Art of Earning
It’s absolutely true that you have to give to get. Often, the more you give, the more you get.
But giving to get is not a magical system by which you can circumvent the sales process. The reason “giving to get” is so often bandied about in value(s)-driven business is that it makes business owners feel secure, like they’re doing what they need to do to move their businesses forward, without having to actually make an effort to change potential customers into paying customers.
“Giving to get” does not excuse you from the sales process. – @taragentile
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Too often, I see eager, but insecure, entrepreneurs put all their time into producing free content, doing free consultations, and offering free gifts then wonder about how to find the time to do work that pays. Or they spend too much time answering queries about their services or products but rarely close the sale. Or they simply see customers that they’ve nurtured buy from other providers or makers.
This isn’t about what you give away for free or even how much you give away but rather ensuring that you have a system in place to accept payment – or other compensation – when potential customers want to go further with you.
There are many ways to receive: email addresses, personal information, experiential information from ideal clients, and, of course, money.
- If you’re giving away virtually free content, do you have a good system in place to collecting email addresses or leads?
- If you’re creating remarkable blog content, do you regularly invite readers to purchase more in depth writing on the same subject?
- If you’re answering questions about what you do, do you have a services sales page to send prospects to?
- If your client nurturing is actually creating buyers for other business owners, do you have a way to get the feedback you need to create compelling offers of your own?
If the answer to these questions is no, ask yourself why you’ve been “giving” in the first place. And why you feel insecure about receiving.
Giving and serving outside the payment system is incredibly important. But if you don’t build in a system for receiving, it’s difficult for your customers to give back and go deeper – allowing you to serve them further.
Art of Earning
When you wonder about pricing your offerings, what’s the script that runs in your head? My bet is it’s something along the lines of “I’m not worth [that much, a higher price, others paying that].”
Rarely is it “The work isn’t worth it.”
This money script is all about shame.
Shame is this feeling we get that something is wrong with us and that somehow we are flawed or inadequate in a way that makes us unworthy of a connection with other people.
— Brene Brown
That’s the trick, isn’t it? We know deep down that each of those transactions, each time money & goods change hands, that it’s a connection with another person. A living, breathing human being.
Shame, that “most primitive” of human emotions, tugs at us when we go to set a price and forge a connection. “No,” we say, “I’m not worth it.”
What is also implied, of course, is that your customers aren’t worth that deep personal connection, either. By pricing the offering too low or not bringing it to market at all, we don’t let our customers exercise their own worthiness. They can’t connect with us and our work.
How do you replace this shame script with a positive one?
Ask yourself about the value of the work. As I said, rarely do we say “The work isn’t worth it.”
We know it is. How much is a website worth? Often over a million dollars over its lifetime. How much is losing weight worth? Medical bills reduced and years added to life. How much is jewelry worth? The priceless feeling you get when you put it on.
Put the emphasis on the work. Put the emphasis on the value. And don’t just try to imagine it – when has that ever worked?
Quantify it.
Run the numbers. How many shopping trips saved? How many sleepless nights avoided? How many good relationships gamed? How much peace realized?
Certainly, the value of your work is not so easily quantifiable. But that’s really the point. The work is worth it. The work is worthy.
The worthiness of that work is the tie that binds you & your customer together. It provides the gentle reminder that you are worth it and that she is worth it.
You’re not worthy because of your work. You’re worthy because you’re you. But the work is a tangible product of that worthiness.
Set your price accordingly.
— PS —
I had a Twitter conversation with Brenda Johima last night that I felt compelled to add to this post. I tweeted that, “It’s never to late to set financial goals higher than you ever dreamed possible.” And she replied that she’d recently done just that, told a few friends, and then was immediately deflated by their reactions.
Unfortunately, you & I both know this is a common story. I’ve been there myself.
That’s why it’s of utmost importance to find yourself worthy of making friends who understand & believe in your big goals. The friends you have now want to protect you – and what you’re doing is scary. The numbers you’re throwing around are downright crazy.
Find new friends who realize that scary and crazy are exactly what you need right now. It’s not that you need to ditch your old friends, just that a business needs friends too!
