Skip to content
    ← Watch
    PRICING
    55m 11 min read 22,674

    Charge What You're Worth: A Designer's Guide to Premium Pricing (FREE Design Cuts course)

    Chris Do explains how to break the cycle of undercharging by shifting your mindset from cost to value and acquiring marketable skills.

    Chris Do

    Chris Do

    Founder, The Futur™ · February 11, 2025

    Watch on YouTube →
    Become a Member →

    Two Kinds of People

    There are two types of people in the world. This isn't a setup for a joke, but a fundamental observation about human behavior shared by author and pastor Erwin McManus. According to Chris Do, founder of The Futur, McManus’s concept explains nearly all of our professional actions and hang-ups.

    One type of person runs from pain. The other runs towards life and love.

    Most of us don’t believe we operate from a place of pain. We see ourselves as ambitious and driven. But a closer look at our behaviors reveals patterns rooted in fear and lack.

    If you grew up with little money, you may have an emotionally charged relationship with it, linking every dollar earned or lost directly to your self-worth. If you grew up without enough affirmation, you might constantly seek it from clients, bending over backward for a sliver of approval.

    These needs create a state of fear and lack. It's a neediness that, paradoxically, repels the very clients and relationships you want to attract. These are limiting beliefs, the self-sabotaging truths you hold that cap your potential.

    Your Financial Thermostat

    In his book The Psychology of Selling, author and speaker Brian Tracy detailed a profound psychological discovery called the self-concept. It’s the collection of beliefs you hold about who you are and what you’re capable of achieving.

    Do explains that this self-concept acts like a financial thermostat.

    Imagine your father was a respected community member who earned $100,000 a year. You internalize this figure as the benchmark for success. Your self-concept is now set to $100,000. As you build your career, you work tirelessly until you hit that number. Then, something shifts.

    “As soon as you hit the $100,000 base,” Do says, “you start to shift into cruise control.” Your calendar fills up with non-work activities. You stop pushing.

    Conversely, if you miss your goals and find yourself at $60,000, your internal thermostat kicks in. You start burning the midnight oil, making more calls, and taking on extra work until you get back near your $100,000 set point.

    Tracy's research suggests we operate within a 10 to 15 percent variance of this internal set point. If you believe you’re a $100,000 person, you will unconsciously sabotage opportunities that push you much higher and work relentlessly to avoid falling too far below.

    This is the invisible force governing your income, your relationships, and ultimately, your worth in a business context. What you think you are determines what you get.

    The Guilt of Getting Paid to Play

    For creative people, the relationship with money is even more complex. The root of the problem is simple: you are getting paid to do something you love.

    If someone asked to pay you for your hobbies, whether watching movies, reading comics, or playing video games, the idea would feel absurd. “I would feel a certain amount of embarrassment and guilt for someone to pay me to do that,” Do admits, “because I actively and happily pay to be able to do this.”

    This psychological friction is at the heart of why creatives consistently undercharge. When a client approaches you to do something you enjoy, like designing a logo or writing a campaign, your instinct is to feel guilty about charging for it. It feels wrong.

    This starts an internal, one-person negotiation before a price is ever mentioned to the client.

    You think of a number. “$5,000.”

    Then, the self-doubt kicks in. “God, that sounds like a lot of money. Why would anyone want to pay me that? This is so easy for me… Why don’t I charge them $2,500? It’ll be an easy yes.”

    You’ve already cut your price in half. Now you present the lower number to the client. But the client is a businessperson, and businesspeople negotiate. They counter with $2,000. Afraid of conflict, you agree.

    You’ve now accepted a project for less than half your original number, and a quiet resentment begins to build. This bitterness poisons the work. You cut corners, rush the process, and deliver something that is merely “good enough.” The client is underwhelmed. The cycle of low pay, low-quality work, and low satisfaction repeats.

    Stop Talking About Yourself

    The solution is not to work harder or faster. The solution is to change the entire conversation. When we price our work, we tend to think about ourselves: our time, our energy, our experience. This is a self-centered, egocentric approach.

    The client does not care what it costs you to make something. They only care about what you can do for them.

    To break the cycle, you must shift from a cost-based mindset to a value-based one. This requires empathy and generosity. The key is to ask a different set of questions.

    Instead of calculating your hours, ask the client:

    • “What are you trying to achieve by doing this?”
    • “Why are you doing this now?”

    When you ask these questions, the client will tell you their business goals. They want a higher click-through rate, a better conversion rate, or increased sales. You are no longer talking about design; you are talking about business outcomes. This approach is central to the idea of a value-based pricing strategy.

    The next question becomes obvious: “What will this do for your business?”

    If the client says the project could generate an extra $10,000 a month, the conversation is no longer about a $2,500 logo. The value of the work is now anchored to a six-figure annual return. You have reframed the entire discussion from your cost to their gain.

    This isn't a trick. It’s an alignment of interests. You are moving from a vendor relationship to a business-to-business partnership.

    The Path of Compounding Skill

    Many creatives hear this and resist. “Easy for you to say, you have awards and experience. I’m just starting out.” This resistance is a defense mechanism. It's emotionally easier to kill a new idea than to accept you've been doing things the wrong way.

    But everyone starts at zero. As speaker Jim Rohn famously said, “Success leaves clues.” The key is not to focus on the differences between you and successful people but to reverse engineer their path.

    Do’s own journey is a testament to this principle. His first job, as a 15-year-old with a work permit, was unskilled labor. He was a stock boy and a fry cook, earning minimum wage. At the time, that was his market value. “That’s exactly how much I was worth,” he reflects.

    He quickly realized his life was meant for more and that he needed to acquire skills. An opportunity arose at a silk-screen shop. The owner, a professional designer, hired him to ink drawings for $18 an hour, nearly five times his previous wage. The lesson was immediate and powerful.

    The more skills I acquire that are marketable to a market that is in demand, the more I was going to be able to charge.

    This started a decades-long progression:

    • Learning Adobe Illustrator and PageMaker: Led to a desktop publishing job at $22/hour.
    • Attending Art School for Graphic Design: Increased his rate to $30/hour.
    • Learning After Effects for Animation: Pushed his rate to $50/hour.

