For years, I've left a lot of money on the table.
I'd charge $ 5,000 for a project, while my competitors charged $10,000, $20,000, and even $50,000 for similar projects.
Why didn't I charge the same as my competitors?
Remember when you were a kid and your mom would say, "Because I said so"?
That was the end of the discussion, right?
Well, here's what Alastair Dryburgh taught me about pricing: Most of us are still waiting for permission to charge what we're worth.
We're waiting for someone to say it's okay.
Spoiler alert: Nobody's going to give you that permission.
I'm not the only one who's not charging what they're worth.
I was talking with a consultant friend last week who charges $2,500 for a strategy session.
He was agonizing over raising his rates to $3,000.
Meanwhile, his clients regularly make million-dollar decisions based on his advice.
See the disconnect?
In his book The Pricing Genius, Alastair shares a brilliant story about a marketing agency that was working on pharmaceutical launches.
Billions riding on their work.
Yet they're haggling with junior managers over the cost of an illustration.
It hit me like the '89 earthquake (yeah, the one I barely missed).
We're not pricing our work.
We're pricing our insecurity.
Here's the thing: AI isn't making expertise less valuable.
It's making REAL expertise priceless.
While ChatGPT can write a blog post, it can't sit across from a CEO and read the fear in their eyes when they're about to bet the company on a decision.
That digital agency that went from $5k to $46k?
They didn't suddenly become 9x better.
They just stopped asking permission and started stating value.
Marcus Aurelius said, "What we do now echoes in eternity."
Maybe that's a bit dramatic for a pricing strategy, but your pricing does echo through every client interaction, every project, every referral.
Three takeaways from The Pricing Genius that will change your pricing game:
- Stop justifying your worth with time - nobody pays a heart surgeon by the hour
- Price the transformation, not the transaction - clients buy outcomes, not activities
- If you're not losing 20% of prospects on price, you're too cheap
Ready to stop asking permission?
Ted
P.S. Join Alastair Dryburgh, Tom Ruwitchand me on Thursday at 11:30 AM Pacific/2:30 PM Eastern to discuss more paradigm-shifting insights from Pricing Genius: [MastermindBook.club]
Photo courtesy of Ruben Sukatendel
