715 Merel Kriegsman:

How do you price your product or service?  The temptation for many entrepreneurs is to price too low, way below the true value of what you have to offer to the right person. Sometimes it’s because we don’t fully understand or accept our own value; sometimes it’s because we’re aiming our offering to too wide a marketplace. My guest today – Merel Kriegsman – is an expert in showing you how to sell whatever you want, whenever you want, and at whatever price point you desire.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur who has lived and breathed the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses, currently the game changing social podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment and join the Wings community over on Podopolo, where we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who started out as an opera singer turned direct response copywriter and now an executive and business coach who is dedicated to helping you become the wealthiest in your lineage.

Merel Kriegsman now serves more than a thousand mission-driven luminaries, all with a hunger for social & environmental justice, with white-glove business mentorship. Her clients have all experienced massive financial breakthroughs doing what the love in alignment with their unique genius, and last year alone they added a combined $25,000,000 in yearly revenue.

So today we learn how Merel is getting those kinds of results for her clients.

Many people have the idea that you have to make a lot of money first – before you can give back in any significant way to improve our world. These days, many mission-driven entrepreneurs are proving the opposite is true: By aligning their desire to solve some of the world’s most intractable challenges with businesses that directly innovate those solutions, these entrepreneurs are generating more wealth for themselves and those they help.

Merel Kriegsman believes an abundance of wealth comes to those who dare to “give forward” with innovative business solutions. She helps her clients architect values-based businesses that create so much value that these entrepreneurs grow tremendous wealth as they make a positive impact on the world.

Merel has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, ABC News, Entrepreneur, and many more – and she lives a unique life of her dreams, usually in the wild, reading erotic novels, or playing with her kids on her organic farm, wearing a 1920s lace dress and rubber boots.

Today we talk about her journey from the Opera house to direct response copywriting to social impact and how to align your pricing to the value you are creating for society.

So let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Merel Kriegsman, and be sure to download Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Merel, welcome to Wings.

Merel Kriegsman:

I am so excited to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

Me, too. I’m intrigued by you. You are an opera singer, but you’re also a direct response, high converting copywriter, who has somehow  combined these things into growing this really successful business that helps other business owners really kind of scale their offerings. How did all that come to be? How do you combine that direct response copy with opera and business? It’s intriguing.

Merel Kriegsman:

I’ve always really loved words and language, and of course when you’re on stage, I would always sit there with the score on my lap, sort of going like, “Which words do I really want to emphasize?” Through melody’s on a voice, which words do I really want to shine right, to really understand sort of an engineer, I guess. How is it going to move people? How is it going to bring people to tears and have them have those full body chills in the audience? I became very, very good at that.

Then when I stepped into conversion copywriting, I was really doing the same thing. You look at a piece of text and you go, “What is the most important, most deeply moving, visceral, immediately captivating, sort of something about this?” So often with my clients, who actually peel away all those layers of what they think it needed to sound like, or look like or whatever, to really get to the core of human emotion. It’s like, what drives us? What inspires us? I think that’s how I sort of hopped from opera singing and the interpretation of classical works, in my case, into the conversion copywriting. Then that background gave me an edge in conversion copywriting, and then both those things gave me an edge as a business mentor. I think that’s sort of how I would describe it.

Melinda Wittstock:

I like what you said about the visceral emotional feeling, because that’s what is missing from most people’s marketing copy, right?

Merel Kriegsman:

100%.

Melinda Wittstock:

If you’re trying to change someone’s behavior, you have a new business, you have a new offering, whatever it is, there’s this behavioral change needed in a really noisy marketplace.

Merel Kriegsman:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Break this down for me. How do you achieve that? How do you get that, for a business to find that deep, emotional connection that gives people the version of the opera house chills?

Merel Kriegsman:

I love that. Yes. Yeah. It’s a little bit different for every person, so I’m just going to give some examples. So one of my clients, he’s a permaculture expert. You might go, “Wait. What’s that?” Sort of think organic?

Melinda Wittstock:

What is that?

Merel Kriegsman:

It’s like regenerative farming, restoring the soil. It all sounds very nerdy, but really this is the kind of work that we need to do if we want to save our planet. We need to start to grow our food differently. We need to start preparing for things like potential forest fires, and droughts, and stuff like that, like preventative as well. Flooding, things like that.