    Today, as a business coach, his effective hourly rate is $1,500. As a public speaker, it’s $30,000. Each step was a direct result of adding a new, valuable, and marketable skill to his arsenal. The development of a strong personal brand was not an accident, but a consequence of this compounding skill acquisition.

    Your highest priority is clear: learn as much as you can that applies to a market hungry for what you do. The more skills you can overlap, the more you will be worth.

    The Agony of 'The Dip'

    The journey to acquiring expertise is not a straight line. It is a predictable, painful, and necessary process that author Seth Godin calls “The Dip.” In his book of the same name, Godin illustrates the typical trajectory of learning a new skill.

    When you start something new, whether it's creating content for Instagram or learning a new software, you get an initial high. You see quick progress and feel a surge of excitement. This is the upward slope of the curve.

    But then, you hit a plateau. Your growth stalls. You enter a long valley where you put in immense effort for very little reward. This is The Dip.

    “This is where most people quit,” Do warns. They blame the algorithm, the platform, or the market. They conclude “it’s not working” and abandon the effort. The valley is littered with the carcasses of abandoned projects and half-learned skills. These people become hobbyists, perpetually starting over but never achieving mastery.

    The difference between an amateur and an expert is the willingness to push through The Dip. You must persist through the frustrating phase of high effort and low reward.

    Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, popularized the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve expertise. While the exact number is debated, the principle holds: mastery requires a significant commitment of time and focused effort. It requires pushing through the dip when every instinct tells you to quit.

    The reward for this persistence is scarcity. Because so few people are willing to do the hard work, those who emerge from The Dip possess rare and valuable skills. Scarcity creates value. This difficult journey is a natural barrier to entry, weeding out the uncommitted. Before you start anything, Godin advises, decide if you are willing to commit 100% or don't start at all.

    A Playbook for Attracting Premium Clients

    Once you’ve committed to building your value, you need a strategy to attract clients who will pay for it. The core principle is another paradox: to get more, you must give more. Most people get this wrong, especially on social media. They spend their time asking for business instead of creating value for others.

    Do outlines a modern approach that sits between aggressive outbound sales and passive inbound marketing. It's a hybrid model built on Seth Godin's concept of “permission marketing.”

    The steps are straightforward and can be applied on a platform like LinkedIn:

    1. Create high-value content. Share something practical and useful that you’ve learned through direct experience, not just something you read.
    2. Offer a deeper resource. At the end of your post, offer to send more information to those who are interested. For example: “Comment with [keyword] below, and I’ll send you the full guide.”
    3. Engage via direct message. When someone comments, you have their permission to contact them. Send them the promised resource.
    4. Follow up and diagnose. A day or two later, ask if they have questions or need more help. This opens a conversation where you can diagnose their problem.
    5. Schedule a value-first call. If there's a fit, schedule a call where you teach them something valuable. Only at the end, after demonstrating your expertise, do you transition to a potential sale.

    This strategy transforms a cold outreach into a warm, permission-based conversation. You are attracting volunteers, not chasing prospects. Do experienced this firsthand when he responded to a fitness coach's social media post. The coach took him through a similar funnel, getting Do to articulate and commit to his own fitness goals before ever mentioning a price. By the time the offer was made, Do was ready to buy. This is how you can use a platform like LinkedIn not just for networking, but as a core part of your client acquisition strategy.

    Drawing Your Lines in the Sand

    Attracting the right clients also means repelling the wrong ones. The strongest position you have in any client relationship is at the very beginning. From there, your power only decreases. You must start strong.

    This begins by defining your non-negotiables. What are the absolute deal-killers for you? This could be industry-based, like refusing to work with tobacco or alcohol brands. It could also be behavior-based.

    One of the biggest red flags is a client who says, “I’ll know it when I see it.” This phrase is a clear signal of indecisiveness and a future filled with endless revisions. When you hear it, it’s time to professionally exit the conversation. “After thinking about this, I don’t think I’m a good fit for you.”

    Another critical filter is budget. To avoid wasting time with bargain shoppers, you must address the money conversation upfront. This demonstrates confidence and sets a clear expectation of the value you provide. A simple script can save you hours of wasted effort:

    “Before we go too far, because I value your time, do you have at least $10,000 for this project? If not, we’re not going to be a good fit.”

    This isn't about being arrogant; it's about being clear. It's a tactic Blair Enns advocates for in establishing a minimum level of engagement. When you negotiate, it's crucial to remain emotionally detached. A client attempting to lower your price is not a personal insult; it is a business tactic. Reacting emotionally is a sign of professional immaturity.

    Your rate is your rate. Be prepared to hold the line, confident that the value you provide far exceeds the price you charge.

    The Power of Reframing

    If you’re currently in a dark place, feeling overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated, you are caught in the vicious cycle of undercharging and overdelivering. The solution is simple, though not easy: charge more so you can work less.

    Doubling your rates means you can cut your workload in half and make the same amount of money. This one act rebuilds your confidence and restores joy to your work. Clients also value things they pay more for. A luxury handbag is treated with more care than a cheap one. A high-end salon experience feels fundamentally different from a budget haircut chain. People want to pay more for better service and a better feeling about themselves.

    To make this change, you need to master one final tool: reframing. Just as an expensive frame can increase the perceived value of a painting, changing the mental frame around an event can change its emotional impact.

    Do points to the character of Bran Stark from Game of Thrones. After suffering unimaginable loss and betrayal, Bran confronts the man who crippled him, Jaime Lannister. Instead of seeking vengeance, he reframes the event, telling Jaime there's no need to apologize. If he hadn't been pushed from the window, he never would have become the Three-Eyed Raven.

    This is what Oprah Winfrey calls true forgiveness: the ability to thank someone for the experience. It’s a profound level of acceptance.

    Every professional setback, every difficult client, every failed project is an opportunity for learning. Do recounts being sued early in his career and later losing over $30,000 to a sales rep who exploited a contract loophole. These were painful, expensive lessons.

    But he learned to see them not as failures, but as tuition. Forgiving yourself and learning the lesson is the only way to move forward without carrying the emotional weight. As Gandhi reportedly said, holding on to hate is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

    You have the power to choose your frame. You can see setbacks as confirmation of your inadequacy, or you can see them as the price of admission for success.

    The choice is yours.

