Grow Your VA & OBM Business: Soulpreneur Scaling Stories
You started your VA or OBM business for freedom, but somewhere along the way, it became chaotic. Whether you're scaling into overwhelm or feeling burned out and bored, there's a better way to grow.
This podcast helps virtual assistants, online business managers, & done for you service pros identify their unstructured expertise and build it into a signature method, so they can stop trading hours for dollars and start running a business that pays them for outcomes.
With a mix of solo episodes and guest interviews, you'll get practical strategies and psychology-backed insights to move from unstructured expertise to a clear method, intentional positioning, and sustainable growth.
We'll cover questions like:
- Why do I keep attracting clients for work I've outgrown?
- How do I know if I'm ready to specialize?
- Should I force myself into industry labels or create my own positioning?
- Why do I keep downplaying what I'm actually good at?
- How do I stop working 50+ hour weeks at the same income level?
- How do I raise my rates without losing all my clients?
- Is my offer wrong, or is it my audience?
- Should I quit my business or just evolve it?
- Why are people excited about my work but not buying?
- How do I know if this is fear or real misalignment?
- How do I make decisions from clarity instead of desperation?
What makes this podcast different:
I'm Andrea, a certified OBM who started as a VA in 2019 and built my own service business from the ground up. With 7 years of clinical psychology training (master's degree before leaving the PhD program), I bring therapy-level insight into business coaching. I don't teach generic "grow your audience" advice that doesn't work for DFY service providers. Instead, I focus on psychology-backed strategies tailored specifically to how VA and OBM businesses actually work - addressing both the external positioning work and the internal nervous system shifts needed to make sustainable change.
This isn't about hustle culture. It's about building a business that supports your actual life, with relationship-based marketing strategies designed for VAs & OBMs.
Ready to turn your unstructured expertise into a signature method? Press play.
Grow Your VA & OBM Business: Soulpreneur Scaling Stories
124. Pricing Confidence for VAs and OBMs: Visibility, Messaging and Identity
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You raised your rates. Things got quiet. And now you are wondering if you made a mistake.
Before you touch your pricing, listen to this episode. What feels like a pricing problem is almost never actually a pricing problem, and reacting to the quiet by lowering your rates might be the one move that keeps you stuck the longest.
In this episode, I walk you through the four real reasons things slow down after a rate increase, and the mindset shifts that will help you actually stand behind your new number.
Key Points Covered:
✨ The four things to look at before you ever consider lowering your rates: visibility, positioning, messaging, and audience
✨ Why correlation is not causation when it comes to pricing and slow inquiries
✨ How task-based messaging keeps your prices feeling like a mismatch, to clients and to you
✨ Why confidence comes after you raise your rates, not before
✨ The hidden cost of undercharging that nobody talks about
✨ How to tell if you are making a strategic decision or a panic decision
Check out these episodes too:
- Episode 121: VAs and OBMs: You're Not Undercharging, You're Under Articulating
- Episode 123: Pivoting Your Online Business as a VA or OBM Without Starting from Scratch
For VAs & OBMs turning expertise into a signature method and a business that pays for outcomes, not hours.
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Podcast produced and edited with love by @FerAssists
[00:00:00] Andrea Elibero: Hello and welcome to Solepreneur Scaling Stories. I'm Andrea a certified OBM turned business coach, helping VAs OPMs and done-for-you. Service Pros turn their unstructured expertise into a signature method and a business that pays them for outcomes, not hours. So if you want a business that gives you freedom instead of taking it, you are in the right place.
[00:00:23] Andrea Elibero: Congrats. You did it. You raised your rates, and that is super exciting. Maybe it has something to do with updating your packages and maybe you even sent your first proposal with this new number, and then things felt a little bit quiet. Maybe you have fewer inquiries, responses are slower, and you're thinking, oh crap.
[00:00:47] Andrea Elibero: Did I make a mistake? Did I price myself too high? Now, don't worry, we are going to examine all this. We're gonna do a deep dive. And so what I see a lot of [00:01:00] times is that people will jump back to their lower pricing when they get this anxiety and they do it at a time when. There things were about to work.
[00:01:12] Andrea Elibero: So I want you to avoid all this. We are going to dive into pricing, and I am not going to tell you that your pricing is fine no matter what. I'm going to make sure that when you make decisions about pricing, you're doing so from intentionality and not from panic. That is going to keep you continuously undercharging.
[00:01:34] Andrea Elibero: So now you raise your rates. And now maybe it feels quiet and. The most obvious change is obviously the pricing. And so it feels like, oh, that's the cause, right? The pricing is the reason that it suddenly feels quiet. But remember now I was a biology major, so I did a lot of research. I. Correlation is not causation, [00:02:00] and it applies here too, as well as all my science things.
