Pricing Creativity w/ Blair Enns Livestream

[Music] what is up everybody happy Wednesday I'm so happy to see you just a few days ago I was in Warsaw Poland and the reason why I'm back it's because of my guest today probably a couple years in the making it's Mr Blair ends and he's in the booth with me his first time we met face to face we've talked before but gosh I'm so excited to get on with today's show really briefly really briefly he's the CEO of win without pitching he's also her before I guess in a previous life the business development person at coset communication marketing he was the count director at McCann Erickson Account Supervisor at Y&R this one's a little questionable he has a master's degree in marine biology and underwater welding from doggerland university he's the co-host of to Bob's which is a podcast and you guys can listen to that wherever you get your podcast he's from a very small town in castle Canada I think they're under 900 people there I can't even wrap my head around that Blair I just can't he's written this book guys this is the Bible you've been hearing me talking about this forever and everybody that's read it has been impacted hopefully in the same way that I have and his second book is equally amazing pricing creativity if you guys want to join the conversation today go to slide o calm use the hash tag h2 five six that's H two five six to submit your question vote those questions up and down and we will be tackling the highest most popular voted question Mr Blair hands is on a mission to change the way creative services are bought and sold the world over here's my fellow comrade in pricing creativity everybody please help me welcome Blair into the show okay class on team here you are I can't believe it you're here so I'm so glad you came back from Warsaw for this nobody has ever come back from Warsaw for me and that explains the poster see the yet you know communist image yes yes yes now we're gonna be fielding some questions but I have my own questions for you I've got some questions for you I'm gonna start off by asking you a couple of questions about the whole win without pitching manifesto it's been so influential in the way that I think and the things that I've been able to share with people so I'm gonna just tee it up for you okay yeah so there are twelve proclamations I believe twelve like like the ten commandments but there are twelve commandments here so let's talk about this so everybody can get really familiar with you your concepts one of the proclamations is we will specialize and create a people struggle with this all the time sir please expand yeah it is the nature of the creative personality to want to solve the problem that you have not previously solved that is essentially creativity is the ability to see the ability to bring novel perspective to a problem therefore if you're a creative person you're really drawn to the problem that you haven't solved before so it's in your nature to build a business that allows you to solve any problem that will ever come along and it's not a problem that's universal to creative people but creative people tend to have that have to deal with that more than others so you as a creative person you have this personal need for a variety but your business really needs you to focus because it's not until you focus on the same types of problems or the same market where you start to see the patterns and you can't really build deep expertise until you set yourself up so that you're solving or staring at dealing with the same types of problems over and over again and that's when you start to see my friend David Baker I do I do the podcast when he talks about pattern recognition that's when you start to see patterns everywhere that's what you really become a subject matter expertise when you're starting to see the patterns so we have this universal problem among creative professionals or creative firms in that they tend to be too broadly positioned because it's what that the owner of the business really wants and it's not it's not like burn in hell for having a kind of a generalist agency position you're just going to make sales and marketing so much harder because you invite so much competition and it's really hard for you to stand apart from the crowd it's hard hard for you to command a premium price so we begin with the first step and that is specialising so of all the creative people that you've spoken to in your many decade-long life as a consultant coach and that's an author what is the thing that they push up against the most like I understand that you conceptually I'm playing one of them that if I specialize it'll be easier for me to develop expertise to do the pattern recognition that you're speaking of yeah but why not hold on to the idea so tightly and what can you say to them so that they can finally let go of that and actually start to establish some expertise so the number one objection is if I specialize Blair I'm going to die of boredom that's the number of subjects right yeah isn't it yes okay so I always say and I think this is in the book it's through the books eight or nine years old now so it's been a while since I've read it I think it's in the book but I always say you're standing in foot in a room full of doors and being a highly curious creative problem solver you want to know what's behind every door so you structure your business in a way that allows you to open every door and I'm standing over your shoulder and I'm saying no you need to pick a door you need to walk through and you need to never look back and you are convinced that on the other side of that door is one boring gray empty room where you are going to die of boredom but that's not what's on the other side of the door what's on the other side of the door are more doors more doors than you can ever imagine not more door more doors so it's like a it's like crawling into a closet and having it open up into Narnia so you you think the niche is going to be so small it's suffocating but it almost never is the niche is just filled with other niches and other places to go and you'll soon realize that this the specialization whether you've chosen to specialize by a discipline or a market or a combination of them the specialization you you won't live long enough to be able to explore everything in that little niche of a business but you don't see that from the outside you don't see that until you walk through the door I see so let's say I'm drinking the kool-aid now I'm ready to go to Mordor or Mordor some more doors and then what do I need to do because I understand conceptualize let's specialize what do I need to do now yeah and first I want to offer a caveat because I know you like your your reaches is global and there are a lot of young creative professionals some who are still in design school are just out who are just launching their practice and you need to take that first step of specialisation with a grain of salt in the beginning because in the beginning of your career your career should kind of look like this where you have this all this variety and then over time you specialize so when you're young and it really makes sense to get a breadth of experience and try different things and go down different alleys and try to take different specializations and weave them together and just try your hand at a whole bunch of different things I think it can be a mistake to specialize too early so fancy once you've once unless you you get into and you just see an opportunity and you think wow there's a whole bunch of white space here nobody's going after it then it makes sense to go after that but generally speaking I think when you're young you should explore a lot and then you should focus and now I was just set up the answer to your question but I've forgotten the question sue well the question was I want to specialize now I'm a couple years out of school I'm hearing what you're saying it's gonna benefit me pricing communication marketing all that kind of stuff yeah what what steps try how do I start how do I start yeah so the first thing I would have you do is what I would call a fast-track strategy exercise which is with a time constraint driven exercise just write down on a whiteboard or a piece of paper the opportunities that you see in the market so where do you see unmet need and don't limit yourself to don't think if you're a designer and you're thinking of opening a design firm or you have opened a design firm don't limit yourself to this business model of fee-for-service for design just like where do you see business opportunities in the market and don't even worry about whether or not your skill sets match that opportunity just throughout your day you probably from time to time think awesome this this isn't designed very well or somebody should do offer a service that does this it's set up or so what are those things and what are the trends that you see in the market business-wise that might lead to some opportunities and then just explore that for a bit then if you've been able to chart out some some white space some business opportunity in the marketplace then you just start thinking around that so that's kind of an easy first step but really when you get down to it you you so when most creative firms endeavor to position themselves so that they are specialized in the club are able to clawback more power in the buy/sell relationship the first mistake they make is they see it as a linguistic exercise so they they go in search of language that will allow them to do what they've always done for the people