What is your price?
About two and a half years ago, I spent about six months out in St. Louis chasing a salary (bad idea, I’ll discuss the why at another time). One of the few people who I met that actually made an impact on my worldview (usually the sign of someone worth spending some time with) was a guy by the name of Matt Homann. Matt runs his own legal consulting/retreat company and is very big into redefining what it means to be a lawyer (or a programmer, or a doctor, or really anyone who has what they think is a well defined profession).
Recently (well, last month), he was talking about how you should let your client determine the price they pay you. Now, you’d think this concept would fly in the face of my “value yourself infinitely” concept, but I think this dovetails in nicely. Matt is a very confident guy, and he has a lot to share not only with other lawyers but really any professional. He clearly places a high value on his time. If you think about it, this concept is a lot like making whatever employer wants to hire you give a dollar value first.
From Matt’s blog:
YOU DECIDE: Your absolute satisfaction with LexThink isn’t just our goal, it’s the measure of our worth — and the determination of our fee. The rules are simple: you pay us what you feel we were worth to you. You decide, no questions asked. The only rule? We want to know why you paid what you did, and how we could have done better.
What do you think would happen if you took this approach with your future (or even your current) employer? You go into your performance review (or salary discussion, or however your company handles that – remember, your employer is really just your customer) and tell them they can give you whatever raise they feel is justified, but they have to explain why, and what you can do to make yourself more valuable next time around. You let them know that you are having this discussion because you value your time very highly and want to be appropriately compensated, but that you also want to provide a good value to them in return (the classic win-win). What do you think would happen?
Personally, I think you’d get a big raise, and I intend to try that tactic next time I have to opportunity. What about you?
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So, you want to know what's up with the brackets in the name? "Curly brackets (also called braces, or "squiggly brackets") are sometimes used in prose to indicate a series of equal choices" and "Square brackets are mainly used to enclose explanatory or missing material usually added by someone other than the original author, especially in quoted text." So basically, if you really want to be wealthy in life, you have to figure out how to get happy. Since that whole spiel would make a crappy name for a blog, I decided to do something a bit creative with some brackets.
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