And where to find these magical people? Well, I’ve found mine (Megan, Adam, Amanda, and so many others) on Twitter. Cliche but true. Maybe you’ll find yours at the local coffee shop, the conference you just signed up for, or in the program you’ve just started.
But make an effort to find that core group of people who are willing to help you draft plans & strategies just as crazy as your goals.
Art of Earning, Business Brainstorm, New Economy
Love scales.
– Danielle LaPorte
Last week, I stated that one reason women are earning less in the Creative Class is that women tend to think in relationships as opposed to scale.
This week, returning from the second annual World Domination Summit, I stand even more firm in this knowledge.
I don’t go to this event for the content. I go to talk to customers, friends, and mentors. And most of the women I talked to – my good friends included – worry about betraying their tribes and coming up short if they were to scale what they offer.
First, what do I mean by scale? Simply, scale is serving as many customers as possible with as little effort on behalf of your business as possible. Serving a group of customers through scale means that your business has an impact on people who you wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise.
Scaling leverages your gifts for the greatest good across the broadest channels.
I believe that most microbusinesses require a level of premium, unleveraged work. It could take the form of commission art, couture dresses, one on one coaching, or corporate speaking engagements. But most of those same businesses require a level of leverage to take their impact to scale. The two sides of the equation can and do work hand-in-hand.
One informs the other, improving both.
I woke up on Saturday thinking, “I need a little Danielle LaPorte.” Maybe you’ve had a similar experience? Luckily, I was in a position to remedy that thought. I plopped myself in a chapel pew at during her session.
She began her Q&A session with her brief observations on the conference so far. Her first was the simple but oh-so-delicious statement, “Love scales.” Ah yes, this is why I came. My entrepreneurial musings boiled down into a two word sound bite.
World Domination Summit is a beautiful example of how you can nurture relationships while leveraging your gifts & skills. Chris Guillebeau doesn’t have a relationship with each of the people who bought tickets – all within minutes of them going on sale. But, of course, many people feel like they have relationship with him.
More importantly, their connection to Chris makes connecting to the others at WDS much easier. It’s not the relationship with Chris that makes this event a success; it’s all the other relationships that are spawned by their implicit connection.
Yes, love scales at WDS. It scales at meet ups, conferences, and events. It scales at rock concerts, sidewalk sales, and yoga classes. Love even scales through ebooks, programs, and masterminds.
It’s the intention, process, and values that create the atmosphere that allows love to scale through a business. It’s not a business owner or her work with any individual client.
What holds you back from leveraging your gifts & skills to create more wealth and impact more lives is thinking that your work can’t survive without you & your attention to the client. But that’s what’s really beautiful: you aren’t the important part of the work you’re doing.
Your process – when you discover it, learn it, codify it – is the important part of your work.
It’s your process, the love that you put in it, and the love that your clients generate through it that carries your work, allowing you to scale your business and harvest its riches. It’s the love that your customers discover through each other that carries your work out into the world in new & unexpected ways. It’s the love that is born in a movement of ideas that creates positive change that you yourself could not create on your own.
It’s therefore your duty – as well as a killer earning strategy – to leverage the love & scale your offers.
So tell me, what is your process and how could you utilize it to scale your business?
Art of Earning, New Economy
Thank the heavens, Richard Florida has just released an update to his foundational book, The Rise of the Creative Class.
Not so thankfully, Florida’s research shows that women earn about 40% less than men do in creative class employment.
In my own research, 32.6% of men surveyed earned more than $75,000 per year in their small businesses compared to only 10.6% of women.
I’m sure that many of the cliche reasons for the gender wage gap apply to creative class employment – possibly better than they do for employment as a whole. Women choose creative class employment because it’s flexible, they can work from home, they can work for themselves. They can take a break for children and they can support their partners.
Yawn.
While these may be reasons that women have traditionally earned less than men over time, they are not the reason you are earning less.
You are earning less because your business model is not set up to earn more.
Here’s what men know that women don’t know:
It’s easier to earn the second $50,000 than it is to earn the first $50,000.
In other words, once you’ve earned $50,000, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be earning 6-figures. The difference is that earning 6-figures generally requires leveraging your earning. It means no longer trading time for money. It means understanding what parts of your business can be duplicated over & over again with almost zero effort. It means finding a tipping point again, and again, and again.
