Money With a Side of Woo with Audrey Faust

Mar 13

I've had a lot of conversations about money over the years. With clients, with coaches, with colleagues who are brilliant at what they do and still somehow underpaying themselves. And the one thing I keep coming back to is that the pricing problem is almost never actually about pricing.

It's about what's underneath the pricing.

I got to sit down with Audrey Faust, the Manifesting CFO and bestselling author of She Grows Rich, for a recent episode of the ScaleSmart Podcast. Audrey works with women entrepreneurs to help them build what she calls a real financial life, not just a number on a spreadsheet, but an actual abundant relationship with money. She started as a CFO working with multi-seven and eight-figure businesses, and now she blends that financial expertise with mindset and energy work. It's a combination that, honestly, makes complete sense once you hear her explain it.

And she explained a lot in this conversation.

The Stories We Picked Up Before We Could Question Them

Audrey shared something that clicked for me immediately. She said the subconscious is wide open until the age of seven. Everything you see and hear, you believe is true. So the things you were told about money, the offhand comments, the fights at the kitchen table, the phrases like "money doesn't grow on trees" or "we work hard for every dollar we have", all of that went straight in and became your framework.

And here's the thing. Most of us who got into helping professions like speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy came with a built-in belief that doing good work and making good money are somehow in conflict. That charging a lot means you're profiting off someone's struggle. That wanting financial abundance makes you greedy or selfish or something other than the compassionate, committed clinician you know yourself to be.

Audrey has an exercise she uses in her groups where she asks people to finish the sentence, "Rich people are..." and to say the first word that comes to mind before they can think about it. I said "snobby" before I could even consider whether that's what I actually believe. And it's not. But there it was anyway, sitting in my subconscious from decades ago, quietly influencing things.

Your conscious mind may be completely on board with charging your worth. Your subconscious may still have one foot on the brake.

What Your Close Rate Might Be Telling You

Here's one of my favorite things Audrey said in this episode. If you are closing 100% of the people who come to you, you're not charging enough.

She said a healthy close rate lands somewhere between 50 and 80%. If it's consistently above 80%, that's actually a signal to raise your prices. If it's under 50%, the issue is probably not your pricing at all. It's more likely your follow-up.

I brought this up with my own operations manager and she had literally said the same thing to me. That my close rate was too high. And I had never once thought to look at it that way. We tend to celebrate when everyone says yes, when really, that might just mean we're not asking for enough.

This is not about artificially inflating your prices to seem more valuable. It's about recognizing that the range of what people charge for the same services in the same city, sometimes $75 all the way up to $185 for a 30-minute session, is not just a market variation. Part of that range reflects a mindset difference.

The Energy Behind the Number

Audrey talked about the energetic scale, from the lowest vibrational states like fear, worry, and doubt, up through neutral, and into the higher states like gratitude, appreciation, and love. This might sound abstract, but she made it very concrete.

When you're sitting in scarcity, in fear that no one will pay that, or in guilt that you're charging too much, that energy changes how you say your price. It changes the inflection. It changes your body language. And the person on the other end of that call can feel it, even if they can't name it.

I have absolutely noticed this in myself. There's a difference between saying my coaching is X amount of dollars in a way that sounds like a question, like, is that okay? And saying it in a way that sounds like, yes, and I'm excited about what we're going to do together. The second version builds confidence in the person you're talking to. The first version plants doubt.

She pointed out that if you're in your happy place, if you're relaxed and energized and genuinely glad to be doing what you do, money tends to move more freely. That's not magical thinking. It's about the state you're operating from when you show up, make offers, and do your work.

Selling Is Serving. Not Selling Is Withholding.

This one stopped me cold. Audrey said that if you know your service is going to work for someone and you're not selling it to them, you're doing them a disservice. You're withholding help they need.

For so many therapists and clinicians, selling feels uncomfortable because it runs against the grain of why they got into the work. They didn't become a speech therapist to be in sales. But if someone could genuinely benefit from what you offer and you're not telling them clearly, confidently, and with follow-up, then you're not serving them. You're protecting your own discomfort at their expense.

There's also the buy-in piece. Audrey used this example I love: if you had a ticket to a local game that you paid $25 for and you were tired, you might bail. If you had a ticket to a gala you paid $2,000 for, you're going. Full stop. The same is true for therapy and coaching and programs. When someone invests meaningfully, they show up differently. They do the work. They follow through. The transformation is more real because they're more present. Free or deeply discounted services don't produce the same results, not because the service isn't good, but because the client isn't invested.

Awareness Is Where It Starts

Audrey's closing thought was something I want to sit with for a while. She said awareness is everything. You're the one who gets to decide if you want a story to be true or not.

That's a powerful thing to hand someone. Because it means the belief that you have to work hard to deserve money, or that wanting abundance makes you selfish, or that charging what you're worth will make people think less of you, none of those are facts. They're stories. And they're changeable.

The first step is noticing them. The second is questioning them. And sometimes, the quickest way to disprove a belief is to look for the counter-evidence. Think of a time money came to you when you weren't grinding. Think of a moment you were paid well and it felt genuinely good. That data exists. We just tend to overlook it.

If you want the full conversation with Audrey, including how EFT tapping works to release scarcity, why she thinks rich people have more capacity to give, and what happened when she finally let go of her accounting agency to step fully into coaching, go listen to the episode. It's one I keep thinking about.

And if this episode brings something up for you, or if you've been sitting on a pricing decision for longer than you'd like to admit, that might be worth paying attention to.