Below are all the images contained in the book for you to refer to if you have been listened to the audio version

The traditional use of timesheets is for your team to record time spent on jobs and clients, and at period end review how much there is on the client’s ledger (work in progress) to calculate the price to charge.

In reality we both know that the client rarely gets charged what’s actually on the timesheet. Instead, you will look at the time costs and then make a judgement. If you feel the amount is too low and know the client will pay more, you will raise a higher amount. Similarly – and most commonly – if you think the amount is too high and the client is unlikely to pay, you will ‘write off’ an amount and raise a fee that you think the client will pay – a bit like this graph

So it’s clear that using time to price is completely arbitrary, and involves judgment from you to raise a fee you think the client is willing to pay. It has nothing to do with time spent.

To repeat: clients are not buying TIME from us. They are buying a result, an outcome, a solution. And they want to know the price BEFORE you start work. There is no link between time and price – only between price and value – and therefore the way you need to think about pricing based upon value is shown in the below four-quadrant chart

If you’re delivering high value, you can charge a high price. Conversely if what you’re doing is low value then you’ll charge a lower price. No link between time and price – only between value and price.

I like to think of the total value we give in two parts – actual and perceived value. Actual value is everything a client gets from us – we’ll talk about that later. Perceived value is what a potential client perceives they will get before even coming on board. This is important to understand. It’s a bit like an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg is only what the prospect sees before they do business with you. Below the surface lie all the real value and benefi ts, but they won’t experience that until they start to work with you.

Perceived value is the only thing a prospect has to go on before they agree to come on board with you.

There are three phases of the customer journey i.e. the stages that a customer will go through when choosing to work with you. The prospecting phase, the meeting phase and the onboarding phase. These three phases are opportunities for you to increase your perceived value in the eyes of the client to get higher prices for what you do and reaffirm to the client that they have made the right choice in choosing to work with you.