The Most Dangerous Number on Your Website

0:01Hello, this is Mark Satterfield, and welcome to the Velvet Rope Playbook. Tonight's chapter. The most dangerous number on your website. Don't tell him the price yet. That was the text message sitting on Nathan Caldwell's phone as he walked into the conference room. Unfortunately, Nathan's prospective client had already seen it. Not the text message. The price. Nathan owns Caldwell Risk Group, a small firm that provides private security and risk advisory services to wealthy families, family offices, and senior executives. He's 52, spent 12 years working in corporate security for a multinational company, and has the wonderfully reassuring habit of noticing exits, entrances, and people standing where they probably shouldn't be.

0:52His clients hire him for everything from reviewing security at a second home to coordinating protection for a family traveling through several countries, which means a client might spend$8 ,000 with Nathan or$80 ,000 or considerably more. The man sitting across from him this morning was Charles Hensley. Charles was 67, had sold a medical equipment company three years earlier, and was now worth somewhere north of$40 million. He had homes in Atlanta and Kiowa Island, two adult children and four grandchildren. He'd contacted Nathan because the family was planning an extended trip through South America, and Charles had become concerned about security after another family he knew experienced an unpleasant incident overseas.

1:41This was exactly the sort of assignment Nathan handled. There was just one problem. Before their meeting, Charles had visited Nathan's website, and there prominently displayed were the words, Private engagements begin at$25 ,000. Charles pointed to his iPad. $25 ,000 for what? Now, Charles could easily afford$25 ,000. That wasn't the issue. The issue was that the number had arrived before the value. And that's where the question of whether you should put your prices on your website becomes interesting. I get asked this a lot, particularly by people selling expensive professional services. And my answer to them is sometimes, which I realize is considerably less satisfying than saying yes or no.

2:27but there's a reason. Suppose you sell a very specific$2 ,500 assessment. Everyone gets essentially the same thing. The process is clear. The deliverables are clear. The price doesn't change very much from one client to another. I'd probably put the price on the website. Why make people hunt for it? They know what they're getting. They know what it costs. And the person who was hoping to spend$300 discovers immediately that this isn't for them. Everybody saves time. But Nathan wasn't selling that. Neither are many professionals who work with affluent clients. Nathan's$25 ,000 engagement might involve assessing several residents, evaluating travel patterns, reviewing household staff procedures, and coordinating with other professionals around the family.

3:14Another client might need something considerably simpler, and another might require an engagement well into the six figures. That's where publishing a price can become tricky. Because a price is extraordinarily easy to understand. $25 ,000. I know what that means immediately. Value takes longer. Before Charles could decide whether$25 ,000 was reasonable, he needed to understand what Nathan might see that Charles wouldn't. He needed to understand the risks Nathan was helping him avoid. He needed to understand what Nathan's experience allowed him to anticipate, and he needed to understand what was actually involved in protecting a family traveling through multiple countries.

3:56None of that fit neatly beside a dollar sign. So Charles sees$25 ,000 and makes the only comparison available to him. He compares the number to whatever he imagined the service should cost. That's not where you want the conversation to begin. So there's a useful principle here. The less someone understands the value of what you do, the more expensive your price is likely to look. This has very little to do with whether someone can afford you. Affluent people don't suddenly lose interest in value because they have money. A person worth$40 million can still look at$25 ,000 and think, why in the world would I pay that.

4:38Your job isn't to merely find someone wealthy enough to write the check. Your job is to help them understand why writing the check makes sense. But there's another side to this. Nathan could simply remove every reference to price from his website. Problem solved. Except now he creates a different problem. Someone contacts him expecting to pay$2 ,500. Nathan's team exchanges several emails with them. They schedule a meeting. Nathan spends an hour understanding their situation, and eventually they discover that the engagement they imagine costing$2 ,500 is more likely to cost$25 ,000. Now everybody has wasted an afternoon.

5:19So complete secrecy isn't necessarily the answer either. This is why I like a middle ground for many expensive customized services. Give people enough information to understand the neighborhood without necessarily giving them the exact address. You might say, private engagements typically begin at$25 ,000 with the scope determined by the complexity of the situation, number of locations, and level of ongoing involvement required. But I wouldn't necessarily stop there. I'd immediately provide context. What does that involvement actually accomplish? What problems does it prevent. Why do clients choose this level of service?

6:02What does your experience allow you to see that someone less expensive might or less experienced might miss? In other words, don't simply give me a number. Give me a way to evaluate the number. There's another approach that I like. Sometimes you don't need to publish the actual minimum at all. You can signal the level of engagement through language. You might say that you work with a limited number of private clients on substantial engagements. You can describe the scope of typical projects. You can talk about who the service is and isn't designed for. You can explain that your work is appropriate for situations where the financial consequences of getting something wrong are substantial.

6:43All this helps the wrong prospect recognize that they may be in the wrong place without reducing your service to a price tag. So how do you decide? I'd ask three questions. First, how standardized is what you're selling? The more standardized it is, the more comfortable I'd be publishing the price. Second, how much context does somebody need before the price makes sense? If the value is immediately obvious, price transparency may help. If the value requires explanation, I'd be more careful about showing the number before you've made the case. And third, how much time are you currently wasting with people who could never afford to hire you?

7:26If that's happening constantly, you probably need stronger financial qualifications somewhere in your marketing. That doesn't automatically mean publishing a complete priceless. It means doing a better job of signaling who your service is for. Nathan eventually changed his website. He didn't hide the fact that he was expensive. That would have been silly. The people he wanted to work with weren't looking for the cheapest person they could find to protect their families, but he stopped letting$25 ,000 do all the talking. Before prospects encountered the financial commitment, they encountered Nathan's thinking.

8:03They learned about risks they hadn't considered. They saw examples of situations he'd helped clients anticipate. They understood the difference between hiring someone to provide security and hiring someone to think through the vulnerabilities surrounding an entire family. By the time price entered the conversation, the prospect had something to attach it to, and that really is the point. The question isn't simply, should I put my price on my website? The better question is, at what point does my prospect understand enough about the value of what I do to evaluate my price intelligently? If you sell something standardized, that point may come very early, put the price up.

8:45But the more customized, expensive, and sophisticated your service becomes, the more careful I'd be about asking someone to evaluate the price before they understand what they're actually buying. You don't necessarily need to hide the number, you need to earn the context around it. And if you'd like my help figuring out how to position and price what you sell and how your website and marketing should communicate that value, go to getwealthyclients.com. When you're there, you'll find my books and programs and along with information about how you can work with me personally. That's getwealthyclients.com.

9:21And one last thing. If you're enjoying the Velvet Rope Playbook, make sure you subscribe so we can stay in touch and you don't miss the next episode. And if you know someone who's wrestling with whether to put their prices on their website, pass this episode along. You don't need to make a big production out of it. Just say, you might want to listen to this before you put that number on your website. It could save them a rather expensive experiment. This is Mark Satterfield. I hope you enjoyed this chapter of the Velvet Rope Playbook. I'll be back at you soon with something new. But until then, bye for now.