or the market that they've always served in just a new more compelling way so the first step by having them do is I strip away language I say you without using any adjectives I want you to define your future positioning in two boxes discipline for market what are you going to do and who are you going to do it for and you can't do full a full sentence just discipline for market and then try that on and then read that out to people what do you think of a firm that does this for this discipline for that market and then once you've arrived at something that feels good to you then you can start to put the kind of user creative powers your powers of language to to make that offering more compelling but if you skip the first step of just articulating a discipline and a market and then asking questions around okay does this feel like this is meaningfully different or do you think we can carve out kind of an expert position in this if you skip that step you're just gonna be left with meaningless language the first step really is even though you can use other frameworks but I really like this idea of discipline for market and that's that's that should that you should view this as an exercise in sacrifice so it's really about if if arm art if it's discipline for market going forward then there are all kinds of implications around what you will no longer do one of the tests that you should apply to whatever the positioning decision you come up with is the first test I believe is are you afraid is the decision that you've written out on paper and you try it on you're considering it is it is there some level of terror around you building your business around this narrower value proposition and the terror obviously comes from the vast hordes of business that you would be walking away from because if there's no terror you're probably not doing it right I see so you have to be afraid yeah okay good okay I think that's a good kind of way to start looking at this I just want to let you guys know but Ben Burns is also in the room and Jonah's cutting this and they're reading your comments guys just hang in there I got a couple more questions we have 399 ish people watching live and I expect this number to grow as we continue on in our dialogue here so let me ask you this next one I was just doing a live stream or earlier that's why I kind of just barely got here in time which is this is that creative people have difficulty talking about money we know what one of the rules are it's we will address issues of money early yeah can you get into the psychology of maybe why people have a hard time talking about money and maybe some tips that you can give to help people a lot of its cultural mm-hmm were you know probably in most cultures in the world were taught that it's impolite to talk about money yeah so there's two kind of Universal mistakes around the idea of talking about money the first mistake is the extrapolation of that kind of personal morei I suppose it is or rule this idea that we don't talk about money in their personal context extrapolating that to business and the second one is well it's kind of it's a it's a corollary of the first that's the idea that in being in business around the world regardless of the culture it's seen as a lack of business acumen an inability to talk about money is seen as a lack of business acumen so first of all we confuse you know the things that our mothers taught us about not talking about money we confuse that personal contacts with the business context and we don't appreciate that if you're sitting in a meeting and it's time to talk about money and you can't do it you lose a little bit of face a little bit of authority and perhaps a little bit of respect from the from the client and at the end of the day you're in business you have to make money you have to earn a profit beyond the salary that you pay yourself because it's proof that the world needs what you do so if you can't talk about it this is the win without pitching rule of money if you can't talk about it you won't make it okay okay so money culturally bad maybe and we can't talk about it but in business if you don't talk about it you're seen as not very savvy businessperson yeah I'm in hall and you kind of beat around the bush when it's like well what's this gonna cost yeah and if you can talk about it even your client is a little bit uncomfortable talking about money sometimes so if you can be the party who puts the subject on the table there's it's not all a power play in these situations but sometimes these little things count so you being the the party more comfortable talking about money in a situation like that that's worth something right that's there's a lot of signaling they say account economists use the term signaling like all of the message that's communicated in a price and there's a lot of signaling around just the ability to speak confidently about money and if I think of the best business development people that I know one of their traits is just the ability to say five million dollars the same way they would say five thousand dollars that's not the size of the number coming out of their mouth does not affect how they behave doesn't affect their tone their emotions their heart rate doesn't go up and nobody's born being able to do that that's something that you have to master over time you just have to get comfortable with it so the reason we avoid money conversations is well we've talked about kind of the reasons we think it's it's it's culturally wrong it's also difficult but we find many conversations stressful and it's important to remember what the source of stress is stress is caused by the things that you don't do or the things that are out of your control and these money conversations aren't out of your control so the reason we find many conversations stressful is because we're avoiding them so if you want to learn to not be stressed out by money conversation then you train yourself to just speak about money as early as possible early and often okay you're from a small town in Canada Canadians are known for being super polite how is it this little you know this guy from Canada is gentleman from Canada can talk about money and teach others to talk about money did you have to overcome certain things yourself and what tools did you develop yeah I first of all I I don't understand why Canadians are thought to be more I believe in Americans and my experience I think Americans are far more polite than Canadians yeah okay let's go down this path yeah you have some observations sir man when I come to the United States and I the border crossing I have a visa that allows me to work here I'm completely grateful to be in your country and to be allowed to work in this country and it's always just from the moment I hit the border we call each other sir and ma'am and I I think it's I think it's a wonderful wonderful thing you would nobody would ever call you sir or ma'am in Canada ever so we don't we're not the niceties the politeness of the initial exchange when people meet in America are far nicer are far far more polite Waterdown be far more polite in America yeah then they are in Canada and I think Canadians get a repetition for being nice just because maybe we're a little bit we're not so much nicer we're not polite or we might even be more cynical and yeah I think maybe we're just Meeker I don't know okay okay this is not congruent with my own experience I have to say okay I have to say so let me just share from the outsider's perspective and maybe I just meet all the nice polite Canadians there's an image of Justin Trudeau right who's like very sensitive thoughtful yeah the way he talks and then there's Trump who's like blasting things out and if that's a repetition it's not a fair comparison okay that's not fair but like I'll say this I remember one time I was in Toronto going to the bathroom just running in and running out like even the homeless guy was like hey I'm sorry excuse me so what okay we say sorry a lot that's the Canadian thing people confuse that with politeness I think it's just a lack of vocabulary we don't know what else to say so how did I how did I learn to do there's some little tricks like I I'm fond of saying I think the single biggest little thing that you can do to become a better salesperson is to embrace silence is to kind of win the battle for silence you don't need to say master silence you don't have to master it because you just have to be better more comfortable at silence then your your your partner the person you're talking to you because nature really truly does abhor a vacuum like it really it really does when you look into the physics of it like you create a vacuum mater starts to appear from nowhere so it truly abhors a vacuum and it's the the same is true in a social or a business conversation so if you deliver an objection or a price a really big price let's say you drop drop the price bomb it's a really big number and the client can't hear what you say next because he just hears this ringing in his ears that's a good thing and what you want to do in that moment is just not save the client from himself just let him recover hmm and sit there comfortably because when you deliver a big price or an objection that you ask the client to overcome or you an obstacle of any kind or you say no in a certain situation and if you can just stop and let the client fill the space instead of you you will gain so much information about where you stand with that client and we like in the sales world we if it's if it's us on the selling side who fills that