About This Episode
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, where I explore what it really means to achieve commercial success without burning out.
In this episode, I take a look into a common pitfall I see among high performers: equating the value of our work with the time or visible effort it takes.
If you’ve ever felt uncomfortable charging properly for work that comes easily to you, or held back because it didn’t take long to deliver, this conversation is for you. I’ll reveal why clients truly pay for results, not hours spent, and how adopting a value-based approach to pricing can transform the way you position your expertise, set your fees, and describe your work.
It’s time to shift your thinking about worth, so you can finally charge not for your effort, but for the genuine impact you create.
Key Themes
- Clients pay for results, not effort
- Expertise compresses time, increases value
- Time-based pricing undervalues experts
- Pricing should reflect outcomes, not input
- Shift mindset from effort to impact
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Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. If you’ve ever felt guilty charging for work that came easily or you undercharged because something didn’t take very long, this episode is going to help you change the way you think about what your work is actually worth. Foreign. Welcome to the Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble. Because success shouldn’t cost everything. Hello. Hello. Welcome back.
I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers coach, and this is where we explore what it really means to succeed commercially and sustainably, and in a way that makes sense. We have been covering a lot of ground in this second series. We’ve looked at the hidden psychology of money, looked at why overachievers systematically undervalue themselves. We looked at the ceiling that hard work alone eventually hits. And in the previous episode, we looked at why charging more feels so uncomfortable and what that discomfort is actually made of. In this episode, I would like us to go deeper into something that’s been running as a thread throughout all of these conversations, the relationship between value and effort. We’re doing this because there is a way of thinking about this that most overachievers have never fully examined. And when they do examine it, when they really, really explore it and take time to think about, tends to change how they think about everything from pricing to positioning to the way they describe their work.
The central idea is simple, but its implications are significant. Clients do not pay for your effort, they pay for their results. That’s what we’re looking at in this episode. If you enjoy this episode, if you find it useful, do remember to give us a Like a comment, a Share subscribe to us on your favourite platform. Review us on your favourite platform. Share it far and wide with your friends. And let me start with something concrete. Imagine two people.
Both of them are consultants, both of them working with a similar type of client on a similar type of problem. The first consultant takes three weeks to diagnose the issue and to develop a solution. They work methodically. They document everything carefully. They put in the hours. The second consultant has seen this exact type of problem dozens of times before. They can diagnose it in a conversation and they can outline a solution in an afternoon. The work looks almost effortless.
If both consultants were to charge by the hour or by the day, the first consultant earned significantly more. But which one created the more value for their client? I’m going to say almost certainly the second one. The client got to the answer, but much more quickly. They spent less time in the problem and they could implement a solution sooner. And they had the benefit of someone who’s navigated this territory many, many times before. Which means the solution was more likely to be more reliable, more refined, less prone to errors that a less experienced approach might make. The second consultant’s expertise is the more valuable of the two. But the pricing model rewards the first consultant’s time.
That’s the effort trap in its clearest form. And it’s the model which most overachievers are running, unfortunately, often without examining whether it makes any sense. Excuse me. Here is a version of this which I have encountered directly in my own work, and something I think many of you will recognise. Early in a coaching relationship, someone presents a challenge that they have been wrestling with for months, sometimes years. To them, it’s really complex. It feels like there’s lots of knots in there. Through the conversation, through the right questions, the right reframe, the right moment of clarity, something shifts, the knot loosens.
They can see it differently. What felt stuck starts to move. That might happen in 40 minutes, it might happen in 20. Now, the effort involved in my part is. It’s relatively modest, let’s be honest about it. The years of experience, the pattern recognition, the instinct for the right question, all of those are invisible. What is visible is a conversation that didn’t take very long. And there’s a version of thinking which says, I can’t charge much for that.
It didn’t take long, it wasn’t hard. But that thinking is measuring the wrong thing entirely. The client didn’t pay for 40 minutes of conversation. The client paid for the end of a problem which had been costing them. It costing them clarity, costing them in energy, costing them in decisions not made. They paid for an end to the end of a problem which had been costing them for considerably longer than 40 minutes. The value isn’t the time, it’s the shift. And the shift was possible precisely because of everything that came before the conversation.
The training, the experience, the accumulated understanding of how these patterns work. None of that showed up in the room as visible effort, but all of it was present in the result. Here’s something for you to think about, something to pause and meditate upon. Think about the work you do that comes most easily to you. The things that feel almost natural, you know, where you can produce a result quickly without a great deal of visible effort. Now think about how you price that work or how you talk about it. Do you charge fully for it, or does the ease of it make you feel like you should be Charging less. Like you haven’t quite earned the full amount if it didn’t cost you much to deliver.