    TRANSCRIPT

    hi everybody my name is Christo I'm a loud introvert a recovering graphic designer a Serial entrepreneur and an above average student but a first class Troublemaker I have this great big mission which is to teach a billion people how to make a living doing what they love in this course I'm going to focus mostly on mindset how you can reframe your problems into opportunities how you can reverse the tides of the Vicious Cycle and move yourself to The Virtuous cycle we're going to talk a little bit about marketing how you can attract certain clients to you how you can deal with difficult moments and challenges in your life and hopefully spring from those things because I fundamentally believe this failure is a tuition you pay for success and instead of trying to avoid failure we should embrace it as part of our growth process it's a clear sign that moving in the right direction that we're going out of our comfort zone I hope you enjoy the course I was at a a church and I haven't gone to church in in a really long time and I heard Irwin mcmanis who is somebody I I met on the speaking circuit he's a very powerful speaker he says I'm going to share one concept with you today which is going to explain a lot of your behaviors and your actions and he said we basically are grouped into two types of people one type of person runs from Pain and one type of person runs towards love or runs towards life and living and they're drastically different so you have to decide which type of person you are now most of us might not put ourselves in that category that we're running from pain but when we start to break it down we'll start to see certain patterns of behavior that will clue Us in is to perhaps we are operating from a place of pain so let's try to examine that a little bit let's say like you grew up as a person without a lot of means you grew up in a poor family so you have a different relationship with money money was a very powerful thing it has an emotional driver in you the more money you had the happier you were the less money you had the less happy you were we put markers of success and selfworth in how much money we're able to command and that's a lot of pressure to be holding on to yourself we might not have grown up in a perfect family environment where we didn't get the enough love and affirmation and so we're constantly seeking others to affirm us a lot of us don't have enough attention and so we're constantly trying to organize ourself and our relationships around people who give us attention and all these things create a state of fear a state of lack and neediness that is actually the very thing that will push away great relationships and then therefore for great clients from us and in general we would describe some of these Concepts as limiting beliefs beliefs that you hold to be true that are self-sabotaging that only allow you to achieve a certain amount I was reading in a book written by Brian Tracy called the psychology of sales or sales psychology or something like that and he wrote In the book about this concept that is a very profound Discovery in Psychology and Psychotherapy called the self-concept which is who you think you are and what makes you you profound concept he said think about it like this you'll notice this about people say if you have thought of yourself of being able to achieve a certain amount of money every single year in your life let's say you thought wow my father and my father father's father made $100,000 a year and he is considered a successful person within the community and very respected so then you put the self-concept like to make it in life is to earn $100,000 so you go to work and you show up and you start to work towards achieving this goal and as soon as you hit the $100,000 Bas maybe you're a salesperson it'll be easier to understand this from a sales point of view where you know you're going to make $100,000 a year what happens then you start to shift into cruise control you don't show up for any more meetings or calls and your calendar is all of a sudden booked up with other things and the funny thing is when when the year starts over again you start at zero and so you're grinding you're making calls so in the book he talks about the concept where give or take about 10 or 15% we move to what whatever belief we hold to be true so if you make 115,000 you'll start to chill out and you go back to $100,000 if you miss all your sales goals whether you're a freelancer or a salesperson and you're at 60,000 and you've set your self-concept to be worth 100,000 you'll burn the Midnight Oil you'll take on another job you'll pick up the phone and reach out to more people until you start to get closer to that 85 to 100,000 Mark and then you'll chill out so what we think of ourselves what we think we're capable of really will largely determine what the kind of life that we have the relationships we have and ultimately how much we're worth as we're looking at this from a business context there's a complex relationship that creative people have with the services they provide and how much they think they can charge for it so let's get into the root of why creative people behave the way they do I think if you were to ask me Chris what do you enjoy doing in life in your free time I would tell you I like watching mixed martial arts I like reading comic books sometimes if I have time I play video games and then if you were to ask me how much how much do I have to pay you for you to do that I would think that's the strangest concept why would anyone want to pay me for reading comics watching mixed marshal arts or playing video games and I would feel a certain amount of embarrassment and guilt for someone to pay me to do that because I actively and happily pay to be able to do this I buy comics I pay for the pay-per-views to watch mixed martial arts I'll go to the venues to watch and I'll pay money for that as well and I buy video games and so now when we reverse that psychology and say well someone will pay us to do something that we love to do it feels really wrong and if you expand this into the creative Fields whether you're a designer illustrator animator editor social media marketer whoever you are in your space there's a good chance that you're doing this because you love it because you have a passion for it and you just genuinely enjoy this and it feels wrong to charge for it so of course what's going to happen in your mind is when a client says hey you're so good at doing X would you do that for me and how much would that cost you say well I'd happily do it for you and then here comes the real battle and it's the internal battle it's the hardest to overcome the greatest enemy that you ever face in the battlefield is the one that exists in your mind not the opponent standing in front of you you'll start to negotiate against yourself and this has happened to all of us and happens to me to this day where I think to myself well I don't know $5,000 and I think God that sounds like a lot of money why would anyone want to pay me that amount of money this is so easy for me it's like something I would do like breathing well why don't I charge them 2500 it'll be an easy yes for them so then we start to transact with the client we start to float a number by them we say I'm thinking $2,500 and so what does the client do they don't say yes because they're business people and business people know that you're not supposed to take the offer you're supposed to negotiate down and so now youve pre-negotiated against yourself and now the other person rightfully so is negotiating against you so they're going to say well Chris would you consider doing this for 2 Grand 2500 is more than I thought and then you because you are afraid of conflict and friction you say yeah that works let's do that you accept a job and you do it but in the back of your mind you feel a little resentful about it because you're like I should have been paid $33,000 why did I ask for 20 so you're going through this whole process and we we know this if you're not a happy person it's going to affect your mood and your state and if your state is a negative one one that is resentful and there's bitterness in your heart then you're going to do the work and it's going to affect it it's going to affect the words that you write if you're an email marketer it's going to affect the logo that you design because you're like you know what I'm tired of working on this when you know if you worked on it a little bit more you could get it just right and you deliver it and the client's like oh okay thanks and this cycle just repeats itself over and over again and it starts probably in our childhood in our relationship with money and acceptance we're looking for approval all the time we're looking for extrinsic markers external markers that people accept us they like us and they're willing to put up with us you're trying to be a whole