258: 4 Strategies to Stop Being Underpaid 

Michele Williams: Hello, my name is Michele, and you're listening to Profit is a Choice. I am so excited to be talking to you today. I'm actually so excited that I didn't wait and get all dolled up to be on the video part of the podcast. I decided in the middle of my work session just to stop and go ahead and share this message. So, I hope you are excited as I am, because we are going to talk about four strategies that will stop you from being underpaid. Do you know what it means to be underpaid? It means a high tolerance for low pay. I think that it is a problem, especially for creatives and certainly in the interior design industry. Now, some of you may be listening to this podcast and you may be thinking, hey, no problem here, I get paid all the time. But my question would be, do you take the money out of the company with ease, without feeling stressed? Some of you may be listening to the podcast and thinking, oh yeah, I have a high tolerance for low pay. Instead, I'm a people pleaser and I want to do great things for other people. Stay tuned because we're going to talk about the four strategies that will help you not be underpaid, but to be paid fairly and to be able to have a profitable company - at the same time.

Every day, empowered entrepreneurs are taking ownership of their company financial health and enjoying the rewards of reduced stress and more creativity. With my background as a financial software developer, owner of multiple businesses in the interior design industry, educator, and speaker, I coach women in the interior design industry to increase their profits, regain ownership of their bottom line, and to have fun again in their business. Welcome to Profit is a Choice.

I usually spend a lot of time on the podcast speaking about overall company financials, but today I really want to dig in a little bit deeper. Some of you may be asking, why do I even need to know my numbers? I recently heard somebody say something along the lines of,” I know that I'm supposed to know my numbers, but I'm really not even sure why they matter”. I want to suggest to you that knowing your numbers does a couple of things. It helps you make sure that you're being paid fairly. It helps you make sure that you can pay all the bills that are associated with running your company. It helps you know when you can hire and how you can pay those people a fair wage for the work that they're doing and have an additional profit in the company so that it's sustainable. Without knowing these numbers, it can be almost impossible to make decisions. And honestly, the stress of not knowing the numbers can create a whole cascade of resulting problems. Knowing your numbers, we throw that out and I've been saying that for probably 20 years. The challenge is we don't even know what it means anymore. So, the numbers that I'm going to help you talk about today are the numbers of what is it that you're pricing. I always talk about an aim with intent to start by pricing based on having your solid foundation. I literally just got off a coaching call where we talked about this. Your solid foundation, your mission, your vision, your why, your values, your strengths, all the things that you do really great and that you are building your business upon. We want to take that information and use it to create the products and services that you're offering. Well, once we know what you're great at, and we offer the products and services, we've got to know how to price that work. That's what we're going to focus on today, is how to price the work that you and your teammates do. Now, I'm not going to talk about it in this particular podcast from the tactics of the hard dollar amounts, but more so about the element of what it is that you're charging for.

Consider this. We're going to talk about it just from an interior standpoint for a minute. A homeowner can go out and buy furniture, lighting, flooring, whatever they want to fill their house without you. Many people do it, not judging it. We have the ability and we are so blessed to walk outside, and to go to a store and to buy anything that we want to buy. However, some people want to be challenged, they want to be stretched, maybe moved outside of their comfort zone, and they want to hire you to do it.

Many don't even have time to manage the project or manage all the details. Maybe they don't even know all the details and some people can't decide. They're looking at three sofas and they don't know which one is theirs. Add all of that up, and they're going to need to hire a professional to help them because it's something that they can't do alone to get the result that they want.

So here are four things that people in that position are trying to hire you for and where there is value so that you can be paid. You probably hear all the time, hire what you're worth. Hire what you're worth. Hire for your value. That's great in theory, but do you even know what it means? Kind of like, I don't know what my numbers mean. I'm going to break it down for you. Here are the four things.

The first one is knowledge. People are paying you for what you know, or they're paying you for what you have the ability to learn and to know. We all have such information available to us, but we don't all know the same things. It's a simple fact. Knowing something gives you the ability to have an opportunity to do something differently than someone else. For example, that's why a more senior team member is going to be paid more than a more junior team member, they simply know more. They can do more with what they know. Over time, we tend to know more. I bet you if you're like me, you learn something new every single day. Now, I may not have the opportunity to put that into practice every day, but I learn something every day. That is important. Knowledge is something that people pay for. And we need to price for it.