Melinda Wittstock:

So important.

Merel Kriegsman:

Yeah, super, super important and extremely timely. This person was selling VIP days at like, I don’t know, $1,500. I think at that point, that was even a stretch. It was something like, “Yay! Oh my God! Look at me! I’m selling VIP at $1,500.” It was really, really fantastic, sort of first win. But then we got into the, what actually drives people to invest in this type of service, beyond $1,500, but rather $30,000, $150,000, more. We got to this point of really, this is about legacy. The people who invest in this, and actually we’re one of those couples, me and my husband. We have a food forest, and we farm regeneratively, and all kinds of things. We live on the prairies in Canada. For us, it’s not just about I want to grow more food. It’s about planting the apple trees that are going to potentially feed your grandchildren.

What we really did is we layered in this whole concept of legacy and hope for a better future for our children, wanting to do something really tangible in the very fabric of the core messaging. What started to happen is that actually governments, and local municipalities and stuff like that, and bigger organizations wanted to hire this person because it clicked into a much bigger concern, and a very timely, very urgent, very visceral concern, in this particular case. It went from come and be with me for a morning and I’m going to show you how to forage in my local area, and maybe I’ll teach you a little bit about some vegetables, to truly changing the world. Right. That’s just one example where it’s through deep understanding of what drives people to really truly invest in what it is that you offer.

Then also having the, why now, layered in from the very start so that you make the justifying of that investment a really easy process. But the problem is that for most of us, and most business owners, we have our clients do the heavy lifting of that whole, sort of like internal justification process of putting down a significant amount of money, and we can make it really easy for them. That’s just one example. There’s so many examples of other consultants, and service providers, and coaches and stuff where we really dug deep into what’s the very fabric of your zone of genius and their ultimate need ecosystem, desire ecosystem, and how to plug in, in a really, really strategic way.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so interesting because it gets into always the why we do what we do. What’s the storytelling? What’s the impact? How does that story, very specific story often, the more specific, the more laser focused, the broader an audience it actually resonates with?

Merel Kriegsman:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think a lot of people try and go very broad, and then it just doesn’t hit with anybody.

Merel Kriegsman:

So, so true. I think we always have a bit of a progression here because when I started out as a copywriter, I was doing websites, and email sequences, and funnels, and… Oh my goodness. I have a funny story there. The first time, because I was so new to the online business world, I was just like, “I think I want to be… I’m going to be a copywriter. Let’s do that one.” I was really good. I was really good from the start with creating conversions, but I also just didn’t really know what was going on. I remember the first person who reached out to me with a request of, “Can you write my funnel?” I literally Googled, “What’s a funnel?” I had to Google it. It was so funny.

Melinda Wittstock:

What it is that will resonate with the audience that you want it to resonate with. What’s the process of being able to do that, because it does require you to get super narrow almost, to be able to go broad.

Merel Kriegsman:

So when you start, and when I started, I was relatively broad. I was doing all these different things for all these different people. As you progress… I always want to say, picture an hourglass. The more you progress in business, the narrow narrower you get. You’re sort of like in that very narrow crook, like in the middle. It’s like super, expert niching, sort of place where you can, by the way, make an enormous amount of money.

This is a very profitable place to be, but then usually there comes a time when we actually want to broaden into more of a thought leadership space. When I think of myself, first I was a copywriter, then I was a conversion copywriter, then I was a conversion copywriter, specializing in X. I got into that very narrow space of basically being known for creating like the most brand and high converting websites. Then after that, I was more, sort of like, I’m going to be into business mentorship, and then into becoming a women’s wealth advocate for like media purposes and how they were pitching me.

Merel Kriegsman:

I think the first thing to understand is that there’s a progression here, and that we want to honor that within ourselves. You have to also look at, “Where am I in my journey as a business owner, and what’s going to be the most auspicious thing that I can do for myself?” It’s sort of like is it the narrowing down, or is it actually a type of broadening right now?

The way I look at niching, because niching is very daunting for a lot of people, it’s like, niching down, narrow, defined. It’s like all these entrepreneurs who are like, “I started entrepreneurship because I didn’t want to be in a box, and now somebody’s telling me that I need to be in a box,” like go away. I actually have a blog post on this where I describe five different ways that you can even look at the niching process. One of them is through that hour glass, sort of like defining your timing around niching and where you’re at. Another one is really looking at you can build a niche around your why. You can build a niche around when this is needed and urgent for people, so like when in somebody’s life, is this a particular need that they have. Of course, you can niche around the what, and the who, or the where, if you’re somebody who specializes in trips to Sicily or whatever.