fills the void the uncomfortable void of silence we typically fill it with words like but we could do it for less right so just bite your tongue admire your cuticles admire the color of the the walls count to ten under your breath whatever you have to do recite baseball statistics to yourself whatever you have to do just be quiet and let the client speak first if you can just do that and I say it's the single biggest little thing you can do because it's actually really easy to learn to do it's uncomfortable uncomfortable the first time it's less uncomfortable the second time by the fourth or fifth time you're gonna love it and you will just sit you will save yourself from yourself by learning to just state the number and shut up I can be uncomfortable in the silence are comfortable in it we've now shot up to five hundred thirty four people watching live so we picked up another 130 blares so something must be happening here that's over half of my hometown is watching this they're on support right now yeah okay here we go this is a question from slide Oh I've not even read it before but too many people have voted this up this comes from Stefan excuse me he's asking in the value conversation how do you measure the success you are promising which are the safe guarantees you can make in order to convince the client so it's a two-parter oh it's a complex question Stefan thank you very much for starting off with an easy one so in the value so there's a lot to unpack here so in the value conversation the value conversation is the part of the sale where you are endeavoring to uncover how much value you might create for the client and then what your fair share of that value creation might be in the form of confidence compensation so tell me again what the two questions are around the vs. how do you measure the success you're promising so there's there's no one answer or easy answer to that question and as part of the value conversation framework there's some steps that you go through to you should be uncovering the KPI right so the first step of the value conversation is to find out what it is that the client wants we call it the desired future state so what desired future state should include you know what are the corporate needs and also what are the wants of the individual so you find that you determine that and then the second step is to try to put metrics around that so you would say to the client okay if we were to help you accomplish these things let's talk about the KPIs key performance indicators or metrics of success what are the things that will measure that will prove that you've achieved what it is that you want so there's no Universal answer to your question because in each value conversation you should be uncovering those KPIs and essentially if you make bullet points of everything that the client wants to be true in the future after the engagement not every one of those items will translate to a KPI you you won't be able to get to a quantifiable metric for every one of them but you try your best so again there's no one answer to that question but you should be uncovering essentially your own answer to the question in every value conversation and there was a second part what was it yeah the second part is what are the safe guarantees that you can make in order to convince the client this comes up a lot so conceptually I think people do understand value-based pricing they don't know how to go about it yeah but the the thing that they fear the most is like well once we say we're held accountable to something oh what can we do in terms of the promise so the safe guarantees that's an oxymoron right if if you are offering guarantees inherent in that concept is the idea of you taking on risk you are taking risk away from the client that's the guarantee through the guarantee and you're taking it on yourself so Peter Drucker the father management consulting is written 60 books and he's a variable variable quote machine he's no longer with us but his best quote that I that I drop every time I speak is in business all profit comes from risk so if you really want to get to that level next level of profitability beyond being kind of an efficient firm or your you hit a certain utilization rate where you're billing as many of your hours as possible if you want to get to the next you really need to structure the odd engagement where you are taking some risk so the idea of safe guarantee you need to let go over that because the very nature of guarantees mean they're not safe they're not safe for you so how do you you know and again maybe we didn't hit this point so for the first time pricing in a customized services firm so like when without pitching is a training company the future is a training company we have a kind of menu for our pricing right you can whether it's on the website or not somebody's interested in something there's a price that everybody pays for the most part and those prices are public and that's that's the nature of a product or a product eyes services business that is built for scale most of you listening and watching your business is a customized services firm it's not built for scale therefore you should see yourself working with a small number of clients at any one time each of those engagements should be unique to the client and not built on your standard processes or the standard packages that you sell and each of those engagements the pricing of each of those engagements the structuring of the proposal and the pricing that is a creative act it is a unique creative act that you will not recreate for another client that's the way you should think about it so the answer is always different and again so the kpi's are always different and you know the idea of a safe guarantee you need to let go of it but you you would never put forward if you wanted to guarantee your your anchor option your most expensive option you would never put forward a guarantee that you weren't comfortable with that represented a level of risk for you and your business that you weren't comfortable with and you will never put forward a guarantee where the conditions did not allow you some oversight into the or transparency into the clients business or the ability to affect certain variables so as an example let's say you're thinking of putting forward a marketing digital marketing proposal to a prospective client and you're thinking well it all goes well we could create a couple million dollars in profit so maybe on maybe your most expensive anchor option is going to be have some level of guaranteed and you're gonna you're going to propose to get paid for on the basis of a profit share essentially you you might tie the ultimate your payment to the ultimate lagging indicator which is the indicator where you look back to see if you're successful rather than a leading indicator which is a predictor so lagging indicators are always financial so you might tie them to sales but if you don't have if you're being hired to generate leads and you have no ability to impact conversion rate closing rate of the salespeople etc and you're worried that your good work is going to go down in flames because of variables out of your control then it wouldn't it would not make sense to offer a guarantee based on that KPI of sales you would build your you would build your performance pay and you were taught you would take risk around the number of leads generated or something that you did have the opportunity to control ooh and burns did you understand all that that got really deep into economic land right there well let's see what our internet friends say Ben how are they receiving this message right now I'm just curious yeah yeah okay well you think about it okay so so you is I'm gonna quote my friend David C Baker again he says you get you get paid for three things in your business you get paid for what you do and that should really be your salary right so you show you're essentially you start a business you've got the job of CEO you pay yourself with the CEOs salary what you imagine it should be and so you earn that for through your effort through showing up to work through doing the things that you do through making the decisions that you do the idea is if you were to shut your business and go work for somebody else you would earn roughly that amount somewhere else because you're getting paid for what you do but you also get paid for what you own and that's let's just put that aside that the third more meaningful one is you get paid for the risk that you take so you imagine that back to Drucker's idea and the profit is comes from the risk that you take so back there Drucker's idea you imagine that your your client is sitting there and they're looking at the market and they've come up with an idea for a new product or service and they're thinking of investing all of this money and taking a whole bunch of risk to try to make money by going to the market and going after this opportunity that they've identified in the market so they're about to take a whole bunch of risk and then they decide they need to hire a firm like yours and part of what you one way to think about this is they are hiring you to help help them to help take away some of the risk of actually capitalizing on the market actually succeeding in the market they are taking on all of this risk and if they're successful they'll make this money and the risk they're taking on is they're investing their time they're investing their money in this situation they've got the risk of opportunity cost the other things that they could do with this money