human 100% complete devoid of gaps not a whole human one that has a hole that needs to be filled those people tend to be very needy and they're looking for fulfillment and acceptance and love from others and it's a NeverEnding cycle the most unhealthy relationship that we have with ourselves transmits and translates into our relationship with others where we self-sabotage we lower our rates because we think that's what people are willing to pay there's a very simple solution when we think about pricing we think about what it costs us to make something how much time energy and effort our level of experience so it becomes a very self-centered approach becomes a very egocentric way of looking at things when someone asks us how much would this cost you think about what you put into it the simple way is to be very empathetic and very generous and ask the other person what is it that you're trying to achieve by doing this thing and this thing could be rebranding it could be redesigning your website or writing a new email marketing campaign what is it you're trying to achieve and why are you doing this and then they other person will happily tell us because no one's ever asked them before and they get to tell us like oh oh it'd be great if I could achieve a higher click-through rate if I can get a higher open rate or I can increase the conversion well what will this do for your business well it'll make us $10,000 more a month well great so what are you willing to spend to achieve that result so now we're learning to speak the language of business we've moved the focus away from ourselves and we're shining that attention or that Spotlight to the other person which is where it belongs so when you're going to work with a client don't think about like what it's going to cost you to make the client doesn't care they only care about what you're going to be able to do for them so this removes a lot of the friction because ultimately you cannot land on a price or a solution that isn't relevant to your client in terms of the solution itself or the price because you spend all this time talking to them you might be thinking to yourself great Chris easy for you to say you have Awards you've been doing this for a long time what am I supposed to do is I'm still starting out I'm still struggling I don't have consistent lead flow I don't have enough yet so how do I apply any of this well the first step to doing anything is first committing your mind and your heart to saying this is possible we have to change the self-concept the internal self- dialogue the selft talk when we can change that then the steps become much easier and often times when I advise people what they do is they put up immediate resistance the idea and I understand this I want to be sensitive to this and I want to address this right now when we hear a concept that's foreign to us what we try to do is we try and kill that idea because it's too emotionally painful for us to think there was a better way to do this this entire time and I've been doing it the wrong way it can't be that I'm wrong it must be that the idea is not good because if it's not possible for me it cannot be possible period well let's invert the lens once again whenever you're stuck ask yourself is someone else in the world we only need one example one person who's able to do this and do this successfully if there is what separates you from them now here's the weird part about how the human mind works we're hardwired we're engineered we've evolved to spot differences that's how we have survived Tom Ross is a certain height he has certain facial structure he's different than me or chriso is different he doesn't have hair he's Asian or he studied this school so we spot differences really well and it's generally a very good skill to have your survival has depended on it but when it comes to say finding someone who is a trailblazer in your industry in your space who's done what it is that you hope to do we have to just remember we're both human and we all started from zero we really did there are some exceptions to this of course but generally speaking they have all gone through what it is that you've gone through so I'm going to quote Jim ran here Jim ran says success leaves Clues we just need to pick them up so when you're looking at someone who's way ahead of you stop thinking about what makes us different think about what makes us the same well they were new at some point I'm new right now what were the first two or three things that they did what can I do we have to reverse engineer their success and quite literally the path and the steps that they took so often what we try to do is we try to jump to the end and say well why isn't working for me well you haven't done what they've done you haven't trained yourself to think this way you haven't positioned yourself to attract a specific type of client so the first thing that you must do is commit your whole soul your body your mind and your spirit to being able to do this thing in his book Dr Price Pritchard talks about this in you to the second power he says when you become clear about your goals you magnetize yourself the means and the methods will be drawn to you and the classic example that everybody gives is if you're in the market to buy a new car and for some reason you're looking at a coupe like a red sports car all of a sudden as you're driving and walking around the street all you notice are red sports cars that are coups it's how your mind works whatever you focus your mind to all of a sudden you become much more observant and aware of those things that exist outside of you so make the commitment to yourself yes I want have a different relationship with my clients this idea on paper sounds really good so I need to start to talk less about myself and spend more time diagnosing and speaking to the client on terms that they understand and trying to be a business to business relationship not a businesses to vendor relationship so once you do that everything else becomes much much easier it's why mindset things are so difficult to overcome but so powerful once you unlock that here's an exercise I would love for you to do and hopefully you come to the same conclusion that I have I want you to map every single job you've ever had and figure out your effective hourly rate your EHR so if you worked on something for 10 hours and you paid $20,000 for it just divide that 20,000 divided by 10 that becomes your effective hourly rate and if you do this Faithfully you'll start to notice a pattern and you'll arrive at a conclusion that I'm going to get to in a second the thing that motivated me so much was to have money because I grew up with not a lot of money and I also felt like my parents worked so hard felt the tremendous amount of guilt to ask them for things and so I knew if I wanted certain things in my life new pair of sneakers or a cool shirt or something like that I'm going to have to go and earn that money so when I turned 15 in America here you can get a workers permit and you can go and work legally so the first jobs I was qualified for were for unskilled labor so I was making at that time minimum wage which I think is like three .35 an hour and that's exactly how much I was worth I was I was basically a stock boy or the French fry guy at a fast food restaurant and I switched jobs pretty quickly because I found that my brain was dying as I was sitting there folding Fabrics bolts of fabric and replacing the different buttons in the fabric store I was thinking to myself I think my life was meant for more than just this and I also knew that I needed to acquire skill because unskilled labor this is what what you make so I tried to go from one unskilled job to the next and they all basically paid me minimum wage is what I was worth So eventually I quit I'm 16 17 years old now and I get this opportunity to show my portfolio to a Sil screen shop and the owner says bring in a portfolio of your work and I didn't even know I wanted to be an artist or a designer at this point so the kinds of pieces I had were just not very sub substantive so I was a little sheep in walking into that studio luckily the studio is very close to my high school so I walked over there showed him the work and he says you're hired he was a professional designer a really good drafts person he says your job is to Ink My drawings to make screens for the shirts I said great so he gave me some pens said go to work he say I'm going to pay you $18 an hour my mind was blown like holy cow by applying a little bit of talent marketing myself to the right person just being in front of the right buyer my effective hourly rate wasn't quite six times but five times as much as it was before five times and I remember I was so happy and so proud I called my older brother and he said you know how much money I'm making right now he goes how much $18 an hour he goes wow congrats and so I've learned