Peter Winick argues that experts earn more by solving complex organizational problems rather than selling workshops and keynotes. Stop pricing by format. Find the big, hairy challenges your clients face and position yourself as the person who solves them. The routine work follows naturally at lower rates.
Hey there, it's Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and here's today's challenge or thought, and that is this: would you like to make the big bucks? A rhetorical question if ever there was one. The answer is typically yes. Well, it's fairly simple to do that, and what do I mean by that? What I mean is if you want to make the big bucks, figure out how to solve the biggest problems for your clients, right? So many thought leaders and authors and experts and such have in essence established a pricing structure, and that pricing structure is often dictated by the modalities or the formats that they put their work out in, right? So if you do a workshop, there's kind of a range of what a workshop would cost. If you do keynotes, there's a range. If you do video-based training series, if you do webinars, all these things are sort of— have a market value, and that's great. And I'm not suggesting that you don't do any of those things, because all those things should be part of the mix. What I am suggesting that you do is think about where inside the organization that you typically work with, do they have a problem, a big problem, not an inconvenience, but a really hairy, complicated, complex problem that you have the domain expertise to assist them in solving? And go after those type of projects, right? The other work will follow, that trickle-down work will follow, but if you think about the biggest problems that organizations have that you can solve, They're going to assign the biggest value to the solving of that problem. So anyway, short theme today is if you want to make the big bucks, figure out how to solve the big problems. Love to hear your thoughts. Thank you.