so they are taking this risk in the market then they hire you and you need to imagine that or understand that part of what they want you to do is take some of that risk away and they're willing to pay you some more money in order for you to take some of that risk away and some of those clients want you to take is much risk away as possible and they will pay you a lot of money and other clients really want you to perform a service and they don't need you to take very much risk away and they want to pay you less money so there's those we tend to think of those as price buyers and the first group is value buyers there's not a direct correlation but it's pretty close so its profit comes from risk it's about its so I know I'm speaking fast I'm trying to cover the budget let me back up another concept there's and I've tweeted this the other day I've a stir died this bastardized this from a few different sources but it's really powerful I yeah there are two levels of success in business in the first level you get there through the tools of hard work and saying yes to everything so when you're young back to positioning you should work really hard and you should say yes to every opportunity that comes your way and that will get you to the first level of success where you're you've got validation from the market people are paying you to do what you do you're earning a profit be out beyond what you would have earned what you would have earned in just a salary the second level of success requires you to let go of those tools of hard work and saying yes because those tools not only don't get you to the second level they become the barrier to the second level and the longer you are the first level the harder it is the more these habits of hard work and saying yes to everything get ingrained the harder it is to let go of these so the second level is about well I'll simplify it it's really about taking risk so I wrote about this in pricing creativity my wife was my business partner will say oh look its own so she's very successful she must work very hard and I immediately say no she must take a lot of risk hard work gets you at some point you know you know building the future at some point you work hard in the beginning but at some point you've got to decide am I going for it right am I gonna invest a whole bunch of time and money am I gonna keep pouring money back into the business and that risk is going to pay off or it's not going to pay off so you get to the second level through risk or I sometimes say innovation which I see is a combination of creativity the ability to see opportunity and risk that the willingness to go for it so so that replaces hard work and then you replace saying yes to everything with saying no to almost everything and that's Wow Warren Buffett quote is the difference between successful people and really successful people is really successful people say no to almost everything whoa okay so the two levels of success in other words it's like what got you to the first level of success is the exact I said what you need so what got you here won't get you there yeah it's almost an inversion of the two principles so when we're young and we're starting out we should work really hard we should say yes to just about everything because that's where we're going to experience things and we start to develop profit and we establish our name and our reputation and market validation all those kinds of things but this is where the big struggle comes in I think Blair we hold on to that those previous patterns of success are the things that doom us from taking the risk yeah you got it how do you help people with that well some of us are hardwired for saying yes and and working hard I'm fortunate that I'm not hired wired for either of those things so the first level of success was harder for me than the second level perhaps how do you oh I don't know how you you just keep hitting people confronting people with the issue then you know one of the principles I talk about in price and creativity is the idea that the pursuit of efficiencies comes at the cost of extraordinary profit so as you try to become more efficient efficiencies is about not wasting resources so you work harder and harder and you don't waste time you're usually tracking time if you're pursuing efficiencies in your firm you're almost always doing timesheets you're almost tracking time you're almost always trying to hit this threshold of billable efficiency where your billing 60% some people use 65 but the threshold of respectability is about 60% of all of the time available from everybody in the firm knowing that only some people will be billable and others won't but yet up all their time use 1600 or 1800 hours per year per person add it all up and see how much your billing and try to increase that amount now the longer you play that game the harder becomes to make a hole make real money because as you pursue efficiencies what you're doing is you're squeezing the waste out of the business and the other end of the spectrum from efficiencies is innovation so efficiencies is the elimination of waste an innovation is inherently messy and wasteful so as you eliminate waste you eliminate kind of the freedom for people to put their feet up on the desk innovative new approaches something you're doing for a client that you've never done before you need the freedom to fail you need the room to iterate and when you're running an efficient shop your people don't have that kind of room hmm we must be one of the most innovative companies on the planet because there's a lot of failure going on bed birds yes we are yes we are I want to say thank you to Chris from this design life from doing the super chat he's saying excellent information thank you the future dot dot so there's something nice going on there we are now up to 642 Wow can we exceed the population of your town by the end of this stream you guys so it's eight eight hundred and seventy-six 876 number we're looking for ladies and gentlemen let's get there now I'm gonna go back to slide over here I'm riding so fast on heart I'm having a hard time player I got an it having a hard time managing the comments reading them writing notes so I can do the summary and listening to you at the same time this is really testing me right now all right okay so here's the question from Jordan they've got 16 up votes on slide oh how do I estimate the value created for a client parenthesis client will increase revenue by $1,000,000 per year do we ask for 20% of that $1,000,000 how do I ask them mate this brother so so it's not that you've estimated the value you're trying to determine what your share of that value should be in the murmur of pricing and yes compensation so that's a really good question and I do not have a satisfactory answer all the time okay so I'll give you a little bit of framework to think about the answer and then I'll give you a tool that you can use to try to get the theoretical maximum so as an example of like just some of how different people think about that problem Allen Weiss who wrote million dollar consulting and value-based fees he's got his chapter on the value conversation I think it's chapter 5 he says if you only read one chapter read this he says he gets asked that question all the time ok you've uncovered the value that you might create for the client what what should your kind of value B and his response if I'm if I'm going by memory here so I might be getting a little bit wrong but his response is there's no right answer there's no right answer there's no right answer there's no right answer start at 20% and work from there he basically says this you don't need a number but if you're gonna pick pick 20% and start from there so if it's 2 million in profit 400,000 now that's so rudimentary that is just a starting point because every price and if you're following the model in pricing creativity you're putting forward options so you're putting forward three or four different options and every price you put forward to your client will have an uncertainty discount built in so the more the higher the level of certainty that you will deliver on the value generally speaking the higher the price so it's not it's not enough to say start at 20% and Alan Weis knows this he just wanted to give people a place to start from and move from move from there so so you can think of 20% another example I'll give you is some boutique consulting firms like some offices of McKinsey well if they uncover in a value conversation that they can create 2 million dollars a year in recurring net profit their fee they generally proposed would be half of the first year's gains revenue gains cost reductions the value creations so a million dollars so that's just a that's a bit of a generalization I'm not saying everybody at McKinsey does this all the time but I've seen examples of it and heard of many of examples of it no others follow that lead so now you have two examples one says 20% for maybe the guaranteed or the the high anchor option that's got some level of guaranteed and the other would be 50% and then I said I would give you a tool and then talk about this in pricing creativity as well it's a technique known as anchoring against guaranteed value and it's not a mandatory step it's a tool that you might use to see if you can't uncover the theoretical maximum that the client might pay so after you uncover the clients desired future state the metrics of success the value that might be created then you move to the fourth and final step which is to set pricing guidance and if you