After reading the article “The Death of Expertise” by Tom Nichols as reminded of an old parable about knowledge and opportunity costs..
The Graybeard engineer retired and a few weeks later the Big Machine broke down, which was essential to the company’s revenue.
The Manager couldn’t get the machine to work again so the company called in Graybeard as an independent consultant.
Graybeard agrees. He walks into the factory, takes a look at the Big Machine, grabs a sledge hammer, and whacks the machine once whereupon the machine starts right up.
Graybeard leaves and the company is making money again.
The next day Manager receives a bill from Graybeard for $5,000.
Manager is furious at the price and refuses to pay.
Graybeard assures him that it’s a fair price.
Manager retorts that if it’s a fair price Graybeard won’t mind itemizing the bill.
Graybeard agrees that this is a fair request and complies.
The new, itemized bill reads….
Hammer: $5Knowing where to hit the machine with hammer: $4995
A few years after posting this I had a SEO story which illustrated it perfectly.
We were hired on retainer for SEO with an initial 6 month project.
In the first 2 weeks of work, we discovered 5-6 bugs in web site configuration and server configuration, and also that there was a dev version of the site indexed by Google causing duplicate content, and the wrong version of the site was showing in another country.
It was a mess, and was a perfect example of how a traditional ad agency just cannot bring the experience to the table that is required for this work.
Fixing the bugs immediately caused the site to leap in organic rank and organic traffic.
Then, the following week we found a dozen DA 60+ links that were broken, including CNN, CNBC, Techcrunch, NPR, and several mid-tier sites. Our tool suggested the links had been broken for over a year. We redirected these and in 20-25 days there was another jump in traffic and rank.
We invoiced for our first month and there was a complaint from finance – even though we bill a fixed amount and the contract was signed.
My reply…”You’re not paying us for this work, you’re paying us to know what to look for, and for the traffic you got this month, next month and the years to follow that is not going to your competition’s site.”
“The Death of Expertise” book link.
I’ve heard variations of this parable on expertise and pricing from many people. It’s very true: deliver value and charge accordingly. The Graybeard’s price is fair; he solved the important problem, exactly what he was hired to do.