Pricing treatments with me vs. my employees

Hello ladies/gents...question.

Do any of you have employes/Independent contractors that work under you? And if so, do you offer different pricing for clients to see them vs. you? I am restructuring my price list and want to set my pricing above my employees but I do not know if that would be too confusing/too many options for our clients. Here are my options so far:
Option 1: Every client would have the choice to see me (at a higher price) or my employee.
Option 2: To offer completely different facials that only I can give to clients?
I really want to make it easy/streamlined for clients when booking.
Option 1, 2 or both?
Any insight would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

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Permalink Reply by Colette Fontana on July 19, 2015 at 6:11pm

Hi Stacy,

I would suggest that you have your employees, especially if they don't have much experience, do basic facials at a lower rate so that they can get more clients and gain experience. Keep the more technical services for yourself and charge more for those. In the event where you get booked for a more basic facial, you have the ability to get the client to upgrade their service based on your superior experience.

If you offer the same service from two people at different prices, the customer will get confused and might be disappointed if she chooses the cheaper one and blame the facial instead of the technician. I also would use a different (less expensive) product line to for the lower priced services.

I hope this helps.

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Permalink Reply by coldsalineplexus on July 20, 2015 at 8:30am

I have been in this situation and chose to offer the same treatment menu with adjusted prices about 25% higher than my staff.

I considered having separate menus, and you may want to do this if you are nervous about your liability with staff performing more clinical sessions, but ultimately I had structured the menu and treatments to be the best reflection of my knowledge and expertise, so I wanted all comers to have access to that. There was a lot of continuous education to keep the sessions consistent.

At one point later on I did restrict my schedule to only the most high end, comprehensive treatment we offered, but this was also at a time that I was injured and trying to actively drive business towards my staff because I couldn't really work without flaring up my injuries. Predictably, it killed my schedule.

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Permalink Reply by Stacy Webb on July 22, 2015 at 4:04pm

Thanks Ladies!

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Permalink Reply by Shelley Birnbaum on July 30, 2015 at 11:07am

I agree with Cathy Hille. She stated it perfectly. I would add that independent contractors do not work under you and by law they are supposed to do their own scheduling, have their own menu and have clients pay them directly. They are not employees. The IRS look very carefully at independent contractors for those reasons.

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Permalink Reply by coldsalineplexus on July 31, 2015 at 7:16am

They do not necessarily need to charge directly for their services. You as the business owner can contract with someone individually to provide services to your clients, however it is true that they set their own hours and work unsupervised.