Know Your Value

Live from the Hounslow Workshops. Simon tells a story about knowing your value and how much you should charge your customers.

Note: This transcription has been generated with AI and there may be errors present. 

 

Imagine a power station, it’s a nuclear power plant. And the engineers are getting really concerned, they’re really worried because there’s alarms going off, and all of the dials in the control room of the nuclear power station are going round into the red, and there’s steam coming out the pipes, and they’re thinking, I think this thing’s gonna blow. We better figure out how to fix it and fix it quickly. Because we don’t want a nuclear incident. I mean, this is in our lives are at risk. And all the engineers are trying to figure out what the what the problem is, they can’t work it out. So they get on the phone. And they ring, a nuclear consultant engineer. And the consultant engineer turns up with his case, and he’s got some tools in this case and clipboard and some computer equipment. And he turns up, he listens to the engineers, he listens to the boss of the power plant to try and figure out what the problem is. And then he starts walking around and listens to some pipes, has a look at the dials and the control centre. scratches his face a little bit. And then he thinks I know what the problem is. He reaches into his bag, takes out a wrench walks up to a pipe on the wall, wax the pipe. And then there’s a hissing sound. And all the dials go back to normal, the alarms stop sounding, the consultant engineer has saved the day. And the the manager of the power plant says, Wow, thank you so much. Because if you hadn’t have done that, we would have been in big trouble, please can you send me your invoice. So he goes home and he makes the invoice and sends the email back to the manager of the power plant. Here is the invoice for the work that I completed for you this morning. And it says 9000 pounds for consultancy to fix the nuclear power plant. Okay. And the manager the PowerPoint opens the email and sees this thing and goes 9000 pounds. I’m not paying that. So he sends the email back. I’m not paying 9000 pounds, because all you did was whack the pipe. Please can you adjust your invoice accordingly. So the guy thinks Okay, I’ll adjust the invoice accordingly and he rewrites the invoice and it says to whack the pipe. £5 to know where to whack the pipe £8995 like it’s the value of what this guy is is brought. That’s the bit that you really want to charge for. Not necessarily the actual you know what I mean?