Cheap Shortcuts
 

Every professional knows the drill– the client comes to you and wants to buy a little slice of your expertise, at a discount. “This won’t take much of your time,” they say, but you know it won’t turn out that way.

This phenomenon is closely related to the “quick question” of which I wrote earlier. Really, what the client, or the pseudo-client, is saying is, “I don’t want the whole cake, I just want to lick off the icing and you can keep the rest.”

Sometimes it’s phrased in the obverse: “Gee, that’s an awful lot of money for just typing up a few documents!” Usually this comes from clients who have cushy jobs with benefits and pension plans, unlike most self-employed professionals.

The story is told of an engineer who was called in to Henry Ford’s first assembly line to figure out why the machinery wasn’t working. He studied the plant for a few moments, then took a hammer and whacked a control box. Everything quickly clanked into action.

The next day Henry Ford got a bill from the engineer for $100, which was a pretty penny back in those days. Ford, outraged, shouted, “A hundred dollars just for whacking a control box?” So the engineer re-submitted his account: “For whacking the control box, $1. For knowing where to whack, $99.”

If in fact all we’re doing is typing documents or whacking control boxes, then perhaps we are overcharging. But if we are bringing to bear valuable knowledge and insights, we should not be shy of charging a fair price. Fair to us, as well as to the client. But more important, we can then do a proper job, one of which we can be proud, not a shortcut.

Then the choice belongs to the client: is what they want important enough to pay that price? If yes, we have a bargain. If not, they can try to figure it out for themselves and live with the consequences, and we can get on with helping somebody who appreciates what we do.

Of course, if nobody is willing to pay the asked price, we have a whole other set of questions to ask ourselves, but frankly, that’s rarely the case. The more important question to ask ourselves is why we so often feel the urge to give away the only things we have to sell, our time and our expertise.