And if that’s true, my question to you is, whose framework are you using to measure worth? Because it almost certainly isn’t the framework your client is using. I remember one time I managed to break a key in the patio doors, my house’s patio doors. Broke a key in the lock, stupid. But hey, it happens. It would have taken me ages to somehow fix that. I’d have probably ended up breaking the lock in the process. I phoned a lock keeper. They came, offered them a cup of tea or coffee and said, no, it’s fine, I won’t be very long.
Within five minutes, they had the old broken key removed. They changed the lock, sorted everything for me in under five minutes. Was I happy to pay their high fee? Absolutely. It only took them five minutes. But what about the years of training they had, the experience they had, and the fact that it saved me the hours, if not more of effort? Here is the distinction that I would like to make explicit. Time and value are not the same thing. They never were. But there is a pricing model.
Charging by the hour, charging by the day, charging by the unit of effort. There is a pricing model that treats them as though they are. And that model, applied to expertise, systematically undervalues the people with the most to offer. Because expertise does something interesting to the relationship between time and output. It compresses it. The more you know, the faster you can produce a result, the more experience you have, the less visible effort your best work requires. Which means the better you become at what you do, the more a time based model penalises you for it. And that’s not a marginal quirk, it’s a structural problem for overachievers.
They tend to be genuinely expert at what they do. It is a significant problem. Now the alternative is to price on value, on the results the client receives rather than the time it takes to produce it. On the impact rather than the input. And this requires a different conversation with clients, a different way of scoping and presenting work, a different set of questions at the start of an engagement, ones that are oriented toward the outcomes rather than the deliverables. It also requires a different internal story about what you’re selling. You are not selling your time, you are not selling your effort. You are selling your expertise and the results that that creates for your client.
That’s what you are selling. And those are worth considerably more. There is something here worth understanding about why clients actually hire people. You don’t get Hired because of how hard you work. You get hired by your clients because they have a problem they can’t solve as effectively on their own, and they believe that you can help them to solve it. That is why they hire you. The problem has a cost. It could be a financial cost, such as revenue not getting generated, inefficiency not resolved, opportunity not captured.
It might be a more personal cost, stress not reduced, or clarity not found, potential not realised. Whatever it is, there is a cost to the problem. And the longer that problem continues unsolved, the greater that cost to your client will be. And the value of your work is directly related to how much of that cost it removes. When you frame your work that way, as the removal of a cost or the creation of an outcome the client couldn’t produce without you, the conversation about price changes fundamentally. You are not justifying your hours. You are describing a result. And the question shifts from is this a fair rate for my time? To is this a reasonable investment given the outcome it creates? Those are very different conversations, and they lead to very different numbers.
Most overachievers, because they’re oriented towards effort and delivery rather than outcome and impact, conduct the first conversation when they should be having the second. The shift is not complicated, but it requires genuinely believing that what you deliver is worth more than the time it takes to deliver it. And for many overachievers, that belief that’s still a work in progress. So here is something practical for you to consider the next time you are preparing a proposal or having a conversation about what you charge, start from a different place. Instead of calculating how long the work will take and applying a rate to that, start with a question. What is the outcome the client most needs? And what is the cost to them of that outcome not being achieved? You don’t always need to put that calculation in front of the client, but knowing it yourself changes how you frame the conversation. It anchors your thinking in value rather than thinking in effort. And that shift, as internal as it is, tends to come through in how you speak about your work, how you present your fees, how confidently you hold the number when it’s on the table, pricing from value rather than effort.
It’s not just a commercial strategy. In fact, it’s anything but a commercial strategy. It is clearer. It is a more honest representation of the of what you actually bring to the work. Next episode, we’re going to move into territory that connects directly to everything we’ve been discussing in Series two so far. But it takes it in a slightly different direction because there is there is another reason overachievers don’t earn what their work is worth. And it’s got nothing to do with pricing or belief or identity conflicts around money. It has to do with being seen.
If the right people do not know you exist, none of the pricing conversations we’ve been having matter. You can charge exactly what your work is worth, but only to the clients who find you. That’s coming up in episode 18, the visibility barrier. I think you’ll feel it’s a natural next step from everything that we’ve built so far in this cycle. Until then, here’s something for you to reflect upon between now and the next episode. Think about a piece of work that you’ve delivered recently, something where the client got a real result. And as you think about that piece of work, ask yourself, did I price that work based on what it cost me to produce or based on what it was worth to my client? If there’s a gap between those numbers, if you’re basing it on what it costs you rather than what it was worth to them, that gap is worth understanding. Hey, if all the stuff we’ve been covering in this series and the previous one is making you rethink how you value and present your work, do remember to give us a Like a comment, a Share subscribe to us on your favourite platform Give us a review on your favourite platform so you stay with it all the way through.
Each episode, builds on the last and sets up the next. Head over to KeithBN.link/TOP where you can find this episode. You can find all the other episodes. You’ll find the show notes for this episode along with everything else from today, including the Overachievers Quiz, where you can understand which patterns are most active for you right now. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers coach, and I’ll be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed. Catch you in the next episode.
