Practice: Money, Customers, & Growth
Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash
For anyone who sets prices, pays subcontractors, or hires: what “just” actually means, and why underpricing your own work isn’t humility.
There is a quiet habit common among faith-driven business owners. We quote a price, watch the client’s face, and lower it before they say a word. We tell ourselves it is generosity. We tell ourselves it is trust in Providence. Sometimes we even call it humility.
Most of the time, it is none of those things. It is fear wearing a halo.
The Church has a great deal to say about money, work, and fairness, and very little of it supports the idea that the holiest price is the lowest one. Her teaching on the just wage and the purpose of economic life asks something harder of us: to tell the truth about what work is worth, and then to act on that truth, whether we are the one being paid or the one doing the paying.
What the Church means by “just”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is direct. Paragraph 2434 opens: “A just wage is the legitimate fruit of work.” It goes on to say that withholding it can be a grave injustice, and that fair pay must account for both the needs and the contributions of each person. Pay should allow a worker to provide a dignified life for himself and his family, materially, culturally, and spiritually, while weighing each person’s role and productivity, the state of the business, and the common good.
Then comes a line every business owner should sit with: “Agreement between the parties is not sufficient to justify morally the amount to be received in wages.” In other words, “they said yes” does not settle the question. A price can be freely agreed to and still be unjust.
Paragraph 2426 widens the frame. Economic life, the Catechism teaches, is not meant only to multiply goods or increase profit and power. It is “ordered first of all to the service of persons“: the whole person and the whole human community. Business has its own proper methods, but it operates inside the moral order, not beside it.
Read together, these two paragraphs give us a working definition. A just price or wage is one that:
- Honors the contribution. It reflects the real skill, time, and value the work brings.
- Sustains the person. It lets the one doing the work live with dignity and keep doing it.
- Serves the community. It fits the real conditions of the business and the common good, rather than extracting as much as possible or giving away as much as possible.
This is the long tradition behind Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) and St. Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of fair exchange. Justice is not the market price by default, and it is not the lowest price we can bear. It is the price that tells the truth.
Underpricing isn’t humility
St. Teresa of Avila taught that humility is walking in truth. Humility is not thinking less of yourself than you are. It is seeing yourself, your gifts, and your limits accurately, and giving God the credit for what is good.
By that measure, chronic underpricing is a failure of truth. If you have spent fifteen years learning to write grant proposals that get funded, charging as though you learned it last week is not modesty. It misrepresents the gift you were given and the work you put into developing it.
Underpricing also carries hidden costs that fall on other people:
- Your family. If your business cannot provide a dignified livelihood, someone at home is quietly absorbing the gap. Paragraph 2434 names the family explicitly.
- Your clients. An exhausted, overbooked consultant serves no one well. Fair pricing protects the time and attention your clients actually need.
- Your peers. When skilled work is routinely priced below what it costs to produce, it pushes down what everyone in the field can earn, including people with fewer cushions than you.
- Your mission. A business that cannot sustain itself cannot keep serving. Ministry that burns out in two years helps fewer people than ministry that lasts twenty.
Generosity is real and good. But generosity is a free, deliberate gift: a scholarship, a pro bono engagement, a sliding scale you choose with open eyes. It is not a default discount you apply because you are afraid to say the number out loud. Name the just price first. Then, if you are moved to give, give freely and on purpose.
The same standard runs both directions
Here is where the teaching gets uncomfortable. The principle that forbids us from undervaluing our own work also forbids us from undervaluing anyone else’s. The owner who will not charge a fair rate is often the same owner who squeezes a subcontractor, delays an invoice, or asks a freelancer for “just one more revision” at no charge.
“The laborer deserves his wages” (Luke 10:7) does not come with an exception for small businesses on tight budgets. If anything, those of us who know how thin the margins are should be the first to pay promptly and fairly.
A few practical tests, whichever side of the invoice you are on:
- Does it cover the real hours? Estimate honestly how long the work takes, including research, revisions, and communication. Divide the price by those hours. If the result would embarrass you as a wage for an employee, it is too low.
- Would I accept this rate for my own work? Before negotiating a subcontractor down, ask whether you would accept the same rate for comparable skill.
- Does it sustain the person? A just wage is meant to support a dignified life, not merely to be accepted by someone who needed the work badly enough to say yes.
- Is it honest about scope? Vague offerings invite resentment on both sides. Say clearly what is included and what costs more.
- Do I pay on time? A fair rate paid sixty days late is not a fair rate. Late payment shifts your cash-flow burden onto someone with less leverage.
- Is my generosity chosen? Discounts and gifts are good when they are deliberate, documented, and given freely, not extracted or offered out of fear.
For those who hire, the same questions apply to salaries, contract rates, and internships. Paragraph 2434 asks us to weigh both what a person needs and what they contribute. That is not a formula, but it is a clear direction.
What we learned from our own pricing review
We did not write this from a place of having it all figured out. This fall, we put Inlight Arts’ own pricing through the tests above, and we did not pass them.
Coaching was priced at $150 an hour, with packages that brought it down to about $100. Experienced business coaches typically charge $200 to $600 an hour; $150 is closer to where a brand-new coach starts. Our historic coaching rate has been $500 per hour depending on the project. Our most personal, highest-value service was priced like a commodity. Worse, our 12-month coaching commitment cost the same per hour as a simple 10-hour package, so the clients who committed most received no recognition for it.
Business plans were priced at $1,500. A thorough plan, especially one that integrates a client’s Catholic mission into the structure of the business, takes 20 to 30 hours. At $1,500, that works out to roughly $50 to $75 an hour, below what freelance writers charge for the labor alone. The part that makes our work distinctive, mission alignment, was effectively free.
So we corrected it. Coaching is now $225 an hour, $200 an hour in a 10-hour package, and $175 an hour on a 12-month term that also includes priority scheduling and email support between sessions. Business plans with mission alignment are now $3,000.
Those numbers were not chosen to maximize profit. They were chosen to tell the truth: about the hours the work takes, the experience behind it, and what it takes to keep this ministry sustainable enough to serve the next client well. And they leave us room to be generous on purpose, with clients who genuinely need it, rather than by accident with everyone.
Price like a steward
God gives gifts so they can be used, not buried. The servant in the parable of the talents was not praised for being cautious with what he had been given. Pricing your work justly is part of stewarding those gifts: it keeps your light burning long enough to guide others home.
So this week, take one honest look. Pull your price list, your last few subcontractor invoices, or the pay rate on your next job posting. Ask the questions above. Where the answer is “this doesn’t tell the truth,” change it, with courage and without apology.
If you would like a second set of eyes on your pricing, your business plan, or how your mission fits into both, we’d be glad to help. Book a discovery call with Inlight Arts, and let’s build something that is both faithful and sustainable.