ALASTAIR DRYBURGH

Pricing Strategies for Consulting Firms and Creative Agencies


Are You Undercharging?

Kudos to you for even asking the question. It raises you from the mass of people who see things as they are, into that smaller group who see them as they could be.

Here are some of the symptoms:

  • You know others are charging more. For instance, I have heard things like “McKinsey charge 5x what we do for this service, and don’t do it any better” or “big Silicon Valley PR firms charge twice what we do, and we can do things they can’t.”
  • A client has just unhesitatingly accepted your largest option, leaving you with a sickening feeling that you’ve left a lot of money on the table.
  • You lose a pitch and then hear on the grapevine that it’s gone to someone else who charged twice as much.
  • You and your colleagues struggle to agree on pricing.
  • You just look at what your work achieves for your clients and think “surely those results are worth more than that?” A client once said to me “If I’d done this a few years ago I’d be millions of pounds richer by now.” That didn’t make me feel as great as it should have, because he’d only paid me £30,000.

Whatever your reasons for suspecting that you are undercharging, I offer you the chance to get to the truth. I’ll take you through a carefully designed diagnostic process. You don’t need to prepare (you know your business well enough already), and I do 90% of the hard thinking.

By the end of the session you will know whether you are undercharging or not.

There’s no sales pressure. The aim of the call is to give you the information you need to decide whether upgrading your pricing should be a priority. What you then do with that information is up to you. (If at the end of the call I think there might be value in us working together I’ll say so. If – emphasise IF – you agree, then we fix a second call).

If you’d like to give it a little more consideration before deciding whether to book a call or not, then watch the video where I present my most useful diagnostic.

There’s a link to my calendar underneath the video. If you’re interested but not quite sure, you can email me via this link and I’ll get back to you with my suggestions.

Calendar is below: if it doesn’t display correctly you can also use this link.

What Other People Say

Mark Sherwood Edwards

I engaged Alastair to help me think through how to approach value-based pricing in the context of legal services. Through a series of weekly 1 hour sessions we worked through the best way to articulate the benefits provided to the customer, the different comparisons available for pricing (choosing the right comparator is key), and the best discovery questions to reveal what the customer really values.

Very, very useful. Recommended for anyone who wants to maximise the value they capture.

Mark Sherwood-Edwards, Lawyering for B2B SaaS

“Alastair is skilled at asking the right questions to help unpack the (real) value being offered to clients – and price accordingly. Our work together challenged some of my own assumptions; helped identify the right frames of reference for pricing; and reassure clients about outcomes/benefits. As a marketer I already know about value propositions & pricing. BUT even a seasoned barber shouldn’t cut his own hair … and working with Alastair is another example of when it is beneficial to get help from another expert.”

Matt Day, Meaningful Few

“In the first month, not only did the adjustments we made pay for Alastair’s fees, we identified enough opportunities to pay for the engagement 30 times over the next three years.

We unearthed highly valuable and unique skills that we had been underselling, and now have an entirely new vision for the future of the company. 

We made more progress in an hour a week with Alastair over 4 months than we had in the previous 4 years.”

Sarah Lafferty, Round Earth Consulting

Working with Alastair has had a massive impact already. Moving away from billing hours and £s towards focussing on value has been liberating. It has removed a lot of the noise and given us a lot more confidence in ourselves and the value of what we do. We’re looking forward to the results from 3-4 proposals we have out which are at much higher prices than before.”

Jo Hind, Bird Soup Consultancy

“At Curated we have an ability to look into our clients’ businesses and see things that they can’t because they are too close. It was amazing how an outsider was able to do the same for us, particularly an outsider who draws on multiple different sources. I have never met anyone like Alastair who can bring ideas from psychology, sociology, philosophy and even management theory to bear productively on business issues. We can’t properly calculate the ROI on our work with him because many benefits are still to come, but we are already beyond 10x”

Simon Douglass, Curated Digital