There’s so many different ways that you can niche, that you can actually have lots of fun with it. I think that’s a really important thing to remember that it doesn’t need to be sort of the “this is how I’m going to define myself moving forward,” but rather a journey, and also giving yourself the freedom to move through those changes and transitions as they come, and being really intuitive with it, rather than, “this is what it’s going to be and now I can’t change anymore.”

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. 100%. So, so important. So when you work with your clients, how do you help them through this process? It’s very much a kind of look within, and much more besides. I mean, there’s all the, obviously, the mechanics of all the marketing and all of that, but to get that message, to get that out of them, is that really core to ground zero, I guess, of how you work with your clients?

Merel Kriegsman:

Well yeah, and because it’s a journey, it’s like we circle back there all the time. Like when they’re ready to up level… For example, yesterday I was working with five of my clients, and they were all basically saying we’re ready to scale to that next level. We’re fully booked. Things are going really well. What is going to be next? The first thing I sort of revisit with them is like, is the messaging, the niching, the positioning still feeling really exciting to you, creatively stimulating? The rule of thumb that I always use is like when you go to your own Instagram account and you see your own IG [inaudible 00:13:22], or you’re about section on LinkedIn, or your Facebook intro, sort of the language that you use to describe what it is that you do and who you do for, and stuff like that, are you excited about it, or are you like, “Well, it’s sort of, okay. I guess it’s not bad. It has worked for a while, so I guess I can stick with it for a while longer.”

That’s a really important test you can just run for yourself. Just hop over to your Instagram account, if you have an Instagram account or whatever, social media platform, and actually go, “Does this feel right? Does this still feel exciting? Is this still a reflection of where I’m at?” If not, are you willing to sit down again and go through that process another time?

You asked me, how do you do it though? For me, what you just said around in the end, it’s all about story, that’s 100% true. When it comes to how we position ourselves and the messaging that create that we create, it’s not so much, this is who I am. It is a conversation starter. That conversation starter, you want to be sort of like something that you have in place so that when people do get curious, because of what you have in, let’s say your bio or whatever it is, that initial introduction, they’re going to ask you the kind of question that’s going to set the stage for you to tell that story.

Merel Kriegsman:

When you hop over to my profile, I think it says, “Become the wealthiest woman in your lineage,” and then it says, “multimillionaire matriarch,” or something, in my Instagram bio, and then #cyclebreakers. There’s a couple of clues there. That’s really what I did. Put a couple of clues as to… Cycle breaker. Well, what cycles did you break? Tell me more about that multimillionaire like nature. What is that? Sort of like sparking curiosity, rather than this is an accurate description of who I am, because you can’t ever capture that in a few words. We’ll always feel really, really like it doesn’t do justice to this magical, vast, all the aspects of your personality, all the bits and pieces of your gifts and everything combined. It’s like an impossible job. So, really like having it be a conversation starter.

The question really is, what is that story? For me, that story is that I had this deep realization when I was very pregnant with our first baby that I did not want to pass on the very toxic limiting beliefs that the women in my family had carried around money for generations, and sort of the life that it cost them, as in they didn’t get to live their full life because it was held back by poverty. That’s my story. That’s why I started my business in the first place. It’s that desire to create a future for myself, and therefore my children that looked different, that deviated, that broke a cycle with how things had been done and had been going in my family for a very, very long time.

Every business owner one day wakes up and before they even start their business, or going, “I want to start a business. I feel that desire. I feel that spark. I feel [inaudible 00:17:14] to go do that.” There’s something that drives us, and that is usually the thing that we want to actually use in our messaging. It’s the story you want to keep telling, tell it in such a way that it does spark that visceral knowing and recognizing in your audience.

Melinda Wittstock:

I like that you say when you’re helping people to get this message right, you’re actually helping them to generate wealth, to become the wealthiest being in their lineage. You’re really helping them to sell what they have uniquely to themselves here on earth in this moment, in their earth suit. Apart from message, what are the other things really that allow them? I’m going to guess that a lot of it is mindset. Take me through that process of how you help people really generate that real generational shift in their ability to generate true wealth.

