The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 45 Degrees
If I’ve learned one thing about money over the years, it’s that the less attention you pay to getting it, the more of it tends to show up.
Had I heard this idea years ago, I would have (incorrectly) assumed I should stop thinking about money and just sit on the couch.
That’s PART of it. But if you’ve ever tried that, you know it’s not all that effective to sit on your couch, NOT think about money, and have much of anything present itself to you.
I guess that would be nice (probably miserable actually), but that doesn’t seem to be how it works.
What DOES seem to work is to invest your focus and effort in building something that brings the money. You’re not focusing directly ON the money, you are focusing on the PROCESS that delivers it.
It’s just like client attraction. If you chase, they run.
That’s why we focus on building the PROCESS that brings the clients so we don’t have to directly pursue the clients.
And that brings me to the topic for today:
The World’s Simplest Guide to Setting Fees!
There are a lot of strategies behind setting fees.
Charge what the market will bear…
Charge within a range normal for your industry…
Figure out how much you want to make and how much you want to work. Then work backwards to figure out how much you have to charge per hour. (I wouldn’t recommend this one to my worst enemy!)
All of these options are possible paths.
I think they are far too complicated. And they talk about fees as though they are a CAUSE and not an effect.
Setting the fee is a byproduct of something else.
What’s the simplest way to set your fees?
You simply charge what you want to charge with little consideration for anything else.
But you can’t just wake up and decide to do that. Like I said, it’s a BYPRODUCT. So what is the ability to do this a byproduct OF?
It’s a byproduct of becoming an Incomparable Expert. When the marketplace can only get what you do from ONE PLACE (YOU!), then you can charge what you want.
By definition, the marketplace can only get ONE thing from you that no one else can deliver. And that is YOU actually doing the service.
That’s a one in a million offering.
The problem is, your prospective clients have no idea that’s the case. Because you haven’t shown them.
Instead, we all stick our noses into books about setting fees and finding some super secret strategy for generating more income. I’ve done plenty of that over the years.
That’s not the work to be done. Setting your fees wherever you want is more the REWARD you get when you finally start doing the right WORK.
The right work is to demonstrate that you are, in fact, offering something your clients can’t get anywhere else.