Like a lot of the freelancers and consultants I work with, I started my business because I wanted freedom.
My name is Shannon Mattern, and I’m a pricing strategist for consultants, freelancers, fractional executives and agency owners who want to make more from the work they’re already doing without working even harder or overhauling their entire business model.
My story starts over a decade ago when I was sitting in my beige, windowless corporate office under fluorescent lights for what felt like the millionth day in a row, finishing up a financial report I dreaded every month, when I overheard someone in the hallway talking about making some lemon-lime Jell-O dessert called 7-UP Salad for the office potluck on Friday when I felt my chest tighten and my heart and my mind start racing:
“OMG, I cannot do this for the rest of my life!” I remember thinking. “Is this really it? Is this why I worked so hard in school, got a degree, landed this “good” job? To sit in this beige dungeon wearing “business casual” outfits and eating 7-Up Salad for the next 30 years?”
I felt trapped. I wanted freedom, flexibility, and to be in control of my own time and income. I was tired of being parented by the corporate handbook.
And then an opportunity to make a shift showed up: a vendor asked who built our company's website, found out I did, asked if I took freelance work on the side, and just like that, I had my first client.
Then someone at my gym asked what I did for a living. “Marketing,” I said. “Oh, and I do some freelance web design on the side.” She told me her company had been looking for someone. Next client. I told a friend that story, and he said his dad needed someone. Next client.
You would think it would have been smooth sailing from there.
It was not.
My clients loved me. What made me a great employee – going above and beyond, being instantly responsive, getting the job done no matter what, being “affordable” – also made me really likeable and refer-able.
But it was working against me as a freelancer. I treated every client like they were my boss. I said yes to everything. I undercharged and overdelivered and wondered why I was exhausted all the time. When I actually sat down and calculated what I was making (because I wasn’t charging for everything I was actually doing because I didn’t feel like I could) it was literally less than minimum wage and completely unsustainable.
I almost quit… but my desire for freedom, flexibility and financial independence was too strong.
And if you know me, you know I don't quit. I find another way.
So in 2015, I started teaching web design directly to business owners so they could be empowered to do it themselves. I created a training that I gave away for free, and then when people purchased the tools I recommended in the training, I earned affiliate commissions from those companies. I was no longer trading my time for money, and my job became marketing the free training. My goal was to earn enough in affiliate commissions to replace my paycheck so I could quit my day job.
But then something strange started happening: people started reaching out to me saying, “I know you’re showing me how to build my own website for free step by step… but I don’t want to do it. Can I just hire you to do it for me?”
And I was so confused. I couldn’t understand why someone would pay for something they could get for free. I thought everyone thought about money the same way I did.
One of those people was a business coach, she was like, “Shannon… you’re sitting on a goldmine. You have people wanting to pay you thousands of dollars, and you’re turning them away because you don’t realize that you get to make all the rules as to how this business runs. I’d like to help you fix that.”
So I said yes, and she helped me make the shift from employee to entrepreneur, and I started offering freelance web design services again – and it was actually working this time – so well in fact that in 2016 I was invited to speak at a conference about how I was running my successful freelance business.
My business coach suggested that I invited anyone who was interested in learning my systems and processes to an info session about working with me to help them implement my strategies in their own business. Six women said yes, and we started what would become the Web Designer Academy, where I started coaching other web designers on how to actually run the business side of their freelance web design businesses. Getting clients. Managing projects. Setting boundaries. Handling scope creep. Pricing.
And what I found pretty quickly is that once our students got past that first hurdle of getting clients, they hit a ceiling. The same ceiling I'd hit.
They were doing great work, their clients loved them, and whenever they’d raise their prices, they’d add in more work for themselves to justify it. More deliverables, more scope, more responsibility, less freedom. So they could never really get ahead.
And when it came to growth, every guru had the same answer: niche down, become the go-to expert in an industry, productize your offer so that it’s repeatable, and then hire people to do the work for you.
That advice isn’t just given to freelance web designers, by the way. It’s the same advice I hear across service-based industries when it comes to growth.