Women don’t need to give up flexible hours or time with kids. They need to embrace better business models that are based on value & results, not time & energy.
Women seem to prefer relational transactions. Men seem to prefer transactional relationships.
Go figure.
Relational transactions happen most often in project-based or one-to-one client scenarios. The easy way to develop a relationship is with time, exchange, and getting-to-know-ya. You put your whole heart & soul into the process. Those relationships turn towards a transaction when you have something that fills a need for the other person.
It’s a feel good way to do business. But it’s a slow process. Each customer represents hours of time, loads of money (don’t think your social media use & Skype coffee dates aren’t costing you), and emotional stress waiting for those relationships to convert.
On the other hand, transactional relationships come fast & furious. They utilize scale to generate the revenue that’s needed in the business. Transactional relationships are built on acute needs & impulse purchases.
The difficulty with this model is that it’s difficult to achieve customer loyalty. Once a solution is purchased, there’s often no word from the customer to find out if it’s working or not. And this type of business might leave you scratching your head, wanting more.
You Economy businesses thrive when they find the sweet spot between transactional relationships & relational transactions.
In this sweet spot, customers are directed through an experience of a business that creates a personal investment. They understand that you are doing business with them in mind, that your business is geared to their success, and that you have a vision for how their lives can be better.
Customers are interested in the content you’ve created: articles, audios, videos, images. They devour it. They want more. They interact with you on social media, they hang out at your store, they talk about your products with their friends.
And you listen.
And listen.
And listen.
That’s the secret of a great relationship, right? It’s listening instead of talking. While you’re listening, it’s your job to discern what your new friends are saying. What is troubling them? What is confusing them? How are they feeling? What are they thinking?
Look for the patterns.
The money is in the patterns.
When more than a few people say the same thing over & over again, you’ve got a pattern and an opportunity.
A smart You Economy business will take that pattern and create a solution for it.
When that solution turns out to be the killer app for the pattern your friends are experiencing, they feel like you created it just for them. They feel heard, witnessed, nurtured.
But instead of selling it once, you’ve sold it 100 times.
Leveraged income isn’t outside the customer relationship cycle. It’s an integral part of it. You don’t develop leveraged income opportunities to generate money where before there was none. You develop leveraged income opportunities to solve problems for people you care about, over & over & over again.
If you’re making $10k, $20k, even $50k per year, you’re already solving problems for people one at a time. To make the jump to your dream income, your goal is to solve problems for people 10, 100, even 1000 people at a time.
As an example, I’ve created systems for listening to my new friends all over my business. One pattern that emerged was people asking for new ways to “get the word out” to potential customers. I could wait for these people to come to me as individual business strategy clients. I could have tweaked my services copy entice people based on this need.
Instead, I created a solution, called Marketing ReWired, that solves the problem for my friends over & over again. As a result, it costs less too. And they get the benefit of working through the program with their friends & colleagues.
I could have a business based exclusively on one-on-one business strategy clients. But it would be an average income at best. Instead, I have a business that’s based on creating leveraged solutions to problems that has already generated $100k in sales this year.
Don’t fight your desire to forge & foster relationships with your potential customers. Just realize that you can serve more than one person at a time. In fact, you owe it to your customers to do just that.
That’s the first step to doubling your business earnings and closing the gender wage gap of the creative class.
Art of Earning
I love pricing for value. In other words, the value I provide you is so much greater than the value of the money you have to shell out to get it.
Pricing for value works because it leaves both parties feeling richer. I sell my service and receive the money I want. You receive my service and receive the information/ideas/action items you want. The “pain” it causes me to deliver the service is much less than the money I receive. The “pain” it causes you to pay the invoice is much less than the information you receive.
We both receive what’s valuable to us. And we’re both extremely happy people at the end of it all. And we’re likely to do business again.
But value is only half the equation. When pricing, you also have to consider how to get results.
A fresh life coach sets her rates at $50 per hour. That’s more than she’s ever made in her life per hour so she feels pretty good about it. She also knows that she can deliver loads of value for that $50. And, she’ll be $50 richer every time she sees a client.
