I used to think my age was holding me back from charging premium consulting fees – until I discovered the real truth about what drives pricing in our industry. If you're tired of being commoditized, shopped against dozens of other consultants, and forced to compete on price alone, you're focusing on the wrong factors entirely. The problem isn't your age, technical skills, or the "competitive market" – it's that you don't understand the four mechanical drivers that actually determine what clients will pay. Once I learned these principles, everything changed: I stopped being a wandering generality and became a meaningful specific, moved from implementation to strategy, and transformed from a commodity into the obvious choice for high-value problems.
Show Notes:
- The commodity trap exposed: Why consultants get shopped against 100+ competitors and how limiting beliefs about age, skills, and market conditions are actually irrelevant to pricing
- The existential problem principle: How to identify and solve the "hundred thousand dollar problems" that keep executives up at night and command premium fees
- From $2K to $100K problems: The truth about why you can't just "dress up your pricing" and charge more without elevating your value proposition
- The specialist advantage: Real-world example of how a cardiac surgeon commands higher fees than a GP – and how this applies directly to consulting
- Strategy door vs. implementation door: David C. Baker's framework for walking into higher-value engagements and why strategy mistakes cost more than implementation mistakes
- The meaningful specific transformation: How to go from being relevant to everyone (and chosen by no one) to being irrelevant to 90% but indispensable to your 10%
- Confidence as a pricing multiplier: Why solving the same problem repeatedly builds both market confidence and self-confidence that shows up in every client interaction
- The four mechanical drivers: Complete breakdown of problem size, problem specificity, market positioning, and engagement level that actually determine your fees