use that you're really looking to set a range and the client might set the low end of the range by giving you a stated budget and if not you just ask them what do you want on the low end but you always start with the high end so you can use this technique known as anchoring against guaranteed value and it might sound something like this listen if I if I could guarantee you that we created two million dollars in net new profit year-over-year would you the open-ended question is what would you be willing to pay for that but I think you should use a closed-ended question and say pick it 50% of the gains would you be willing to pay us a million dollars silence right and that question if I could guarantee results would you pay X begs a question doesn't it if you're the client you're sitting there thinking well are you saying you're going to guarantee this Blair and my answer is no I'm not saying that in fact I haven't even thought about solutions yet just a hypothetical question and it's possible that when I go back to the studio and we start putting together solutions it's possible that I might see an opportunity for a guaranteed solution and if it would feel comfortable about it and if I did I'll put it forward but so if we did arrive at a guaranteed solution would you pay a million dollars and the client might say yeah if you could guarantee it I'd pay you a million dollars okay great you've served a few purposes here you've you've anchored the high end of the range and and and the clients thinking okay you're you're probably not going to guarantee this and you're thinking I'm probably not going to fully guarantee this right but you've set like a theoretical maximum right so any price that you come up with afterwards you just work back from that million and ask yourself kind of subjectively now how close to like a guarantee or how close to absolute certainty do we think this solution that we've come up with gets are we 75 percent in the way there may be price it at seven fifty makes sense yeah makes a lot of sense I guess in my experience working with most entrepreneurs they too are comfortable with some level of risk therefore they're not going to pay you 90 to 100 percent of the value gained so 20 to 40 or 50 percent seems pretty reasonable relatively speaking because they too will own some of the risk and therefore won't give you all the money yeah and you make a good point you know some of your clients will be entrepreneurs and some will be at the other end of the spectrum they'll be bureaucrats and they won't want to take any risk at all so when you're putting together your options in your proposal you really want to think about what the clients level of risk is so have you found in your experience in consulting for people that if they work with government agencies and bureaucrats that they can actually ask for more of the what is it guaranteed value anchoring against guaranteed value no oh okay no so we talk about the value conversation and they've talked about the four-step framework yes it's really hard to have a value conversation still worth trying but it's hard to have a meaningful value conversation with somebody who's remit does not include value creation so if you're dealing with a bureaucrat or a manager people managers manage people processes and budgets and they're not really in charge of the future right so they're they're not in charge of it's only executives who are in charge of future value creation so executives and entrepreneurs love being on the receiving end of a value conversation bureaucrats you might get them talking about value but the whole time they're saying but mine but my budget is $15,000 right so they they won't really be drawn on that conversation because they think I don't like that value who cares about value I deliver this project on time on budget or I'm in trouble so you'd need to recognize that it's a more valuable tool when you're dealing with a more senior decision-maker or an entrepreneur so III know the answer says so the person that you need to talk to you're gonna have the value based conversation is somebody who's got skin in the game an executive skin in the game or who's in charge of future value creation yeah okay fantastic there's a lot of people loving this where it's except where to keep pushing this up to burn 200 words on one of you guys come on that our short guys get in on this right now then burns I'm gonna turn it back to you because you're monitoring YouTube what's hot yes there's a couple of questions about providing the value that you promised and I sense that there is a limiting belief here in the comments section about hey we might not be able to provide the value that we promised can you guys address that I know Blair can well if you can't provide the value that you promised maybe you should do something else for a living that's the glue I know where's my zinger sound effect yeah I'm looking for if you're if you're in the early part of your career or practice and you're listening to this stuff you might just like want to temper this down a little bit right the idea of if you're still trying to get to the first level of success go ahead and have the value conversations and then go back with your multiple proposal your multiple option proposals but don't don't put yourself in a situation where you're taking more risk than you're comfortable with okay so don't it's not it's not like selling time is going to consign you to hell or makes you a lesser person or a lesser business person it's just it's a it's a it's some written a few books on value-based pricing this this idea that you should view your client base as an investment portfolio and if you have an investment portfolio and if you're working with the financial advisor that financial advisor in most jurisdictions certainly in North America they have a legal obligation to discern map out your risk profile before they sell you any investments and so they might decide that through some sort of assessment that they've that you have a moderate risk profile like a medium propensity for risk now they're free to sell you high risk investments and low risk investments but what their obligation is to make sure that the total package of investments balances out to meet your risk profile and you want to think of your client based the same way so you might be in a place where either it's the early stages of your business or the last stages of your business and you're winding down and for whatever reason and you're the reasons are all your own and they're completely valid but you might be in a place where you just do not have the appetite to take any extra risk so don't never put forward an option in a proposal that would see you taking more risk than you're comfortable with it's these they're not going to get chosen those high anchor options with skin in the game aren't going to get chosen very often there's a lot of signaling and that option too it communicates a lot of confidence that you're willing to be kind of a business partner so it says a lot of good things about you that you're just putting that option forward but never put forward an option that you wouldn't be happy delivering on so at times when you're feeling flush you've got money in the bank you've got all kinds of opportunity to feeling good about your ability to win new business and in an engagement comes along where you think wow this is in our sweet spot I know we can really move the needle here those are the ones where you would think about putting some skin in the game but it's not necessary to always have skin in the game even on your highest price anchor option perfect is aberrant yeah I got another question you got another mic yeah another mic okay we weren't hearing you very clearly another one sorry about that so this question comes from the the pro group her names mushke and she asks what are some of the other ways that you assume risk as the service provider in value-based pricing yeah what is some of the well it's the big risk there are books on this there's this idea that there's seven types of risk not all of them apply in your business like what physical risk doesn't apply in your business the biggest one is performance risk which is related to the clients of financial risk there's a - you're seen as two different types of risk but it's essentially performance risk that you won't do that you won't do you won't perform and therefore you won't get you won't earn everything that you hope to earn and if it's a contingency payment where you said you don't pay us anything until we hit these metrics that's the most risky option you can put forward four you should get rich if the client selects that then then you lose everything so I'm not saying you yeah I'm so yeah choose contingency payment with a with you know at your discretion and at your risk I think that goes without saying but another form of risk that you take is opportunity cost the idea that if you so when you when you value price and you have skin in the game one of the things the client is not buying from you is an a package of time there is no conversation between you and the client around how much time it will take you now you've probably done some math around how long this will take you to deliver and create the value but you're no longer in a position to go back to the client it's if they've bought value rather than time time and materials or even deliverables if they're paying you to hit the value of certain number of leads or a certain amount of profit then that's that all of that if you let go of the ability to go back