Pay What It’s Worth

In Pay What It’s Worth, Tara Joyce provides an elegant framework for understanding how not setting prices can be a viable strategy for your small business. Consciously explore your relationship to money, to other people, and to exchanging value. Imagine, the growth made possible when you don’t set a limit to your business’ value.

Available in paperback and eBook format.

Buy the Book

Buy Pay What It's Worth on Amazon Buy Pay What It's Worth on iTunes Buy Pay What It's Worth on Barnes and Noble Buy Pay What It's Worth on Kobo

Where you get to pay what it’s worth to you and I receive the full value you pay.

You will need to provide your email address to download the chapter excerpt. Unsubscribing is always available should you no longer find the content beneficial. Your information will not be sold to third parties or used to promote content other than this book.

The Benefits of Paying What It’s Worth

Benefits to Businesses & Entrepreneurs

  • Your customer relationships strengthen and grow through the value exchanged and the mutual trust built.
  • Your business’ value and principles become central to your brand’s identity.
  • Your pricing systems inherently become more tailored and effective.

Benefits to Artisans & Innovators

  • Your audience will better communicate how they price and value your work.
  • Your art/innovation and its value is given the ability to grow as your work does.
  • Money and how it’s exchanged becomes a tool for shared social responsibility.

Get Your Chapter Excerpt

“Why Pay What It’s Worth?”

Pay What It's Worth

Sign up and receive the chapter excerpt,
Why Pay What It’s Worth?

What is Pay What It’s Worth pricing?

Who is Pay What It’s Worth pricing for?

Explore your relationship

To money, to other people, and to exchanging value.

Available in paperback and eBook format.

Chapter 1: The Foundations

My Truth: Exploring the Heart of Value

It would be convenient to think my own journey with Pay What It’s Worth began when I was shaping my business—but the reality is, I started on this adventure far earlier. My education, experiences, and environment were all integral to my decision to take this journey. They formed the foundation of my relationship with money, and my recognition of it as a tool for empowerment.

Business was a fundamental part of my life growing up. My father is a real estate entrepreneur and very much a traditional businessman who thinks of profit first. For him, a day is worthwhile and joyful when he makes money. As a kid, I discovered business was a powerful tool to connect with him, and to build our relationship. We would spend time together talking about his business and the business world at large. I found satisfaction and love in connecting with him this way, and in supporting him however I could, that, as odd as it may sound, business became one of my favourite tools for exchanging love. This early belief stayed with me. No matter what the rest of the world thought and taught, I knew the truth. Business is about relationships—it is about exchanging value and it is about service. It is in my nature to be loving and generous, and business became a natural tool for me to express this.

At a very early age, I also had my first lessons in understanding my external value, and my first experiences of providing a service and of being fairly paid for it. At the age of two, I was employed as a model and I received my first paycheque. I continued to work steadily as a child and to learn about the intrinsic value of doing my best work, and the external value of being paid for it. Later, when I was fresh out of undergraduate business school, I participated in my first Pay What It’s Worth experience, though only years later did I realize that was what it was. I was a marketing associate, and one of my roles was doing the accounting administration for our department. Each month I would process the blank invoices of our graphic designer. My manager would determine the price on the invoice and how much our designer would receive for the project(s) he’d worked on. Their relationship’s foundations were shaped by trust—he trusted her to fairly value his work, and she trusted him to skillfully and consistently deliver work she valued. There was an ease and fluidity to their relationship that unknowingly stayed with me. When I shaped my own design business this experience helped me feel confident that nurturing my relationships would continue to bring wealth into my world.

Does this truly answer why I came to question setting prices and why I was willing to risk my business health (and my personal wealth) to explore an alternative? I’d say, no, not really. The truth is there was something deeper, more unconscious, driving my decision… I was in pain, and I was looking to relieve it and heal myself, using business as a tool. Extremely sensitive to money being misused, especially to gain power over another, I was hurt by and rebelling against the scarcity mindset and fear-based messaging I saw all around me. I objectively live in abundance, and yet I had learned to believe in—and invest in—scarcity. As my colleague Ebele Mogo wrote, “a language and logic of fear and scarcity around money and finances” (personal communication, July 13, 2014) pervaded my world. With my newly forming business relationships, I could choose differently—and create things differently. Not setting prices was my way of critiquing my experience in a scarcity-focused economy, by creating a different relationship with money and with exchanging it than I had known previously. It was my money pain that led me to question my scarcity mindset and to feel I could trust people (and myself) to be fair in their giving. I needed to believe there was a different perspective on money, and of others, that I could grow wealthy with.

