Minute SHIFTS That Matter #31

I sold my brokerage. Years later I found out what I'd handed over.

I sold it. Signed, done, moved on.

Then years after that, I started building a new one.

And that's when I found out what I'd actually given away.

Here it is in my own words, out of a coaching session this summer:

"I was mad at myself for having sold the other brokerage with all of the stuff that I gave them for the price I gave it to them, because there was so much I needed to rebuild again, way more than I had remembered. And you don't realize it until you start redoing it. It's like, all the SOPs, all of the... The documents, all of the training material, everything I built. Start over."

The price was the smallest part of it.

The part that stung was sitting down to write the onboarding doc for the second time in my life, and realizing I'd handed the first one over like it was scrap. The SOPs never felt like an asset. I wrote them. The training material never felt like an asset either. It felt like Tuesday.

You only find out what the pile was worth when you have to build it again from nothing... and the pile turns out to be way bigger than the version you'd been carrying in your head.

Maybe you sent a number last month and shaved it before anyone pushed back.

Maybe you've never once raised the price on the thing you're better at than anybody in your market.

Maybe there's a proposal in your drafts right now with the right number on it, waiting for you to feel ready to send the right number.

Maybe you know exactly what you'd charge if the work belonged to somebody else.

I say this to clients all the time. You play defensive with your money. And when you play defensive with money, guess what it does? It goes away.

Defensive doesn't look like fear. It looks like reasonable. It looks like market conditions, and being competitive, and not wanting to be the expensive one. Every discount I ever gave had a good argument attached to it. That's what made them so easy to give.

There are money rules that you don't even know you have, and you're going to face them. They were set a long time ago, by somebody who wasn't running what you're running now. And they price your work before the spreadsheet is ever open.

Your work is worth what it's worth, whether or not you can see it from inside.

You built the thing. The systems exist. The training exists. The judgment you use on a hard file at 4pm on a Friday exists, and there's no version of that you can download. None of that changed when you got quiet about the price. What changed was who was doing the pricing.

And here's the part I want you to keep: that money is not you. You are not that money. The number is just the number. It stops being a verdict on you the moment you stop letting it be one.

So the next time you set a price, price the work itself. Let the discomfort of saying it out loud be its own separate thing.

Identity first. Then everything finally works.

See the pattern that sets your prices

P.S. Think of the last number you sent. Now think of the number you almost sent, the one you talked yourself down from. Notice which of the two your stomach reacted to just now. The body knows before the mind does.

Bill