Be Indispensible and In Demand: How to be the First One Hired and the Last One Fired

Welcome to Your Business, Accelerated! Digitally remastered with AI, Your Business, Accelerated! is the go-to podcast for entrepreneurs ready to scale smart. Hosted by Attorney Shaune B. Arnold, it delivers strategic business insights, legal frameworks, and real-world solutions to help you operate with clarity and confidence. Get actionable guidance to protect, grow, and optimize your business…one smart move at a time.

Want clients to keep choosing you—at your full rate—year after year? In this episode, Attorney Shaune shares bold, proven strategies to make yourself essential to every client you serve. Learn how to lead with value, hold your pricing ground, and expand your business without diluting your genius. 

Transcript

Hello everyone, and I am welcoming you this week to your business accelerated. I'm your host, attorney, Shaune B Arnold, and gosh, I'm so excited to be here with you today. We are going to talk about making ourselves indispensable to our clients. But before we go there, I want to deal with just a couple of little housekeeping matters.

First, as we generally do on your business accelerated, I want to make sure that you understand that I am a California business attorney, and that means to the extent that we talk about legal issues here on your business accelerated, they need to be taken in the context of my being a California business attorney, and to the extent that we talk about other issues, we're just fine, but if we do talk about those legal issues, then you need to take those issues to an attorney in your jurisdiction to the extent that they apply to you, and just make sure that there's no difference between the law here in California where I live and the law where you live.

I also want to invite you to listen to my other podcast, legal biz Cafe. On legal biz cafe, we deal with those mindset issues that stymie you as an entrepreneur and make it difficult for you to function and make you just want to just throw your hands up in the air. Compare that with the hardcore business training that you get here on Your Business Accelerated. None of that is necessary, because we've got you covered with legal biz cafe and your business accelerated.

Let's just jump right on in there on tonight's subject, which is how to be indispensable to your clients and still get paid your price. This is a subject that all of us entrepreneurs are dealing with these days, especially with a really, really tight economy. We are dealing with the issue of how to become indispensable.

How do we make our clients choose somebody else to cut at the end of that budget year, rather than us? I have some tips for you tonight, as I usually do, the first thing that I think you should really think about when you're considering how to make yourself indispensable and fully paid.

The first tip for you this evening is to improve your client's condition. You know, when you are the solution to your client's problem, your client is going to think of you as a member of their team. They're really going to think of you as even though you're somebody who is outside the company. They're going to think of you as an indispensable member of that team. And they will get rid of other things before they get rid of you.

So, really think in terms of what problems your client is really experiencing, and how you can be the solution to those problems. I would also like to offer to you that you really need to consider your products and your service and also your underlying relationship with your client in terms of your products. You want to make sure that your products are providing that solution that we talked about earlier, faster than anyone else in the marketplace is able to.

Provide them, you should also be able to provide those solutions better than your competition, or at least differently than your competition provides those solutions. Think about your service, and you know, we talked last week about looking at other industries and seeing how those industries are providing solutions to the marketplace.

Is there a way that you can reach across there and pull in something new, something different, that your competition is not actually providing to your client something that is going to make your solution a little bit faster or a little bit better, or perhaps just a little bit different? Sometimes you don't need to be better, you just need to be new in this marketplace, in this day and age.

Unfortunately, we are so instant access oriented in the marketplace that a lot of times, clients just don't have longevity on their mind. And so they're constantly casting their eyes about the marketplace, looking for the next thing. And so make somebody's job on your team that of casting their eyes about the marketplace and finding out what's new and what's sexy.

What can you provide that nobody else is providing that's going to really help you in dealing with clients, because unfortunately, clients tend to be very odd. They don't have the sense of commitment that we had in years past.

So, stretch out and make yourself a little bit different. Here's something as well for those relationships that that you are going to be entering into. Really look at whether you can be a conceptual partner on your client's projects, as opposed to being someone that is task oriented.

In other words, I want you to really think about being integral to whatever your partner is doing. Think about what it is that they are looking to provide to the marketplace. This requires you to look a little bit past what you do for a living and think about your client, and think about what they are providing to the marketplace, and try and help them think outside the box and see what you can do within their projects to actually affect those outcomes, and not just be somebody that does x, y and z, but you're really thinking down the line and around the corner, down the block and across the way, how can you be a resource to that client, so that they're not just looking to their in house team, they're looking to you be outcome oriented.

Okay, so let's talk about your fees for a moment. This is a really big one for a lot of people. Fees have to be valued by the client, but even more importantly, your fees have to be valued by you. I want you to really consider your fees based on the outcome that the work that you provide is going to provide to the client.

Someone asked me yesterday, how much do you charge? And I actually had two different answers for them. I gave them an hourly fee, and then I said to them, but you know, for the products, for the projects that you are contemplating, here, they are really short-term projects. For short-term projects, I tend to give a project fee so that my clients are not paying me by the hour.

