Over the last few rants I’ve been sharing with you what I call “Brass Balls Principles” that I live by.

By the way, women have these too. It’s not in a physical sense that I am referring to here so don’t get hung up on that one.

It’s this particular “Brass Balls Principle” above all other where I have witnessed more hidden money to be found and lost.

It’s the principle of…

“Set Your Own Price”

You should actually determine price based on how much money you want to make and the life of autonomy you want to live. That is, working when you want, with whom you want, how you want, and being paid what you want… as opposed to the option most business people use when determining price.

Here is how most people price their products and services. They find out what everybody else is charging and they pick a price in the middle or under the market. It is actually good advice to find out what competitors are doing with price but bad advice to allow that to determine your price based on what others are doing.

The service industry is particularly bad at this. Typically the carpet cleaner will either be very low, in the middle, or high. Most often low in the middle. The problem with being low of course is that you become a commodity bought on price alone and someone will always do it cheaper. Hence a very poor strategy but what most people do because they know no better.

The primary reason for setting price should be how much money you want to make, and the market will take you at your own appraisal.

The marketplace today is less and less concerned about your academic qualifications. Personally, I have never ever been asked for mine and that goes for Ma and Pa Fish and Chip shops and publicly listed companies and everything in between.  None… have asked.

What the market place is interested in is results, in other words, if I hire you to clean my carpets will you actually clean them? Will you move the furniture? And put it back? Will I be able to walk on the carpets in an hour? And can I trust you not to steal from me when you are cleaning my carpets? It’s highly unlikely you’ll ask the carpet cleaner for his qualifications. Are you going to ask, has he been in some way ordained by the Carpet Cleaning Guild of Australia?  It mostly, ain’t gonna happen.

The marketplace makes its decision on what you say about yourself, and what you ask for.

And your own appraisal should be high priced. They, the prospect or client, should be shocked about how high the price is, not how low it is.

If you are having trouble charging what you could or should be charging, it’s a marketing, sales, and/or positioning problem.

People say to me that they want to sell in a zero resistance environment. Well, no you don’t! If there is zero resistance, your price is too cheap, and the hidden money you’re not banking is probably far greater than the money you are banking. Your price is too low and you are leaving money on the table.

What you want is an almost zero resistance environment.

It’s been said by the Reverend Ike that “People have more hang-ups around Money than they do around Sex”.

So here is the mathematical fact, if you push your prices up 10% today, you could afford to lose 30% of your current paying clients and still break even and work less and have less hassles.  The reality is I have never seen anybody lose as much as 5% of their clients when putting their prices up, so it’s hard to make a case for not putting your prices up, making more money and working less.

So don’t let your hang-ups about price “and sex” get in the way of a pile of money.

All the best,

Mal Emery
Committed to Elevating the Financial Wealth and Wellbeing of Society
Through Entrepreneurial Excellence and Guilty of Conspiracy to Create Capitalism

P.S. If you’ve missed any of my previous Rants, I have them all available
for you to see on my website.

Simply go to www.rebelliousrant.com and enjoy!

I succeeded in getting a handful of complaints to my previous rant entitled “Does Mr Wonderful really exist?”

Better still, I had many more positive responses, some of which are instructive to anyone that reads them and others just made my ‘jelly-belly’ wobble.

Now believe it or not there’s a marketing lesson here.

Marketing Lesson Number 1:
If someone’s not complaining, if you don’t upset somebody by midday every day with your marketing message and efforts, it’s too wimpy and you haven’t pushed the boundaries, and in a sense tipped over those fence-sitters who would otherwise not spend money with you if you had.  Bottom line, most people never find out how much hidden money they never get to bank because they never pushed this envelope.

Marketing Lesson Number 2:
Those you did upset were highly unlikely to become paying clients in any event and if anything, this is a good way to thin the herd and resonate “message to market match” with only those who would keenly seek you out for your product or service.  After all, less is more and I’d rather not waste my time, energy and money trying to convert anybody.  In other words this is a way to shake the tree and find out who is the right person (prospect) at the right time receiving the right information.

As far as I know the Rudd government hasn’t passed a law yet that says you have to take clients on although I’m sure it’s on the agenda.

Now the message for the last rant was “Entertain and involve and treat them like an AUDIENCE” or one day, don’t know when, there’s a good chance you won’t have a business.  You’ve probably heard that saying “If you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got…” well you won’t anymore.

The market place will no longer tolerate this type of incompetence and your competitors are plotting as you read this how to steal your clients from you.