Value-Based Fees: How to Charge—and Get—What You're Worth: A Guide for Consultants, Second Edition

Chapter 7. Seventy Ways to Raise Fees and/or Increase Profits Immediately: Act Today and Receive the Bass-o-Matic Free of Charge!

After six chapters on strategy, rationale, and large-scale tactics for improving your fees, I thought it would be nice to examine some street-level tactics that can be employed immediately. (With apologies to all those excellent "guerrilla" and "street fighter" books, I don't believe that fee setting is a matter of ambushing clients in alleys or garroting them from the rear.)

You might want to use the techniques in this chapter as a template, to test your aggressiveness in setting fees. Or you might view them as a buffet, from which you can draw the nourishment that best augments your current diet. Or think of them as an exercise ritual . . .

That's enough of that. The point is that none of us, despite our smarts and successes, is doing everything we can to maximize our income commensurate with the value we are providing. And while the preponderance of this book deals with the longer term, there is a high probability that you may be leaving money on the table today—right now, as you're reading this—in terms of proposals that are too modest, negotiations that aren't handled assertively, and opportunities that are being lost.

If you leave $50,000 on the table each year, that's a half-million dollars over a decade that you will never, ever be able to recover. If it's $100,000 a year, . . . You get the picture. Now is the time to plan for that extra million ...