[00:02:03] Andrea Elibero: And in business, the symptom and the source are often not the same things, so lowering your rates back down to what they were before. Is a panic response and it feels like, okay, I'm taking action. I'm doing something. It feels more comfortable. I've resolved this issue. Great, let's move forward. But what that actually is, is a reaction to discomfort and not to actual data.
[00:02:27] Andrea Elibero: And there is a difference between a strategic decision that is made intentionally and a decision based on anxiety. And it can be really difficult to tell what is leading your decision making in the moment. So before you touch your pricing. I want to dive in a little deeper into the picture of why things can suddenly feel really slow once you raise your prices.
[00:02:51] Andrea Elibero: And there are four things to think about in this scenario, and they are visibility, positioning, messaging, and audience. And we're gonna go through each [00:03:00] one. So the first one is visibility. You raised your rates, but you're still showing up to the same, most likely smaller audience that found you when you were charging half that.
[00:03:10] Andrea Elibero: And so this pool of people is too small and you don't have enough data to give you any information either way and cannot data from such a small sample size. If we want to go back to my research days, we need more information. We need more visibility. We need to get this in front of more people to see.
[00:03:31] Andrea Elibero: And so the fix here, when you don't have. Enough people in your audience is not to lower your price. It is to be visible to more people and be visible to the right people. Now, I talk more about this in episode 1 23, which is pivoting your online business as a VA or OBM without starting from scratch. So check that one out if this is something that interests you.
[00:03:53] Andrea Elibero: And then the second one. Positioning. So now most likely you are raising your risk 'cause your skills [00:04:00] have grown, your results have grown, your confidence maybe has also grown as well. But the way that you present yourself online has not caught up. You're still using the same bios, the same language, the same framing from before.
[00:04:13] Andrea Elibero: So you are quoting a price at a higher end, but you're showing up at a lower end, and that feels really disconnected to clients. Because people don't just buy based on what you say you can do. They buy based on how they perceive you, how you're showing up. So if that perception hasn't shifted, if you haven't grown into that, then your pricing feels out of place even when you do the work, even when it is completely justified.
[00:04:39] Andrea Elibero: So take a look at your positioning, how you are showing up online, and make sure that it communicates the value, the higher level that now you know you are acting as. Number three is your messaging. I see so many service providers done for you. Service providers base their messaging on [00:05:00] tasks, and because it's natural, right?
[00:05:02] Andrea Elibero: You think about, oh, this is what I do. So I help with email management, social media, admin, support, operations, whatever. And when you talk about tasks. That signals a certain price point when instead you talk about outcomes and transformation. Like I help online business owners get their operations running without them.
[00:05:22] Andrea Elibero: Um, that's a really basic one, but basically when you're communicating how you help them so they can make more money, so they can spend less time and all the changes that happen because you are in their business. That is a different price point that signals something different. So if the messaging is still at this task-based language, the pricing will always feel like a mismatch both to the client and also to you, which is really, really important for when you show up and when you talk about your offers, when you talk about you prices, you know when you say, this is how much I charge.
[00:05:53] Andrea Elibero: To stand behind that, you need to really believe in it, and you need to really. Stand behind what you do. [00:06:00] So higher prices really need to be backed up by language that makes the value feel immediately understood. And, oh, I'm giving you so many other resources in this one. I dive more into this in episode 1 21, which is VAs and obms.
[00:06:13] Andrea Elibero: You're not undercharging, you're under articulating. So check that one out as well. And then number four is your audience. The people who were interested, attracted to your old offers. Your old pricing are oftentimes not the same people who are going to pay your new pricing. They're not there yet. They're at a different level in their business.
[00:06:37] Andrea Elibero: Different price points attract different buyers with different budgets, different urgency, different expectations. So some of the quiet after you raise your rates is really because you don't have. The right audience anymore. The people who this is not, you're not meant for anymore, are stepping back. And I want you to think about this as a good thing because the old energy is [00:07:00] getting cleared.
[00:07:01] Andrea Elibero: You are making way for new energy and new clients who are a good fit and who are excited, and more importantly, who want to pay you. So the next time that you are raising your rates, I invite you to remember that confidence does not come before you raise your rates. It actually comes after. I see so many service writers who are waiting to feel ready, you know?
[00:07:24] Andrea Elibero: Like, okay, I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready yet. And the annoying part about this is that readiness happens after you do the thing. It happens through the decision, not before. So you raise your rates, you stop showing up, and then you get the confidence. When you start seeing the evidence of, oh, I'm able to attract a different caliber of client.
