Be Kind to Your Clients; Pay Yourself First

Imagine you’re flying across the country with two young children. Takeoff was smooth, and the plane has reached cruising altitude. The lead flight attendant is announcing that you can now use electronic devices, when suddenly oxygen masks tumble from the compartments above your seats. Your first thought is for the children. But do you reach for their masks first? No. You put on your own mask and make sure that oxygen is flowing before seeing to the kids. Every time we fly we are reminded to take care of ourselves first so that we can more effectively care for others. Apply the same principle when you set prices, and you’ll enjoy long, mutually rewarding relationships with your just-right customers. You see, the more you care about your customers and clients, the more you want for them to get what they need to benefit from your work. That means doing whatever you can to deliver on your promises. Promises to Keep Every business transaction involves promises. Some of them are explicit: Evening appointments available. Some of them are subtle, as the promise of tranquility implicit in the colors and imagery on a massage therapist’s business card. Ask yourself what promises you are making to your clients and customers. Ask them about their expectations. Make a list of explicit and implicit promises related to your products and services. (And I do mean to write it out. Keeping promises in your head is a slippery slope.) It Takes What It Takes When you have a working start on your list (it is likely to be a work in progress), ask yourself what it takes to deliver on these promises. Take some time with this, tracking not only obvious things like answering your phone but also underlying factors, such as cultivating a mood of warmth and welcome so that when you answer the phone you’re the kind of person you want your customers to hear on the other end of the line. “Just Be Nice” Doesn’t Cut It During one particularly desperate month in 1994, I put a sticky note on the handset of my phone. It said, “Be nice.” In those days, I often felt as though every call that came in was just another energy suck. I was cranky, afraid, and resentful. Even if you’ve never sunk to such depths, I’m betting that some days it’s not so easy to be the person you want to be for your customers. Need I say that my sticky note rarely inspired me to niceness? More often it reminded me that I was expected to give more than I got. Who Expects What from Whom? I won’t go into the gory details of my self-pity. Suffice it to say that, in time, I began to wake up to my complicity in this sad situation. Who was requiring me to give more than I was getting in return? Only me. Somehow I had come to believe that I should pay myself last. If I gave enough, worked hard enough, and believed in myself (!), surely people would eventually give me what I needed to thrive in my work. Heaven forbid that I should ask for what I needed. That would be crass, craven, and self-indulgent. And, come to find out, that would be the key to taking really good care of my clients and customers. Why Oprah Gets the Big Bucks I have no idea what Oprah gets for a speaking engagement or a book deal. I suspect that it’s more than my wildest imaginings. Not only does Oprah have a black belt in self-care, she’s got one in business, too. Nobody’s surprised when Oprah asks for and gets the big bucks. But I’m not Oprah, and neither are you. How You Can Get the Big Bucks I know you’ve heard it before, and I’m here to say it again, earning good money starts from the inside out. If you think that your colleagues who charge more than you are fleecing their clients, you’re not likely to raise your rates (and if you do, odds are you’ll wimp out and quote a lower price or resort to the ubiquitous and iniquitous sliding scale). If you think that no one would pay you “that much,” you are almost certainly correct. How can they, when you aren’t asking for it? And if you’ve ever bitten the bullet and jacked up your prices to a giddy height, then watched as no one – and I do mean no one – shows the slightest interest, you know that there’s more to getting paid well than asking for more than you think you deserve. Which brings me to another deadly pricing premise: “I deserve it.” Ladies and gentlemen, deserving has nothing to do with it. So how do you pay yourself well enough to deliver on your promises? A New Pricing Paradigm Paying yourself enough begins with charging enough, and that requires three things: seeing, counting, and standing. Seeing Seeing is all about making that list of things you want your customers to expect from you and getting clear about what it takes to deliver. Keep this list as a living document. When you have an experience that goes exceptionally well or badly, study your list and make changes based on what worked and what didn’t. Counting Counting is finding out what it costs to deliver on your promises. This includes the costs of giving the boss an occasional vacation, not to mention such things as continuing education, legal and accounting support, and a host of things that the accidental entrepreneur may be tempted to consider unreasonable and unfair expenses. The only thing unreasonable and unfair about the costs of doing business is when we don’t account for them in our prices. Standing Standing is my favorite piece because, for me, it has been the key to the pricing puzzle. Standing is about taking a stand for the well being of the entire system and not just some part of it. It means embodying your conscious commitment to caring for yourself, your work, and your clients. It takes practice to integrate this stance with quoting prices that, at first, may trigger old voices about excess and unworthiness. But practice is something you can do. In mid-air or in business, taking care of yourself first is the key to taking care of others. Be nice to the people you most want to serve. Pay yourself first. 2008-04-08T04:59:48Z

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be-kind-to-your-clients-pay-yourself-first

2008-04-08T07:07:31Z

Be honest. Are you living as well as your customers? If your rates aren't  sufficient to pay yourself well, how will you take great care of anyone else?

Be Kind to Your Clients; Pay Yourself First

2009-02-24T09:43:44Z