Konnected Minds Podcast

Segment:- Price is a Message: What Does Yours Say? You’re Not Losing Customers-You’re Underpricing Your Value.

• Derrick Abaitey

Share episode

Price is a story—so what does yours say about your value, your customers, and your profit? We pull back the curtain on the fear that keeps founders stuck at low prices and show how to rebuild your number from the inside out. Starting with target market clarity, we unpack the difference between truly competitive pricing and a race-to-the-bottom mindset, then map a step-by-step system that includes vendor costs, overhead, time valuation, and a deliberate profit target.

You’ll hear a candid case study from a premium hair brand that doesn’t just sell hair, but confidence—using community perks like a loyalty card, tutorials, and proactive support to justify a higher price. We talk about why some creators study competitors and others ignore them to avoid becoming commodities, and how reverse engineering your monthly profit goal can transform scattershot pricing into a focused strategy. If you’ve ever wondered how to price without apology, how to add value that customers can feel, or how to communicate a premium promise without sounding pushy, this conversation gives you a clear playbook.

We also zoom out to the wider opportunity: thousands of recent graduates with one powerful asset—time. We share practical ways to turn that time into leverage through volunteering, soft-skill development, personal branding, and small online ventures, plus how early exposure to real work and mentors accelerates market sense and pricing confidence. The throughline is simple: protect your margin, stack meaningful value, and choose a position that keeps you out of commodity territory.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who’s wrestling with pricing, and leave a quick review telling us where you’re stuck—we’ll tackle your questions next.

Support the show

Watch the video episode of this on YouTube - https://linktr.ee/konnectedminds

Host: https://www.instagram.com/derrick.abaitey/

Join Entrepreneurs Community: https://www.skool.com/konnected-academy

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, is it because business owners don't know how to price?

SPEAKER_00:

How do we price? I think we are afraid. What's the the common pattern I have seen in my coaching experiences? People are afraid. They are afraid that once they increase their prices, they are going to lose customers. But you're not having customers, enough customers anyway. You might as well just price right and then use the margins you are making. Use the the margins you are making, leverage on those margins to attract the kind of customers that you want. Okay. What is price right?

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. I'm just starting out in business.

SPEAKER_00:

How do I do it? Okay. So I know a lot of the time when we when we are starting businesses, we would just look at what other people are pricing and then make us lesser than this. But then that doesn't always work. First of all, you need to understand your business model. Who is your target audience? If you don't understand that, you're never going to get your pricing right because you can't have middle to low income earners as your target market, and then your pricing is all the way up. And then when I say target market, it means, like he said, it's a conversation. You marketing to your audience is a conversation. So when you are marketing to them and they are speaking back to you, so you realize you are marketing to middle income earners, like you are in makula, you're trying to sell something, you are selling, ringing bells, but then you are trying to price something for somebody in Chasako, but then you are marketing it at Macola, right? So you need to understand who your target market is, first of all. And then of course, you need to steady, once you understand your target market, you need to steady your competition because you want to make sure you have competitive prices, not low prices, but competitive prices. What's the difference? Yes. Because people think low prices means competitive prices, but it's not. Because people, okay, let me just use my business as an example. Yes, glamin inches. I would say at the moment we do have high prices or like we do have premium pricing, right? And you may wonder why we do have premium prices, it's because of the value that I want to give our target clients, right? Because in glamin inches, we want people to feel confident and look confident when they wear your hair, right? So in their minds, this hair, because of the price point and because of how she speaks to me when she markets the hair, when I wear the hair, I have some kind of feeling. Like I feel like, okay, I am wearing glaminches. And then when we do that, we also have something called the glam card. So when you buy hair above a certain amount, you have the glam card, which makes you feel special, makes you feel like you are part of the community. We offer tutorials, we will send you messages, we'll call you. So in that case, we offer value. So that is competitive pricing, right? Because you're not just looking at the number, you are offering value, added value to the price. Unlike other people who may just be pricing low and then just throwing the product on the client, come and buy, come and buy without really giving any sense of belonging, any sense of value, right? So in that case, our prices may be higher, but they are competitive because we add a lot of value to the price.

SPEAKER_01:

What method do you use to price your hair products?

