The Client Letter
June 12, 2012
Sedona, Arizona
Sunny 56 degrees
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Want to raise your fees? Want to become more valuable to your clients? Then discover how to uncover the gold you need to do it. Start with this skill.
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Your fees are too low. Your fees are too low. Your fees are too low.
How do I know?
First of all, we’ve all been trained that easy cannot be valuable. (Which is just dead wrong.)
It’s “easy” for me to sit down and write a salesletter or create a marketing funnel. In fact, I’m really, really good at it. So does that make it any less valuable to my client because it’s relatively easy for me?
No suh.
Do clients really pay you so that you can “work hard?”
Not unless you set things up so that’s how you are judged. (Doing this is really not a smart idea.)
Another reason I know your fees are too low is because you probably looked around at everyone else when you set them. “What’s John charging for this? OK, I’ll charge somewhere in and around that. Not too high, not too low.”
You might think that me confidently stating your fees are too low is a bit bold. After all, I really don’t know you and well, how dare I assume anything about you, right?
If that’s how you feel, then I’ve reached my goal. My goal is not to be liked. My only goal in this issue is to get you to think about why you charge what you charge.
This is your life we’re talking about here and if you aren’t going to ask for what you want from the world you’re never going to get it.
So how do you know what to charge?
We could talk about that answer all day long. And no matter what you use to arrive at a fee for your services, the end result is a number.
Just one number, that you choose.
You set a fee and see what the world does. If your results, reputation and marketing allow the market to support that fee, then you stick with it. If the market doesn’t support it, then you make a change. But don’t just start by changing the number. Start with bumping up the value and see what that does.
So let me ask you this, “How would your life and business change if your fees were 4X what they are now?” Would that make a difference for you?
I remember Dan Kennedy mentioning that he charged somewhere around $200 for an initial consultation with a client back when he was getting started. So we’re talking $200 just to talk with him… and that was the fee like 20 or 30 years ago.
Does that get you thinking?
You might say, “Hey, that’s Dan Kennedy you’re talking about. And I’m not Dan Kennedy…”
Well, 20 or 30 years ago, Dan Kennedy wasn’t THE Dan Kennedy either. Not yet. Even so, he just jumped to the top and stuck to his guns.
A few years ago, I sat in on a consultation my client had with a well known marketing mind. The call was exactly 1 hour. The fee to speak to this individual was about $3,000. For one hour.
I did something similar again a few months ago with another client and another marketing mind. The fee was in the same range. This one included some extra stuff, but it was still a fee that would blow most people’s minds.
Some people would call $3,000 an hour high. Some people would probably call it a deal. Both opinions are irrelevant really.
The world will never call you up and ask you to charge more for what you do. That’s your job. You have to ask for it. And if you abdicate your responsibility for that job, you’re going to shortchange yourself.
If you need some motivation for you to bump up your fees, go find it somewhere. As you know, I have kids. One thing I do is picture myself explaining why I didn’t do something smart to my kids.
“No son, I can’t take you on vacation this year. You see, I could have made 4 or 5 times the amount of money I did, but frankly, I was scared to ask for it. You see, I’m just not confident in myself so I have to consistently undercharge to avoid conflict with anyone who doesn’t see the value in what I do. I want people to like me more than I want to be successful. I’m sorry son. I’m hoping that next year things will be different. Go and play now, your dad has to work.”
Barf.
It only takes me a few seconds of reading something like that to slap some real sense into me.