Lowering Your Price When Your Value Goes Up?!

When you gain more knowledge and skills, do you lower your consulting price?

Do clients get more, and you get less?

That’s sounds ridiculous, right? 

How is that possible?

It works like this. As you consult, you will start to accumulate more knowledge and skills. 

You will learn more while you are working with clients and get better at what you do. 

You’ll work with other consultants and learn from them. 

You’ll get more insight into what makes your industry tick and be able to anticipate where it’s going. 

You’ll uncover gaps in your knowledge and skills and fill them. 

Oh, and as the new knowledge and skills become ingrained in who you are and what you can do, you’ll be able to deliver your increasing value in less time.

And if you’re still only charging hourly, you will be paid less.

Even if you don’t mean to.

Let me use myself as an example. 

When I first started to do strategic planning for clients, I labored over the right way to do it. I spent more time producing interview guides, slide decks, operational assessment tools, etc. 

I now have much of that in hand and can customize it to each client. 

I create new tools as I see the needs of clients evolving over time and use them with other clients that would benefit from them.

I have done strategic planning enough times that I know what works and what doesn’t and how to adjust what I do based on the particularities of each client faster.

That’s not to say that you should ever “phone it in.” Never do that. Our clients deserve a thinking, engaging human being, not an autopilot robot in a suit. 

But, like me, you will show up with a bigger toolbox and better skills than you had when you started. You will become more efficient, which is in and of itself tremendously valuable to clients. 

However, let’s say that you can deliver the same value to a client in 4 hours that used to take you 10 hours. 

That doesn’t mean you were ripping them off before. They still got their money’s worth before. It just means they’re now getting a more seasoned consultant who is faster and better. The value is the same. 

If you charge hourly, let’s say $400 an hour, you would have charged $4,000 before and now would charge $1,600. 

Let me do that math for you: you would have reduced your price by $2,400! For the same value. 

That doesn’t even take into account the extra value they would likely get because you know and can do more.

Your value is not your time. Say it with me! Your value is not your time.

As a consultant, you should be paid for the value you bring to a client, that is, the results you produce for them.

Other pricing models can help you get paid for every ounce of your value.

Not to say that hourly pricing is always wrong. It isn’t. Sometimes it is the best or only option.

If you want to learn more about other pricing models (and when hourly does make sense)…

Join me on my FREE live training on HOW TO PRICE YOUR CONSULTING SERVICES.  

Date: May 24, 2023

Time: 9 am PDT (12 pm EDT)

Location: LinkedIn

This training will help you pick the right pricing model, price your services right, get clients to say yes, and get paid for your value. 

When you register, you'll get a free tool to develop your unique value proposition. Your value proposition describes your value and is critical to picking a price that prospective clients will know is worth paying. 

REGISTER HERE

Cheering you on!

Deb