Why don’t we just do what we need to do to better our lives? We know that we need to save more money, get healthy, or up-skill ourselves. But we just get stuck to step-change.
So, we set resolutions, action plans and to-do lists. But we always find a reason to procrastinate or never achieve our goals. This topic fascinates me! Recently, I have been on a journey to truly understand my professional and personal worth in order to charge my clients fairly and meaningfully.
I have learned that the clients that are the most successful in achieving their goals are the clients that invested (or sacrificed) valuable time, money and effort. You are much more engaged to prioritise and shift your mindset to ensure your success!
Show notes
- Why don’t we just do what we need to do? Why do we procrastinate?
- My journey to understand what I should charge my clients.
- Working for a big corporate, people paid mega sums of money for my expertise.
- As an entrepreneur, I needed to re-evaluate my worth!
- Many brain-based methodologies and models to understand what to charge your clients.
- Ultimately, I faced the fear of rejection that my clients would not accept my price and me.
- I have learned to separate “Lisa – the individual” and “Lisa – the product” to overcome the Imposter syndrome.
- People are the most successful when they need to sacrifice time, money and effort for their goals.
- I am currently completing a very expensive online course.
- The funny thing about paying A LOT of money is that there is very little that is going to stop me from finishing this course.
- You have to invest enough that it hurts in order for you to prioritise and ensure you maximise the output.
- If you are truly passionate about your clients – then charge what you are worth! They will collaborate much more with you to ensure a good result.
- Shift your mindset from trying to get the best things for the lowest cost. Compare like for like.
- Be brave to be free! You deserve to live the best life possible!
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Transcript
Lisa Linfield: 00:09 Hello everybody, and welcome to today’s episode of Working Women’s Wealth. One of the big questions that always bothers me is why when there’s so much we want to do with our lives, so much we want to change about either ourselves or the way we do things, do we not do it? We set New Year’s resolutions. We never get them done. We know there are things that we need to do to change in terms of our workplace, or our happiness, or our health, and they seem to go on and on, and we never seem to gain resolution. And so I’ve explored it in a number of different ways with a number of different people, because it fascinates me. But I’ve had a major insight that I wanted to share with you. A secret tool, a secret strategy as to how to get yourself to change things that you need to change.
I’ve been on a journey that I’ve shared with many of you many times on this whole challenge of working out what to charge. Now, it’s easy when you work for a big corporate to charge the fees they tell you to charge. When I worked for big corporates, I used to be charged out at very large sums of money that would make anybody’s eyes water, and that seemed fine because that was the corporate that was charging. It wasn’t me, it was them. They were the ones that were saying that. And then I started my own business, and in starting my own business I had to work out, “What was I worth?” And that is a very complicated question, and as I discussed in episode 28, Asking For What You’re Worth, there are many intellectual or brain-based ways that you can go around understanding what you’re worth, what people are prepared to pay, and how you go about charging them.
The challenge for me personally was not the brain-based ways. I chatted to all the financial advisors. I’d been in the investment industry. I knew exactly what I could and should be charging. The challenge for me came to that piece of the conversation where someone physically said, “How much do you charge?” Because what went on inside me was an absolute panic. First of all, the question felt like an attack, not a question. And secondly, it brought up a number of different feelings inside me, which was predominantly driven by the fear that if someone didn’t accept my charging structure, it meant that they were rejecting me, that they were physically saying that I wasn’t good enough for that amount of money, and whilst intellectually I can easily come up with many reasons why people can’t afford to pay the fees, the main one being that for them at that particular point in time, they might not have the money, my biggest challenge was to separate Lisa the person from Lisa the product.
In my discussion with Tara Bradford in episode 57, we chatted a lot about this whole imposter syndrome, and I realized strongly that I was really taking them saying no to Lisa the product as a rejection of Lisa the person. All very deep
[inaudible 00:00:03:31]
, but it’s been a fantastically interesting journey, because this last quarter I’ve really engaged meaningfully in the answer to the question of, “How can I step change my business?” And the biggest thing holding me back from step changing my business is me, is the fact that I have such a high fear of rejection and want so much for everybody to like me, want me and pay for me without ever having to have anyone say no. And so I’ve engaged a number of different people in a number of different environments on this topic, and it’s been a fascinating learning process I wanted to share with you.
