Charles Leikauf almost turned down a marketing agency owner who wanted his finance services, thinking small businesses couldn't afford him. He quoted $45,000 upfront for six months of work. The client said yes immediately, changing how he thought about pricing and small-business clients.
Small businesses don't need help from someone who has finance skills like me. They can't afford to pay a lot. Don't you understand? I use big budgets and do all those things. I didn't understand that. It just didn't work, make sense to my head. But anyhow, after a couple days of her bugging me, I decided to have a call with the lady who needed help with their small business. So I snuck away at my job in the middle of the conference room, and I was sitting in the conference room taking a Zoom call with this lady. She owned a small business. She was doing a couple million dollars a year in her marketing agency, and she needed help with like a budget and a forecast and other easy entry-level finance stuff, and she wanted help with it. So what I ended up saying to her was like, you know what, I can help you. This stuff is for me, but it'll take a little bit of time. I'm really busy. You know what, it'll take— and I said it'll take $7,500 a month, but it'll take about 6 months for me to do all this. So what I was able to do is I told her it would be $45,000 paid today. And so with that, I paused for a second, I told her, and she goes, hmm. She said one word, and that one word was okay.