and say well this is taking longer you can't do that you have to eat it so the there's this opportunity cost of opportunity cost is what are the other things you could do at that time or money so all these other projects that you could have been working on with this time because it's taking you so much longer and so that those are the two main ones there's performance risk you're not going to get the results therefore not get paid there's the opportunity cost and then there's also financial risk because in certain scenarios you might actually end up investing a bunch of money and outside costs or even just inside cost so those are the three main types of risks that you need to look out for them great I want to just do this thing here in case you guys are joining us midstream and you don't want to rewind you want to stay current with what's happening right now so you can participate in the live chat on the show today's mr. Blair ends and he's written two books that I think are amazing and game-changing for you guys you definitely need to pick up the book the win without pitching manifesto and pricing creativity the follow up to that and if you want to join the conversations happening online you can either comment on youtube but the more kind of democratic way to do it is join us on slide or calm use the hashtag h2 five six love having blur on the show and in a way blur I didn't want to have you on the show and just admit it because I've been using your ideas so often that people credit me with your ideas and now here you are just saying almost exactly what I would have told them so now they're like oh my god that's where you got problem with Ron Baker that's where the source is you guys have to go to the source Blair can you tell us some ways that people can interact with you they're loving the content how do they engage with you besides buying the two books yeah so when without pitching calm we're training company we do some public workshops we do private training and coaching similar to the future so you can find us there I'm at Blair ends on Twitter I'm not on Facebook tracked me down so every time I mention your Facebook I get no love yeah no are you mentioning me I do sometimes I do yeah but the win without pitching logo shows up guys just for the for the hard-of-hearing there we go thank you Jonah he's missing the cue there where's the Communist Manifesto I'll bring that up in a second there we go so we're ready to go no matter what we should do that with a split screen the the communist Blair and the capitalist Blair anyway time for a new photo shoot win without pitching calm go there check it out and he's at Blair ends there's two ends and that Blair ends and he's only gonna respond to on Twitter apparently been wasting all my energy on Facebook okay now I'm gonna ask you this question people struggle with this so much they're so used to doing hourly based pricing they are intrigued by the value based thing but they feel guilty they feel it's unethical to charge in orders of magnitude more than what it costs to make something I would love for you to just definitively just answer this one and just put this one to bed yeah I like get over it okay so keys are not that polite let's just extrapolate okay so at the beginning of your career you get hired to do X and it takes you Y number of hours to do X and you charge say are we is that country or Z country the last letter the alphabet Z Z Z I can never remember okay so I'm a Zed country you're Z country so Z price per hour so in the beginning you're a generalist or you're not very experienced and it takes you a certain amount of time as you get better what you're saying here is my inference you're saying that it's okay for me to raise my hourly rate but I think we all agree that as you get better at what you do you can do it faster so what you're saying is you should be punished for getting better at what you do that is absolutely ridiculous it's absolutely absurd and so we need to appreciate what value is value is entirely subjective that and different people value of things differently and you how people you know how value is created in the world is through trade how people are lifted out of poverty the world over is through trade and trade at the heart of trade is this idea of the double thank you moment where you hand over the work to the client the client hands over the money you both shake hands and say thank you you both mean it you are both better off you would both do that transaction again your costs have nothing to do with that transaction your obligation is for you you want to strive for that double thank you moment where you have created this extra X you want to be focused on extraordinary value creation for your client you want to create extraordinary value you want to get paid an incredible amount of money for it but not so much that the client resents you right so where that where that line is here's value creation and you know here's your share of it in the form of compensation like at some point your price will get so high and it's going to vary client by client that there will be some pushback you don't want to be at that where they'll say okay thanks but I'm next time I'm going with somebody else if you can hit that sweet spot of thank you this was a I'm paying you a lot of money but it was worth it I would do it again that's all that matters this idea of like time is emit isn't even real right let's not put a price on time it is a human construct outside of like it's just I always tell myself don't talk about it it's not even real so like the idea that you're trying to capture it and build for it etc the only reason we do this is it's the easiest thing to count and it's just it's so highly flawed now I'm not trying to talk people out of selling time those who are selling time but the idea and I see this argument all the time when people move to value-based pricing there's always somebody in the firm who says it's unethical for us to charge that because it didn't take us that long you need to like let go of that ridiculous idea if your clients willing to pay for it and you are creating value well beyond that it really doesn't matter what that number is and it doesn't matter how long it took you to to arrive at it okay this brings up so many issues and so I'm gonna dig in there because I've had this conversation online with lots of people so they say okay fine you get better with time just charge more per hour what's wrong with that isn't that the same it's the same but it's so limiting you think of so I don't want to be overly harsh but I have to have you guys already I'm gonna get the shotgun ready there are there are if you think of your best your very best clients so clients clients sitting there and says Chris I have this problem I'm like thinking of hiring your firm to help me capitalize in this classic and and my problem is like sales are going down and and I don't know what to do and I'm worried about kind of I'm worried about the survivability of the business etc and you say okay I'm gonna sell you a lead generation plan and we're gonna put these four people on and we're gonna sell you X number of sprints or we're gonna sell you you know a certain amount of time the client you know any right-thinking especially in entrepreneurial clients gonna look back at you go i I don't think you heard what I said I'm not like interested in buying you know a bunch of hours of your time I have a very serious business problem and if I don't solve this problem I'm out of business so there are three things you can price and sell and therefore three things your client can buy from you you can sell the inputs of time and materials you can sell the outputs or the deliverable or you can sell the outcomes or the value that created and in a situation like that where you have a client who has a real problem they're really worried about the about the consequences of this problem they don't want to buy your time they don't even want to buy your deliverables they want a partner and we use this term all the time and it's just and we talk about partnering with our clients you you only partner with your clients if you put your some skin in the game compensation wise but in this situation that client wants a partner wants somebody who's going to sit down and not be thinking about time and not be constrained by look deliverables but who's going to come to the table with them and help them solve this problem and turn this business around so the idea that there's some sort of ethics around how long it takes you to do it it's it's just so wrong it's so bad it's so limiting it's like you're you're never really truly going to help people if you keep thinking that way and I'm not trying to beat up the question or like because I get that question a lot I'm just trying to as forcibly as I can while still being loving and supportive make the point that you really need to let go of this archaic idea it is not helping you it is not helping your clients now some clients just want to buy time from you and if you're okay selling time then just sell them some time but this idea that it's unethical does know it's crazy okay so let's say we've moved beyond this and say I have a team and an estimate the time it's going to take to do it and there's say four or five people so we're advancing here without the freelancer selling ours anymore and by my best guesstimate it's gonna be anywhere between twenty to thirty thousand and if I'm not familiar with this value-based pricing thing that I'm just I'm gonna think to myself what's a reasonable