The Suit and the Man

Summer in upstate New York is hot and heavy, the kind of humid that soaks through a shirt by midmorning. As a teenager at the MasterWorks Festival, a summer music camp for young orchestral musicians, I wore a suit through all of it. My friends were convinced I had lost my mind. None of them could understand how I survived August in wool.

The suit stayed with me long after that summer, through years of live events, until it became part of how people knew me.

People treated me with more respect for it, and the respect did not stay at work. It followed me to the post office counter and the local diner, where people who knew nothing about me treated me as someone worth listening to. They had made up their minds on first sight.

Mark Twain put it with his usual edge:

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

This week the same idea kept coming up in conversations with my peers, only the subject was price instead of clothes. What we charge tells people what to expect from us, the same way that suit did.

The Number Speaks First

Earlier this year I wrote The Fifth P, about how perception sets what you can charge. It works in the other direction too. The price you set shapes how people see the work before they have seen any of it. By the time a buyer reads the number, they have already started deciding what kind of work they are getting and how seriously to take the person who set it.

Warren Buffett has spent decades repeating a line he learned from Benjamin Graham:

Price is what you pay; value is what you get.

The trouble is the order those two things arrive in. The price shows up on day one. The value shows up later, sometimes months later, and until it does, the price is the only evidence the buyer has.

Robert Cialdini tells a story about this in Influence. A friend of his owned a jewelry store in Arizona and had a case of turquoise pieces she could not sell, even at the height of tourist season. Before leaving town on a buying trip, she left her head salesperson a note: everything in that display case, price × ½. The salesperson misread the note and doubled every price. When the owner came back, the case was empty.

The jewelry was the same jewelry. Most of the buyers were tourists with no idea how to judge turquoise, so they did what any of us would do. They looked at the tag and let it tell them.

Anyone who puts a price on their work is standing where that jewelry case stood, whether they sell a service or a product. Our price is the suit our work wears to the first meeting, and like a suit, it has to fit the people who see it.

The Humble Discount

I have underpriced my own work more than once, and I know I have company. Some people can name their price without blinking and mean every dollar of it. I was not one of them. I hedged. I shaved the number down before it ever left my mouth. I quoted what felt safe instead of what the work was worth.

The honest reason was fear of rejection. I was afraid the client would hear the real figure and say no, so I lowered it before they had the chance. Underneath the fear sat a quieter question about whether I was really worth it, and whether someone down the street would do it for less.

A low price tells the buyer the work is small, and they treat it that way. They haggle more and trust less. We wanted to make yes easier for them, and we made it easier for them to take us lightly.

In Ten Percent of What?, I wrote that expertise gets underpriced because buyers cannot see it. What I left out is that the people selling it often look away from it first.

The suit taught me this long before I had words for it. Nobody at music camp asked me to wear one. I decided I was the kind of person who did, and the people around me took their cue from that. Price works the same way. Nobody else will believe in a number we do not believe in ourselves.

My friend Martin Watts just published a book called When Doubt Becomes Design. Marty has spent a lifetime building through uncertainty, and his argument is that doubt is not a character flaw. It shows up when something in the situation has shifted. Instead of asking what is wrong with us, he teaches leaders to ask better questions:

What changed? What is my doubt questioning? What do I need to build differently?

Those questions fit pricing almost perfectly. For most of us, what changed is the work itself. We have years more experience than we had when we set our first rate, and the rate never caught up. The doubt is asking whether the old number still fits, and it is right to ask. What needs building differently is the price.

A price set by feeling drifts toward whatever feels safe. A price set by design comes from what the work delivers and what it costs to do it well.

Perception Validates the Price

Once the work is delivered, the buyer gets to check the price against what they received. The price made the first argument. The work makes the last one.

When I quote high, I am making a promise about what the client is going to get, and from that moment the work has to keep it. When it does, they leave convinced the fee was right, and the next fee is easier to say out loud. When it does not, the price turns into a lie, and people remember that long after they have forgotten the invoice.

The suit helped me make a better first impression. Whether people kept their good opinion of me came down to how I treated them and whether I did what I said.

Bob Burg names this in The Go-Giver as the Law of Value:

Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.

Burg’s law is the guardrail on a higher price. If I charge more, I owe more, and the goal is to give more than the fee asks for. A small price lets us off that hook, which is the other problem with the humble discount. It sets a small promise, and a small promise asks very little of the work.

Wearing It Well

A suit in the wrong setting does the opposite of what you want. In The Most Expensive Thing You’ll Never Sell, I wrote about a Fortune 500 CEO who toured a manufacturing plant in a $30,000 suit. The people on that floor saw the suit before they heard a word, and it told them he was not one of them.

Pricing can miss in either direction. Set it too low, and the buyer decides the work is small. Set it far out of step with who they are, and they decide it is not for them. Wearing it well means knowing who you serve and setting a price that tells them the truth about the work and still invites them in. People first, always, including when the subject is money.

Price is the suit our work wears. Set it from doubt, and we tell the world the work is smaller than it is. Set it by design, and the work has something to live up to.

The suit tells people what to expect. The man decides whether they were right.