The Desert of Arizona
Partly Sunny 64 Degrees
One of the easiest ways to increase your income as a service provider is to increase the SIZE and COMPLEXITY of the problems you solve for your clients.
You become a master at a much higher level of things. When you do that, the size of your fee expands as well, pretty much automatically.
I’ll use my world of the copywriter to give you a simple example.
Some copywriters write articles. Very simple and straightforward. I’ll write X articles for you for X dollars.
This isn’t my business so I don’t know much about fees etc. but my hunch is that you can’t charge $3,000 for a simple one page article. Could be wrong, but that’s my guess.
Article writing is a valuable service for someone who needs it done, but it’s fairly straightforward. And it solves a very limited amount of pain. Plus, there are a LOT of people who can write good articles.
So let’s go up a couple of levels to the sales copywriter. This is the copywriter who writes things that are directly responsible for money coming in the door. This requires a knowledge well beyond “writing” and deep into the world of selling.
Fewer people do this, the problem it solves is both very valuable (revenue) and also more complex (you have to get people to reach in their pockets and send in money!).
Let’s go up from there to the land of the consultant. This is the “copywriter” who looks at a product or service, looks at a hungry market, and then creates all of the steps in between one side and the other. This is the person who has the strategy to figure out how to build something that produces a result starting from a blank slate. So this copywriter isn’t getting told to write X. This copywriter is the one figuring out all of the things that need to be created and how they fit together.
This level is generally far more complicated than just writing a salesletter. It also solves an enormous problem for the business owner. After the work is complete, they have a way to turn products and services into revenue streams.
My bet is that there are levels like this in YOUR area of expertise. Are you solving big enough and complicated enough problems to warrant the fees you want?
If you aren’t, you know which direction to go! Upstream!
Fee wise, you can be on the low end of the high end of the market and still make out quite well.
This makes you a “good deal” AND increases your revenue at the same time.