I’m enjoy­ing Seth Godin‘s lat­est book, Linch­pin: Are You Indis­pens­able?. In his chap­ter on “Becom­ing the Linch­pin”, he has a great dia­gram on page 52, which I’ve repro­duced here. His linch­pin dis­cus­sion is a good illus­tra­tion of the vari­ance between price and value. I always cringe when a client reacts neg­a­tively to my billing rate (which is low for the indus­try). If they say, “I wish I could bill my time at that rate,” I know they haven’t got it and may never “get it.” I want to ask them what rate they pay their mechanic or their accoun­tant. It’s a ques­tion of the value con­tributed, not the price paid. This is the prob­lem with peo­ple who try to do too much tweak­ing on the prod­uct of a good designer… they don’t under­stand that they’re pay­ing for exper­tise and then negat­ing its value. Per­haps they’d rather have an expert at min­i­mum wage?

Nope… there’s no sat­is­fac­tion to be found in that formula.

This is what I do: coup d’oeil. Strate­gic Intu­ition. I con­nect dots that may not have seemed to have any rela­tion­ship before. Other experts like a good accoun­tant or lawyer are equally impor­tant. Under­stand their con­tri­bu­tion in terms of value, not price. Oth­er­wise you’ll just get what you pay for and never real­ize the value for which you paid.