That all sounds good, right?
But, “You’d be a fool not to buy this at this price” pricing can work against you. If your product or service requires some work from your clients or customers – and really, who’s doesn’t? – your pricing might be enabling complacency & inaction.
So that life coach might get some clients at that rate. But do those clients feel invested – both literally & figuratively – in the work? Or are they patting themselves on the back for just taking a step in the right direction?
On the flip side, the people who are most ready to do the work, the people who are the best clients for this coach, will look at the number and believe that this coach isn’t well-equipped to help them take the actions they need to take.
Fair? Nope, not at all. But just like I remind my toddler on a daily basis, “Reality isn’t fair.”
Whenever I price a new offer, for instance, my new Insight Intensives, I’m not only considering the value I’m offering, the time it takes me to prepare, my position in the market, or the benefit of my experience, but I’m also considering what price will create allow my clients to create the best results.
- What price will allow you to take this seriously?
- What price will ensure that you’re a success story?
- What price will push you past “comfortable” and into the discomfort of action?
If you’re a painter, what price will put your piece of art over the sofa? Or even get it hung at all?
If you’re a copywriter, what price will force your client out of cliche language & into what’s true to them?
If you’re a jewelry designer, what price will ensure your pieces get paired with fabulous outfits?
Sure, there’s quite a bit more that goes into those decisions. But don’t fool yourself that price isn’t a big factor in personal investment on all levels.
Start by pricing for value and then check yourself by pricing for results.
Art of Earning, New Economy
56% of Millennials believe their generation will be the same or worse off than their parent’s generation financially. This is a far cry from the “American” value of upward mobility.
I put “American” in quotations because this is a value we’ve had so much success exporting to the rest of the world. Parents don’t just want to create copies of themselves, they want to create better copies of themselves. It’s both biological and financial evolution at work.
But what if being “better off” financially is just not as important to this generation? What if the McMansions, shiny cars, and high-end shopping malls mean less to the average 18-32 year old than they did for their parents and their grandparents before that? What if they always will? What if the trappings of financial progress are just not that important to them?
It pays (literally, and we’ll get to that) to figure out how the next generation will be better off. How will they measure progress from here on out? I doubt it will be in stock portfolios and 401(k)s – just as pensions seem so 20 years ago. While financial stability will be an important part of any generation’s big picture, what is truly valued will be transformed.
We are in a period of shifting values. And with shifting values comes an opportunity to create new value for a new set of customers. This is where there is the most opportunity in business right now. If you do the hard work of creating wealth beyond the financial, if you seek instead to create deep, enduring value that makes people’s lives meaningfully better, you can have both the purposeful change you seek and the financial reward you desire.
So what values are being raised up? Where are the opportunities? I asked:
…treating everyone the way you would want to be treated. I would love to be a generation of common sense and compassion.
— Stefanie Lin, Artsy Momma
Living life in line with my purpose instead of “sacrificing” everything for the sake of the children.
I hope that we’re better off health-wise.
For me, being ‘better off’ than my parents would mean that I create that better opportunity, that I have agency in what that opportunity should look and feel like as opposed to going where an opportunity might exist. For me, better off means having control and determination over how my life will look and the legacy I will leave.
– Sapna Mehra
It means being able to talk about feelings and being more open with others.
The real challenge is making meaning with the money, or making meaning while making the money. My parents were always generous, but the scope was more local; now we (and they) are exposed to a much broader view of need, and have to decide how we’ll respond.
— Sarah Lewis, @bookchiq
Spending most of my days in flow, focusing on immediate opportunities for action, improvising, doing work I believe in, that lights me up, and getting better and better at it, and not needing to build rigid barriers between work & play, because everything feels like play.
…being “better off” than my parent’s generation is having a society and economy that is community-driven rather than one that is at the expense of others/other people’s families.
Business owners, entrepreneurs, country(wo)men, these are your opportunities.
These are your golden tickets. Solve these problems, make this easier for people, and I’m betting you can have your world-change and your IPO too.
What would being “better off” look like to you? I encourage you to submit your answer here and you just might see it in an upcoming piece!