[00:07:43] Andrea Elibero: Oh, you know, this is happening. People want to pay me this. Then you get confident. So if you are waiting to feel confident, you are gonna be waiting for a really long time. So it really is just a phase to move through. It really is kind of a faking it till you make it situation that your confidence will come after.[00:08:00]
[00:08:00] Andrea Elibero: The next thing to remember is that the pricing actually changes how you show up, because when you're charging more, you're naturally going to communicate differently. You're going to hold the work that you do differently. Your boundaries are clearer, your discovery calls shift. Your energy is. Different.
[00:08:17] Andrea Elibero: The higher price point is not about what you attract. It also changes who you are and your identity in terms of who you are as a business owner and in the quality and the delivery of the work that you do. And the next one is that the silence that happens is. Sometimes just the market doing its job, meaning that we are going to, we are staging your business.
[00:08:41] Andrea Elibero: So this quiet inbox online in your email, it can feel like a rejection, but instead of thinking that I invite you to reframe it. So this quietness is often these wrong fit client self-selecting out. They're not a match anymore for you and that's okay. They [00:09:00] were a match for the old version of your business, and now you have evolved, you have grown.
[00:09:04] Andrea Elibero: So the goal was never, and hopefully, is never to appeal to everyone. The goal is to be a clear yes for the right people. Your right people have shifted and that's all. So losing the wrong ones is just a part of getting to the right ones, so we can lovingly thank them, for getting you to where you are now, clear away that energy, sage them away and excitedly welcome new people into your world.
[00:09:31] Andrea Elibero: And lastly, there is also a hidden cost to undercharging. And because when you charge two a little, you obviously you need more clients, right? It takes more time. You have income goals to hit. And you're charging little, so you need more and more of all of these things. And more clients means less energy spent per client, less
[00:09:55] Andrea Elibero: capacity to do good work overall and more energy spent, honestly, [00:10:00] overall. So over time, and I see this so much and I felt it myself, resentment builds. Even when you love what you do, the resentment can show up in the work, in the communications, how you show up on calls, procrastination, things like that.
[00:10:14] Andrea Elibero: And so this changes when you charge higher. When you are charging what the work actually demands, it's not just about money. It's about having the energy to deliver at the level that your clients deserve, and at the level that you get to fully stand behind. And I talk about this a lot when I do my free business audits.
[00:10:34] Andrea Elibero: If you have not taken advantage of this, you will want to. And it is also one of the core things that we untangle inside of expansion, which is my one-on-one coaching container for VAs and ODMs to package your expertise into a scalable, aligned offers so you can step away from all this client chaos. You could increase your income and build the business that you are excited to run.
[00:10:55] Andrea Elibero: And. So before you panic lower your rates, [00:11:00] I invite you to ask yourself, has my visibility grown to match my new rate? Or am I just presenting to the same small audience over and over and over again and expecting different results? Has my positioning and my messaging evolved with my pricing? Do I sound like someone who charges this amount or am I still speaking in a way that's keeping me small?
[00:11:23] Andrea Elibero: How long has it actually been? Because let me tell you that a few slow weeks means nothing. It's just a moment. Real data takes longer than that to actually gather. And lastly, who is actually in my audience? Are they people who can see and who can afford my value at this new price? Or do I need to go grow a new audience?
[00:11:49] Andrea Elibero: So those are the things to question, to consider and to in order to really analyze your business intentionally so you don't have [00:12:00] to make panic decisions anymore. So you know now what questions to ask so you can make a decision that comes from a place of intention and not a place of panic. Okay, and I also want to assure you that this phase is completely normal.
[00:12:14] Andrea Elibero: I know it kind of sucks. Transitions are hard, but it is there and there will just naturally be a bit of a lag as you transition from who you are into who you are. Now, and one thing that I am so proud that I do is that I help my expansion clients shorten the slide significantly. So check out expansion in the show notes if this episode is speaking to you.
[00:12:38] Andrea Elibero: And remember to really own your new rate and back it up with positioning and messaging that it deserves, and give it enough time, gather some data. Don't just react to an uncomfortable week. And so with. I would love to connect with you also online. You'll find me mostly on Instagram threads and on LinkedIn.
[00:12:59] Andrea Elibero: Um, [00:13:00] let me know, uh, what comes up for you in this episode. I'm so interested and I will see you on the next one.
[00:13:06] Andrea Elibero: That's a wrap on today's episode, and thank you so much for listening. If anything we talked about today made you think, okay, well, what does this actually look like in my business? That's exactly what a free business audit is for. In just 45 minutes, I'll help you identify your unstructured expertise, pinpoint what's keeping you capped, and map out what your signature method could look like.
[00:13:28] Andrea Elibero: There's a link in the show notes to grab your spot, and I will see you in the next episode.
