There’s a sentence I’ve heard so many times, from so many brilliant creative business owners, that I could probably say it along with them.
“But I can’t charge more for that. It comes easily to me.”
Last week I wrote about the four layers of what your clients are actually paying for, and what happens when people first see layers three and four (the judgement, the eye, the years, everything that happens before the work is even touched) is that they see it, something flickers… and then this sentence arrives and shuts the whole thing down before they’ve had a chance to look at it properly.
So I’d like to slow that sentence right down.
Where the sentence shows up
It isn’t only something you think. It leaks out of you, in small ways, all over your business.
Perhaps you notice you say “it’s just a…” before you describe your work. It’s just a small collection. It’s just a little consultancy thing I do on the side. It’s just a half day. It’s just me, really. That word “just” is doing an enormous amount of quiet damage, and most people don’t hear themselves say it.
Perhaps you quietly knock something off before you’ve even sent the quote. Not because anybody asked. Not because anything changed. Just because the number looked at you from the screen and you flinched, and you thought, well, that bit only took me an hour.
Perhaps you leave things off the quote entirely. The initial call. The sourcing. The two hours you spent thinking about it in the car. The follow-up. Because those weren’t really work, were they.
Or perhaps you’ve had that experience of a client being absolutely delighted with something, thanking you warmly and very specifically, and you’ve found yourself slightly baffled, because in your mind you didn’t do very much at all. You just did what you always do.
Ring any bells?
None of that is modesty, and it isn’t a confidence problem in the way people usually mean it. It’s a seeing problem.
Where the ease actually lives
Layer three, last week, was the accumulated and natural knowledge. And what comes easily to you lives almost entirely there.
That’s the definition, really. Layer three is precisely the stuff that used to be hard and isn’t any more. That’s what accumulated knowledge is. It’s difficulty dissolved by time and repetition until it stops feeling like anything.
So look at what happens when you price it. You ask yourself the wrong question. You ask, how much effort did this cost me today? And today the honest answer is, almost none. It took twenty minutes. It came out fully formed.
And so you price it at zero.
You are pricing twenty years of accumulated judgement by asking how tired it made you feel on a Tuesday afternoon.
But I can’t charge more for that, it comes easily to me. Of course it does. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to feel like.
The thing you can do in twenty minutes may contain twenty years. Not resemble twenty years. Contain them. The twenty minutes is possible because of the twenty years, and if you took the twenty years away the twenty minutes wouldn’t exist.
Ease is evidence of expertise. It’s what mastery feels like from the inside, and the reason it feels like nothing is that it’s been fully absorbed. That’s what mastery is; when a thing has stopped being something you do and become something you are. The speed is the achievement. The fact that you didn’t have to labour over it is what you spent years buying.
Think about anybody you’d consider properly good at anything. The very experienced doctor who looks at somebody for eight seconds and knows. The tailor who runs a hand down a sleeve and knows. Nobody thinks, well, that only took eight seconds, so it can’t have been worth much. We understand it perfectly when we’re looking at somebody else.
It’s only about ourselves that we get it upside down. Partly because from inside your own work, effortless simply feels invisible; there’s no friction to notice, so nothing registers. And partly because when you watch somebody else with a completely different strength, you only ever see her finished version. You don’t see her wobbles, or the quote she sent before she stopped being able to look at her phone for an hour, or the version of the proposal she deleted. You’re comparing your inside to her outside, and then concluding she has something you haven’t got.
The years I spent in that sentence
I lived in that sentence for a long time, and I want to be honest about it, because I didn’t work any of this out from the outside.
I underpriced my work for years. And the frustrating part, looking back, is that I knew. If you’d asked me directly, sitting in a room, I’d have said yes, of course all that judgement counts, all those years count. I knew it completely, in my head. I just didn’t feel it anywhere near where the pricing decisions actually got made.
So what came out of me was a very particular kind of apologetic work.
My proposals were itemised to a degree that now makes me wince. Not itemised so the client could understand the shape of what they were choosing. Itemised so I could prove I hadn’t taken anything for granted. Broken down and broken down again, until we were at the level of whether six candles could in fact be four. That was a real conversation. It looked like transparency; it was a defence.
And in consultations I hedged. I can hear myself. “So the investment would be around £8,000, but we could potentially adjust things if needed…” Listen to all the work in that sentence. Around. Potentially. If needed. And then the trailing off at the end, which was really an invitation. It said, please don’t be cross with me. It said, I’m not sure about this either.
I also made myself physically smaller in the room. Slightly hunched, slightly turned in, taking up less space than I actually take up. I don’t think I decided to do that, but if you’d filmed me in those meetings you’d have seen a woman making herself into a smaller object while quoting a large number.
And this next part is the one I most want you to have. Clients responded to the wobble. Every time. Not to the price, to the wobble. They questioned details, small oddly specific ones, because the itemised document had invited them to. They asked for discounts, quite reasonably, because the hedging had told them one was available. They compared me to cheaper options and said so, because nothing in how I’d presented the work suggested comparison was beside the point.
None of that was them being difficult. They were being completely sensible. I’d handed them a document and a sentence that both said, quietly, I’m not certain this is worth what I’m asking, and when somebody hands you that, you do the natural thing. You start checking. My wobble gave them permission to doubt.
It cost me real money over the years, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But it cost me more confidence than money, because the cycle feeds itself. You hedge, they push, you conclude you were right to be uncertain, so next time you hedge a little earlier. Round it goes, and from the inside it looks like evidence, when it’s only ever an echo.
What actually changed
Not the work. I want to be really clear about that. I didn’t go away and learn something new, my skills didn’t improve overnight, the flowers were the same flowers and the eye was the same eye it had always been. Nobody gave me a qualification or a pep talk.
What changed is that I finally saw what my ease actually contained.
That’s the whole turn. I looked at the thing I’d been discounting as nothing, which was that I could walk into a space and know, immediately, what it wanted. And I understood for the first time that it wasn’t a small charming quirk. It was the product. It was decades of looking. It was the most valuable thing in the room, and I’d been leaving it off the quote because it didn’t tire me out.
And once I’d seen it, everything about how I presented the work settled. Not hardened. Settled. There’s a real difference. The hedging fell out of my mouth, not because I was gritting my teeth and forcing myself to be assertive, but because it had stopped being true. You can’t apologise for something whose value you can actually see.
In consultations I did one very simple thing, and I still think it’s the most useful single change I ever made. I said the price, directly, and then I stopped talking. The number, plainly, as a piece of information. And then quiet.
That quiet was the hardest thing in the world at first. Every instinct wanted to fill it, to soften it, to add a “but of course we could look at…” I learnt to leave it there.
And what happened in the quiet surprised me. Clients felt safe. They stopped checking. The questions changed from can this be cheaper to when can we start, and can you help us with the other thing as well. Because I’d shown them somebody who knew what she was doing and knew what it was worth, and that is an enormous relief to a person about to spend money.
I didn’t become somebody else. I became less apologetic about who I already was. Those are very different things, and only one of them is available to you by Friday.
The ease was never the problem. The problem was simply that you couldn’t see what the ease contained.
Comments +