Most coaches and consultants get it the wrong way round, making their work cheaper the longer the and more intense a client engagement gets.
Today's episode flips the script, so that you can actually get paid what your mental real estate is worth.
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Your mind is your most valuable asset, and if somebody is going to live there, they could pay the rent. This is Sales for Nice People, the daily podcast for ethical entrepreneurs who want to sell more because of their values and not despite them. This is episode 41. I am Martin Stetter. I help nice people sell more, and I want you to have a good thing about how you charge for the amount of mental real estate that your clients occupy. What most consultants and coaches and knowledge workers do is they charge a fixed rate for an hour or for a day, and then the longer the engagement gets, the lower the per-hour cost becomes. Now, on the surface that might seem fair, you buy a larger package, you get a lower price. But if you think about it, you're actually doing a disservice to yourself because each time that you sign a client for a long-term project, it means that you have tenants in your mind, and your mind is prime real estate. You've spent years, decades maybe, learning things, experimenting with things, having experience that gets all fed in to the way your mind works, and your mind is where the magic happens. It's where you do the highest quality work for your buyers. So if you then reduce the per-hour price or the per-unit price based on the size and duration, then basically you're giving people a discount on your mental real estate. So that mental real estate that is the most valuable, the highest value, the highest output asset that you have. So instead, I want you to consider getting more expensive, the longer and more complicated and complex the project gets. Not only because this is a fair compensation for your boss self, who has put all this time into developing your mental abilities to help a client, but also the more a client pays, the more you are able to fully immerse yourself into their projects, into the challenges that they have. The more you'll be able to allocate time and resources and talk to your supervisor and your mentors and study things and get better at solving their problems. Whereas if you charge a lower price on a per-hour basis, the bigger the engagement gets, you're going to end up feeling resentful, because this client has such an enormously large set of complex challenges and there's so much chatter going on in your head, you're trying to figure out how to solve their problems for once you're back in a meeting with them. And you are not getting paid as much as if you would have only charged 500 for an hour, because now you've made a 12-month commitment and the average rate is 300 for an hour. It doesn't make sense. What makes sense is having your buyer see that the more time they spend in your mind, the more they occupy your mental real estate. And you can tell them, this is prime real estate. I'm pointing at my head if you're listening to this on your podcast player, this, your mind is prime real estate and somebody's got to pay the rent and that somebody is not you. So think about how you charge your work and ask yourself if you should become more expensive, the larger and more complex and more costly the client project is. I'll leave you with that for today. Sign up for a short daily email at martinsteller.com/nicepeople.