Based on the unspoken premise that you can’t charge more, so find another way to make more money.
Which sounds great… if you want to niche down. If you want to productize. If you want to run a team.
But most of the people I was working with didn’t want that. It didn’t feel like the freedom they were seeking. And if they were being really honest, they still didn’t feel like they were making enough for the value they were creating for their clients.
I found myself constantly coaching my students on helping them see the value they were creating for their clients, helping them sell themselves on their pricing, helping them understand what they were really selling, helping them communicate the value, helping them build the confidence to charge what they really wanted to be charging.
It was a lot of mindset work, but I didn’t have a real strategy behind it to help them operationalize it.
Until I randomly met a podcast guest that would change everything.
In 2018, a business consultant named Paul Klein reached out to me to thank me for a tutorial I created on how to make an Alexa Flash Briefing of all things. We hit it off, and I invited him to be a guest on my podcast so we could get to know each other better and see what collaboration opportunities there might be.
Paul had spent years helping companies negotiate and structure high-value consulting engagements, from $1,500 projects all the way up to high six-figure contracts, and he shared something in that conversation that cracked everything open for me.
He talked about how pricing is positioning, how people are really buying outcomes, not your time or deliverables, and that when you only give a client one price, they have to find their own frame of reference for whether it's a good deal, usually Fiverr or whoever else is out there. He talked about always providing clients with three options, starting with the most expensive option first, and how 70% of the time clients land in the middle… and how putting those options in front of someone changes the question in their mind from “should I work with Shannon?” to “how am I going to work with Shannon?”
It was a record-scratch moment for me. Beyond just being able to charge more, I started to see how this structure would solve so many more of the problems myself and my clients had been experiencing – undercharging, overdelivering, overworking, trying to justify prices, trying to compete with other freelancers in the industry and stand out in a saturated market, communicating the real value of what you do, how to handle clients that push boundaries, scope creep, and so much more.
It wasn’t about what you’re charging, it’s about how you’re making the offer.
Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
So I took what Paul shared and I started applying it to my own business.
I had a client that was constantly pushing the boundaries and wanting more than what they were paying for, so I decided to use Paul’s structure to test my theory that this proposal structure could solve so many more problems than just pricing.
I put together options, one of which was they way they currently wanted me to work for them – basically be on call for them – and made that my most expensive option, and then gave them a couple of other options that I thought were more in line with their budget but that spelled out explicitly how responsive I would be.
I thought there was absolutely no way they’d take the most expensive option at the price tag I put on it: $5,000 a month – which felt astronomical to me at the time.
But I was wrong. They chose my most expensive option with the most access to me. And what was most unexpected is that I stopped feeling burnt out and resentful. I had capacity. I had resources. I felt like it was worth it.
THIS is what sustainability feels like…
I put together a different proposal for another client who chose my low-end option, and I noticed I didn’t feel compelled to overdeliver to please them. They saw they had the option, they didn’t choose it, and I felt free for the first time ever.
THIS is what I’ve been missing!
I brought the strategy into the Web Designer Academy and started teaching it there. As students brought business problems to our coaching calls, I thought about how this way of making offers could solve it. Eventually I started calling the strategy a “Package Matrix™” and we created a module to teach how to do it, how to make offers with it, how NOT to make offers with it. We saw places where it broke down and didn’t work, places where our students would get really stuck in creating a Package Matrix™, where their own mindset would get in the way.
As we honed the process, our students started reporting back things like “I sold my highest priced offer ever” and “I was shocked when they chose to pay more than what they said their budget was.”
And the best part? They weren't doing it by overhauling their entire business model. They were doing it by changing how they made the offer on their next proposal.
Package Matrix™ worked. Our students loved it. So much so that one of them turned it into a mascot – a 3-option proposal with a cape, because it swoops in and solves so many business problems that seem like they are separate problems.
There was no doubt Package Matrix™ worked… but I wanted to know more about why it worked – not just that it worked. Because if I could understand the why, I could teach it better, build a repeatable framework around it, troubleshoot it when students broke it, and know which pieces were non-negotiable and which were flexible.