The second thing is expertise or experience. Knowledge enough isn't alone. People aren't just paying you for what you know. They're paying you for the knowledge and action, and that is your expertise or experience. As we've stated before, you can't fast-track experience. You can't fast-track expertise. You've got to practice. You got to work at it. You got to be in the trenches a little bit. You got to get knocked down and get back up. That's what provides expertise. That's what gives us the ability to say, I've been there, I've done that. I’ve got the T-shirt. The expertise is what does know. It's one of those things. I always use this kind of jokingly, but to get the point across, it goes something like this. I know how to pull teeth. Like I pull baby teeth for my children. Right? We always help them do that. If you were to call me and say, hey, Michele, like, I've got a problem with my molar, can you come pull it? Nobody would call me because I know how to pull the tooth. They're not going to do know. I make the joke unless we're on Castaway like Tom Hanks, and you have to pull your own tooth. I mean, you might enlist my help at that point, but by and large, that's not what people are calling me to do, even though I know, in theory, how to do it. I have zero expertise when it comes. To pulling adult teeth. Zero. So, they're not going to call me just because I know it. What they're going to do is they're going to call me for what I know how to do. I know how to help you price your work. I know how to help you build your business. I know how to help you get out of overwhelm. I know how to help you put numbers around what it is you want to do or to reduce the work so that you can work less and make more. I know how to do that. I've done that. They'll call me for that. They're not going to call me to pull teeth. They're not going to call me to design their entire rooms because I don't tell anybody that I would do anything like that. That's not what they're calling me for. But they're calling you for that because that's your level of expertise, and it can't be fast-tracked. We always say you can't take the elevator to the top, you have to take the stairs. People are willing to pay you for what you know and the fact that you can put it into practice and that you are an expert at doing it so that you can tell them what the outcome is going to be, and you can hold to know. Watching something on YouTube or watching it on the Internet is not a transferable skill when you're actually doing the task. I want to invite you today to price for your expertise.

The third thing is time. It takes time to do what we're doing. Everything you do takes time. It's not fast in some cases. And honestly, the more that we see damage claims or the more that we have hiccups along the way, it takes more time and more time. We're always trying to recoup that time. Time is a currency that we spend in our calendar, and people will pay us for the time that we have available to devote to their project. Usually, it's because they don't have the time themselves to spend on the project. They would rather spend their time at work. Maybe they have a corporate job. Maybe they're a doctor, maybe they're a lawyer, a nurse, a teacher. Maybe they're retired and they want to be playing with their grandchildren, or, maybe they are on a tennis team and that's what they'd rather be doing. They're having to make a decision about their time and about what's important, and they are making a decision when they hire you to use your time in place of their time. That's the same reason that we talk about white glove service or about letting us order and do procurement for you so that we can do it and know what to do. We have the expertise to order it, to fix it, to take care of it, to white glove receive it, to bring it to your house, to install it, to do all the things, all that time that it takes, we're saying that we will do that for them, and that is valuable. They will pay for that. They are paying us so that they can have their time back, and reclaim their time to do something else. We need to capitalize on that: price for your time.

The fourth strategy that I want to, implore you to look at is stress relief. When we talk about the overall value of what we bring, stress relief is a big part of that. We walk around with such a mental load these days, so much information in our heads, on our hearts, and things to do, and the never-ending task list. You know, I've made jokes on the podcast. My task list is like rabbits. It has babies at night and I wake up and I’ve gotten more things on the task list. Everybody's walking around like that and it's not great. When you are brought in as an expert to solve a problem that they can't solve alone during a time frame where they can go do something else while you're taking care of it, the stress relief of the mental load of letting those things go, knowing that they are in good hands, is valuable. We need to be pricing for that as well. When they're handing out that work, they don't have to micromanage it, they don't have to We're all looking at what we can hand off to somebody else's task list. Stress relief is a big deal. check up on it, keep up with it, especially if you do your job well and you're communicating back to them. They've hired you to take care of everything. I would like to ask you to price for the stress relief that your work brings.

