Is your advice expensive?  

Well, the thing is right, I don’t know unless I can compare it to something else.   

I’ve had a lot of questions from Advisers over the last couple of days saying, “Ah Kim, we’re getting pushback on our price” (this has been new clients) or “we’ve had existing clients who are now starting to question the value of how much they pay and what they’re getting for it.”  

Or we’ve even had clients come back and say, “oohh please don’t put my fees up next year, this has been a really hard year.”  

So, the challenge is that as humans, we’re creatures of comparison. 

We tend to evaluate decisions that we make relative to, or in comparison to other decisions that we might make.  

So other ways that we could potentially have spent that money or other things that are around about the same ballpark price.   

Problem is with financial advice is often for new clients, they’ve got nothing to compare it to. 

So, any price that you’re going to put in front of me is expensive, when I don’t even have a baseline to compare it to.  

And for those that have been around you for a while, maybe they need to just reframe how they’re perceiving the price of your advice.   

Because you know you’re valuable… I mean you’re doing life changing work and giving them benefits that potentially are going to last forever, hopefully well for their life forever.  

But they don’t always see it like that.  

So a really good way that you can help them understand that yeah, this is value for money and this is worth your spend is to help them compare it to something else that they might spend money on where it’s a similar price.  

So I don’t know, maybe your price is similar to what someone spends at Dan Murphy’s… in a month, maybe in a year.  

Maybe it’s what they spend on streaming and entertainment, maybe it’s something they spend on going out for dinners (when we could go out for dinners) whatever it might be but give me something to compare it to.   

So that I can say, “Wow, yeah, I flick that much money away on, I don’t know, looking good yet for half that price I could actually get advice that’s going to last me well into the future, and give me more money to put into my “look good” spending account, that I can keep looking good for many, many, many more years to come,” whatever it might be.  

So we just got a quote for some new air conditioning because our air conditioning has ‘carked it’ and we’re about to go into summer so we decided we’d upgrade and get refrigerated air conditioning.   

So the people that installed our heater, we got them to come in and they quoted us and we got the quote, it’s about $10K and for anyone who’s had air conditioning before that might mean something to you.   

To us it was like “oh fruit, that’s expensive”.  

But here’s the thing, we thought it was expensive because we’d never bought it before, and we didn’t know what it should cost.   

So we fixed that. We got someone else to come in, give us a quote, it was around about ballpark so we knew that that first quote was ‘on the money’.  

And they’re actually $600 more than the group that gave us the second quote, but we went with them because we really love them.  

We love their work.   

We love the experience of working with them.  

But at least we knew that we were in the ballpark of what it costs to get refrigerated cooling.   

So have a think about how you can help clients understand and compare what it costs them to be with you each year or to sign up in the beginning versus something else they spend their money on.  

And hopefully, when it’s also jam packed with lots of understanding around the value that they’re going to get they’re going to go with you and price no longer will become an issue or a hindrance to them doing all the good work that they can do with you.   

So whatever you do with that, just remember You are Valuable.