When People Think Cheap

When you are busy – and busy making money – you don’t have time to deal with aspects of life that are outside your realm of expertise.  Why would you change your own oil to save $10, when you’re busy making more money than that working?  Instead, you head to the local quick lube pay a little extra, and catch up on phone calls and email on your mobile while someone else does the dirty work.  That is so 2007.

As 2009 rolls out, we’ve seen a very different attitude.  In the A/E/C industry (and others), the amount of available work ground to a halt.  Almost everyone slowed down.  Almost everyone had extra time.  They didn’t have enough work to fill the hours they were hired to work.  One result – dramatic plunges in profitability.

When profits drop, you try to economize.  When people aren’t busy making money, they will often try to stay busy saving expenses.  Insourcing, rather than hiring experts where appropriate.  If you don’t have phone calls to make and emails to catch up on, why pay someone to change your oil?  You’d just be sitting in the reception area waiting.  Instead, you put on some grubby clothes, head to the auto parts store, and you save yourself $10.

Whatever your profession, your clients have likely done the same thing.  In the boom, they scurried around with more to do than time to do it.  With all the deals going on, money was flowing, so the easiest solution to getting work done was to hire you, the expert, to do it.  Now, with deals drying up, your clients have time to do parts of your job for themselves.  Not only is there less work overall, but less of the available work filters down to you.

Your value has changed.  In the “old days” a key part of your value was simply ability and availability.  You could do the work, and do it well enough to be worth the price you charged, relative to competitors.  Now, you have a new competitor – the client!  Your value pitch has to focus on how giving work to you is actually more cost effective than doing it on their own.  When you change your own oil, do you do a 24 point inspection?  Do you check all the fluids, lubricate the chassis, etc?  What effect will it have on your car to NOT do those things?  Besides, do you like to change your own oil, or are you just trying to save a buck?

You’ve got to understand the same case with your clients.  What are they doing (or trying to do) without you, that you used to do for them?  What are they doing, that they really wish you would do for them again?  Have you asked?  They may not only need help doing something, but might need help justifying to their boss why it’s more valuable and cost effective for you to do it instead.  Have you helped your client understand all the ways you can help them save money, and helped him give you the work?  Have you helped your client understand the risks of not employing an expert do to things that really need an expert to do well?