The Generosity Mindset: A Journey to Business Success by Raising Your Confidence, Value, and Prices

INTRODUCTION

Several years ago, I was on a discovery call with a videographer. This man had been in business for five years, and he knew he needed to make some major changes to his business if he was going to achieve the goals he had set for himself.

He was proud of the progress he had made with his business over the years, which was notable, and he was ready to take it to another level. Something, however, was holding him back from earning the revenue he wanted. He described his services and some of the clients he worked with. He wanted to work with more best fit clients, and he was in a quandary as to how to move forward.

This videographer ran through several issues and concerns he felt were affecting his business negatively. As he did, he unknowingly checked off just about every red flag I look for when assessing the pricing of professional services providers.

About twenty minutes into the conversation, I said, I can tell your pricing is too low.

He was shocked, and I understood why.

How do you know that? he asked. I haven’t told you my prices yet.

In no particular order, there are several reasons, I replied. "First, you price by the hour. By definition, a professional services provider like you who prices by the hour is underpricing their services.

Second, you tell me that all clients are paying the same price. Not all clients have the same values. Different clients value your services differently. You probably go the extra mile for clients who don’t value that added care you’re giving them, and you give them way too much for what you’re charging. You also probably have a few clients who would be willing to pay you much more than you are charging them. They love you, your work, and how you do what you do.

By this point, I could tell he had begun mentally scratching his head and wondering how I was able to diagnose his situation so quickly. I continued.

Third, you’re not offering options. Options are a powerful way to tailor your services to your best-fit clients who love what you accomplish for them, and they’re willing to pay you a good price for that.

He interrupted, But options seem like too much trouble. One price is easier for me to keep track of. It’s also most fair to my clients.

When I explained that a pricing structure for his services is just as important to his clients as it is to him—even more so in most cases—he settled down and listened to the rest of what I had to share.

Fourth, you complain that you feel like you’re working too hard for too little money. For professional services providers like you, that’s always a sign of a pricing problem.

Should I let this guy off the hook now or keep going? I wondered. He seemed to be taking it all in fairly well. So with two final points, I concluded the diagnosis.

Fifth, you seem to be taking on most projects which come your way. More prospects should be turning you down because of price.

Turning me down? he asked.

Yes, and we can talk more about why later, I said. Finally, you’re talking too much about you, what and how you do what you do, instead of the challenges clients have that you solve for them. What that tells me is you’re not having deeper value conversations with clients at all. A value conversation is the dialogue you must have with a prospective client to understand the difficulties you help them overcome. If you persuasively articulate how your solution to their problems moves the needle for their business and for themselves personally, then you’ll be able to set better prices.

I paused. It was a lot for him to digest all at once.

Finally, his silence gave way to a hopeful aha. I knew he could see the possibilities of making some changes.

You’re exactly right, he said. I need to work on my pricing.

And so his transformative journey began.

In the four-plus decades in which I have served variously as a Wall Street analyst, an investment banker, an investment manager, and a business consultant, I’ve learned firsthand what famed investor Warren Buffett once said about pricing: The single, most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by ten percent, then you’ve got a terrible business. Over the past twelve years, as I have worked exclusively with small businesses—specifically solo and small firm professional services providers—I have affirmed the idea that the difference between a very good business and a terrible one often comes down to pricing.. This truth, however, comes with a couple of twists.

With an enterprise company, pricing starts with marketing studies, competitive analyses, policies, cost accounting, coordination between marketing and sales departments, and endless committee meetings. As a services provider, essentially selling your grey matter, you are the product. You are not pricing an inanimate object like doggie treats, a decorated cake, or a garden tool. You are pricing your knowledge and your experience. You are pricing yourself. It’s an intimate, highly personal action.

Consequently, your mindset often becomes a major issue. Some of those mindsets can be injurious to your ability to price your services effectively and, by extension, to the rest of the business.

Further, most entrepreneurs go into business without much, if any, formal training in pricing. Assuming you went to business school or majored in business in college, you are in the minority if you took a single course in pricing. Therefore, your ability to price your work relative to the value it generates for your clients is limited.

The common goal of all services providers I’ve ever met is to do transformative work for clients who they love working with and to get paid commensurate with the value they deliver to those clients. For you to get to that point in your own business, though, you must adopt a different mindset that can replace those mindsets which inhibit your growth. You must be able to diagnose and communicate the value you deliver to clients, and, in turn, more effectively price to receive a portion of that value.

In truth, there is nothing proprietary about my work on value and pricing. The concepts I teach, write about, and present in workshops are all out there, somewhere, on Google, in books, in presentations on LinkedIn Learning, in research papers. So why, then, are folks seemingly irrational enough to pay me good money for one-on-one coaching or to conduct a workshop on value and pricing? Why would they pay me when all that information is out there somewhere and they could go find it themselves?

My clients—primarily solopreneur services providers—hire me to gather the plethora of information that exists on value and pricing. This includes the studies, books, ideas, and concepts that would take them years to sift through, understand, and apply. With my guidance, they learn the techniques I have spent decades gaining insight into and practicing, and they get my support as they apply those techniques to transform their businesses.

Beyond the how to, though, my clients start to recognize and modify the mindsets that have held them back from sustainable success. They replace those mindsets with a powerful way to serve their clients with what I call The Generosity Mindset.

These solopreneurs have critical changes they need to make in their business, and they need help today. They need to build a successful practice today. Therefore, they don’t have time to do all the work, the reading, and the research, nor do they want to determine what part of all that works for them and their business, and what doesn’t.

I get hired because I shortcut a client’s learning process significantly, saving them a ton of time and a mountain of effort. Such clients have grown weary of other approaches to their problems and are urgently seeking the benefits that come from solving those problems.

