The Key to Increasing Your Consulting Fees: Deliver More Value
If you're a consultant, you–as Gerald Weinberg put it–are influencing people at their request. And if you are wanting to charge a premium price for that influence, you are certainly thinking about how you can create more value for your clients. Creating value for your clients is one of the keys to charging more for your work.
Creating more value actually has a stunning number of positive effects on your business that are not all related to your fees:
- Clients are willing to pay more for the results of your work.
- You get to work with clients that are more pleasant to deal with.
- Your social status increases, and both prospects and clients treat you with more respect and deference.
- Your perceived expertise increases (if you don't do anything to damage others' perception of your expertise).
- You often get to work on more interesting problems (because they call in the "big guns" for those).
- You get to be more selective about which clients and what work you take on.
It's up to you to increase the value of what you do and to discover new ways to create value for your clients. Fortunately, there are lots of resources out there to help. This guide is one of those.