Who Sees More Value in Your Work Than You Do?

Years ago I was sitting with a potential client who was interested in hiring me to help him with his business. The meeting started in an odd way. This client was proudly talking about the multiple locations he and his wife had opened, how they’d grown, cash flow, and how much, he was quite certain, the business would be valued in a sale.

I was beginning to wonder why he needed my advice, since everything was so rosy.

Then his wife walked into the office, and we were introduced.

“Boy, am I glad you’re here,” she exclaimed. “We have no idea what this business is worth. The books have been a mess since day one. We’ve got constant turnover and that means we’re working too hard at our age. I want to figure out a way to get out of this thing. Our retirement is tied up in this business, and I can’t go one more day without us having a plan to figure out exactly what we have here and what we need to do.”

“So I’m glad,” she continued as she plopped down in a chair, “that he’s FINALLY called someone to help us sort all this stuff out.”

Truth blew into the room, you might say. The conversation went in an entirely separate direction than I think the husband originally intended.

This couple are archetypes of the two distinct aspects of how clients identify value in your work as a professional services provider.

The truth-avoiding husband represents the tangible service you provide. In my case that day it was the analysis of financials, the advice, and other elements of the service itself. The surface reasons, you might say, you get called in in the first place.?

The wife embodies the intangibles. In her case it was the worry over having their retirement nest egg tied up in the business. How the decision to invest in this business, after her husband had left corporate, was going to change their lifestyle in future years. Whether they’d get to enjoy their grandkids the way they wanted to, or if they’d be able to take the trips the two of them dreamed about.?

Your own professional services practice has these same two sources of value you generate for clients. The tangible is the service you provide, whether it’s business advisory work, consulting, legal, accounting and tax planning, or marketing.

The intangibles are what a client hopes they will be able to do, to feel, to realize, and to avoid because of the transformative nature of your work.

The intangibles are value in your work that you might not ever know if you don’t make it your practice to ask and to understand.?

What this means is that your clients, by definition, see more value in your work, even if they can’t fully express it at first, than you do. That’s why you must ask and explore in a value conversation.

Prior to this anxious wife walking in the room, quite willing to discuss the intangible value they were seeking, my focus was on the tangibles:?the arc of the business, how it had grown, the financials, and so forth. All that is vital, of course, but incomplete.

It’s not that I wouldn’t have gotten to where I could identify intangible value at some point during the engagement. It might have taken me a while, though, particularly if I was only dealing with this husband who was seemingly reluctant to confront the truth. In any case, though, I would have priced my work based on an incomplete assessment of value.

Your clients always, always see more value in your services than you do yourself.?

If you develop a deep understanding of this one concept, and let it pervade every aspect of how you operate your professional services practice, it will entirely change the trajectory of your business.

It will affect how you talk to prospective clients and the questions you ask them. It will affect the value that both of you see in the work you do for them. It will result in you taking on clients which are a better fit for your practice.

It will change how you talk about your work. Your efforts at business development will improve significantly.

Your clients will see you as an investment with a return rather than a cost which they resent. Your pricing will improve, and you’ll be able to do a better job with fewer clients and put more money on your bottom line than you did before.

#value #valueconversation #pricing #professionalservices #pricevaluejourney

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John Ray?advises solopreneur and small professional services firms on their pricing. John is passionate about the power of pricing to change the trajectory of a business and the lifestyle choices of a business owner. His clients are professionals who are selling their “grey matter,” such as attorneys, CPAs, accountants and bookkeepers, consultants, marketing professionals, and other professional services practitioners.

John’s book,?The Price and Value Journey: Raise Your Confidence, Your Value, and Your Prices Using The Generosity Mindset Method, will be released later this year. The book covers topics like value and adopting a mindset of value, pricing your services more effectively, proposals, and essential elements of growing your business. For more information on the book, as well as John's podcast,?The Price and Value Journey, go to?pricevaluejourney.com.