The Horizon Method ยท Chart Your Harbour
Chart Your Harbour: How to Price Your Services
How you price your services decides who buys them, not vaguely, specifically. Every price you charge is a filter on who walks through the door, and a cheap filter only ever attracts people who value cheap. If you're wondering how much you should charge, the more useful question first is: who is this price actually attracting right now?
Start the four free modulesDavid White learned this the hard way, running a telemarketing business out of Newbury called Alterindex, on a five-year office lease that didn't care whether the strategy behind it was working. The strategy at the time was stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap, undercut everyone, take whatever came through the door. It filled the pipeline. It also filled it with the worst kind of customer: the one who chose you because you were the cheapest thing in the water, and who leaves the second somebody cheaper turns up, because that was the only reason they arrived in the first place.
The lease forced a correction. Margins that thin don't survive a bad month, so the pricing had to change, and once it did, so did the customers. That's the whole lesson in one sentence: the price you charge is a filter on who walks through the door, and nothing else. Cheap filters for people who value cheap. Want a different customer, become a different kind of expensive.
It isn't only price. The same audit applies to the harbours you keep returning to, the rooms and referral groups where everyone already knows you. A referral group can feel like one open network and actually behave like several small, closed ones sitting next to each other; you can be well liked inside it and invisible outside it. And it applies to the water you haven't crossed: the markets that look harder to reach from the harbour than they turn out to be once you actually cast off.
Chart Your Harbour is the practice built around this: a one-time, three-question audit, written by hand, that takes about three minutes.
- What price filter are you running, and who does it attract?
- Which rooms do you keep returning to, where everyone already knows you, and what have they actually produced lately?
- What water haven't you crossed, and what do you actually believe is on the other side of it?
Written down now, a mismatch between what you charge and the customers you actually want is cheap to fix. Left unwritten, it's a considerably more expensive lesson a year from now, in lost revenue and time spent serving people who were never going to become the client you wanted.
The Chart Your Harbour worksheet inside the Horizon Method app walks you through all three questions and keeps the dated record in your Ship's Log, so the audit is something you can check back against, not just something you did once and forgot.