Beyond saving folks time and effort, there are other reasons I get hired. Clients hire me because I’m able to explain complex concepts with stories and metaphors that make those concepts come alive for them. They engage me because I’m willing to listen to their problems and address them directly. They work with me because I have a reputation for delivering much more value than the price they pay. All those reasons I get hired are based on the value others see in me, value which is intrinsic to me and not my content. The same is true for you.

Whether you are a consultant or a coach, marketing or branding professional, business advisor, attorney, CPA, or in virtually any other professional services discipline, your content, your technical expertise, is not unique. None of us wants to believe that, but deep down, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know it’s true.

What is proprietary, though, is your experience and how you synthesize and deliver what you know. What’s special is your demeanor or the way you deal with your best-fit clients. What’s invaluable is how you deliver great value by guiding people through massive changes in their personal life and in their business that bring them to a place they never thought possible.

The combination of all these elements is quite different for you compared to any other services provider in your industry (otherwise known as your competitors). You have a combination of tangibles and intangibles uniquely yours, a combination that appeals to a particular swath of clients. Some clients are attracted to your onboarding process, while others appreciate the education you provide them throughout their work with you. Some like your follow up, the resources you provide, the support team you work with, your accessibility, or the intuitive way you anticipate their needs. Each of these characteristics makes you unique and adds value to the client experience, a value you must learn to put a price on.

You may be a solopreneur in the strictest sense of the word—it’s just you as the chief cook and bottle washer of your business. You might have grown, and are now using a virtual assistant, contractor labor, or even have employees. Maybe you have taken on a partner to perform the technical work involved in your practice. Whatever the case, you are the founder of the business, and you are both the chief professional who delivers services as well as the chief (and most likely the only) salesperson. Success or failure in building a sustainable practice falls on you. Wherever you are in your journey, the term solopreneur applies, so I’ll use it throughout this book.

If pricing your value feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar to you, keep reading. You’re about to learn why putting a price on the value you provide your clients serves them and you . . . and you’ll learn the factors involved in getting your price right. So let’s take this journey together.

Get the Right Mindset About Value

CHAPTER 1

THE MINDSETS THAT HOLD YOU BACK

The great part about being a professional services provider is that you carry the factory floor around every day. It’s between your ears, and it’s yours and yours alone. You don’t need an expensive, fancy building or facility to operate in. You don’t necessarily need a lot of employees—or any, if you prefer to work solo.

You control the quality and delivery of the service. You can adjust the service on the fly. You also control whether you deliver it or not and even who you allow to buy your service.

The product is you, not an inanimate, third-party object like a coffee machine or an automobile. The product—your expertise, experience, and advice—is all in your head.

You are the product, and that simple fact makes your work highly personal.

From the client’s perspective, there is no psychological separation between you and the product. When a new client agrees to purchase your services, in a sense, they are buying a part of you. When a client comments on the quality of your work, or lack thereof, your senses are heightened because those comments may be very personal. When a client fires you or a prospect turns you down, it feels personal. You feel rejected.

Because your factory floor is between your ears, your business is affected by your mindsets, whether positive or negative. You have carried some of these mindsets around for as long as you can remember. You may have developed some of them as a child. You might have a vague sense of what’s going on in your head and how it affects your business, or you might not have any idea that you’re carrying some of these mindsets and how they might be affecting you and your business.

The success of your professional services practice depends on the mindsets you allow to dominate your thinking. Your mindset about your business—and there are many mindsets you could adopt—is the foundation of everything, and certainly the key to your success. That goes for everything in your business, from your business model, your positioning, prospecting, sales conversations, marketing, delivery, follow up, and, in particular, your pricing.

Contrary to pricing a product like doggie treats, when you price your services, that pricing often gets quite personal. You are essentially pricing yourself, and that can be very uncomfortable. No one wants to put an actual price tag on themselves. The difference between how a bag of doggie treats is priced and the pricing of your services often boils down to mindset. Because your mindset affects how you view yourself, it can heavily influence how you price your services. Your pricing, in turn, has serious implications on not just your profitability, but also on your positioning with clients.

Price is a marketing signal. Depending on how they are set, your prices can be a signal of either quality or inferiority. Pricing, therefore, affects the perception clients have of both your expertise and the quality of your services.

There are several mindsets a solopreneur can assume, some of which I will discuss here. A few are more common than others, and you may identify yourself in one or even a number of these mindsets:

The Mindset of Inadequacy

The Mindset of an Imposter

The Mindset of Comparison

The Mindset of Helping

The Mindset of Scarcity

It is important to identify those mindsets that hold you back as you build a successful professional services practice and then develop the right approach to eliminate destructive thinking patterns.

The Mindset of Inadequacy (I’m not good enough.)

This mindset might be the most common of all the mindsets that inhibit your professional and personal growth. The mindset of inadequacy is a pervasive belief that you are simply not good enough or that you do not have the skills or experience you need to thrive in your practice. This mindset is not the same as imposter syndrome, in which you think you are somehow deceiving others. With the mindset of inadequacy, you believe that you are missing some of the competence you need to elevate the quality of the clients you work with.

The way you run your business is a dead giveaway for the mindset of inadequacy. You might be reluctant to promote yourself due to a fear of being exposed as not good enough. Maybe you don’t take on engagements or clients that seem too challenging because you prefer to stay inside the comfort zone you currently occupy. Because you fear that clients will not see the value, you might be reluctant to set prices which adequately reflect that value.

The mindset of inadequacy can be particularly pervasive early in the life of your business. You think that because your business is brand new, you haven’t proven yourself, and therefore you cannot go after certain clients that are too large or too established for you. Your pricing is affected because you feel like you must discount your services simply because you are just starting your business.

When you actually do get clients, the mindset of inadequacy shows up in how you interact with them. You might minimize your own abilities