I tend to think about it from the client's point of view. If I know what I'm going to do for that client has a quick beginning, middle and end, the fees for something like this I can really quantify. It behooves me then to come up with a project price so that my fees are really discernible to the client from the outset.

Sometimes, however, you really do have to hold out for your price. And this is something that I also encountered some time ago in dealing with a nonprofit agency. They called me to do a multi day project with them, and the proposal that I gave to them some months back actually gave my price for the project for the several days that I would be working with them, what they attempted to do was shorten the days. Therefore, they wanted to lower the price.

I thought about that for a moment. I thought to myself, in this particular case, I know the value of what I'm providing. The fact that we're going to knock one day off the back end is not going to negate the value of what I'm giving to that client.

I had to make a really hard decision, and the hard decision was when they asked me, oh, well, doesn't that come out to a lower price because we're doing fewer days? And my answer was no, the price is the same. The price is exactly the same. And by the way, if you want me to do this extra thing for you, it's going to cost you even more money. And I gently hung up the phone.

I then spent the next couple of days really agonizing over that, because I wasn't really sure about how the client was feeling about that conversation that I had, about whether or not the hard line that I took with respect to the price was really the right thing to do, but in that case, I said to myself, I understand the value of what I'm bringing to the table for this client. If I lower the price, they are not going to understand the value of what I'm offering to them.

I held on to the price and gritted my teeth. And sometimes you really have to do that, but guess what? Two days later, I got a call from that client. They accepted my proposal at the proposal price. Sometimes you do have to grit your teeth and bear it. But if you know that what you are offering them is at least as valuable as the price that you have set, then I say, stick to your guns.

If your fees are based on the value of the outcome that you are providing to the client, then definitely hold out. Now, you know, some people will sort of scoff at that and say, it's the transformation that really matters, and the price should always give way to the transformation that you're providing. And although I think that the transformation is, frankly, going to be there once your proposal is accepted, you know, you are going to give them all the value. I would not just shoot myself in the foot.

I guess I want you to walk away from this particular conversation with a sharp awareness of the value of your services and whether or not you're going to need to back off that price at all, or whether you have given them something that you can really dig in on the on the back-end and say, You know what? I know what my value is. I'm going to stick to my guns, because, as I said, they came up with the price that I asked for.

So, you know there is no right or wrong to that answer. You just have to know your value, and you have to have a conversation with that client and be absolutely willing to walk away.

So let's assume then that you did get the gig, and you provided a lot of value to the client, and that they were really happy. How do you make sure that you wind up as the consultant in year two and year three and year four, etc. Well, I would suggest that you attempt to broaden the base of the services that you're providing.

Some people would disagree with that. Some people would say that what you have to do is absolutely specialize, because if you don't specialize, you'll die. And while I agree with that, going in, the client needs to be very, very certain who you are, what you provide, and what your reputation is in providing the outcome to them.

So, while I certainly agree with that, when you are getting down the line in services, you're going to find yourself sort of running out of road with a particular client. So you'll, you'll need to broaden your perspective with respect to that particular client and what they need. So even though you're offering broader services to those clients, you don't necessarily want to offer those broad services to your incoming clients.

You might want to maintain that narrow focus so that you can really pound out that reputation in the marketplace. It really is up to you.

Some people think that to specialize in the first instance and then never go wide is the right thing. I tend to think that go deep and then go broad. I tend to think that you will have a a longer lasting business if you can go deep and then go broad.

Another tip for you this evening is to establish the growth at the high end of your business and then abandon the low end of your business. That's a tactic for when you've been in business for some time.

So, that's a way to get that movement through the marketplace. And one other thing that I would like to discuss with you is, as you take on new markets in your business, then change the way that you actually advertise to those markets, really consider them, because the message that you deliver to the market at the top end is not going to resonate with the same people at the low end. So, you have to really hone your marketing message as you're moving through those groups in the marketplace.

And finally, I want you to remember it's not what you make in the marketplace, it's actually what you keep. So really consider making a relationship with a CPA or some tax professional that is really going to work with you on keeping more money in your pocket as you move up the ladder of consulting.

So those are some tips that I have for you today on creating a million dollar consulting business and how to become indispensable to your clients as you move through the marketplace.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for joining me today on this week’s episode of Your Business, Accelerated! I’m attorney Shaune B. Arnold. I invite you to follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter X. In all of those places, I’m known as S.H.A.U.N.E dot Arnold.

In the meantime, and in between time, I am, …as always, reminding you to MAXIMIZE your COMPETENCE to get the CONFIDENCE YOU NEED to succeed.

I’ll see you right back here next week, on Your Business, Accelerated! ...Bye-bye, friends.