The Desert of Arizona
Cloudy 80 Degrees
There’s nothing worse than closing a deal with a client only to hear her accept your fee and think, “Dang… it’s not going to be worth doing it for this amount of money.”
I guess you could say it’s being extremely ungrateful to feel that way. But actually, I think the issue is something else (so stop being so hard on yourself!).
Whenever I feel that dread feeling in my stomach right AFTER a client agrees to send me money, I realize that’s a clue I didn’t ask for what I wanted. I only asked for what I thought I could get.
There are a lot of ways to set fees. You can charge for time (not so smart), you can charge for value (smarter but complicated), you can charge per project (we’re getting there) and then… finally… you can just charge what you want to charge to do the work (simple, refreshing).
There’s just a small problem with charging what you want. Actually, it’s a big problem. And for most service providers, it’s the cause of that dread feeling you get when the client accepts a fee that YOU discounted in your mind without even uttering the REAL number you wanted to charge.
Some people might say it’s because you don’t value yourself. That could be part of it. I don’t know.
I’d put my money on another reason though. It’s a 9 letter word we’ve all been trained to hate.
The word is REJECTION.
We were all taught to fear rejection. In fact, most of us go out of our way to avoid it. We’ll even hurt ourselves to avoid it.
You know why? Because that’s how they want it.
But I want to tell you a secret:
Rejection doesn’t KILL you. We’ve just been trained to feel that it might. And so we steer clear.
Rejection is how you’ve been taught to CONTROL YOU. It’s really sinister actually. Instead of having a taskmaster to run your life, the system has simply created a way for you to keep YOURSELF in line.
And congratulations! You’re doing a great job!
Next Monday, October 13, I’m going to walk through what I’ve learned about how to take crap like this and bust through it. Especially when it comes to setting fees and dealing with money.
If you want to come along for the ride, then register now while there is time left.