Consider the value proposition of what we do (“law-ing”) as it relates to price. Exactly how does value to price measure up when spoken of in terms of legal advice?
Every day of our lives we correlate the value of stuff based on the price of the stuff and the alternative option to the stuff.
When we buy a fast food hamburger, the decision of whether it was good, bad, or indifferent is based on the price we paid and a comparison to a hamburger from a different place, whether the alternative costs $.99 or $25.00. Compared to another $.99 hamburger, our original hamburger might have been great. Compared to the $25.00 hamburger, our judgment of the original was probably “not so good.”
We also would expect the $25.00 hamburger to be better. Price and an associated judgment or expected outcome is in almost everything that we experience.
However, I am submitting that in what we do, “law-ing”, there is no correlation between the price we charge and the result we deliver to our clients. If we are cheap, our clients are not happy with a lesser quality outcome. If we were free, our clients would still not compare us to another free alternative.
This is because we deliver content and content is always measured against “perfect.” We don’t measure content against alternative content at a similar price.
Music on the radio is free. But we don’t lower our standard of judgment because it is free. If we don’t like the new Brittany Spears album and tell all our friends that it is garbage, the price was irrelevant. That is because our judgment of content (in this example the new album) is not reliant on price.
How does this apply to us? It applies to us in a number of ways.
First are client satisfaction, retention, and referrals. We are not going to get a free pass on the quality of the content we deliver because we are cheaper. This leads to two sub-points: 1) we’re not going to try to be cheaper, the price is just the price, and, 2) we have to be perfect (well, not so much us but our content).
Second is client development. We are not giving it away. Free gets us mass. That’s not our goal. Our goal is the impact of our content.
Please consider content as it relates to what we do and allow it to affect your how you operate.