The Value Of Your Value: How To Elevate Your Pricing And Move From Hourly Wages To Outcome-Based Wealth
When you charge for outcomes, people invest in your solutions and resultsâand these have nothing to do with how many "hours" you put in.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Do you know how much youâre âworthâ?
If this question makes you tense, itâs because value (especially your value) is a highly emotional topic.
The thing is, your valueâand your customerâs, client's, or employerâs reaction to your valueâsays more about them than it says about you. Yet, people are scared to increase their prices or ask for a higher salary or more stock because they think itâs a personal reflection of their worth.Â
But it actually reflects your customers, clients, and employers.Â
Do they have the budget for what you want to charge or don't they?Â
If they don't have the budget, they're not going to be a good fit for you. If they do, working with them will be a helluva lot easier. And if they can create net-new budget for you, youâve found someone who truly sees the value of what you do.
In this mini-book, pricing is going to get personal.Â
Youâre going to learn why and how to value (and price for) the outcomes you generate.Â
Not only is this relevant for negotiating your salary, bonuses, or commissions if youâre working a regular 9-5 job, but itâs also important if youâre a solopreneur, consultant, coach, writer, creator, or anyone whose pricing is determined by charging for an hourly rate or a deliverable. Because you might currently charge the equivalent of $100/hour or $1,000/hour for your time. But if you charge for outcomes, instead of hours, you can charge the equivalent of $10,000/hour or even $100,000/hour.Â
We know you (might) have doubts.
We also know that youâre valuable beyond what you believe yourself to be, which is why you should charge for it!
So grab a drink and chairâand come up on deck for different pirate thinking. To think about it more broadly, this is about how you monetize you. And if youâve read the Power of Outcomes mini-book and realized you consistently generate high-impact outcomes for others, you deserve to be fairly compensated for the value you help create.
We Pirates have helped each other price based on outcomes, and we want to help you do it too.
First, letâs talk about value.
The Value of Your Value
Everything you value, you've been taught to valueâand taught to value in a particular way.
When you go to the grocery store and hand the cashier a Benjamin, you walk out with groceries you believe to be âequal in valueâ to what you paid. Thatâs because everyone agrees that the green-colored pieces of cotton folded in your wallet have meaning and value. Itâs what weâre taught to believe. And it works because we all agree. (Thatâs the only reason money works. Itâs a made-up construct for value exchange with no intrinsic value.)
But value is dynamic.Â
It can, and does, change.
Pastor Evan Mawarire, a Zimbabwean pastor and democratic activist (and perhaps the most courageous mission-driven leader we know), described what it was like to grocery shop during hyperinflation in his country. He said you would stand in line to buy eggs and other basic groceries with enough money to pay for your food. But by the time you got to the checkout counter, you no longer had enough money for the food because inflation increased so rapidly.Â
It got so out of control, the Zimbabwe government had to print one-hundred-trillion-dollar bills.
In reality, nothing has intrinsic value.
But most people see value (and therefore, money) very differently.Â
They look at an iPhone and say, âOf course, this chunk of metal, glass, and microchips is $1,200 worth of value.â No, it's not. That price is the perceived value that weâve been taught to âseeâ by the clever Category Queen of smartphones, Apple.
Can you really âseeâ the difference between these two phones?
If youâre a regular consumer (or a sea-faring pirate visiting shore), itâs impossible to understand why one is worth $1,199 of value and another is worth $899 of value. But you immediately âseeâ the $300 difference if youâre an Apple or Samsung Superconsumer. In fact, it would be painful to trade your metal chunk for the other metal chunk.
That pain is acute and powerful.
So powerful that it directly impacts the perceived value and, ultimately, the pricing.
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