Overview & Preview

7 Chapters

146 Pages

ISBN: 9781649707147

What if the customer determined the price they pay, rather than the business, based upon the value they receive? How might that change things? Pay What It’s Worth pricing is a system allowing for a different way of valuing the products, services and experiences we have and exchange with others. Each of us has the power and ability to create our own economy, and approach to valuing products and services.

In Pay What It’s Worth, you’ll explore the power and potential, as well as the pitfalls, of not setting prices. Mutually beneficial exchanges are possible and sustainable for you, as a business owner, and as a customer. Your integrity is your most valuable wealth creation tool.

Table of Contents

Valuable Words

Why Pay What It's Worth?

UNDERSTANDING

^

Chapter 1 — The Foundations

My Truth: Exploring the Heart of Value
Understanding the Current of Exchange
Exploring Our Money Shadow
Rethinking Money
The Importance of Integrity

^

Chapter 2 — Building Your System

My Truth: Minding My Business (Systems)
Your Constraint to Not Setting Prices
Building a System that Lasts
Perceptions of Value
Your Economic Opportunity to Co-create

THE SPACE BETWEEN

^

Chapter 3 — Paying What It's Worth

ACTION

^

Chapter 4 — Co-creating Disclosure

My Truth: Perspective Taking
What Disclosure Looks Like
The Open Sharing of Relevant Information
Disclosing A Price
Communicating Value

^

Chapter 5 — Co-creating Norms

My Truth: Necessary Boundaries
What Norms Look Like
Clear and Well-Founded Rules
Building Strong Connections

^

Chapter 6 — Co-creating Accountability

My Truth: Exploring My Role
What Accountability Looks Like
The Establishment of Fair Consequences
Ending Relationships
Taking Responsibility

^

Chapter 7 — It's Your Combination

My Truth: Giving = Receiving
Understand Your Generosity
Transform to Thrive

Resources

Acknowledgements

Footnotes

Sample Pages

"Pay What It's Worth will cause you to re-evaluate your understanding of business, money, and value. Tara Joyce has done the research and work to demonstrate that we can shift from extraction and zero-sum models to shared respect and value models that add more depth, self-awareness, and dignity to commerce. Definitely a new, more relational approach to business."

—Keith Witt, Ph.D.
Author of Loving Completely, Shadow Light, and The Gift of Shame.

"It gave me the basis and strength to believe in other pricing ideas."

—Ian Thomaz
Restaurateur & “Pay What It’s Worth” practitioner, São Paulo, Brazil

"Beyond innovation in pricing, the book allows you to evaluate, redesign and take responsibility for the systems and economy you find yourself in, while giving you building blocks to create change in the systems around you."

—Ebele Mogo, Ph.D.
President, Engage Africa Foundation

On SALE NOW!

Buy your copy of Pay What It’s Worth: You Don’t Need to Set a Price on Value.

Available in paperback and eBook format.

Tara Joyce

FUTURIST Author

Tara Joyce

Unfulfilled at 26, Tara Joyce left her corporate marketing career to start her own business and to explore how she wanted to be of service. Quickly, she was attracted to the seemingly backwards strategy of not setting a price and to allowing her customers to determine the value of her offering, and to sharing what she learned through her blog, Rise of the Innerpreneur. Today, the “Pay What It’s Worth” concept and Tara’s published work support people globally in exploring their own scarcity and fear-based ideas around money, value, and business relationships. Tara lives in Peterborough, Canada with her husband, daughter, and canine son.

Other Books

Cross My Heart:
Strange Adventures in Vancouver

Join the strange adventure of two world explorers bringing to light the beauty of the dark. In their first trip together, the reluctant duo travel to Vancouver, Canada to meet a man who has the power to seemingly change people’s lives.

Cross My Heart:
Strange Adventures on Big Island

In their second trip together, the world explorers travel to Big Island, Hawaii while being visited by the same eerie man in each of their dreams.