The Underpriced Expert
He's better than the guy charging triple. He just doesn't know it yet.
I’m writing this from a conference for fee-only financial advisors.
I’ve done a lot of these events over the past year with all types of professionals, and the conversation is always some version of the same one.
Someone tells me their pricing. I run the number against what I know their competitors charge for comparable work…
…and the gap is usually bigger than they think, sometimes a third of the going rate, sometimes a tenth.
I tell them. Gently. The good news…they could easily be charging more.
And almost every time, they push back.
Not with numbers. With a kind of quiet resistance, like accepting it would mean admitting they’ve been leaving money on the table for years…
And that’s harder to accept than just staying where they are.
I’ve started calling this the Underpriced Expert.
You know one. Based on my informal research, there’s a decent chance you are one.
The Underpriced Expert usually isn’t bad at the work, that’s what makes it maddening to watch.
I’ve sat with financial advisors, consultants, lawyers, coaches, who are genuinely sharper than the person down the road charging three or four times what they charge.
Confidence plays into it.
So does lead flow…or the lack of it.
Because if you don’t know where your next client is coming from, you’re not going to risk quoting a bigger number to the one in front of you today. But the more of these conversations I have, the more I realize how often it comes down to the offer itself.
Most Underpriced Experts describe what they do the exact same way as everyone else in their industry.
“I do financial planning.”
“I do consulting.”
”I’m a lawyer.”
That’s not really an offer. It’s a category, and categories get shopped on price whether you like it or not.
Here’s what actually separates the two.
A premium offer describes a specific transformation, with a unique name, clear enough that a prospect can picture the outcome before they talk to you. A commodity offer just describes a service.
“I do consulting” tells a prospect what category to compare you in. A named, specific offer tells them what changes.
I know this because I lived it.
Over the last four and a half years we raised our own prices 400 percent. We didn’t change what we delivered. We changed the offer, how it was built and how it was shown. Conversion went up anyway.
I saw the same thing play out on a sales call not that long ago.
A prospect came in skeptical, arms crossed, already burned by a competitor’s program. Nothing I said was landing.
What finally moved him was seeing the offer and the process laid out visually.
He could immediately see how and why we differed from what he’d experienced with that competitor. He literally said, “Wow, I see how different this is from what I did before.”
He signed that day. His book’s published now. He’s a bestselling author.
Why did I share these two stories?
Simple… If you’re sitting there right now thinking this is a confidence problem, I’d gently push back the way I did at the conference.
Confidence isn’t the starting point.
A sharper offer and a pipeline you actually trust, those come first.
Confidence follows.
Getting that order backward has a real cost, and it’s simple to see.
Take the gap between what you charge now and what your best-priced competitor charges for the same work. Multiply that by every client you’ll take on this year. Most Underpriced Experts never actually sit down and do the math.
I didn’t either, until I met Bill Baren.
Bill built a coaching and consulting business in the early 2000s and scaled it to eight figures before he sold it. He built the whole thing on a system he created for himself first, because he didn’t like selling either, and needed a way to do it that didn’t feel like selling.
Turned out a lot of his clients had the same problem. By the time he exited, he’d helped over 6,000 coaches and consultants build a better offer and a sales conversation that didn’t make them cringe.
He helped redesign ours.
Within six months, I was out of the sales role entirely.
Not because I’d mastered some new closing technique.
The old model only worked if the prospect connected with me personally, which meant the business was capped by my calendar. The new offer and the structured conversation did the convincing on their own, so someone else on our team could run that exact same conversation and still close the deal.
That’s the difference between a practice that’s capped by its founder and a business that isn’t. It’s the same shift that moved our prices 400 percent.
If part of you already suspects you’re the Underpriced Expert in your market, I have a solution >> here...
If you’re like most professionals I talk to you’re doing great work.
But, your offer is worth a second look.
Steve “Underpriced No More” Gordon
P.S. I’ve got a theory about why the Underpriced Expert fights the diagnosis even with proof sitting right in front of them. More on that next week.
Where to find me: If this is the first issue of mine you’ve read, welcome aboard. Every Saturday I send a new roadmap for building a business that doesn’t need you personally to keep running. If someone forwarded you this one, grab the next one here.