Don’t let someone else price your time. You determine your value not just by the amount of time you spend on a project, but rather as the sum of all your experience, your accumulated wisdom. Ken Courtright empowers you to look within yourself and find value in the base of knowledge you’ve created over years of work. You are the embodiment of all you have accomplished, you are the Intellectual Property. Your experiences have value, so let that drive the way you price yourself.
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Pricing Yourself
This is episode 78. I’m calling it Pricing Yourself. I remember a while back that I did an episode where I talked about Tony Robbins telling Andre Agassi, the tennis pro that used to be number one in the world. After a few years of slipping, he could not get himself back to being ranked anywhere near number one, let alone even the top ten. The bottom line is somebody told them to call Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins charged him $250,000 for a one-hour session. Six months later, Andre Agassi was number one in the world. I’ve been approached a couple of times where people say, “How can you possibly charge what you charge for an hour of your time? How can you possibly charge a person or a company what you charge for a one day or two-day session? How can you charge much to build an authoritative website for someone?” The bottom line is nobody is paying me for an hour of my time. That’s not what they’re paying.
People that get me or say one of the top consultants at Accenture or any of these firms that have years of experience. You’re not paying someone. I want you to make sure you’re not taking this as I’m saying it in vain. I want you to use the reciprocal of this and shine the mirror on yourself and view yourself exactly the way I’m about to say this. When I tell you that people do not pay me for an hour of my time, they pay me for what I charge because they’re buying my whole life. They’re buying the knowledge and the wisdom I gleaned from coaching 3,100 clients in years, what I’ve learned from my own 80 employees, what I’ve learned from 700 revenue-generating websites and the ups and downs of that battle, dealing with Google algorithms and buying websites that are not even real websites. They’re garbage and you find out later that you were hosed. They’re buying the countless hours of being on the firing line, working with companies, contracts, attorneys and employees.
When you're pricing your service, you have to consider that you're pricing your intellectual property and accumulated wisdom. Click To TweetThey’re buying all of that time accumulated into one body so when I’m allowed in that 1 hour, 2 hours, 1 day or 2-day session, they’re buying the fact that I can ask a series of questions which will always provide me with specific answers. I can dig into my tool chest and say, “You need this screwdriver. Let me turn the knob a little bit here. Let me dial this division of yours down a little bit. Let me show you why in 90 days, that division, that person is probably going to implode and/or why you should consider buying that blog, that other company or this or that. Why you might want to look at buying your competitor with zero money down, taking over all of their accounts receivable and adding more employees in the buying process and making both companies better.”
I want you to understand that when you’re pricing your service, what you’re simply pricing is your IP. What is intellectual property? What is the accumulated level of knowledge in your gray matter upstairs? That’s what you’re pricing. You are never pricing an hour. Some people get paid $40,000 to $100,000 for a talk. Gary Vaynerchuk is running around the world charging unbelievable amounts of money. Why? It’s because of his accumulated wisdom of running his companies to the level they’re at and turning his dad’s liquor store from a million to mega-millions in less than a year. His knowledge of taking companies, divisions and people, and showing them how to reinvent themselves and explode is priceless. Thus, he charges accordingly.
In every industry, there’s always a couple of breakout consultants that charge what seems like this obnoxious fee. When you do retain them and you see what you gleaned from them, it’s priceless. I was telling somebody that there was an ad platform that the private placement marketplace platform was charging this obnoxious amount of money for six million page views. I said, “Stop. My company would find that much more valuable than what they’re charging. I would pay three times that.”
Everything is relative. This drills back down to what should you charge for an hour of your time and ask yourself, “In the last 1, 5 or 10 years, how many business transactions have you done? How many people have you employed? How many deals have you done? How many books have you read? How many seminars and conferences have you attended?” In your opinion, what is your level of knowledge? What is your personal IP? Charge accordingly and don’t be afraid. If you’re a consultant and/or you could start a consulting division in your company, I want you to come out with three different prices. One is a small price for a small service. One is a medium price for a medium-sized service, and one is a mac daddy price for maybe a 2 to 7-day camp where you go into a company or you do this or you do that.
It’s obnoxious but the reason you want to price it accordingly is when you want that middle service to be your main product line, you’ve got to pull a Sam Walmart method. If you’re not sure of that, you’ve got to dig deep into one of the episodes of the last fifteen episodes where I explained the psychology of pricing. You want to lay that out there in a way that you want it sitting next to that larger price so they feel much more comfortable with one of your two smaller prices. How do you price yourself? Are you looking at yourself as an hourly figure? Are you looking at yourself as a bucket in a bottle of wisdom that can get turned over like a ketchup bottle that you can dump your wisdom onto somebody else or some other company and explode their revenues? What’s the value of that? I hope that helps. I’ll talk to you soon.
Important Links:
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Leave a Reply