amount of profit so you might say 30 percent forty percent and that's their mindset yeah and how do you deal with that yeah and it's that's tied to the issue that we just talked about so some people think that there's a an ethical level of profit the level which isn't really ethical right it's kind of understood in the creative professions that in an efficient firm the threshold of respectability is kind of 15 to 20 percent profit margin pre-tax profit margin but there are firms out there doing 40 and 50 percent and on some engagements doing you know 90 percent 95 percent I remember when I was a solo consultant way back in the early days the most profitable engagement I ever had is I had a client paid me thirty five hundred dollars to get to an outcome and I got it in twenty minutes so ten thousand dollars an hour is that ethical he was happy I was happy you got the double thank you yep okay he never did hire me again though so I got another question for you is this is that I think creative people aren't so excited about this value based thing because I think we're uncomfortable with you mean the aesthetic decisions that I make can actually have a measurable impact and I think that's where people get tripped up because in school for the most part designers creatives are trained to be good craftspeople and make amazing things many hours are spent refining and perfecting something so the it gets really scary for them to say my I'm going to go out of business if we don't do something drastic their way out of their element at that point yeah and you know and I completely sympathize I mean that's why I do what I do and I'm sure you tap into a similar sense of purpose I always think of I would think of the individual artist who's made his or her calling his or her business and you're not like he didn't really sign up for this right and you go to design school there's no business education in design school like look why is the future your business like exploding all over the world like you your are everywhere I go in the world people are talk people are talking about the the training that they're getting from your YouTube channel and other sources and it's I speak at design schools as I know you do and it's like they keep saying how come we're not being not being taught this in school so I mean just shout out to you like a feeling though there's there is such a massive demand for this in the world and I to this day I don't know why design schools aren't stepping up but you know what they don't need to they don't need to we the future is here right the design schools can focus on design and and these guys can get their business education elsewhere what was your question I was just busy blowing smoke up massive there's this massive unmet need in the world yes there is so but you're like the the creative person you know back to value they're so vulnerable in that moment right yes in the early days of their practice and you're so what you you're your solution is so personal it's so it's your creation it's your baby therefore a rejection is entirely personal therefore you're you're so vulnerable in this moment so what I would say is if you're really struggling with this idea value-based pricing just take it in baby steps like that there are three rules in the in the book or six rules in the book if you just follow the first three rules up very quickly generally wherever you can price the client not the service so don't don't have a standard price for whatever service right just because the price should differ from client to client just reserve the right to charge more to different clients and less to other clients so that's rule number one rule number two is offer options so always put forward three or four different ways that the client can hire you and you might think about you know you can buy time from us you can buy the deliverable or you can you can pay for the value that we create and we'll take some risk there so but you don't have to do it that way you can put three different options together that are based on price the inputs of time or sorry based on the inputs of time and materials and then the third one is anchor high so it's in simple terms when you're presenting your options just start with the most expensive one and know that they're probably not going to buy it they're probably end up in the middle just follow those three rules and you will get to the next level of pricing success and then one day you'll be ready for true value-based pricing whoo guys I'm like tweeting away I can't keep up I'm on my seventh page of notes right here and everybody's loving the conversation we seem to be somewhere the six hundred and seventy number of people come on guys we're not gonna make it we're not gonna make it people come on we're almost running out of time here okay so I gotta ask you this question this is a personal question I believe this and and doctor please tell me if I'm okay I believe this that no matter what amount the client agrees to pay me I will deliver an excess of value so I'm okay charging whatever amount it like to me there's no limit today's the discounted rate for tomorrow so tomorrow they pay me a million dollars I will deliver one and a half million dollars worth of value am I messed up in my head no you're not so you should you should probably be paying delivering two million or more in value but there is related to that is the idea that creative people tend to over deliver and that's something that you should learn to and I'm not saying you specifically Kris but because that wasn't that wasn't exactly the question but if that's you listening and watching if you think you're proud of the fact that you over deliver like if you're selling deliverables and you deliver more than what the client paid for okay that's nice and in the early days of your business that's helpful to maybe help build reputation client loyalty etc but if you put forward three options and the client chooses the middle option you should not be delivering for free some of the options that were outlined in the most expensive option that the client chose not to take so be careful about over delivering I've seen so many scenarios I remember being in an edit suite a client of mine in New York he's doing a corporate film and he was one of these guys who does like six-figure corporate films for the Fortune 100 and he's proudly showing me a film and then he he he makes some comments to the editor about hey can you change this can you change that and I don't know how much work it was made was another hour of work and I said to my client the agency principal I said is the client gonna notice those things and he said no they won't notice at all and I didn't say anything but my thought was then don't do it right you yeah you have an obligation to deliver a high level of work but your clients only paid you so much you've already met that bar going beyond is just now eroding your own profitability makes perfect sense is trying makes perfect sense but I'm not sure I agree no I agree no it's super logical it's just I'm trying to channel the creative people are listening to this to where they're gonna push back it's like they they they pay you to like just to do the details they don't care about the undercarriage of the car the nobody sees and they want to make sure that that's perfect you'll get over that too well okay so what in the early days of your business your business is like a rock and roll tour bus right you hire your friends everybody's working late it's like you've got the shared sense of purpose it's I think I talked about this in the manifesto it's just the feeling is when you're all young and working hard and just like barely making enough money and you're kind of like winning the battles you're celebrating the winds and commiserating over the losses together it's so much fun in the early days but at some point you're going to and and so you tell yourself that's fun and weird achieving all these other benefits but the money's not quite there but the money will come one day and you kind of lie to yourself over as the years go by yeah it's not really about that you listen to that your art school professors saying it's not about the money it's about the art it has to be about the money too so you kind of lied yourself for a while and then one day you wake up you look in the mirror and you you have an honest conversation with yourself and you say to yourself I'm tired of having fun I finally want to make some money I promise you you young people who are watching this you will get there so all these things you think well I'm challenging these like really conventional art that were embedded in you in art school you will see that I'm right I'm old enough right I'm a few seasons ahead on this on this show that you're watching that's called life you will get there you will see that I'm right so what can we do to help to get them there is just a matter of everybody's on their own journey I think we just did okay right I hope so you know we you keep doing what you're doing I can see what I'm doing there are other people out there doing great work too you had Jonathan stark on this on your podcast recently there's but and there's there's just so much demand there's and there's a lot of great work being done out there so it's a great time to be running your own creative practice you've got YouTube you've got all these other resources available to you like just imagine the people in the in the pre-internet like people my age in the pre-internet era like we had to go to library and take us books ablator