something very valuable at that point in time the more skills I acquire that are marketable to a market that is in demand the more I was going to be able to charge so just follow me here okay I W up working in desktop publishing once I learned Adobe Illustrator and pagemaker I got paid $22 an hour now I'm in junior college when I learned graphic design by going to art school I was able to charge $30 an hour I'm moving up in the world not a ton of money everybody but I'm just showing you that there's a progression here when I learned how to animate using After Effects I was able to charge $50 an hour and eventually I'll fast forward to you today as a business coach my effective hourly rate is $1,500 an hour because that's what people pay me to do one-on-one coaching when I do public speaking for an hour's worth of my time I'm paid $330,000 an hour where is this all going your single highest priority should be the acquisition of marketable skills that you can compound say that one more time time your highest priority should be to learn as much as you can that you can apply this skill to a market that's hungry for what it is that you do and the more skills that you can overlap the more you will be worth so let me now Look at a timeline here and I wanted to share that with all of you because I did not start out as the person who's speaking on stage or making YouTube videos I was just like you a young hungry person trying to just make it in the world applying my Artistry and craft to to a market that would want to pay for it and it took me a long time to find it relatively speaking now my journey into this space and I I'll I'll map it to like who I was and how I've changed because of this I forget who said this I don't know if Jim Ron or Jack Canfield said this which is it is important for you to have clear goals it's less important for you to achieve them but more important the person you become in the pursuit of those goals when I read that or I heard that I'm like this is profound we have goals like we want to make money we want to achieve certain things in order to achieve those things we have to learn and change so anybody who's listening to this you can charge whatever amount of money you want you can charge a million dollars an hour but you can't be the same person you are today because you frankly are not worth a million dollars an hour yet and so how do you have to do that so you have to learn lots of things you have to go outside your comfort zone you have to face your fears and you have to walk right into those headwinds and despite having zero evidence that you can succeed you push forward you do the hard work that no one's willing to do and you're willing to risk personal and professional embarrassment and for the naysayers to say see we told you you couldn't do it we told you if you're willing to take those risks you will reap those rewards Seth Goen in his book the dip he talks about this he says whenever we start something new there's this graph that he shows and it goes up and then it goes down and stays in that down state let me illustrate this for you in your mind here every time you start a new skill when you learn something new let's say you want to create videos on YouTube or you want to create content for Instagram you get that initial high like wow this is awesome I'm doing really well and you pick up 10 15 25 followers a day and you're like this is fantastic and you might get to 200 300 followers and it's awesome per day and then something weird will happen you'll start to Peak and you'll start to go into a state of decline fewer followers because you've reached whoever you're going to reach with the knowledge base that you have and you enter into the valley into the dip where you put in a lot of effort and energy and you get very little reward so the beginning High reward low energy at the bottom towards the middle part of this graph lots of energy and effort very little reward and this is where most people quit you're like this is too difficult it's not working Instagram sucks the algorithm has changed and you go on the internet and you complain the difference between you and someone who becomes super successful is they push through the dip they keep working until in which they get to this point where it becomes really sweet and then they start to reap the rewards from repetition from repeated exposure to the same problem through trial and error through learning and applying best practices that they achieve the next level success and this process repeats over and over again now this is generally true about most things in life in terms of you achieving your goal which is this Valley the dip is a natural barrier to entry it's what weeds wannabes or wantrepreneurs from entrepreneurs because they all quit there's a lot of carcasses dead bodies in the dip because they quit and they start and they repeat this process over and over again so what they wind up doing is to become hobbyists or enthusiasts in many different subjects never truly achieving that level of expertise now Malcolm Gladwell is famous for saying this it takes about 10,000 hours for you to achieve some level of expertise now there's some debate about how much time you have to spend to be an expert but let's pretend for argument sake it's 10,000 hours are you willing to commit yourself to putting in the work to pushing through this Valley this dip where you put in a lot of energy and effort and you see very little reward now here's the cool part to this whole thing which Seth does not talk about in this book which is if you look at it from a day-to-day point of view it will look like you're making no progress and that Valley will be really shallow and deep but if you zoom out a little bit you'll start to notice it's moving ever so slightly upward and you're making progress because how could you not you spot the patterns you push to the work and now you get to this place that's very rare very few people are able to achieve and this is how it goes rare things are scarce scarce things are rare and those things create value something that's hard to obtain something that's difficult to get that there are few of become very very valuable this is why people generally speaking are more respected if they have a master's degree or pH D if they went to college versus an ivy leak school because they're harder to obtain you get instant credibility and you're validated for that so think about that and what Seth talks about in his book is before you make a commitment to do something decide that you're going to commit to it 100% or better yet don't start people always ask me this question Chris I just don't know if I'm that passionate about ux design should I continue on and I tell them something that surprises them which is no if you're not passionate about this why are you doing this you're doing this to fulfill some other goal that's not your own and I'll tell you right now the field is going to be full of people who are hyper passionate about ux design that eat breathe and sleep this stuff they're going to run rings around you and when things get really tough they'll have the drive to get through the dip and you will quit so find something that you love love that you can see yourself doing for 10 years commit your entire soul your body your mind your spirit to achieving this thing and just keep grinding at it because nothing teaches you more than repetition nothing builds confidence more than repetition you know what happens often times is when you follow people who are influential who seem to have all the markers of success they rarely talk about their struggles mostly because maybe they think no one's interested interested some of them feel professional guilt or shame from not having it all figured out but I think it's really important for us to sit down and talk a little bit about professional struggles and how we overcome them oftentimes when I'm interviewed people ask me what is the biggest mistake the biggest failure you've had and it's hard for me to come up with one not because I've not had many setbacks and failures and hardships I have I've had them all but because I don't record and process them as failures and hardships I believe in this very much that failure is the tuition you pay for Success it really is so we would love to go through life and not hit any obstacles and have zero failures but that's not really how things work in fact if that's your life today if that's been your pattern I would challenge you that you have not risked enough you've not taking taking a big enough risk because you're always playing it safe in his book Paul Arden WR writes about whatever you think think the opposite he says risk is safe and safe is risky the way that we're supposed to evolve and change is we're supposed to take on bigger risk so in my life I look back there are a couple like gigantic problems I've had uh a couple years out of school