Are you charging enough for the value your clients perceive you are creating for them? If you are in financial services, insurance, business services or professional services, I’d hazard in 80% of situations you are not. Think about that for a second. 80% of your best clients if they are intellectually honest with themselves think you are leaving money on the table.

Why is that? Here are my five most frequent observations:

1. You feel guilty asking for a fee commensurate with the actual value to be provided (imposter)
2. You are afraid of losing the business (fear of the consequences)
3. You insist on a commodity remuneration basis (charging hourly,
   day rates, percentage of a transaction, per capita, per user, per asset under management and so on). Fear of challenging “market norms”.
4. You don’t have, omit to or do a terrible job in establishing in the buyer’s mind in the pre-agreement period (proposal), and on an ongoing basis (frequent monthly or quarterly reports/updates) the value you mutually-agree to deliver or have delivered to the client. It is impossible for the client to calculate anything except the fee they are paying.
5. Your signalling (desperation for the business), the language you use (lose control of the discussion), and the deal vibes you give off (willing to continually acquiesce to client demands), simply encourages the buyer to keep chiseling the terms (no risk of you walking away or perceived harm for them).

Revisiting your historic pricing model or the terms that you typically work with clients, feels uncomfortable for many. There is a weird comfort in familiarity. Yet the reality is you are increasing the risk that your competitors are going to overtake you. Confront your pricing with confidence not fear. After all if you don’t believe in your own value, why should your clients and prospects?

Some pseudo marketing experts have a need to make marketing excessively complex and wrapped in a language of its’ own to address their own insecurities. Entrepreneurs have learned to unashamedly make what is simple simple. Skin in the game. There is a clear symmetry between their success creating customer need and their own personal fortune.

People talk about “doomed” sports and a lack of appeal to “Gen Z” (golf, rugby, baseball, horse racing and so forth) but isn’t the uncomfortable truth that there is insufficient excitement to sustain and grow a large pool of their ideal fans. Those people with the means and the greatest propensity to pay for the “must see” experience. The assumption that this is a “generational divide” is misguided, there are greater differences within than across generations.

A great many small businesses are chasing business at prices, which is unsustainable today. Why? The fear (missing out on good and bad business), guilt (how could I charge so much?) and “servant of the customer” belief (we are lucky they’ll consider us) is creating a huge problem for another day.

If their intent is to move from surviving to thriving, and they trust their own judgement and talent (value), why wouldn’t their prices reflect that? The answer of course, is they don’t.

Until the “cause” of those behaviours is addressed, the owner and/or manager’s self-worth, they cannot shift out of a never-ending survival mode.

A highly successful UK sports star was chatting ruefully to me about her new business venture at a recent charity event. The slow customer uptake, the financial turmoil and the drain on her mental health through the past 18 months. The conversation pivoted to where and with whom she was taking expert advice. She talked about the advice that she’d received from her financial and legal advisers, many she’d known from early in her sports career, and a few other well-meaning large corporate business executives and sponsors. When I asked how many had successfully achieved what she was seeking to do, and could readily translate and transfer their success to her situation, she was flummoxed.

As much as they wanted to help and were loyal friends, they weren’t qualified and the advice that she was getting wasn’t relevant.

Who is your best source of unfiltered feedback for the immediate challenges facing you and your life? How can you be sure it is both relevant and immediately useful?

My most successful clients are constantly adapting their sources, not beholden to the longevity of the relationship or their content knowledge but the depth and breadth of relevant perspective that they bring today about future risks they face and the decisions they must make.

If you have been unable to make the desired progress with a new initiative perhaps you are not asking the right questions of the right people, nor taking on board and applying the smartest advice? Don’t know where to turn for “help” identifying qualified expertise, ask someone who has successfully done what you want to accomplish.

Are your processes (“how to’s”) “right” for your ideal business today or last year’s ideal business? If not, when will you adapt, abandon or create them? Your competition are addressing that as we speak.

A lot of local recreational sports clubs are awash with members and volunteers giving their time, energy and money for a better, and more prosperous future, when they are able to resume playing.

In these extraordinary times, extraordinary generosity is on display. None of this creates main stream media headlines but it has been picked up by a lot of local broadcast, print and digital media, where their staff have not been furloughed.

One of the trends I spot in this pandemic, and I suspect it will sustain and grow, is an increasing thirst for local human interest stories, and acts of kindness. Distinct from national and international media, and social media, whose incessant fight for eyeballs, is driven by editorial viewpoints and divergent beliefs. If we are more connected with our local communities at this time, why wouldn’t we be more connected with and trusting of ‘local’ media?

One of the interesting dynamics, I see regularly at social events amongst the global private equity community (investment partners, portfolio company managers and non-executive directors), is a surprisingly small number of people truly at ease with their own success.  I am talking about people, who project fear (credibility), portray guilt (success) or don’t act as a peer (socially confident). Given this is a business that is founded on building superior peer-level trusting partnerships within and outside firms, you’d think individuals with those qualities will be in even greater demand in the future than simply those with impressive analytic skills.

© James Berkeley. 2018 All Rights Reserved.