Why were some clients choosing higher options than what they'd originally said they could spend? And why were others choosing the lowest option even when I could tell they had the resources for more?
It reminded me of when I was teaching web design – why would someone choose to spend money on something I was trying to give them for free?
It wasn't about how much money they had. I was seeing that pretty clearly. It was something else… something about what they believed about money. About what happens when you spend it. About whether spending money is a risk or an investment. About whether their time is worth more than their money or the other way around.
I started reading every single book I could get my hands on about money mindset.
And then I started thinking about myself. About how I grew up.
I was raised in the Midwest by a single mom who was always, as she put it, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Her default answer to everything was “we can't afford it.” And what I learned watching her was that money comes from your time… since time is finite, money is finite… and once it leaves your bank account, it's gone forever. The only way to get more is to work more. So you hold onto what you have, because what you have is all you get.
That's what I call an expense or employee mindset. And for a long time, it was the only way I knew how to think about money.
But then I figured out there was another gear I could shift into. If I worked really hard, got more skills, got better, became more valuable… I could raise the value of my time. So I became the best employee I could possibly be… the yes girl, the people pleaser, the one who climbed the corporate ladder and made herself indispensable. I took on more and more responsibility. I became the go-to, the team player, the one who always got it done. Which works out great for employers, by the way. Not so much for the person doing it.
That's what I call a hustle mindset. And it'll get you pretty far… until it doesn't.
What I didn't encounter until I left my corporate job and started meeting other entrepreneurs was a third way of thinking about money entirely. The investment mindset. People who genuinely believed that money doesn't come from their time… it comes from the value they create for other people. That their ideas alone could create money. That spending money now to save time or get a better result was just smart math. That there's always more on the way.
I had literally never met anyone who thought this way growing up. And when I did, it kind of blew my mind.
So I started mapping it. I identified three pricing paradigms: expense-minded, hustle-minded, and investment-minded. Not income levels. Not demographics. Just three distinct belief systems about how money works… and I started noticing that every single person I talked to, every client, every student, every prospect, had one of these as their default. Including me. Including you.
And here's the piece that changed everything about how I made offers: every single one of us has all three of these paradigms living inside us at any given moment. We have a default… the one our nervous system goes to first… but depending on how an offer is framed, how a price is presented, what order information comes in, you can either speak to the investment-minded version of someone or trigger the expense-minded version of them.
And most of us, without realizing it, were triggering the expense-minded version. Every time.
When you put one price in front of someone with no context, no frame of reference, no other options to compare it to… their brain goes looking for a frame of reference on its own. And the frames it finds are never good for you. They're thinking about what they paid the last person. What they've seen on Upwork. Whether they could just figure it out themselves. Whether now is really the right time. You didn't mean to set that up. But you did.
And when I started teaching our students to map the options in their Package Matrix™ to pricing paradigms… when they started making offers through the lens of what each type of person values most and what outcomes matter to them specifically… clients started choosing options that were more than what they'd originally said they wanted to spend. More than they'd spent the last time they’d worked together. More than our students ever secretly thought anyone would pay for a website.
I discovered the work of behavioral economist Melina Palmer… her book The Truth About Pricing handed me the research that explained everything I'd been observing in my own business and in my students' businesses for years. Why anchoring is so important… the behavioral economics principle that says the first number someone hears becomes the frame of reference for every number that follows. Why presenting your lowest price first is working against you every single time. Why when prices rise, the brain's primal response is to hoard, to protect resources, to feel anxiety. And Melina's concept of the wingman offer that mirrored Paul’s explanation of why pricing is positioning… that highest-priced option isn't really there to be bought most of the time. It's there to make the middle option feel like the obvious best value.
I learned about why a single-option proposal converts at only 20-30%… because you've essentially handed someone a yes-or-no ultimatum, and our brains default to the status quo when we feel backed into a corner.
