Captain’s log, stardate 20180629

Terrible Thing

Sent by Jonathan Stark on June 30th, 2018

What could happen on a client engagement that would be painfully embarrassing to you? I mean, REALLY BAD. The kind of thing that was so humiliating that you would want to refund their money?

If your answer is “Nothing,” then you’re either overconfident, inexperienced, or not aiming high enough.

If your answer is anything other than “Nothing,” then you probably already IMPLICITLY guarantee your work.

Why not make that guarantee EXPLICIT?

Why not say right on your website and in your proposals, “I guarantee that $terribleThing won’t happen, or we’ll refund your money.” if you did, I guarantee you (see what I did there?) that it would differentiate you from your competitors. And differentiation gives you pricing leverage.

Once you articulate your guarantee, you can make it stronger and more beneficial over time by doing the following:

Find clients who are especially nervous about $terribleThing happening on their project.
Slowly move your $terribleThing closer to a more expensive, more risky, more tangible business outcome.
Increase your profits enough to create a cash reserve that would enable you to refund one out of ten clients without being overly bothered by it.

Yours,

—J

P.S. A few people called me on the carpet for not including Pricing Creativity by Blair Enns in my message yesterday about book recommendations. Fair enough. Blair’s book is GREAT and I heartily endorse everything he says in it. The reason I didn’t include it, is because it’s targeted at owners of advertising agencies, which AFAIK, is not the type of person on this list. At any rate, it is included in the honorable mentions section of my published “must read” list with a bunch of other excellent titles: jonathanstark.com/reading-list

P.P.S. I recently updated my product ladder. If you haven’t looked at it in a while, you might be interested in this summary: jonathanstark.com/pricing