TES 020 - The Two Factors That Allow You to Charge More

Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey there, Mel Abraham here, the author of the number one best selling book the Entrepreneur Solution. The founder of Business Breakthrough Academy, where we teach you how to design a business and create a life, a life of financial freedom and peace of mind. And welcome back to this episode of the Entrepreneur Solutions show. We're going to continue our talk about value creation and the value of your ideas and how to bring bring that to your customers, to your team, to yourself in a way that's meaningful, that is something that starts to drive value. Remember, as I said, we live in a value exchange economy and if you're not providing value, someone's not going to pay you value in return. So we need to focus on that. So after this brief introduction, we're going to come right back. We're going to go into a couple of my frameworks on value creation, what I call my value sectoring framework and my value focus framework to start to bring this home, bring this full circle. And remember, every episode comes with a guidebook or tool or something to download to help you execute and put this into your life, into your business immediately. So make sure that you download the tool in order to get it. For this one, for this episode, you're going to need to go to melabraham.com session 020. That's session 20. So melabraham.com 020 if you're not at your computer, you happen to be running, working out at the gym, driving, what have you. Just go ahead and text, text Mylegacy with no spaces, just one word. MyLegacy to 38470. You'll immediately get the download link so you'll have access to the information when you get to a safe place to get access to it. And I look forward to getting back with you right after this brief introduction. See you soon.

Welcome to the Entrepreneur Solution where highly successful entrepreneur Mel Abraham becomes your entrepreneur entrepreneurial mentor. Here, Mel reveals his business building strategies and even gets a chance to answer your questions. Mel Abraham, a CPA by education, but an entrepreneur by exhilaration and a true believer in the entrepreneurial way of life. It's through entrepreneurship that we create community, support society and live our dreams.

It's where possibility meets reality again and you can have the life and lifestyle you want. One of freedom and peace of mind. Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution where it's time for you to be bold, dream big and live life your way.

Alright, welcome back. This is Mel Abraham of the Entrepreneur Solutions show. And welcome back to this episode. We're going to continue our discussion from the last episode about value and creating value for your customers. And you know, if you recall, one of the things that I was talking about is that in order for you to have a commercially viable business, in order for you to be successful in business, the only way that that's going to happen long term is that you create value in other people's lives. We live in what's called the value exchange economy. You know, a lot of people will say, well, what's the price, what's the cost, what's the price? What's the cost? It's the wrong question. We shouldn't be asking about price and cost. We need to look at and say, what's the value? What's the value I give up? What's the value I get? What's the value you give up monetarily, what's the value you give up socially? What's the value you give up time wise, what's the value you give up? And compare that to the value that's created because that's truly what your customers are doing, that's truly what your team and your employees are doing. That's truly what's happening. Every decision we make is a value decision. When we understand that, we say, all right, if I have a product, if I have a service, how do I create value in my customers lives? How do I create something that they value and they value highly in my customers lives? Because when they value it highly, they're going to pay you greatly for it. And that's the equation, that's the perspective we ought to be looking at is coming from a place of value. You can look at it any way you want. You can sit back and say, well, I put in my time, I get it. You may have worked 20 years, 30 years for the same organization, but unless you're continuing to provide value to the organization, I hate to say it, you're not entitled to a raise. You're not entitled to it because that's not the economics of what's really going on in the world. We get paid and we get compensated based upon the value we create, the value we provide, the difference we make in, in people's lives. Let's continue to make big differences in people's lives, then we'll get paid greatly for that. And so I don't mean to badmouth or ridicule anyone that maybe feels that way, but in one sense I want to shake them up to say, hey, understand how this works. Here's the universal law, the universal economic rule. Value for value. Create value, you get paid value. And the greater the value you create, the more value you get back in return. So off my soapbox, let's move to the frameworks. The first framework I want to talk about is something called my value sectoring model. What I want you to think about is where you are in the context of what you provide to your customers, what you provide to your clients. What do you provide to the companies or the people that you serve in that process? And I want to think about it two axes, if you will. One is the connection you have with them and the distinction that exists for you in the marketplace. And there's four levels that I think we need to realize and understand, become aware of where we are in that marketplace, because once we're aware of it, then we can make some choices to transition and transcend, to move and change the way we are in the marketplace. The first, and you've heard me speak about this before, what I call a commodity, it's low connection. I've got very little connection to my customers and the product or service is easily replaceable. When you think about commodities, whether it's, it's gas for, for a car you just driving down the street, gas is gas. And in many cases, unless we're using high performance vehicles, gas is gas. I'm gonna go to the cheapest provider. This is, this is, I've got no relationship with the gas station or the or, or the company. I, nothing. It's basically a price driven decision or a convenience driven decision. There's no loyalty, there's no relationship that's going to keep them coming back and I'm easily replaced. It is the most precarious, uncertain position you can put yourself in in a business. And if we find ourselves in this position, we need to start looking at one. How we can increase connection and increase distinction either through providing a community, doing things differently in a way that starts to create loyalty. If we don't, what ends up happening is we are always, always dealing with this concept of price, price differentials, and that's it.

