🥤 Are you being penalised for being good?

If I give a piece of advice to Coca-Cola that takes me 1 minute to share but saves them $20m per year is that advice only worth 50 cents?

If I can create a website or logo in 1 hour that would take you 50 hours to do at the same quality, is my work worth 1 hour of my time or the 50 hours it saves you?

Both of those examples sound ridiculous, but that is exactly how most people price what they do.

It doesn't matter if the work only took 10 seconds. The amount of time it takes you to do something has no bearing on the value you provide. The amount of time it takes you to do something shouldn’t impact your price.

I have written about this before in context of the locksmith paradox (worth reading).

It is natural for people to try and uncover your inputs, how long things take you, as people naturally focus on cost - it is part of loss aversion. Bad clients will fail to see the value in your price. It is our job to help people focus on value, not cost, or to find good clients who already understand the value.

I consciously help my clients focus on the value of what I provide, not solely on the cost. It helps them to make better decisions that help them more long term.

When I am a buyer I like to remind myself to focus on the value I will receive rather than how long it will take someone to give me that value. I have learned that $100,000 for an hour of somebody’s time can be an amazing deal!

How can this help you? Well one key way to focus on value is instead of billing clients by inputs like hours worked you can charge for your services based on tangible results and deliverables. This prevents you from being penalised for finding new sources of leverage that allow you to deliver more value more quickly. If you need help with that, reply “deliverables” to this email and I am happy to take a look over your offer to check it makes sense and see how we can focus your offer more on your tangible results.

Do you currently sell inputs like hours worked, number of sessions, number of deliverables (e.g. x number of social posts), or features (e.g. x pages or x resource)?

Or do you sell outputs like “x paying customers in x time frame”, “confidence to do x”, or “save x time per week”?

When you charge based inputs you’re often incentivised to do more work, not better work. Instead, what if your clients were paying for what actually matters: the results they can see, feel, and measure? I’d bet that they would prefer that, and so would you.

The Value Equation (by Hormozi). You can use this to help customers to better understand the value you provide so you no longer get penalised for being good. Read more about the value equation here.

Features vs benefits, help your customer see the value via the benefits you provide

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-april-9-2025

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