One of the big insights that I have had, which resonated significantly with me, was insight from Russell Brunson, and I use the platform ClickFunnels, and he’s the CEO of that business, and they do an enormous amount of training there. And in that training, one of the things he said kind of slapped me a lot, which was that he once was doing a very expensive mastermind, and it’s now multiple times that. In fact, to join the mastermind now costs $50,000, but when you first started it, he had a very few amount of people, and so he offered a number of his friends and family to fill up the spare places on that mastermind. And his insights really struck me in that of the people who went on to build million dollar businesses, not one of them were the people that came for free, his friends and family. They were all the people who invested in themselves.
I thought back on my own experience, and when I offered free courses, financial courses, very few people came, and when they came, sometimes they didn’t rock up. Sometimes they rocked up late. They didn’t need to make a significant sacrifice in order to engage in this course, but when I’ve offered courses or done my financial advice where people have actually had to invest money in the process, they engage in it significantly, so they’re never late for the courses. They never don’t arrive. They always are rescheduling other things to make sure they can be there, and I notice it in financial advice clients, is that when people pay an upfront fee for financial advice, they engage much more extensively in the process. The documentation arrives quickly, because they’ve already paid the deposit. They answer all the questions. They do the homework that you give them, and the level of almost return on that investment of their time becomes a significantly step change event in their life, and they implement the financial plans that I have made for them.
What then tends to happen is that those that don’t pay an upfront fee tend to not engage. You wait for the documents for a year, they give them to you at the last minute. It’s a very different engagement process, and it really resonated with me what Russell Brunson said, because it is in my own experience that if people are to get the best results out of any form of engagement, you need to invest the money that slightly hurts your pocket. I’m currently doing a course that costs $5,000, which is an enormous amount of money for me, but I believe it’s one of the parts of my business that I really need to work on in order to step change my business. And so the investment is worth it. I can get others to do it for me, but I would basically get a return on investment within six and a half months for the cost of having a monthly agency do this work for me.
The funny thing about paying money that really kind of hurts and really makes a big difference in my life is that there is nothing, absolutely nothing that is going to stop me from attending those live training sessions, because I have put my skin in the game. And so usually I’d say, “Oh, well, you know what? I’ll rock up and watch the replay, and it doesn’t matter if I don’t really get it.” That doesn’t happen. I am there every single training session on time, engaged, and I’ve done every single piece of homework, because there’s no way I’m going to waste that much money.
The surprising secret of step changing your life is an actual fact that you’ve got to invest in what it takes to do the work that you need to do, whether it be hiring a financial coach, or advisor, whether it be hiring a health coach or a weight coach. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you significantly invest in it, you as a human being will make sure that you do not waste that money and that you do the work. Russell’s argument is actually that if we are deeply caring and deeply passionate for our customers and we want them to get these step change results, that we should charge more money for it, because that’s what then causes them to do the work to get the step change results.
It does go against every bone in my body, but I am thinking deeply about it at the moment, because personal investment or any form of investment that generates the results of needs is always worth that investment and then tenfold. You know, if you’re to build a $10 million business, would spending $10,000 be a lot for a $10 million business? No. $50,000? Well, no. And Russell says that in his $50,000 mastermind, every single person there has built multimillion dollar businesses, and it’s just such a shift of mindset because we’re always so used to trying to get things for free and the lowest cost. And absolutely, if things are like for like, try and get the lowest cost. But the irony being that you yourself might not get the same results for two equally valued interventions if you’re not paying a higher price for it.
As we come to looking at the things that need to change in each of our lives, maybe one of the things to contemplate is to get the top and the best help that you possibly can be, and not see a higher price as a waste of money, but pay for high quality and high value content or service that over-delivers. But that also means that you will invest the time and money needed to make that change.
Good luck in your journey. It’s so worth it because each one of us needs to be brave. We need to be brave in order to be free to do the things we want to do, and because each one of us deserves to live our best life possible.
As you guys will all know, I’m passionate that every one of us has the money we need to live our best life possible. Today I opened the registration for a series of free webinars on, What Do You Need to Do in Order to Start Your Own Side Hustle? Sign up for the free webinar series of How to Make Money Without Needing Millions to Invest or Wasting the $37,400 or Over Half a Million Rand and Time That I Did. So save your seat and come join us for a really fun and interactive live webinar. I’m Lisa Linfield. This is Working Women’s Wealth. Take care and have a great day.