Merel Kriegsman:

First, I just want to say, I think earth suits is such fun word.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s kind of what it is. You’re here right now. I mean, you may be back another time. I don’t know. I mean, we don’t really know, right?

Merel Kriegsman:

Yeah. It’s very cute. My kids are fully on the reincarnation train. My dear, very mentally handicapped auntie, is actually dying as we speak. She’s like, final days in Holland. I can’t be there for her passing, which is very, very heartbreaking for me. We have a woman down the… I was going to say down the street, but we have more paved… They say unpaved roads here, so I guess it’s down the mud road from where we live. There’s a woman, and she’s about to have a baby. They were already conspiring together with siblings going, “Oh, maybe our little great auntie is going to be reincarnated down the road.” They’ve decided that’s what’s going to happen. It’s interesting how kids also gravitate towards those kinds of pockets of wisdom.

So, yeah. As to your question, it’s a couple of things. Yes, it’s mindset. I think that especially women, but not just women. I think men, too, really struggle with what you and I both know is extremely important to succeed in your entrepreneurial journey, as being supported. It’s like, can you always keep an eye out for… Is there something that I’m doing that I actually don’t need to do, whether that’s home front, or inside of your business, or other areas of your life? Sort of the, can you strip away the unnecessary work so that you can really focus and do your best work, and fully be present to the work that you’re doing and not being distracted by 100 things. I think there’s a huge thing for me in there, and that’s sort of like an ongoing conversation that I have with all my clients, with myself. Right? Are you trying to do it all yourself, sort of thing.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. A lot of people make that mistake, and there’s no leverage in that.

Merel Kriegsman:

There’s no… No, you keep spinning your wheels. I will also say there’s things that I still do myself, but it’s a very conscious choice. I still create all of my own content because I really loathe people touching my words. Somebody touches my words and like, What the hell did you just…”

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, but you know that’s what you love to do.

Merel Kriegsman:

That’s what I love to do. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

You’re expressing one of your highest values, but there’s probably lots of other things that you don’t really like to do that someone else loves to do.

Merel Kriegsman:

Yeah. Yeah. Totally, like tech, and systems, and creating SOPs and stuff like that. It’s like, literally, I feel like I’m back in math class. I wasn’t very good at math. Well, let’s just be honest. I was absolutely disastrous at math. It was not a good thing. That’s a really important thing to look at.

Merel Kriegsman:

I think the other thing is another play or area where we can create a lot of leverage, income wise, is actually looking at the offers. Are your offers stacked in such a way? Do they go from the one, to the next one, to the next one so that you are not just attracting people into your world? Really, the first part of our conversation was around how do we entice people? How do we persuade people? How do we call them in? How do we help them remember that this is what they want on the messaging side of things?

But then also, do you have the sales and marketing skills to actually have them take that next step? Are you putting those calls to actions out there? Right. It’s like, is there actually a next step? I find so very often that people just keep on marketing, but they don’t make any invitations. There’s no, sort of like, this is the next thing that follows, the “I love this,” now, what do I do next?

Then also, do you have the offers ready? Are they priced in such a way that you can actually reach your financial goals in a way that feels really loving and kind towards yourself? The vast majority of the people that we support come in, really, really, truly undercharging. It’s interesting because when there is a settling for both, sort of a lower price point than you would ideally love to use, and there’s also a settling from a perspective of like, “Well, I’ll just have to work with the people who land in my doorstep.” What you get is that you work with people who are not really, truly poised for transformation. What that creates is like this negative cascade of they’re not getting the results because they weren’t actually ready to get the result. They weren’t poised for transformation, and then you don’t get referrals, and you don’t get testimonials, and you start to doubt whether you need to maybe even lower the price even further.

But, you can also step into the opposite cycle, which is really what we help people too, is that you become really picky at who you want to serve. One of the questions I always ask my people is what do they already need to have in place? When they knock on your door, what do they already need to have in place? When they do, how do you need to structure your offers? Then very often, what bubbles to the surface is that they don’t need 20 calls. They need six, because they’re so ready. They already have all those things in place. People simplify their offers, they start working with the right people, are really, really ready, they get tons of referrals, they get tons of testimonials, and then they can just keep raising their rates and further step into their self-confidence around marketing themselves. I would say that’s a really, really important one.

