now. Don't start a new account. Go on there and say, I have this offer. This is what I'm thinking of selling, or this is what I'm selling people. Do you know anybody who could want this? Here's the problem it solves. Here's the expected outcome. Here's what I want to help you achieve and see if you get any takers.

work with people, get on calls with them, figure out what they want, Take those initial steps for your new offer instead of like, like I said, putting your head down and spending all this time building something while you're not making money before we know if people want it, okay?

I'm not your business coach. Here's, here's when it's time to work with me. You already have an offer. At least two or three people have bought it or two or 300 people. And so you know that it's verified and now it's time to market it. And then we can, we can hone the messaging. We can fix it from there. We can create content to get people to buy it. We can get you more comfortable selling and show you how to sell on Instagram, all of those things. So this isn't actually even my expertise of like telling you how to make your offer because

I'm in marketing. So when you come to me, I expect that you've got your offer and a couple of people have bought it. And that's also why I get passionate about this is because people come to me and no one has bought their offer because there's no market for it. And that puts us all in a really difficult position. Cause it's going to be hard for me to get you results if you're selling a fish water, you know, you're selling somebody something that nobody asked for. And it's not priced at a price point that they're like willing to spend. So ⁓

Once you have sold that offer, that beautiful offer, just get out there and be brave and whip something up. And then once you've sold it to two or three people, then it's time to come to me so we can sell it to more people. And if you're like, Jenna, I'm just tuning into this episode because I like the show. I've actually sold my offer to two or 300 people, like like any great.

come to me, let's sell it to more. Like at that point, it sounds strange, but we're taking the same steps when you want more visibility and to sell more with a verified offer, it's the same steps.

Quick plug, if you're trying to come up with what to post on Instagram this week and you're not really sure what it should be, there is a tiny little micro course underneath this episode called Strategic Stories, the five day challenge. I will tell you exactly what to post for five days. And there's actually a bonus day at the end where you sell. So the idea is you know what to post every day. You're trying a bunch of new things. You're warming up your audience so that by the end of the week, you can

and feel comfortable enough making a pitch and selling to them. And I actually just got a message this morning. Let me read it to you.

She says, hi Jenna, day three of the story challenge done and oh boy, I had 26 people in my DMs sharing their stories. Now that's a first in my six years on Instagram. So really excited to hear that. get DMs like that all the time about this stories challenge. It is $10. It's so like super easy. And

I I do encourage you when you get that make today day one, even if you're not listening to this on Monday, make today day one and start it right away and commit to finishing it in the following five or six days. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next one. I didn't mean for that to become like my sign off. It really was born out of how do I end this?