what's the library good question I'm there with you Blair I have my library card it's a thing before Amazon okay actually we're at 763 now Blair my screen wasn't refreshing the YouTube audience was telling me hit refresh so we're at 760 - how much more time do we have with you I know you have a soccer game to watch I have a very serious engagement my team Liverpool is about to play Barcelona in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final when it's kickoff what 12 noon 12 noon okay yeah and where you gonna watch at a pub or something yeah you can do it proper I'm gonna go to the little Los Angeles branch of the Liverpool supporters Club has a pub where they watch these things where is that it's in Culver City oh okay so we're need to wrap up pretty soon because LA traffic I don't want you to miss this we were able to get Blair in before the most important thing that's gonna happen today so Ben is there a fantastic question and we've been sitting on or should I go back to slide oh let's go to flight oh okay slide out like my brother from another mother it's slide oh here we go this is from anonymous as 22 votes up I think we might have answered this but I'm gonna ask it so you guys feel like I'm reading your comments here how do I estimate the value-based pricing for a product where the client is launching new product but doesn't know yet how much money it will generate so there are a lot of questions like this about how do i how do i how do i your job is really to uncover right you facilitate the conversation you ask the client so you learn to ask the right questions and it can be a little bit awkward at first and you get better at it as time goes by so you don't let let go of the let go of the need that you might feel to be the person with the answers when you're conducting a value conversation you really need to be the person with the questions and you just bring a blank slate with no presuppositions of any kind bring curiosity and bring empathy and do your best and your and you don't have to be a slick polished salesperson just do your best human to human having the conversation you're trying to find out how you can best help you're not even thinking about solutions in this moment you're just navigating this framework ask whatever question that comes to you if you have to back up and ask it differently later if you have to call back later and ask differently do it just be be a comfortable human who fumbles and searches for the right words and you'll you'll be fine let go of the need to be the subject-matter expert in that moment just be focused on the client what do you want what will we measure how much value what might we create what would you be willing to pay for this that was very healing Blair you came in hot bombs on your face think you'll be ok we're not perfect you're on your journey don't be an expert everything's cool yeah so those are you guys had a hard time with the rest of this just cut that audio track down put again some classical music and they just let it play on repeat is the reason why I don't coach anymore I had a client say to me once as he was quitting the program you said Blair there's a fine line between coaching and abuse and it's kind of funny but he was right and he was I was I'd crossed the line wait what do you mean you don't coach anymore I have all business on coaching yeah so I do on-site training and some public workshops but I have a coaching staff who does the does the coaching and my Director of Coaching Shannon Lee is the most empathetic supportive person that you will ever meet so when people are exposed to me and to her they just immediately gravitate a little bit more of that healing energy she's a human yeah okay excellent then I have my wrap up I need like two minutes to wrap up sure I got another kind of question an easy one yeah or maybe Blair is there anything you want to say yeah no hit me with the question okay there we go let's do it all right so tons of our audience are just kind of starting out and there's a sentiment that value-based pricing might be too much for them at an early stage can you address that do you agree disagree I agree and so ignore almost everything I said I think I empted to address that and they said a second last question it's just like don't you don't take more risk than you're comfortable with one step at a time start with the first three rules of price the client where you can offer options and anchor high and that'll get you to the next level of success and then one day you'll be ready for moving into proper full-on value-based pricing and maybe you won't and your world's not gonna end and it doesn't mean you're not going to be successful so and I just spent a couple of days with a whole bunch of agencies from around the world and there are people in their 60s there have been running their agency for 35 years and they've never priced on value and they've made boatloads of money and had a lot of fun along the way and done a lot of really cool work so it's not like if you don't price based on value you know your world is going to end there there are many ways to get to the endgame and this is just one of them you got right okay before we say goodbye to Blair I'm going to attempt an admit I was writing frantically I might have screwed some of this up here we go we're in lunch in the summer and then I'm going to tell you how to get in touch with Blair right afterwards then we're gonna say goodbye so he can make his game all right so here's what we know by specializing you're more able to recognize patterns and this is a very important thing that you need to do this is expertise demonstrated by going broad you invite competition and nobody wants more competition because then it becomes an issue of price specialization allows you go deeper and unlike what you think you're not gonna die of boredom it's actually going to open more doors not more door not more door so the fast-track way of figuring out your positioning and specialization is get a rough working definition of what discipline for what market and if you're reading it back to yourself and it doesn't make you scared you're not doing it right because you have to let go of things you have to make some sacrifices when talking about money you have to learn how to be unemotional this is a learned behavior so whether you're saying five million or five thousand do it without changing your state say number and be comfortable in the silence if you have to count to ten under your breath see what happens otherwise you're gonna undermine your own efforts to price the value conversation is about uncovering KPIs or in pricing creativity's described as desired future State and finding out what the metrics are all profit comes from risk that's a quote from Peter Drucker who's written gazillion books there are two levels of success hard work especially in the very beginning of your career and saying yes to almost everything gets you there the second level requires you to let go of everything that you learn from the first level and to take on risk innovation its defined by either creativity where you have the ability to see an opportunity you take on risk and then conversely to the stage one you say no to almost everything efficiency is about squeezing out the waste or as innovation is inherently messy and wasteful you have to learn to fail till forward and fell often coming up to the homestretch here because people couldn't catch it Alan Weiss I believe wrote the book million dollar consulting and value-based fees somewhere in there you remember the exact chapter 3 chapter 5 when pricing try this technique anger against guaranteed value the what if I could guarantee the outcome would it be worth this and then you can figure it out later on the three model surprising price on inputs which is time and materials outputs which is deliverables and then outcomes that's where the value-based pricing comes from and your job is to uncover and facilitate the questions through curiosity empathy Blair's key three three things forget everything else in this entire discussion if you can do these three things you can generate more value for yourself price the client or not the service provide options and anchor hi Blair it's been a pleasure to have you on the show you guys Blair ends let's give them a round of applause everybody win without pitching their game on Twitter I think you've got some summary and I just want to say I love what you're doing and I'm so appreciative I know though there's so many people out there in the world who are benefiting from everything you're doing here at the future so keep going thank you so much Blair I'm gonna play the music when I get out here and get you on your game oh I just wish the bunt too hard there we go guys don't forget to Like comment Donna like comment and subscribe we want to thank everybody now it's all jacked up thank you very much it's okay guys cut their faces that Joan is so rusty

Channel: The Futur

Views: 84,135

Rating: 4.9870481 out of 5

Keywords: business, how to, chris do, the futur, price, client, pricing design services, value-based, pricing, how much to charge for logo design, what to charge for logo design, what should i charge, how to price design services, pricing design, how to price logo design, web design pricing, make money, value based pricing, blair enns, pricing creativity, business of design crash course, pricing logo design, futur, strategy pricing, win without pitching, manifesto

Id: J6Su5Vx3x5U

Length: 78min 40sec (4720 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2019