How The Market Appraises You

The marketplace doesn't make decisions necessarily anymore on how long you've been in business or whether grandpa founded the company or what degrees you have.

I once had a client say, “I wanna see your wheel barrel.”

I said, Huh?”

He said, “I wanna see the wheel barrel you use to wheel your balls around in.”

This was right after we had a fee discussion.

If you really want to boil down what separates successful people from unsuccessful people, I think it’s brass balls. And I don't mean in the physical sense, obviously.

I really do think it is the distinctive issue. You know, a whole lot of people just don't have whatever term you wish to use - the guts - to ask the marketplace for precisely what they want.

Because, to a great degree, the marketplace takes you at your own appraisal and I think it is increasingly so. The marketplace doesn't make decisions necessarily anymore on how long you've been in business or whether grandpa founded the company or what degrees you have.

Paul Hartunian once had a course and newsletter about PR and publicity and advised people not even to bother mentioning their academic qualifications (unless you’re a heart surgeon, then you might wanna mention that you got a degree). But in other applications, the media no longer cares about that stuff.

And so often that means that when I was being requested to do a direct mail campaign or an ad, I'm sitting across the desk from somebody and quoting them fees of $25,000, $35,000, $45,000, plus a royalty tied to results.

For example, we used to teach chiropractors to work up to their pitch using their ‘Report of Findings’, which is his or her sales presentation (in case you didn't know, that's what it is).

For a chiropractor, a good report of findings is Problem-Agitate-Solve (for those of you who understand formulas) and a good Report of Finding’s first job is to scare you to death. You must believe at the end of the Report of Findings, that if you don't do certain things, your spine is gonna fall out of your body the next time you get out of the car (that's why they show you a model of a spine, so you can recognize it when it comes out). And then it's the sales presentation.

Well, we taught for years what's called “prepay” in chiropractic, which means that after the problem, after they agitate and provide the solution, they figure up your whole case… kind of like a marketing consultant would quote a budget for a program.

They say to you, “You're gonna have to come 14 times a week for the first three weeks and six times for the next 18 weeks and four times a week for the next and four times a month, we're gonna have to hang upside down. And that all adds up to X.”

We started teaching this in the early 1980s and the average prepay case for doctors who were in our program was $7,000. And we had to teach these chiropractors how to look a patient in the face and ask them for $7,000. It’s the same principle.

All kidding aside, we had to put 'em on video camera and put 'em in front of a mirror and make 'em practice this because otherwise their entire face and body language would give them away. When it came time to ask for the $7,000, the doctor would suddenly look like, you know, an epileptic terrorized.

To them, you know, they're charging like 30 bucks a visit. And so of course all this mental stuff pops up… “Nobody's got that much! Nobody will write a check for that! Nobody will put $7,000 on their credit card!”

And so they have all that in their head, and those who did it were enormously successful. There are still probably 10% of chiropractors where prepay is a significant percentage of their practice. And just as an aside, the patients who prepay generally have a much higher rate of success, in terms of getting well, than do the pay as you go patients.

So the first brass ball factor is this - Set your price. Practice it. And Stick to it.

That’s the beginning of my Brass Balls training, where I go into far more detail on how you can get paid what you’re worth. If you are already a NO B.S. newsletter subscriber, then Midas Touch is yours FREE inside your member portal.

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