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How To Charge What You’re Worth
filed in Entrepreneurship, Strategy, Worldview
The days when you clocked in and out, and got paid by the hour for dipping squares of caramel into big vats of icing, (pink or white—a job my mother did for years), at the factory, are largely gone. You don’t get paid for showing up. And yet that’s how many creative entrepreneurs try to charge for their art.
How is it possible for Johanna to charge Starbucks by the hour, for the joy drinking in the London store surrounded by her hand designed wallpaper? What about the time in took to get there? The years of practice, of putting her bum in a seat, the knowing exactly where to ink?
If you’re a coach, consultant, writer, designer, teacher, leader or muse how to you charge for the ability to change everything?
You do two things.
1. Acknowledge what you’re worth to yourself first
Really sit and think about this for a second. I work with a slew of creative geniuses (writers, coaches, designers, leaders and on and on), who have trouble acknowledging what their work is worth. Mostly to themselves. “It only took me half an hour”, or “That’s what everyone else charges”, they say.
You don’t work on the assembly line.
Your art is not billed by the hour, it’s billed by the impact it creates.
2. Frame your scarcity
Don’t be shy about telling the real story. Point out how your designs brought a brand to life. How your coaching helped someone to do the thing they’d always wanted to do. Tell people the story of how your work changed how people feel. Show them how you take people from where they are to where they want to be.
Find the right words. Set yourself apart.
Then hold your head high and double your prices.
Image by Fred Hasselman
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The Story Makes The Product Better
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Storytelling
For three decades, 10% of the population of the tiny Welsh town, Cardigan, made jeans.
35,000 pairs every week.
Then one day the factory died, and the jean artisans could no longer practice their art.
They simply had no way to do the thing they did well, until Hiut Denim was founded.
Now the company’s ‘Grand Masters’ make a handful of jeans each day. Each pair has a unique number, and a ‘History Tag’ that the owner can register on the website, to begin adding the memories associated with wearing their jeans.
Hiut are telling the story of a product built to last, and they are encouraging their customers to consume less by attaching meaning to the things that they love.
“We make jeans. That’s it. Nothing else. No distractions. Nothing to steal our focus. No kidding ourselves that we can be good at everything. No trying to conquer the whole world. We just do our best to conquer our bit of it. So each day we come in and make the best jeans we know how.”
Hiut didn’t just make an average product, then try sticking a marketing story on as an after thought. They made the story part of the product, and the story makes the product better.
Image by Don Shall.
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How Dollar Shave Club Succeeds With A Better Brand Story
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Storytelling
How does a startup come on to the scene, take on giant global brands like Gillette, and win?
That’s what Dollar Shave Club did, by harnessing the power of great brand storytelling. This is how they did it.
- By telling the truth, and keeping it simple.
- With an easy to remember brand name and tagline, which reinforces the brand’s value proposition.
- Presenting that clear value proposition right there on the home page.
- Educating the audience and clarifying why they are different from the competition.
- Appealing to the target demographic, with anti-status quo values, design, tone and copy.
- Giving customers plenty of calls to action. All roads on the site lead to customer conversion.
- By showing their audience that other people are excited by this product too. Using social proof; almost 5 million shares on YouTube, and thousands of tweets and Facebook likes.
- With a great affiliate program. Customer incentives are front and centre, (the photographer who took the photo above is earning free razors with an affiliate link on his Flickr!).
- By making their customers feel, enlightened and doing what the big brands were not prepared to do.
You no longer need to own the means of production, to secure a slice of the market. Big companies will try to work out how to avoid being ‘dollar shaved’.
But the truth is, that today, you don’t need $57 million to tell a better brand story.
Iage by Mitchell Bartlett.
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Understanding The Problem To Solve
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Strategy
There are a million and one web hosting services on the market. It’s hardly a niche. The market is so saturated, why would you consider launching yet another one?
That’s exactly what my friend Kelly did. Her hosting business doesn’t stand out by competing on spec, or uptime. Kelly differentiates by understanding the problem to solve in a tiny niche, and going narrow and deep.
She realised that the biggest pain point for bloggers, was the helplessness they felt when things went wrong. When their site went down, there was nobody local available to answer the phone. Sure, they could get through to a faceless overseas call centre operative, but what they really wanted, was an unscripted conversation with a real human being on the end of the phone. And how many hosting businesses have a picture of the person who answers the phone on their about page?
Kelly’s business provides hosting, but what she actually sells is peace of mind.
She succeeds not by being cheaper, or more perfect. But by understanding the problem to solve perfectly.
The same opportunity is open to you.
Image by Carlos Bussenius.
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Because It Matters
filed in Entrepreneurship, Strategy
How do you stand out when there are two other juice bars on the same street, and half a dozen ‘good enough’ life coaches just three clicks away?