Then I would say another really, really important aspect of the work that we do, which I guess you could call mindset, is this principle of making the most amount of money with what feels the least like work. We tend to undervalue what comes to us most easily, but what comes to us most easily is usually our most valuable work. The tendency is actually like the closer we move to our zone of genius is to undercharge more, and more, and more because it feels really easy. “I’m not going to charge for that. That was just a suggestion. I’m not going to charge for that. It was just a download I had on behalf of you. It just came to me in the shower.” It’s like, “No! Those are your million dollar ideas for your million dollar clients.” Whereas sometimes we tend to over market, and feel we need to charge higher fees for the things that come to us not so easily, because it feels like hard work, and that’s what we’re comfortable with.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think we do tend to think that value is in the hard work, because we’ve all been acculturated that way, thinking we have to do it all or it’s not valuable. There’s just sort of this knee jerk of rejection of things, or it just lack of understanding of passive income.

Merel Kriegsman:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

For instance, I mean the root of that, maybe might be like, “I don’t deserve it because I didn’t do anything for it.”

Merel Kriegsman:

Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

Big, big mindset shifts that have to happen. This is why I think entrepreneurship is the best therapy for everybody.

Merel Kriegsman:

True.

Melinda Wittstock:

It confronts you with all this stuff. It brings it up. It’s just going to bring it up, because you’re going to have to have things you have to overcome in order to be able to… Yeah, get to that next level.

Merel Kriegsman:

Staring you in the face.

Melinda Wittstock:

How do you evaluate your clients and who you want to work with? Who is your ideal person?

Merel Kriegsman:

Yeah. I’ll answer that in a second. I just wanted to insert something that I think is really important and often missed. In the process of mindset, we often think of that on a very individual level. What am I thinking in my own mind, how it’s impacting my life. It’s very, sort of like the way that whole scene has developed, it’s very self-centered in a way. Usually, actually the way to break out of that is to look beyond yourself. For example, I’d much rather create a whole bunch of wealth in my business that was fairly easy for me to call into being, and then actually give from the overflow as much as I can, which then also completely eradicates the whole conversation of like, “I don’t deserve it, blah, blah, blah,” because it doesn’t even matter what you think about yourself. You’re understanding that you had a set of privileges, or you earned yourself a set of privileges, that made it possible for you to be an entrepreneur, and for you to be really successful entrepreneur.

I personally feel that with the privilege that I have, and the chances that I’ve gotten in life, my job is also really tied to sharing as much of that as possible, and creating opportunities for people who maybe didn’t get those opportunities as easily handed to them as I did. This whole conversation of I need to change how I feel about myself, it’s like no, you just need to realize that you have an opportunity here to not just help yourself, but so many other people, so you better get over yourself. Someone in my office say, “Just get over it. You have an opportunity here to make a huge difference in so many lives.” Staying stuck in this place of do I deserve it? Do I not deserve it? Do I have credibility? Do I not have credibility? It’s just extremely ineffective. This is something I wanted to put out there, as well. Sometimes, the inner work is actually looking at the world around you, not just internally.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. This is so important. Merel, I could talk to you for a lot longer, but I want to make sure that with the time we have left, that everybody knows how to find you and work with you.

Merel Kriegsman:

Sounds good. Well, thank you so much. I mean, the people that we work with are, I would say established service providers, creatives, consultants, coaches. We have very many success stories in all of those different categories. How you can find me, a couple of different places. Definitely Instagram. Come give me a follow. Just look for my name, come say hi in the DMS. We have a Facebook group, obviously on Facebook. I was going to add that just for clarity. It’s called, Wealth on Your Terms. You come just knock on that door, and my team will let you in. There’s a ton of awesome, awesome content in there. I also have a secret podcast that I run, basically every single day where I just drop in five minute nuggets. I can have you drop the link and give them access to that for free. Usually it’s $200 or something, but if people want to just follow along with what I’m truly doing behind the scenes, that’s an incredible opportunity to get really close to what is actually happening and unfolding for me and my clients, and why what we’re doing is working, and why sometimes what we’re doing isn’t working. Really transparent. I always love to teach through transparency. Yeah, that’s where you can come and find me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Ah, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Merel Kriegsman:

Thank you for having me.