Take Yourself Off the Clearance Rack

Priscilla Kenny was charging four dollars for a dessert American Airlines would later pay nine for.

Same dessert. Same two days of work behind every piece. The only thing that changed was the story she told herself about what it was worth.

Let me back up.

Several weeks ago, Bessy Martinez, founder of The Latina Foundation, invited me to mentor one of her cohorts on offers and value. I ran back to my office from a Round Rock Chamber After Hours event, jumped on Zoom, and waited through a few minutes of technical difficulties while the connection sorted itself out. These entrepreneurs were all local to Austin, but the sessions ran remote.

Six PM to nine PM. Three hours.

I didn’t teach them a pricing formula. There isn’t one worth teaching. Instead we went somewhere most workshops never go: your value is tied to your meaning. Not your materials. Not your food cost. Not what the market down the street charges. Your meaning. What only you create, and what it makes possible for the person who receives it.

Priscilla runs MeringueMe. Her product is the EntrePop, and each one takes more than two days to create. She was selling them for four to five dollars a piece. Her food cost was only twenty percent, which sounds healthy until you do the rest of the math. She wasn’t paying herself. She couldn’t grow. She had priced her work like it belonged on the clearance rack.

Here’s what makes that night strange in the best way. The same evening as that session, my Rock Solid podcast episode with Candyce Hunt released. We had recorded it three months earlier. Pure timing. And in that episode, Candyce described her own turning point as getting herself off the clearance rack.

So I carried her phrase straight into the room. I told these women: stop pricing yourselves on clearance. Then I pointed them to the episode, released that very day, so they could hear it from someone who had lived it. One phrase, traveling from a podcast guest to a mentor to a room full of entrepreneurs on Zoom.

That week, something shifted for Priscilla. She raised her price to nine dollars.

Then American Airlines ordered EntrePops for their 100th anniversary celebration. At the new price. That order produced her company’s first thousand dollars of profit. Eminem has had them too. Famous chefs and CPG professionals have told her what she makes is exceptional.

This past Saturday, at a pitch competition, Priscilla stood up and told the room what changed. On her slide, she put a quote from that mentoring session:

“Once you know your value, your life changes.”

I have watched a lot of businesses grow. Nothing compares to watching a person see herself accurately for the first time.

And here’s the part I want you to sit with, because it applies to you. Priscilla is still underpricing. She doesn’t sell a dessert. She sells an experience built over two days that no one else can produce, a moment inside a celebration that doesn’t exist without her. American Airlines didn’t buy popsicles. They bought something worthy of a 100th anniversary. When she fully sees that, nine dollars will look like the clearance rack too.

This is the pattern I see frequently, in solo entrepreneurs and in eight-figure firms. We anchor to our costs. Our materials. Our hours. And we miss entirely what the buyer is actually purchasing, which is the outcome, the experience, the meaning. You cannot price what you cannot see. And most of us cannot see ourselves. I am guilty of that myself.

That’s why every engagement I run starts with excavating the core story before touching strategy, pricing, or marketing. The story you tell yourself about your value sets the ceiling on everything else. Change the story and the pricing conversation resolves itself.

One more thing from that cohort. Another entrepreneur from those sessions keeps showing up at Chamber events, and she is a different person now. Different confidence. Different presence in the room. That didn’t come from a spreadsheet. It came from being seen, really seen, and deciding to agree with what she saw.

We shouldn’t go through life not feeling valued.

On July 26, I’m bringing this conversation to an exclusive gathering of women leaders in the SHE IS community. The session title says everything: You Are Worthy. You Are Chosen.

Before then, do one thing. Write down what you charge or get paid. Next to it, write down what it actually costs your customer to get your result without you. If those two numbers live on different planets, you already know which rack you’ve put yourself on.

Take yourself off it.

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