I was sued by a multi-billion dollar health and wellness company um and the mistake that I made there was an author had reached out to me and said I'd love to profile this website Tye project that you're working on and me hungry for PR I said yes I'd love to share let's go and I said to him the author I do not own the rights of these images but what rights I do own you can have please contact our client to get the assets to the permission that you need long story short the person who sent the assets later on because they were under some heat denied that they had signed anything and there was no paperwork and so now we're in a three-way lawsuit here and it was a very traumatic period in my life because I didn't have any money we were struggling and barely making ends meet as it was now to enter into lawsuit and being served and paying an attorney hundreds of dollars an hour to fight something I didn't think I had committed anything wrong that was a huge learning opportunity very painful emotionally traumatizing for me but I learned in that instance read your contracts do not assume that you own the IP to anything that you work on this is just me being a naive business owner it all ended just fine I paid a few thousand bucks a little slap on the wrist no one admitted fault and we just walked away from it so it all just resolved just fine but in my life apparently I did not learn from that lesson very well because once again I'm working with a sales rep who verbally quit on me so I assume that we're good who then waited for our contract to expire and there was a clause in the contract that they had written that auto renewed for a whole another year so when they call us in January and like hey what are we doing said why are we even talking you quit and my rep said no we didn't I said well there's two of us who were on that call and you said you quit and our rep said read your contract apparently I don't learn my lessons very well so now I have a rep who doesn't want to work for me who wants to take a percentage of all our buildings in their Market and I don't want to work with them anymore so I have to do the big grown-up thing and literally pay them 30 some odd thousand to make them go away so I can sign a new rep very expensive lesson and it hurt me it hurt me emotionally but you know what I learned a very important lesson this time around which is when you settle a lawsuit try your best to behold cuz if you pay and you still feel angry at it you're losing twice now you pay the person the money and you're only hurting yourself I think it was Gandhi who said this that holding on to hate is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die so I've learned you got to come to peace with lots of things there's so many things out of your control and if you continue to beat yourself up over the mistakes that you've made in the past you continue to pay the price and you're the one who pays it not not your sales agent not the brand that said that you can have the work so these are kind of important things we need to learn like learn from your mistakes look at as tuition that you pay for success and forgive yourself when you missed up I'm I'm working on a couple different ideas and they're put under this giant label of the Paradox principles where your instincts tell you to do something and that's exactly the wrong thing that you should be doing if you want to get more you have to give more so when we talk about attracting clients you have to ask yourself are the things I'm putting into the world me asking for things or is it me giving value and creating value for others and this is fundamentally what most people on social media get wrong when it comes to content creation and attracting clients to you now there's a couple different concepts I want to share with you briefly here first of which is there's a difference between outbound marketing and inbound marketing right outbound is where you chase after clients and you try to convert cold leads into warm and hot leads it's somewhat aggressive and it's appropriate for certain types of individuals with a certain mindset generally speaking you're extroverted you're outgoing you have a great memory for people places names and things you're very social and you're probably more of the alpha type that does not sound like me and most creative people I know so I've not spent a lot of time developing outbound strategies to attract clients but if you're hungry and if you're starving outbound is the sure strategy for you to get some clients in the door because you can't afford to wait for them to find you what I recommend for you if you're in that position is to spend 20% of your energy doing outbound stuff and 80% doing inbound and I'll talk more about inbound okay so outbound the example would be you spot someone you do social prospecting you find out their titles and their contact information and you just reach out to them unsolicited they didn't even know that you're reaching out and you can see a lot of examples of this in your inbox probably a first class lesson on what not to do anybody that pops in my inbox I have zero relationship with and no context no introduction who wants to sell me Outsourcing programs for design or or coding I what I do which what many of you probably do is I just go straight there I say block and then or unsubscribe and I delete that email I don't even read it anymore so you have to be careful about how you do that there is a hybrid version in between that I think can work really well for those of you that are like uh a little squeamish about doing outbound marketing what you can do is you can create a piece of content that is very valuable that people would pay money for things that you've learned practical things not things you read but things you've done and experienced firsthand and I would recommend you do this say on a platform like LinkedIn because it gives you different metrics and there are much more business oriented people who are looking to buy things on LinkedIn as opposed to other platforms if you can post a piece of content there that's valuable what I would do is just say comment this key phrase below and I'll send you more information based on what you like so this is you stepping into permission marketing which is the term that Seth has used Seth Goden has used where you're asking for people to volunteer to participate in an a long-term marketing campaign with you you've given me value I want more so your obligation as the marketer is to give increasing amounts of value until a certain point when they want to actually do business with you I love this approach because it's voluntary it's permission based and as long as you hold up your end of the bargain you don't have to feel shameful or guilty about doing any of this stuff so when they comment whatever the key phrase is you can then DM them and say Here's the resource that I promised then in a day or two you can follow up with them and ask do you have any questions do you need additional resources or help with this if you do you continue to diagnose the problem and then you can schedule a call where you teach them something valuable at which point they can decide I want to work with you or I don't want to work with you I'll give you a very concrete example of someone who did this to me I actually bought from them and I I think you'll be able to see this very clearly there's a person that I know who's super fit he's posting constantly shirt off you know six-pack abs the whole bit everything looks cool and giving tips on exercise diet nutrition and he asked the audience something is like hey I would like to help three people figure out their Nutrition Fitness program contact me if you want some information and I said me I need some help here and then because this person knows me he's like Chris are you serious I'm like yeah I goes why don't we jump on a call it's great so I'm thinking I'm going to get free advice and what I didn't realize I was stepping into a sales not trap but sales funnel okay and I'm sure he spoke to more than three people and so I'm on the zoom call with this person and he says let me ask you a couple of questions why is Fitness so important important to you on a scale of 1 to 10 how how important is it and what would make it a higher score what would make it a lower score let's go the opposite why is Fitness not important to you tell me what it means if you're not fit and so he got me to commit to my own goals and I'm increasing my engagement with him so at certain point when he's like well here's the program here's how I work it's nine months long it's this price per month if you want to move forward let me know I can process the transaction right now so what he's done is he's given value over time he's asked for volunteers me he's jumped on a call he's gotten me to commit to my own goals to him so therefore I'm like the fish that puts myself on the hook and