The second quadrant is what I call the connected. Okay? That's where I have high connection with the customer. I have high relationships with the customers. I have high, in effect, loyalty with the customers. But still, what I'm giving them as far as a product or service.

Is easily replaceable. Now, many of you know I'm a cpa. There was a time where I was doing a lot of tax work, and in some senses, the taxes, getting a tax return done. Is this necessary evil that we need to do? Because the government says that we need to file our taxes and get those taxes paid on an annual basis. And so.

The clients, many of the clients would come in begrudgingly and go, it's tax season. It's about as bad as going to the dentist. Sorry for the dentists that are out there, but it's about as bad as that. They don't come in happy. They don't. And they're just scared to death about the answers they're going to get and how much taxes they might owe. But the way they look at it is they have a relationship with me of trust. So they continually come to me to do the work. However, interestingly enough, what they walk away with is a tax return. And that tax return is truly easily replaced. You know.

A lot of tax accountants, all they're doing is putting it into a computer that's easily replaceable. We could put the information in it, it spits the tax return out. But for the connection that I have with them, they could go anywhere to do that. And so think about this and say, is your product is your product or service and your relationship with your customers.

At the connected level. In other words, I have good relationships. I've got high connection with them, but the stuff I'm giving them is easily replaceable. And so that again, puts you all I want to try and do. Remember way back when, when we started talking, the concept of business is about managing the downside risk, the uncertainty that exists, and trying to make sure that we reduce that uncertainty and risk as much as possible and maximizing the upside potential. And all I'm trying to do is identify this so you can minimize the risk. And the uncertainty here is that the product or service you are providing, although you have a good connected relationship with the customers, is easily replaceable. Now, on the other hand, you could be in a situation where we call it what I call the incrementalist, where I don't have a lot of connection with them, but I have a high distinction. In other words, my product or service is unique, and that's what they come to me for. I have no relationship with them. So they're not coming for the warm and fuzzies. They're not coming for the relationship, the dialogue, the socialization, the connection. They're coming because I'm the only one that has that type of product and that there's a very unique or distinct element to the product or service that's being delivered in that marketplace, and that's why they're coming to it. It's actually a better place to be, I think, in the sense than the connected place and certainly before better than commodity. Because you have distinction, which means that you don't have the competitive environment and the competitive risks that you might have if you had an easily replaceable. However.

What you're going to be challenged with is if you have high distinction, which means typically you have high margins, high profits, because you're unique in the marketplace, competition is going to enter in. And the only way that you're going to stave off the competition and keep them at bay is to make sure that you have a connected relationship with your customers. Connected at a deep level. So even if you're in the incrementalist perspective in that quadrant, we want to strive to move up our connection to create what I call a valued, valued customer, a valued relationship. Because now I'm at a high connection, high distinction. When you decide and you look at your products and services and say, how do I deliver to them in a way that connects me with the customers at a. A emotional values, deep level, and do it with distinction, uniqueness and differentiation that separates me from the competition. Now all of a sudden, now all of a sudden that that starts to really, really drive some of the things that are going. And your customers are going to look at things totally differently because, because of the relationship you have with them. And they're saying, one, I get this uniqueness and I have this relationship. I can tell you this. My wife and I will frequent a certain hotel. We go there for brunch on a regular basis, right on the water, on the beach. We typically have.

The same waiter who sees us there. They are uniquely distinct in their food, in their location, the ambiance and the environment, but the connection that they have with us, because when we come in and they greet us and they know us, they call us by our names, we have the same waiter who knows what we want, and we have a dog, we've got a relationship that creates what I call values based loyalty far surpasses anything you can do. So no matter what it is you're delivering, product, service, the key is to look at and say where am I? And be brutally honest to say I'm at a commodity place, incrementalist, connected. And no matter where you find yourself, what we want to do is strive to be valued, strive to be valued, come up with the strategy that's going to move you up the hierarchy of connection and down the line of distinction. That will make huge difference. So now, given that, let's look at this next framework because I think when you put these two together, you'll start to understand how this plays out and we'll talk about some other things. I talk about it in my Business Breakthrough Academy training. We teach it at the live event about strategy canvassing of how do you get that distinction? There's beyond the scope of what I can do here, but there are tools and things that will help you do this. But let's talk about what I call the value focus spectrum and the value focus spectrum. What I want to try to differentiate between is what the potential value is compared to what the actual value is. And this could be perceived value spectrum. But the value focus spectrum is how I look at this. The first is this, this concept of collecting. If what I am, what I'm delivering, my idea, my product, my service in the environment.

