HiveBloPoMo Day 10: Going Off Topic — Self-Employment and Charging What You're WORTH
And so, we have reached Day TEN of HiveBloPoMo; still hanging in there... barely!
You can read more about HiveBloPoMo here. It is definitely being a worthy challenge.
Today's writing prompt is "Go for a walk and share at least 5 photos for Wednesday Walk." Well, too late. I've only just sat down and opened up PeakD and it's 6:21pm and well after dark... so I'm going to go "off the books" today with a bit of a continuation of yesterday's work-related post.
What Are We WORTH?
I have been self-employed for a long time.
Regardless of whether you work for somebody, or you are engaged in some form of self-employment, chances are you have found yourself a point in your work life were you pondered ”what am I actually worth?”
When you're self-employed, odds are a little bit higher that you're in some form of "selling yourself" or selling a product, making that particular question more relevant. How do you "price" yourself?
Part of answering that question relates to how you intend to position yourself within your field.
In yesterday's post, I wrote (rather briefly) about one of my microbusinesses, selling old and rare postage stamps to collectors. Being a ”stamp dealer” pretty much covers soup to nuts. Like many collectibles, there's no set "if you have item X, its value is amount Y." Stamps and stamp collectors come in many sizes and shapes and ages and interests and qualities. So who do you cater to, and what are you offering?
In my particular case, I am a specialist. I almost never deal with the general or beginning collector. Mostly, I deal with people who have been in the hobby for a long time already, and have reached the point where they have focused on a particular area of interest and are looking for very specific things. That's my niche. My focus is also on providing the best possible quality.
That means my little corner is about making relatively few people very very happy, while most people don't care that much about my offerings.
When you are in some kind of service business, it's also important to consider your positioning.
This is a process, for example, that Mrs. Denmarkguy and I went through for her counseling business some years ago.
In her earliest days, it was very important to her to be "accessible" to everybody. However, she soon found that to be a very frustrating approach. What became evident, is that the old truism ”people value something about as much as they pay for it” was far more real then we'd like to think. The money was less important than the fact that the clients had less respect for her time, and weren't always ready to listen.
So, when Mrs. Denmarkguy offered essentially the same counseling sessions for twice the price, the quality of her clientele also improved considerably, particularly addressing the aspect that the people booking sessions were far more interested in learning something, making progress and actually listening to her than the people from before.
Quite simply, they had been willing to put more at stake!
When it comes to valuing yourself and setting prices, it might be tempting to just argue that you look at a market average for whatever field you're in and then set your price accordingly. But it's not always that easy! Most professions have a lot of nuances and specialization... making it tough to actually "compare apples to apples."
Once again, looking at the field of counseling and therapy the range of services is considerable.
Mrs. D. is actually one of the best in her field (Trauma Recovery), but the cost of her sessions — currently $200 for 90 minutes — pretty much fit the low-to-middle end for someone of her skills, training and experience. As a comparison, one of her teachers is undeniably among the top in the world and she was just talking to him yesterday. His fees are a stout $1600 for three hours and he will not even see anybody who doesn't have three hours to give to sit down and get serious.
You might think that $1600 to get some advice is insane, but this is somebody who consistently changes the lives of very successful people who find themselves at a crossroads.
So what are you worth?
Interestingly enough, far more people seem to either grossly underestimate or grossly overestimate their worth than those who actually hit their value pretty close to reality!
One of my other home businesses is that I am a book and article editor (and White Papers, and such), and I tend to be the person people come to if they're not the greatest writers but have a good idea and want me to turn their so so manuscript into something that makes them sound highly literate and intelligent and like a top expert in their field. That's my particular skill set.
My fees are pretty midmarket as editors go, but quite low for the kind of quality work (and re-writing) I provide. My excuse for not charging more has always been that I work very slowly, and that I don't have a huge body of work to my credit.
If you want me to turn your notes scribbled on napkins at a restaurant where you ate last week into a New York Times bestseller by next weekend that's not who I am, and never will be! If you're willing to wait six months for those same great ideas scribbled on a napkin to be turned into a bestselling book then by all means come to me! I's a "miracle worker," but a very slow miracle worker.
Again, your value is always going to depend and where you position yourself within a market or industry. And then, of course, on your ability to deliver the goods as promised!
And that's one of the other important aspects of both pricing and positioning. If you truly know your skill set and you always deliver as promised or even overdeliver, that has huge value. And that's something you get to factor into how much you're worth.
As you can probably see, there are a lot of things to think about. The reason this all came to mind, was partially Mrs. Denmarkguy’s conversation with her teacher yesterday, as well as my own intent to recommit myself to my struggling stamp business.
If you want to go anywhere with your self-employment niche, you have to know what it is you have and exactly what it's worth!
Thanks for stopping by, and enjoy the rest of your week!
How about YOU? Are you self-employed? Have you ever spent time examining the pricing issue, IN DEPTH? Even if you have external employment, are you fully AWARE of all the factors that make up your VALUE? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly and uniquely for this platform — NOT cross posted anywhere else!)
Created at 20211110 19:35 PDT
0401/1642