If you’ve got the same choices as the competition, how you choose can make all the difference.
Do you make decisions based on what’s gone before, or do you change everything?
Are you doing what you do because if feels safe, or because it matters?
Same amount of effort, big difference.
Image by Ed Yourdon.
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What Does The Competition Do?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
I was consulting with two financial planners this week. We were discussing what made them different, when they told me this story about working with one of their clients.
Jonathan was offered $9 million for his house, which had amazing, never to be replaced views out over the river. He was in a quandary about what to do. Most advisers, (thinking about maximising the return of a portfolio) would have told him to make hay, sell immediately, take the equity and reinvest it.
Not Mark. He sat out on the balcony with Jonathan and chatted to him about his personal and life goals. They talked about why Jonathan had chosen to live there in the first place. Mark encouraged him to imagine what life would be like with the money in the bank, but no view. Jonathan decided to walk away from the $9 million, that could never replace the feeling he got every day by just living comfortably where he was.
No surprise then that Mark and his partner don’t need to advertise, and that 95% of their business is generated by word of mouth.
Work out how you are least like the competition, then tell that story.
Image by marksjonathan.
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Valuing Creatives. When Love Is Not Enough
filed in Entrepreneurship, Worldview
No business owner would expect to rent an office for half the going rate, or buy a delivery van for far less than it was worth. Not even a fledgling, bootstrapping, startup founding, entrepreneur. And yet every day designers, creatives and freelancers are asked to drop their rates, do a deal, or consider some special circumstance.
Talented geniuses who have the power to communicate everything about an idea to the world with visuals and words. Who make the abstract concrete. Who take their insight and experience and make ideas tangible, are regularly asked to take less, so someone else can be more.
Not just less money, but less respect for their art, and less acknowledgement of the value they deliver.
Can we quantify the value of Nike’s swoosh or Apple’s apple? The impact of “Think different” or “Just do it”?
I think we do a pretty poor job of commoditising creativity.
Creatives who take on projects at knock down rates to pay this month’s rent, can’t do their best work when they know it isn’t truly valued.
Great designers get ten enquiries a day prefaced with, “we love your work”.
Bargain basement rates are never a bargain in the long run, and sometimes love is not enough.
Image by Adam Toldfield.
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Why Are People Ignoring You?
It’s been a while since I bought a nice glossy magazine. I usually enjoy flicking through one at my favourite cafe. I’m not sure why I was so surprised to get 32 pages into the latest edition of Vogue and still be on the adverts. The entire magazine was 208 pages, 100 of those pages were adverts.
By the time I’d leafed through the articles, (it didn’t take long), I felt more than a little cheated. That was fifteen minutes of my life I would never get back. What I wanted was to be entertained, but as I closed the back cover I couldn’t help feeling that my attention had been stolen. Impact of those 100 pages and thousands of advertising dollars. Zero.
The world is full of people like me. Remote control wielding, advert skipping, PR immune consumers. The kind of people you want to engage with. People who choose to ignore what you’re selling every day, because they can.
So instead of trying to steal their attention, captivate them. Do the thing that the big guys didn’t realise was important.
Give them something to care about.
Image by Siddharth Khajuria.
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Being The Most
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Storytelling
In the 80’s Starbucks set out to be the most inspiring coffee brand on the planet. When they forgot this in the 90’s and tried becoming the most ubiquitous, they lost their way.
If you could be ‘the most’ to people what ‘most’ would you be?
Most reliable.
Most irresistible.
Most ubiquitous.
Most loved.
Most —————.
You get to choose.
Image by Steve Rhodes.
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Worldviews And The Story Of Bottled Water
filed in Marketing, Strategy, Worldview
Do you remember the first time you saw bottled water for sale? For me it was back in the late 80’s when I was on holiday in Greece, where the tap water wasn’t safe to drink.
And then in the 90’s suddenly there it was. A trickle that turned into a deluge, supported by a worldview that we need to drink two litres of water a day and that bottled water is “better for you”. The global consumption rate quadrupled between 1990 and 2005.
Today the bottled water market is valued at $60 billion, and apparently the need to drink two litres of water a day is a myth.
Bottled water was not created to satisfy a need for thirsty consumers. It is a product designed to fulfil a western worldview about health. A 21st century creation that supports the story you can tell yourself about making the right choices. Like a take away Starbucks coffee cup, bottled water has become a statement as much as a product, for people with a particular worldview.
Bottled water companies didn’t create the worldview, they tapped into the beliefs at the edges of a market and created a product that supported those beliefs. More on that in this video (it’s well worth watching).
You should pay attention to the beliefs of the people you serve. Marketing and brand storytelling is about reminding people what they wanted in the first place.
Image by Dave Hoefler.