The value of your expertise or advice has nothing to do with hours worked. Here’s a great example:

The famous $1.5 million Citi napkin logo took designer Paula Scher just a few minutes to sketch.

But listen to how she brilliantly described what led up to those minutes:

“It took thirty seconds… plus thirty years of experience.” -Paula Scher, designer

Selling Advice or Specialized Knowledge

Let’s talk about specialized knowledge. It’s what many of us sell as consultants, advisors, and strategists. Its value will singularly increase by 2030 when tactical skills become automated and cheap with generative AI. Specialized knowledge is your ideas, creativity, and awareness of nuance that’s honed over a career.

Great advice, guidance, and ideas are frequently priceless, or at least hard to quantify.

But we have to price our ideas because in business, we exchange money for goods and services.

However, there’s a way to do it with a karmic contract so both sides are happy and your clients stay. More on that – watch the full episode on YouTube: 

A Parable (Knowing Where to Tap)

This well-known business parable is as relevant for consultants and advisors today as ever before. It’s about critical thinking, problem solving, simplifying complexity, illustrating tangible value and value-based pricing… 

You’ve probably heard the one about a broken engine, an old man, and a hammer:

A giant engine in a factory failed. The factory owners had spoken to several ‘experts’ but none of them could show the owners how they could solve the problem. Eventually the owners brought in an old man who had been fixing engines for many years. After inspecting the huge engine for a minute or two, the old man pulled a hammer out of his tool bag and gently tapped on the engine.

Immediately the engine sprung back into life. A week later the owners of the business received an invoice from the old man for £10,000. Flabbergasted, they wrote to the old man asking him to send through an itemised bill. The man replied with a bill that said:

Tapping with a hammer: £2.00

 Knowing where to tap: £9,998.00

 The moral of the story is that, while effort is important, having the experience to know where to put that effort makes all the difference.