says yes this is very important so by the time he goes to ask for the sale it's super easy I'm like let me go get my credit card easy and that's how you would attract clients in a way that's hybrid between outbound and inbound so it's a combination of the two but I'm a big fan and proponent for inbound marketing which is you being a really great teacher sharing what it is that you've learned to help others achieve their goal in a very generous way where you don't ask for anything and you do this for as long as possible on as many platforms as possible such that you get to a certain point when people voluntarily ask you Chris can I buy something from you can I give you some money how do I go deeper in your program is there anything that's recorded or a course I can take can I buy a ticket to the next event or Workshop that you're running and that's the model that we as the future work on you may find yourself in a predicament when your clients are really driving the engagement and you feel like you have no power of the relationship they ask for more changes and you don't know how to bring up like this is going to cost more and they're not approving anything it's driving you crazy and it's just stealing all the joy in your life from doing the thing that you love so let's figure out how we can prevent this from happening in the first place and also give you some tools about how you can address this once you're in this state with or this relationship with your client the best way to do this is to not get into this situation in the first place yeah duh okay so how do we do this you have to understand a couple things how you establish the relationship at the very beginning will largely determine where it's going to go and keep in mind this idea the strongest position you're going to have is at the beginning and it's just going to go down over time so it's best to start very high because you know it will go lower over time okay you need to hold your ground so you need to probably make a list of things that are deal Killers like under no circumstances would I work with a client that does these two or three things it could be that you've lost a parent to to cancer to lung cancer so you will not work with any client that are tobacco related you might have lost someone due to a drunk driving accident so you you don't want to deal with alcoholic Brands so you can cross those people off the list you can also probably identify clients who are super indecisive as clients that are not good for you because you can see them coming a mile away they're not sure about anything and how do you know they say this very specific phrase this will make your skin crawl I'll know it when I see it that should be a clear sign to say you know what after thinking about this I don't think I'm a good fit for you I don't think I'm going to service this well and we're probably better off recommending somebody else versus doing this work so you're professional about it you're polite about it but as soon as you see one of these red flags go off you need to extricate yourself you need to kind of terminate the call as soon as you can some clients will want to pay the lowest amount of money and they're just really like bargain shoppers we'll we'll call them Bottom Feeders here and when you encounter them it's they don't value your your contribution they don't value your time what they value is getting a good deal and that's their right and prerogative to be able to do that but you don't have to participate in that so one way to address this upfront especially if you keep meeting these Bottom Feeders is just to say simply before we go too far in this conversation because I value your time do you have X budget to do this at minimum so you would say something like do you have at least $10,000 to redesign your logo cuz if you don't we're not going to be a good fit so you're addressing the elephant in the room right off the Jump and this will help establish you as a person who knows what they're doing who's confident about the value you provide and the Baseline of what it's going to cost to work with you you have to remember something you have a unique gift it may not feel like it because you see a lot of people competing against you but you what you do how you see the world and how you execute in the way that you make people feel it's uniquely you I'm not saying you're the best or you're the worst it's just uniquely you and in order for someone to get you to give you their gift they have to be smart enough to recognize that you are a gift and to give you the appropriate amount of money so they can receive the gift I consider what I do who I am and the service and value I provide truly as a gift so when when people try to negotiate with me I'm like you can do whatever you want but it'll always be this rate and this rate will always be the lowest price because tomorrow it will be a little bit more and the day after that it'll be a little bit more give you an example here somebody I know who's an event organizer reached out to me and said hey love for you to speak at my event and I say to them well you know the rate right and he's like yeah and my rate is $30,000 to do public speaking and he said why don't we do it for 25 I said well why don't we do it for 30 so in a case like this many of you will hear this and like dude $25,000 to do an hourlong presentation that you've done before just take the money and just laugh all the way to the bank that's not how I see it I see $30,000 for me to perform to give my best for me to feel Joy ful in doing this I'm going to need that money and the value that I create for the event organizer and for the people who are attending will be greater than the amount of money that I charge I believe this in my heart so here comes another limiting belief here if you do not believe that you can create more value than what you charge and if it's true work on acquiring more skills hence why I brought that up in the first place I know based on the amount of work I put in the experience that I have and contextually looking at what other people do at these presentations that I we deliver more than I overd deliver in in terms of value so I'm confident saying pay me that amount of money and so I just hold the line I'm not offended by it so what we have to do is we have to remain emotionally detached from the negotiation process that we're not personally offended when someone asks us to do it for Less reacting emotionally is a sign of professional immaturity and poor business skills it's two people coming together to discuss budgets and one of us determining if it's right or wrong and the other person has the same right to do that when you go to buy a car they don't apologize for the price in which they've listed on the sticker they don't justify they do not explain they don't rationalize and they don't try to convince you and if it's not a good fit for you and you say well I have to test driving this and spending an hour of your time I decided it's not a good fit would it be fair for the salesperson to react poorly to you emotionally to insult you no because you have that right to say no too so if you flip this equation around when you talk about a price and the client doesn't want to buy don't get upset they're in the market just like you were at some point in your life and they need to make sure that the value that they perceive is in alignment with the price that they're willing to pay and that's how I would look at that if you're in a dark place right now if you're that person who's running from Pain there's a couple things that you can do to help you start to walk into the light and run towards life run towards love there's a good chance that if you're feeling this Darkness it comes from you working too many hours stretching yourself too thin and not making enough money and it stems from you agreeing to take less money for the things that you know that you can do and do really well and your Caught In This Very vicious cycle of under charging and overworking the answer and the solution is going to seem very obvious which is to charge more for what you do so that you can work less so that you can do a better job higher quality and have stronger quality control to be able to experiment to learn to research properly so if you could just do this one thing it's going to start to reverse the cycle for you if you have the guts to say to someone my rate is two times as much as it used to be you can literally cut your workload in half and make the exact same amount of money and that sounds wonderful to most people but there are other psychological things are going to happen underneath that that are going to slowly rebuild you and transform your psyche and your outlook and your state number one is you're going to surprise and delight yourself if I can charge twice as much it's like my confidence goes up like wow I didn't know people valued what I