Archive for December, 2009

The year is almost over. Just like everyone else, I can’t believe how fast it went.

Instead of looking forward to 2010 (there will be plenty of time to do that in January), I’m going to reflect on what I learned this year. I invite you to do the same.

What I Learned This Year

It’s hard to resist the pull to look forward into the new year when the end of December rolls around. I’m going to resist anyway, and spend a little time thinking and remembering what I learned this year. Here’s a partial list:

1. It is possible to travel too much, even if your travel takes you to the Bay Area in California, which, except for the traffic, is God’s Country.
2. Publishing a book is a lot harder than I thought. But now that I’ve done it, I can see how I’ll publish the next one.
3. I love writing with real fountain pens. I don’t care if I stain my fingers with ink.
4. I love love love helping people figure out who their right clients and what their right work looks like. I especially love helping people figure out how to combine a disparate set of skills into a real business.
5. It’s okay, and possible to be very successful, as a business person who loves the work (as opposed to being a business person who loves business itself). I always thought every business person should want to create a big company with lots of employees, and having one of those big companies with lots of employees was the only measure of success. Not true.
6. Marketing my business is probably the single most successful way to come up against Resistance (see this book for an explanation of resistance). It brings up all the crap: I’m not good enough, this work is so easy, who would pay me to do it for them, I might succeed and THEN WHAT? Etc. That is the main reason we don’t market.
7. The second reason people don’t market is that it’s not as fun as doing the real work. This doesn’t have to be true, but most people believe it anyway.
8. I do a lot better when I shift my thinking from “I failed” to “The marketplace is giving me feedback about my service that I need to heed.”
9. There is an underlying order to things. I do best when I try to listen to that, and respond to it with what it’s calling for.

Now that I know these things, here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Leave Friday open to do my marketing for the week. Blog and send newsletters because I like to write.
2. Call the other customers I haven’t surveyed yet this year, and get more “marketplace feedback.” I have enjoyed getting the feedback I’ve gotten thus far; I’m going to institute a way to get it more regularly.
3. Buy all the bottled ink at Office Max in case they stop carrying it altogether.
4. Be honest about how much I like working with people who love their work, and who want to figure out how to delegate everything else so they can do their amazing work that they love.
5. Set aside time to listen to what is being called for now.

What’s different in December 2009 as compared to January 2009? What have you learned? What will you do with this knowledge?

Tags: Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Relationships

Setting Prices is Scary

Pricing, especially for people who set the price for the product or service, and deliver the product or perform the service, can be very tricky. It’s easy to confuse the price you need to charge for what you make or do, with your self esteem.

You can combat this two ways:

1. Research what your competition sells their work for

2. Figure out how much value you deliver, and set your price at some fraction of that value.

Research is pretty easy to do: the internet is an unlimited source of pricing information; and even in the unlikely event that you can’t find an exact price for what you do, you can pick up the phone and call someone outside your area and ask what they charge for a similar product or service.

If you do this research, you’ll find that there is a huge range of prices for almost every product or service sold. People who go to the local barber shop and pay $11.00 (plus tip) for a haircut may be flabbergasted (or horrified) to know that you can pay $400 for a man’s haircut (and even higher for a woman’s cut). In my field, you can pay a coach $25 an hour, or $5,000, depending on who you hire.

Why would someone pay $400 for a haircut? Why would someone hire a coach for $5,000 an hour? Because they feel like they receive much more value than the cost they incur. Perhaps the $400 hair cut makes you look a lot better on TV, hiking your ratings and securing your contract for the next five years. Maybe the $5,000 coach showed you how to break through a barrier that had been blocking you forever, enabling you to triple your income.

Farfetched? The $400 haircut and the $5,000 per hour coach both exist. More than one person is willing to pay for these rates for that kind of value.

If you haven’t raised your prices recently, or if you simply want to expand your mind on the subject, read these blog posts.

www.fluentself.com/blog/biggification/the-art-and-science-of-pricing/

www.fluentself.com/blog/biggification/coming-up-with-prices/

http://www.shaboominc.com/blog/ (read the November 20th post called “Does Your Pricing Prevent Customers from Committing?”

Do you need to raise your prices? Are you afraid? What’s next for you?

Tags: Business Numbers, Pricing, Value