What value is.
After encouragement (read: being prodded) by a friend with whom I generally have aligned viewing habits, I finally started watching The Gentlemen on Netflix. She and her husband are deep into Season 2, so I have some catching up to do. That said, the first hour-long episode of Season 1 was so darn good, I don’t want to rush it.
In that episode, the patriarch (His Grace) passes away and the estate, title, etc. is passed down to his son. That son (the new His Grace) needs to raise some cash — quickly — for reasons I won’t go into in case you’re intrigued enough to start watching. He agrees to take a meeting with a VERY interested buyer of the estate. At that meeting the potential buyer presents an apparently VERY sizable offer to the son (I say, “apparently,” because the sum is not revealed to the viewer).
In doing so, he says this about the idea of value:
“Value is derived from what someone’s willing to pay for something. If I say it’s worth that much, it’s worth it. At least to me.”
Then the buyer proceeds to say that he’s “prepared to go farther north of that number.”
I can hear the pushback already. “But Katherine, this is an extremely motivated buyer. The seller is reluctant. This doesn’t apply to me.” And I get it.
And yet… there’s value in entertaining the idea he presented.
What does the word mean?
You know I love a definition, so here it goes…
value /ˈvalyo͞o/
Value is the relative worth, usefulness, or importance of something. [1]
Because the word has different meanings in different fields, it helps to look at how it is used across major areas:
Financial and Economic Value
Market Price: The amount of money that an item, service, or property can command in a market.
Exchange Worth: An equivalent return in goods, services, or currency during a transaction.
Bargain: Something priced fairly or cheaply relative to its quality (”a good value”). [1, 2]
(Source: Cambridge Dictionary)
As for the etymology of the word…
The word value comes from the Latin verb valēre, which means “to be strong, be well, or be worth”
(Source: Mirriam-Webster)
I’m intentionally planting a stake in the ground, something to hold onto.
Conversations of late.
Last time around, I wrote about How to bring craftsmanship to your service-based business. In that post, I shared the idea that “Not everyone appreciates craftsmanship — anything made with craftsmanship is made for those who do.”
I would say the same about value. Not everyone will value what you do in the same way. It’s your choice what to do about it. Whom to engage with and whom not to, based on the value they perceive (or not).
I recently had two conversations with new clients. Both were with founders of creative businesses who are outstanding at what they do. And both have been giving away work for free.
When you’re caught up in the day-to-day running of the business and pitching new clients in competitive verticals, it’s hard to see what you’re really up to for your clients in terms of the outcomes you deliver.
This is especially true in the “discovery phase” when you’re trying to sign on a prospect. You want to show them how good you are, the impact you can have on their business, why they should choose you. It’s at this point that it’s easy to start giving away your work for free.
Some potential clients are naive when they’re asking what you would do and others know exactly what they’re doing. They want you to “give them the goods” before they agree to sign on.
They make requests. You start giving them some ideas so they know how you think, assessing where they’re at in the area they want to hire you for, researching their market, and producing “sample work.” These are examples of how this can show up when you’re doing business development. And they’re all ways you can be giving away work for free. This is a slippery slope.
In addition to the two clients I referred to above, I’ve seen it with almost all of the other agencies and creatives I’ve worked with. And I’m on a mission to change it. I tend to say to something along the lines of, “this is the work.”
When I met up with one of the aforementioned clients IRL just a couple of weeks ago, she said to me, “You helped us see the value in what we’re delivering.” Yes, yes, yes.
What comes easy.
One of the reasons we can end up on the slippery slope of giving away work that we should be paid for is that it’s precisely the thing we find easiest to do. Because it comes so easily to us, we tend to undervalue it. This is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.
I wrote about this in a prior post, “How to value your services.“ It’s worth a read as it goes into more detail on the ways creatives tend to undervalue their work and our fees, and why this is so darn difficult to master.
To the point about undervaluing what comes most easily, here’s what I shared via Elise Loehnen’s Pulling the Thread podcast episode, "Five Things I’m Thinking About: The Creative Process, Pricing Your Work, Inspiration vs. Discernment, Insanity, and the Etymology of Should.”
In the episode, she said this about a friend she described as “a literary agent giant”:
“But that when she would be talking to or mentoring younger people, she’d say like, what’s this in your proposal? And they’d say, oh, that’s really easy for me. So it’s like hard for me to charge for that. It’s really easy.
That, my friends, is your gift. What is easiest for you is your gift, and in some ways it’s the most valuable thing. It’s the thing that you charge the most for, even if again, can’t best be encapsulated by the time it takes.”
So, don’t fall into this trap. And while I’m at it, try not to discount your rates. If you really want to work with a particular brand, then adjust scope, but don’t reduce your rate for the same work.
Because it’s worth remembering… Most of us want to sign on new clients at any given time. We have businesses and lives we’re running. That said, it’s always good to remember that what someone is like in the business development process is, with a few exceptions, what they’ll be like as a client. Difficult, challenging, demanding… that’s who you’ll be working with.
Confidence.
The other reason we can land on the slippery slope is that we lack the confidence to stand up for our value and what we truly deliver.
This goes beyond the discovery phase and extends to the engagement itself. This can look like constantly overdelivering on the agreed upon scope, allowing for scope creep, doing that one extra thing… just this time (and of course, it’s never “just this time”), not setting boundaries in terms of revisions, and not going back to the client when your fee needs to be revisited based on what they’re asking for and what you’re delivering.
And it’s not holding firm when you know the right thing to do to get the results the client is looking for, and instead, giving in to what they think is right to keep them happy. Somewhere along the way, they’ve forgotten that they hired you as the expert. They’ve lost the plot in terms of what you’re delivering.
That said, confidence is a tricky thing. It can be hard to find, especially when we’re negotiating or want to keep a client. Everyone’s been there. To help, here’s a little more etymology, this time for the word confidence…
Root Breakdown
com-(or con-): An intensive Latin prefix meaning “with” or acting to strengthen the meaning.fidere: A Latin verb meaning “to trust” or “to rely upon”
Which comes together to mean, "to trust fully."
(Source: Online Etymology Dictionary)
It comes down to learning to trust ourselves and what we know to be true about our work and how valuable it is.
I wrote about confidence a several years ago (yes, this is an “evergreen” topic). In the post I included:
A story about my mother participating in a duplicate bridge competition in Las Vegas with three other women from one of the bridge groups she belonged to.
A tennis story (they’re always so darn good when it comes to mining business lessons).
A thoughtful opinion of men versus women in business.
And what our younger selves can teach us.
I’m not saying it’s easy. I am saying that it’s possible, one decision, one action at a time. It’s a muscle like any other. And we all need to regularly work it out.
An exercise.
With a focus on business development or your discovery phase, pre-proposal, think about the last three to five opportunities you worked on.
List all of the ideas and information you shared with the prospective clients. How do you feel when you look at the list? If you recorded the meetings, download the transcripts and have your AI tool of choice give its take on what you shared.
Did you give away what should have been paid work for free? If so, great. Now you know. Now you can choose to perhaps do things differently the next time around.
Some book recommendations:
Lose Your Mind: The Path to Creative Invincibility — by Josh Pais
Journey to the Heart: Daily Meditations on the Path to Freeing Your Soul — by Melody Beattie
Go Gentle: A Novel — by Maria Semple
Whistler: A Novel — by Ann Patchett
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth — by Patrick Radden Keefe
Until next time.
Katherine
#ICYMI
This is something I find particularly interesting for women who genuinely enjoy being generous with what they know. Giving is part of how many of us work and build relationships. The difficult part is noticing when generosity has quietly become an entire business model.