And Dr. Lee Cordell from the Institute of Trauma & Psychological Safety’s work on creating psychological safety in sales conversations and framework on the three core needs every offer has to fulfill for a client to say yes, and how your client needs to believe they will gain resources by working with you, not lose them. They need to feel psychologically safe… that you understand them, that you'll deliver, that they can trust you. And they need to feel like they have real choices, that they have the autonomy to decide what they most value – and how a single-option proposal fails on all three, but a properly structured Package Matrix™ addresses all three… before you ever get to the sales conversation.
Every piece of research I found confirmed what I'd been seeing in practice. And every piece helped me teach Package Matrix™ better, explain it more clearly, and help my students apply it more effectively.
I built out the full framework and methodology, creating templates, sales scripts.
I figured out all the obvious and subtle ways people got stuck or broke the framework, and I built guardrails and the teaching around every single failure point I observed.
And I kept watching what happened when students applied it correctly.
Aprile tripled her prices on her next proposal, from $5K to $15K.
Jenelle went from $11K to $17K on her next proposal.
Jen sold $77K worth of projects in seven days.
Hundreds of web designers inside the Web Designer Academy used the Package Matrix™ to raise their prices, get more yeses, reduce scope creep, and stop overdelivering for clients who hadn't paid for that level of service.
Not by finding some secret pool of wealthy clients. Not by niching down and rebuilding their entire business model. Just by changing how they made the offer.
The Package Matrix™ became the cornerstone of everything we teach inside the Web Designer Academy.
And for years, it stayed there, tucked away inside the program as a strategy that was given to our students once they joined – and only for women web designers.
And as my network expanded over the years, I started noticing that freelancers, consultants and service providers in other industries were experiencing the exact same problems web designers were bringing to me… the scope creep, the overdelivering, the clients who said “I can't afford it” and then went to Upwork, the feeling of being on call constantly, the revenue ceiling they couldn't break through.
I started seeing it in masterminds and networking groups I was in. Business coaching programs I’d joined to help me grow my business. Friends who ran consulting businesses and coaching practices and agencies, all experiencing the same challenges and hitting the same revenue ceiling:
People who all left corporate for freedom and flexibility, built something real and successful… and somehow found themselves working more than ever, delivering at a first-class level for clients who were paying economy prices, because they didn't have a structure that let them do anything else. Dropping their number just a little bit right before hitting send on a proposal, just to feel confident saying it out loud, not making nearly enough, and thinking the solution is more clients, more projects, more team.
Sound familiar?
These weren't beginner problems. These were experienced, talented, successful service providers… fully booked, under-earning, and completely burnt out. And all the conventional advice… charge your worth, raise your rates, stop billing hourly, productize your services, remove yourself from delivery… sounded great in theory but didn't actually tell them how. Or it required overhauling their entire business model in ways they didn't want to do.
So in 2025, I started testing the Package Matrix™ strategy outside of web design entirely. A business coach. A podcast production agency. An IEP advocate. A competitive ballroom dance studio. A fractional Chief Marketing Officer. A digital marketing agency. An SEO agency.
Different industries, different offers, wildly different clients.
Same business challenges, same amazing results: landing new projects at 3x their previous rates and close 2x more proposals on average.
I taught Package Matrix™ to one of my friends who runs a marketing agency, and she told me she closed over $100K in contracts in her first month using Package Matrix™ – that every single proposal she sent was a yes – when normally she would have only closed half of them – and at lower prices than she charged with Package Matrix™.
Another friend sold an $18K business coaching package – double what she used to charge.
And another added $36,000 in recurring revenue to his SEO agency.
Which is why I made the decision to pull Package Matrix™ out of the Web Designer Academy and make it available to all kinds of consultants, freelancers, agency owners, fractional executives, or really anyone selling their expertise and the hands-on implementation of that expertise.
If you know you're good at what you do, you work hard, your clients love you, and you want to make more from the work you’re already doing without working harder, Package Matrix™ will help you make this change on your very next proposal.
Not after you fix your mindset or get more confident.
Not after you find better clients.
Not after you overhaul your whole business model.
On your very next proposal.
Ready to get started? Get access to the Package Matrix™ framework here.
