Bear Hebert: sliding scale & compassionate pricing (anticapitalist business coaching)

Bear Hebert is an anti-capitalist business social justice educator who's trying to help us all get a little more free. They believe that relational work is real work, and emotional work is movement work. They've been fully self-employed since 2014. Now they use their years of experience to help fellow small business people (and other beloved weirdos) figure out how to build the world-yet-to-come inside the world-that-currently-is. Their side gig is teaching men+ how to unlearn patriarchal bad behavior.

In this interview, we discuss…

Why setting your rates can be so confusing and overwhelming for people

How to approach pricing from an anticapitalist perspective (sustainability instead of scarcity, reciprocity instead of extraction, etc)

Some basic ideas about how to engineer your pricing to allow for greater access, and a vision for even more radical approaches to our pricing: always having pay-what-you-can spots, thinking about further support for low-income folks, what about paying people to participate? So many exciting options!

**

Here’s how you can work with Bear…

Bear has a self-paced online course called Freely: An Anti-Capitalist Guide To Pricing Your Work. It's at https://www.bearcoaches.com/freely

Part 1 walks you through how to calculate your rates based on facts rather than feelings, Part 2 addresses the nitty gritty of how to offer sliding scale and other non-traditional payment structures, and Part 3 deals with getting through our internal blocks around money in a way that doesn't cast aside systemic considerations.