I got to a point a few months ago where I was considering asking the prospective clients what they thought was a fair price for a project after discussing their needs and wants.
Great thread!
I actually tried the above several years ago. Most people thought I was crazy. I was just trying to encourage people to haggle more with me, instead of treating my quote as something that was set in stone so that they could call around and try to "beat" my quote.
I am focused nowadays on trying to move out of the residential-work side of things. There is just too much competition in my area, everyone has forced the price of tree work down to poverty levels. I hate constantly hunting down new customers. I hate just scraping by. I'm trying to slowly build a roster of commercial and institutional clients with yearly work - golf courses, cemeteries, schools, churches, etc. I wrote up this thing called the integrated tree management plan, which is all based around us doing regular site visits and communicating with our clients about their own trees. Property managers have enough on their plates without having to worry about keeping an eye on all of their trees. Often times they miss issues for a long time that we would pick right up on, and then we don't end up getting called in until it's too late. So I want to flip things around and be more proactive, instead of just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. It's a big experiment and I haven't actually sold it yet, I'm still working on a pitch and getting some more written material together. I'm not a natural born salesman so I really need to talk myself into knocking on doors and picking up the phone. But that's the plan anyway. Gotta put in the hustle.
In regards to the law of attraction, that in itself is a fascinating concept, in a practical way, not a hocus pocus sort of way. I have seen it time after time in my own life. Two of the very first self-help books that I ever read were James Allen's "As A Man Thinketh", and Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich", both of which focus on this concept. Required reading in my opinion. I have read so many business books, but its the mindset stuff that seems to help the most.
Fascinating idea about perceived scarcity, that is absolutely true. If there was a practical way to implement that into our regular business I would love to see the effect. But I have no idea how you could actually do that as standard operating procedure.
I listened to a great podcast about the guys who invented Airbnb. They said that at the very beginning, everything was fine except for payments. People felt so awkward about handing over money to another person. That is when they tried moving all of the payments over to online, and it fixed the issue entirely. Running all of the payments through a trusted 3rd party made all of the difference. I have thought a lot about that in my own business. Even after doing a huge job for someone, it can still seem awkward at the end, when it comes time for money to exchange hands. I have accepted credit cards for years through my website but hardly anyone ever uses that option. Most people pay with cheques. I have had many people mention how weird it is for them to write me a cheque, they always say something like "you know, I haven't written a cheque in a couple years, I just don't use them anymore these days". And it's true, I don't really use cheques for anything in my own life either. What's the point of saying all that? Not sure. Just something that has been on my mind.
Anyway, hope I'm not derailing here, I could ramble on for hours about this stuff. Peace.
