Cheap
Cheap
Cheap
No, that’s not the bird sitting in your tree outside, it’s how most services business owners seem to compete:
- Must be the lowest.
- Oooooh look, there’s a sale on, gotta match their prices.
- Gotta give huge amounts for the same price, it’ll cost me more, but that’s normal isn’t it?
- and so on…
I almost made that mistake myself yesterday…
…let me share it with you, and the two lessons that if you use, could double your hourly rate (minimum).
My Monthly Package
A tiny bit of context for you: I subscribe to a number of monthly packages, largely marketing, and got one in the post yesterday – this one costs me $97 USD a month.
Opening it up in my normal inquisitive “what can I learn this month for my investment”, I found a smaller than normal booklet – by smaller I mean skinny, it was still its same A4 size print out.
Skinny = Cheap (Mistake)
My first impression? This is too skinny, last time it was like a tree, maybe this guy has ran out of ideas and maybe I’ll be cancelling this subscription later today? But I’ll have a read of it later to be sure…
…and yes, in between watching Happy Endings and the start of Castle, of the six main ideas that were inside this skinny ‘possibly not worth the money’ booklet, was at least one thousand, if not tens of thousands (if I apply them properly) of ideas.
So what’s the first lesson here?
The First Lesson
It really doesn’t matter on size, it is how you use it that matters
In different words: Add lots of value, and your customers will keep coming back for more
Everything is value based, price doesn’t matter from there
A second lesson?
The Second Lesson
This guy writes once and then sends his package all over the world, I’m guessing his hourly rate for this is into the thousands – and also most of the stuff in his package is reused examples of his own material being used as an educational piece – that will lower the number of hours his side and so his hourly rate will go up even more – that’s very smart use of leverage
How can you do both in your business?
If you’re in the services business, there will be examples of how someone doing what you do has done the very same thing, so I don’t want to hear “I can’t do that in my business Jamie”
Thinking back, it’s probably my mum that taught me this, but there’s no such thing as ‘can’t’, it’s ‘won’t’.
If you do want to, and know how, get going, and start watching your hourly rate jump in leaps and bounds.
If you want to, but you’re not sure how, get in touch, let’s see where it takes you…
Bye for now
Jamie
p.s. if you’re interested in who the guy is that I’m talking about, visit his site here: Ben Settle