ALASTAIR DRYBURGH

The Strategist For Those Impatient To Do Great Things, and Frustrated With The Usual Methods


Some Good News, And A Warning

First, the good news. You are almost certainly undercharging. I can say that because you are here. That means you have at least a suspicion that you could be charging more. And those suspicions are almost always correct.

But now the warning:

Do not attempt to raise your fees until you have grasped Step 2 and Step 3 of the Intelligent Pricing Architecture process.

Jumping the gun and presenting your value-based proposal without preparing the ground will just blow up the sale, beyond repair. (Believe me, it happened to me many times before I worked out the solution).

Understanding and being able to communicate your full value is an essential first step, but it isn’t enough.

Your prospective client needs to agree. And they look at things in a very different way from you. Step 2 of the process goes beyond understanding the perceived value in the mind of your prospective client. It enables you to shape that perception in your favour.

Even once you cross that hurdle, though, there’s another.

You could convince them that what you are offering them is worth, say, $100,00. But that only means that they would pay $100,000 if they had to. And if there’s someone else offering apparently the same thing for $50,000 it would irresponsible of them to choose you.

Step 3 solves that problem by positioning you as the only viable choice. In a category of one.

Go through all three steps and you can confidently raise prices without risking the sale.

I’ll finish with some more good news. All this is probably easier than it seems. I find that most people most of the time already have most of the building blocks they need. They just need to see them, work out how they fit together and fill in a few gaps.

If you think some help might be useful, I’ll very happily take some time on Zoom with you. I’ll answer these questions:

  1. Are you undercharging?
  2. How much is the potential improvement?
  3. Do you have the building blocks to make the system work? (Very often you do, but just haven’t seen them).
  4. How much time and money, in rough ballpark terms, would it need?

Here’s the link to my calendar.

What Other People Say

“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