Has very low potential value and very low actual value. Really, it's probably not a place we want to.

Operate in. It's a place where we want to collect data, we want to look at the marketplace, see what the market's telling us. So we can then increase our potential.

Value where then we can realize a higher actual value. We don't want to play in a low potential, low actual value space, just like a commodity space. So ask yourself those questions as you start to look at what it is you're doing. And then if you're looking at this and saying, well, I've got high actual value.

But I don't have a lot of potential value, then where your focus needs to be is I'm maintaining the relationships with the customers because this may be your bread and butter. Remember I talked about A, B and C customers at one my high priority and everything. This is where probably most of your B customers are in that we want to maintain it because it's foundational in our business as we move forward. Alternatively, if I have high potential value but not actual value, then it's about cultivating. We just haven't realized the value. Yet what tools, what strategies, what tactics, what team do we need to put in place to cultivate the potential value in this marketplace from this customer base, to make it actual value? Because what we really need to look at is, again, just like we did in the last one, we want to be in that upper quadrant where we are looking at marketplaces and ideas and products and services that have high actual value, high potential value. And that's where we commit our resources, that's where we commit our time, that's where we dedicate and invest more and more to move forward. So what I invite you to do now is to look at the products and services that you're thinking of offering or that you're already offering, or the ideas that you have. Ask yourself and be again, if you're not brutally honest in these evaluation processes, it doesn't serve you because sooner or later the truth will come out and the market will slap you in the face and say, hey, there's really no value here. So you're better off being brutally honest with yourself and not blinded by the desire to put something out there. And you believing that it's got value in the market doesn't perceive the value. So being brutally honest with yourself and say, don't. Do I have something that has high potential value? How do I realize that potential value? What do I need to cultivate it? What are the things that I need to do to bring that value to life? Is it something that I have actual value in? That we're already realizing the value, but we don't have potential value. We don't have any growth there? Well, what can I do to grow it? How can I do what's called add value to it, to grow it by bundling, by adding services, by doing other things that customers might want that increases the potential value far greater than what you're already realizing. And we've got the guidebook. Like I said with the last episode, there's a guidebook that allows you to go through and helps you ask those questions, answer those questions and come up with some of the answers. If you haven't got the guidebook, remember, you go to melabraham020 episode 020, and that will get you access to downloading the guidebook. Every episode, like I said, is a working episode. I want to give you strategy, I want to give you tactics, I want to give you tools. I want you to go out and execute, execute, execute. Your success is all going to be based on execution. The majority of failures are failures in execution. Failures in taking action, concerted action, staying with it. So here's the thing with this Download the guidebook. Look at what it is you're offering. Look at what it is you're trying to offer. Look at the ideas that you're evaluating. Figure out whether you've got high potential, high actual, where you are in that spectrum. Figure out if you've got distinction in the marketplace, how you get distinction. How do you get connection with your marketplace? Because if I know that I can get think about it. If I know that I can get high potential, high actual value by committing my resources and then at the same time create distinction in the marketplace while creating connection in the marketplace, man, you are, you are going to fly. Your business is going to grow like crazy and that's the place to be. So hope you found this helpful. You know, I know it's a lot of information and I don't have the time to go as in depth that I could in a workshop, but you'll get a chance at some point to, to go deeper, hopefully with me. But in the meantime, if you found this of value, you want to stay with me. I've got a lot more stuff coming up. We're going to keep doing some of this. Make sure that you subscribe to.

These episodes so you get notified immediately of a new episode. And if you got someone that is in business looking to be in business looking to create more success and financial freedom and peace of mind, go ahead and share this with a friend. Why not? Let's do this because I think the society is hungry for a new way and the entrepreneurship path is the vehicle to allow people to get that peace of mind and financial freedom. And to the extent that I can serve, to the extent that I can give those tools, give some guidance, be there to be the mentor and be the guide, I feel blessed and honored to do that. So share this with a friend. If you have a question for me about wealth, about success, about business, about entrepreneurship, about anything, just go ahead and go to askmelnow.com and leave me your message. And we'll probably bring fact the next episode. I'm going to be answering some of the questions that came through on that line and I'll answer your questions on one of the upcoming episodes and move forward again. You can get the download of the guidebook@melabraham.com session 20 or you can text mylegacy one word mylegacy no spaces to 38470 and you'll get the download link then. I hope you found this enjoyable. I hope you found it valuable. Go out there, make a difference. Go out there, build your business. Be bold. Be vibrant. Be energetic. Go out there and live your life your way. So until we get a chance to see each other in the next episode, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant. See you soon. Cheers. Bye.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you subscribe so you get access to all of Mel's business and success tips. And if you like this episode, share it with a friend. If you have a specific business or success question, you can ask it at www.askmelnow.com. remember, it's all about being bold, dreaming big, and living life your way because the world needs you. Until the next episod May your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant.

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