Last Friday, I dropped $25,000 on a consultant.
When I woke up that morning, I wasn’t even thinking about what I hired the consultant to help with. By 9:00 AM, the money was out of my account.
What happened in between? I wrote a blog post on experience.
That blog post made me think about our pricing. Specifically, I was mulling over how most of our projects are under the average minimum project pricing that came out of the research I completed on agencies last month (for the channels we sell through.) I was wondering if we were doing comparatively smaller projects or selling ourselves short?
That got me thinking about benchmarking and what or who would be a good resource? That’s when I remembered the consultant I hired.
It was a $25,000 investment before breakfast. But it wasn’t an impulse buy. I liked having the $25,000 around.
What I came back to was my vision for the business. My vision is to have our agency in a leadership position within a market. Not in the sense of getting the most customers, but in the sense of leading the market towards solutions. Today, I don’t know what that market is- we don’t have a market oriented position. Beneath all the near term optimizations we’re working on, I’m thinking about that big question.
Drawing on the experience of a consultant who knows businesses of our type and the kinds of ecosystems they thrive in will accelerate that. And there is a good chance they’ll generate a ROI in a year or two solely by tweaking our pricing.
Having a vision helps to make hard decisions clear. Even an imperfect vision. That’s one of the reasons that it’s worth thinking deeply about where you want to end up.
Featured image is The Judgement of Solomon by Gaspar de Crayer, c. 1620. Used under public domain.