The use of these four strategies when you're looking at your overall company value and worth is really important. Here's the cool part. This is really the bridge as I explained it in the coaching call today, this is the bridge between knowing the foundation that you've built your business upon and your pricing and your financials. The bridge is knowing what you're charging for and how you're doing it. Looking at these four things, the knowledge, the expertise, the time, and the stress relief, will really help you understand what people are paying for. So, when you think about that and you think about it, just think about it for one job, take one job that you've done and really sit down as part of your postmortem, we would call it, and think about what extra knowledge did we have to have on this job? Where did our knowledge really shine and show up? Where do we have expertise that maybe somebody else doesn't have? What do we know and what do we know in action that got us through on this job? How much time did it really take us? What was the investment of our time and, the outcome of this particular project? And then what kind of stress relief did we bring them? Where did the client tell us that? Listen, you can use all that as part of your marketing message. You can use it in part of your process, you can use it in part of building that trust and that faith to say, hey, here, you guys can hand this off to us now. It's kind of like handing off the baton. You've done this part, you've hired us. We are going to walk it the rest of the way. We're going to collaborate with you, but you don't have to do the heavy lifting. We're doing the heavy lifting and that's what you're paying us to do. So, it's actually a beautiful conversation of moving them out of the day-to-day decision-making so that you can make it so that you don't have both hands in the same pot kind of thing. That is frustrating when you're going through a project.

You can also use this when you're looking at your teammates and you're considering what level are you in the company. Are you a junior? Are you a staff-level designer, senior designer, or team member? Because the knowledge, the expertise, the amount of time it would take, the stress relief, or the independent work that can be done is very different at a junior level than at a senior level. You can use these same four strategies. When you're just looking at career paths, the opportunities within your firm.

When a business prices to be profitable and they price conscientiously, knowing what they're bringing to the table, then when the client or somebody asks you something, you're not going to undervalue your work. When they ask you why does it cost ABC or XYZ, you're not going to feel shame. You're not going to feel like you have to apologize for your pricing. You're actually going to feel very confident because, you know, the building blocks that were used to put your pricing together.

Pricing is so much more than just marking up or discounting down or giving a percentage off or looking for a margin. It's really a thoughtful approach that is a mixture of mathematics and art. It's the art of pricing is what we all call it in the industry. Understanding pricing and understanding your attitude around it is really going to allow you to move forward with confidence and not cockiness. Nobody wants somebody who's cocky to be around them. Knowing your numbers and what they mean, again, will keep you from being offended if people ask you about it. If anything, it gives you an opportunity to stand back and go, wow, I'm so glad you asked. Let me share with you what I've done, how I got here, what went into it, like a little bit more to show them that you're not fly by night. You've done the work. You didn't just choose a number out of the air. You didn't just buy somebody's pricing guide and start using it. You know where the pricing comes from. You're going to feel amazing in that process. Again, it's going to reduce shame and help you not feel embarrassed.

If you want to begin learning about your finances, about pricing, about value and worth, and all those things, that's exactly what we do in the Scarlet Thread community that I'm building and have been building. That's what we talk about. We talk about these nuances. It's not just $3 with a 1.5 markup. It's so much more than that. There's a lot of nuances here and I want to invite you into the community to talk about that.

I've got lots of free downloads on my website. You can start there at ScarletThreadConsulting.com. Go in and look at the resources tab to begin. You can also sign up for our monthly coaching that we do by email. We send you two emails a month with coaching tips in there that will move you forward and help move the needle forward in your business. I would love to connect with you that way as well. You can find that sign-up on the Scarlet Thread Consulting website.

I want to ask you to choose to not be underpaid, choose to understand, do not have a high tolerance for low pay, and then choose to be profitable because profit doesn't happen by accident.

Profit is a Choice. Is proud to be part of thedesignnetwork.org, where you can discover more design media reaching creative listeners. Thanks for listening and stay creative and business minded.