The point of this is that lifting your rates just on their own is fine. But really if you do the support work and the other work I’ll talk to you about, it supports the effort of lifting your rate. It makes it easier to justify a higher rate.

Let me explain, if you’re a shit business, you don’t do good work, putting your rates up is probably not a sustainable thing isn’t it?

If you’re a good business owner, a good trade, or a good builder, you may be able to charge a bit more and that’s great.

If you’re a good business owner and a good builder, or a good tradie and you do good work and you do these other stuff, it’s easier for your customers to accept a slightly high price.

You could probably tighten some things up!

Let me explain.

If you do your marketing properly and your branding properly, it’s an opportunity to higher rate. Think about it…

Compare the guy working out of a shitty old clothes, shitty old tools, no signage, the blue books and a diary to manage himself. It feels a bit chaotic.

Compare that to sign-written vehicles, good signage, uniformed people, new vehicles, computers, and ipads plus IT supporting the business.

You’d be more comfortable spending a bit extra with the second team wouldn’t you? You’d feel reassured, you’d feel like they know what they’re doing and you’d feel like they are in control rather than haphazard and perhaps likely to not be there when something goes wrong.

So the branding is very important.

If you’ve got lots of lead because you do your marketing properly and you’ve got lots of quotes and opportunities to win jobs and somebody says you’re a bit too expensive, it’s a lot easier to say “we’ll go with the cheaper guy then.” Those are alright if the that’s not the only job you’re bidding on. Not so easy to say right, so you’re more likely to discount.

So do your marketing properly, your confidence is high.

And if they do go with the cheaper guy you don’t care so much because you’ve got other jobs to bid on right?

If you do your sales properly and you don’t just focus on price, you don’t just throw numbers at them but you talk to them about how you can make their project less risky, you talk about the trust, you prove to them why you’re good at what you do, why you’re a good company to work with, then price becomes less of a factor and it’s not the only thing they focus on, which helps.

If you run your business properly, if you organise and systematise, use IT properly, turn  up when you say you’re going to, don’t make many mistakes, your people are well-mannered and all that kind of stuff…you use your gantt charts, and your project management documentation…

People are more impressed and you feel like you’re worth more.

So tighten up your business! It all counts.

People are happy to pay more if they feel like you’re worth more so set yourself apart from the others and tighten up those aspects in your business. Not just the bits you know you’re good at, the building or the trade that you’ve been training, but these other good stuff too.

Come to my workshop of course, and I’ll help you, I’ll show you how to do it, I’ll show you to make a big difference with the reasonably small investment of time and energy.

There’s a button down there or you could ring me.