did this much and you're going to be able to spend more time working on it you're going to love the process you're going to find joy in doing this and it's going to transmit through everything you do in your Communication in your email even how you approach the workday most people when they complain to me that they hate their work I just ask them a simple question what if you were paid 2x 5x 10x that amount would your attitude about that change they're yes not everybody but they would say yes so that's a clear sign that you're undervaluing yourself and you need to change that and you have all the power in the world to change it so why don't more people do this mostly because they're afraid they're afraid that the clients are going to say no and they're afraid that all their work's going to dry up by Design when you raise your rates to two two times what you used to charge you're effectively asking people to say who still sees value and who doesn't so you're going to get rid of a lot of clients but you're going to be able to service the ones that you have better and guess what because they paid more they appreciate the work more it's a psychological thing we cherish the things that we pay more for versus the things we pay less for let's just check in on our own lives if you bought a really expensive handbag versus an inexpensive one you'll cherish the one that's more expensive you'll wear it with pride you'll treat it better you'll make sure it doesn't get wet or dirty or scuffed you'll be hurt emotionally you'll be saddened if someone stole it the cheap one me it got dropped in the mud who cares somebody stole it who cares it's easy to replace so it turns out most people want to actually pay more for stuff because their relationship with the things and the services they get are different inherently think about like here in America we have a thing called Super Cuts which is a chain of haircut salons right that you can go into it's a nationally advertised price or you go into one of these Beverly Hills salons where they greet you they serve you champagne they might even give you a foot massage and they talk to you and everybody's happy to see you and and obviously I don't have hair but imagine if I did I'm like wow you made me feel so good that this was a bright moment in my day so if you realize this from a buyer's perspective that people actually want to pay more because they want better service they want to feel better about themselves that they can afford these things start there start to reverse the cycle because chances are if you're in that dark place you're overworked you're underappreciated and you're not having the most positive selft talk and self-concept there are other ways there are other reasons why you're in a dark place it could be because you have no Market validation as to what you're doing is working you could just be going at this for really long time and not seeing a lot of progress this is super scary and it's not right for every single person but I suggest you get some inexpensive coaching or go see a therapist because as soon as you can flip that switch in your mind and feel better about yourself you're going to show up differently I mean ask yourself this question when you've gone out to hang out with your friends or go on a date or spend time with your kids or your parents if you're you're in a bad mood if you're in a bad mental state how will it affect the way that you show up how would affect the way that you communicate and your willingness to do things and to participate conversely if you're super happy if you're in a a a place of gratitude how would you show up then with your kids on a date with your parents so what we have to do is we have to learn how to flip that switch and there's one thing I want to share with you that you can apply today and it's going to sound a little bit like yeah are you sure this works yeah it's a very powerful concept it's called reframing and I'll explain this very simply if you think about it when you buy a painting and you hang it on the wall without a frame the value of that painting is what it is conversely if you put it in a cheap aluminum frame with Plexi you actually might bring the value down so there's a baseline of what we think the painting is worth so if you were to be able to acquire an original Andy Warhol print and you frame it cheaply people are like that's a knockoff isn't it like no no that's the real one yeah whatever conversely if you frame it in something that is complimentary to the art and you spend hundreds of dollars on framing that and you put it on a wall that's clean and neutral and the lighting in it's beautiful people walk in and say wow you have an original warhall and you're like yes so reframing is looking at something through a different frame through a different lens so I find that when I am able to look at negative things and reframe it as a positive thing I have a different relationship with that event a different emotion with it let me give you some examples from pop culture and then I'll give you a real life example now I'm A Game of Thrones fan now it's been a couple years years since they concluded the series you know say what you will about the last two seasons but I think there's something wonderful about one of the characters Brandon Stark also known as a three-eyed Raven you know Brandon had witnessed some incest was pushed out the window is a and loses two of his his whole family is slaughtered his mom his dad his brothers everybody dies and so there's a lot of reasons for Brandon to hate and to be angry so there's two characters in which he comes in contact with I'm sorry one of them is Jamie Lannister who he sees and he's like Brandon I'm sorry I've done things to you I I want to make amends and he says there's no need for you to apologize if you hadn't pushed me out the window I would not have gone north of the wall I would not have met the three-eyed Raven and become the three-eyed Raven all of this stuff happens for a reason and I'm appreciative of it and there's a quote here I want to throw in from Oprah Winfrey which is true forgiveness is when you can thank the other person for the experience that's some profound level of acceptance and forgiveness there not all of us can do that but I want you to think about that hold that thought the second scene is there in the the the final moments of The Dark Night the all the white walkers are going to come in and just kill everybody and Theon grey Joy is there once again Tey he's betrayed the entire Stark family he's done some really horrific things he's allowed his steps sister to be raped it's just horrific he stands there and looks at Brennan he's like Brenan I just want to again the same thing he's like Theon you're a good man you're a good man and with that like Theon breaks down he's been looking for some Redemption he's so profoundly moved by this moment that he's going to fight this last battle to his dying breath and he's going to do everything he can to protect Brandon that's this that kind of reframing we're talking about here now my son you know one of his few things few chores he has to do in his life is to take out the trash he's always moping about it like oh Dad I have to do this he's dragging his feet often times he'll miss it and when now we have stinky trash because he didn't do his job my wife will cover for him he's just not happy about it he's like Dad do I have to do this I said no you do not have to do this son you get to do this he goes what you get to take out the trash do you know how many people would be happy to have a home to go to that then they have trash to put in and to be able to afford people to come and waste management to come and pick up the trash every single week could you imagine if we didn't have any money any resources you wouldn't have anything to throw away then you wouldn't have a job you get to take out the trash cuz if you'd like we could trade places with people and you can live in a home where you don't have to take out the trash because they have nothing so this is an important thing reframing so if you're in a place that's dark try your best to accept your situation to not blame people for where you're at and just say like this is the dark period before things get really good try to reframe try to be grateful for what it is that you have you have breath in your lungs you hopefully have a roof over your head and you have food on the table everything else you can manifest
    Download transcript

    Enjoyed this? There’s more where it came from.

    Get insights on pricing, value, and creative business.

    You can unsubscribe anytime. By submitting, you agree to receive communications and to our Privacy Policy.

    “Failure is the tuition you pay for success.”

    — Chris Do

    Key Takeaways

    Subscribe

    YouTube

    Details

    Length
    55m
    Views
    22,674
    Topic
    PRICING

    Share