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, yes. So this actually in uh it's a lot, it's a question I get a lot, right? So I do have a system where I for hair products, I have a number of vendors. So I just have an Excel sheet with the vendor cost prices. I know it sounds kind of a cake, but then the vendor cost prices, and I have an average of them, and then I use that as my cost price. And then I so now you need to look at your expenses, right? So initially, your cost price, your expenses, and then the profits you want to make. So some people struggle with that, the profit they want to make. So sometimes I ask them to value their time. If you were working for a company, how much would they be paying you for a month? Like how much do you think you would deserve to be paid for a month? And then find your hourly pay, and then look at the amount of time you spend marketing or working on that business. That becomes your hourly, right? And that is what you want to earn, and then some. So first you need to look at the cost price, the base cost price with shipping, packaging, and everything. And then you look at your expenses, your overhead costs. Everything you spend to run the business trash, collection, light, water, everything you spend to run the business needs to be recorded. And then you look at you value your time, value your time as well, and then you add some based on after steadying your compet your competition, after looking at your business model and who you want to serve. Yes. So that's how you price in your business.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, what's your method of pricing?

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly this almost the same thing. But for me, what I want to do is that I because business is for profit, I just want to just jam that. Not just running a business just because it's a business. Okay, you are trying to make profit, you are trying to do something, even though you're trying to some people want also want to impact, but you still want to make a profit. In other words, impact without profit is frustration. And so you need to first of all optimize your business for profit. And so for me, I always try to put a hundred percent mark on whatever I'm trying to do. So I look at my expenses, I then look at that. For me, I don't look at competitors. Why? Because I feel like they will influence my pricing and what I become like a commodity.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, because when I when, for example, if I the thing about if I was gonna buy, for example, this marker, and this marker was one CD, and somebody else then sees another marker at 80 pesos, all of a sudden, just because probably I looked at this and decided to price, this guy looked at my product and decided to price at 80 pesos and somebody came, just buy the 80 pesos as well, because it's cheaper because now it's just like a commodity. But when I don't look at anybody's thing and I price at my own price, looking at my time, what I've put into it, the effort, everything, and I determine that okay, this is what I want to make, then I do that. So I don't try, I don't, I don't look at other people's things, otherwise I become a commodity. I want to be a premium, I want to be a person of my own, I want to optimize the business for myself, for whatever I'm doing. And so I want to look at my expenses, I take account of my expenses, everything that is going, is going on is going on are the teammates, the people who are helping us do the business, the people who are everything, everything when it comes to the business. And so I look at that expense, I look at the profit that we want to make. So I work end from the beginning, not beginning to end. I determine, okay, let's say, this month we want to make 100,000 Ghana CDs. If we want to make 100,000 Ghana CDs and we know our expenses are this, that means that we need to price this way, otherwise, we are not going to reach this thing. And so the moment you work beginning to the end, no end to the beginning, you're going to be in trouble.

SPEAKER_01:

Today, there are over 50,000 young Afghanistans who have just finished their national services. Majority of them are actually over 100,000. Well, there you go. Majority of these people are looking for jobs. But I am a big believer that even if less than a quarter of those numbers started their own businesses, they can employ half of those people in the next five to ten years. What do you think the young person that has just come out of their national services? What can they do as far as entrepreneurship and business is concerned?

SPEAKER_00:

So I think they need to leverage their time. They have all the time on their hands, which is more than a lot of us. Honestly, sometimes I wish I had a lot more time. Like as I wish I had the time I had when I finished my national service. Because I know you can you can even attest to it. You are so busy now, Derek, right? Yeah. And you wish you had more time. Yes. So this is the time to understeady, understeady people. I'm very sure if you reach out to Papa Quisi, like even though he may not directly respond to you, you can you can reach out to him, attend some of his free events, like make yourself visible to him, right? You have a lot of a number of volunteers here as well. I don't know why people don't volunteer enough for things like this. So they have time. Use your time, get to know people, make yourself valuable, right? And then you get to learn soft skills. So that's if you want to, you don't want to go directly into trading and stuff. You make yourself valuable. Personal branding, start something online. People are making so much money by just sharing recipes for simple things that they eat at home and it's doing so well. So you have time. So right now, after national service, all you have is time. So just make sure you make the most out of that time. And honestly, that's it.

SPEAKER_02:

What do you think? So this is what I'll say. If you're just coming out from national service, I think everybody, first of all, needs to determine what their goals are going to be in life. If you don't have that straight, you're going to be very confused. Okay. Because there's some people who know that they want to work as an engineer, there's some people who they have people have different goals. Most people don't have goals, and so they have little aspirations, and so they are not able to move out to that. But this is what I'll tell somebody. Number one, you need to be exposed to different things. You need to be exposed to the pros of the job and the cons of the job. You need to be able to be able to be exposed to the pros of a business and the cons of a business. Not only that, you need to understand the different types of businesses. I think when people think about businesses, they only think about probably just a brick and mortar structure, but now it's a different world, it's a different board game. Yeah, different things that people can do to make money.