Great Consultants Don't Audition
Stop underselling yourself to get a 'foot in the door'. The tactic undermines your credibility and attracts the worst types of clients. There's a much better approach.
Hi, I’m Rich. Welcome to my weekly newsletter, where I share systems and frameworks for scaling your consulting practice from $0 to $1m+ in revenue.
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I frequently stumble across advice along the lines of:
“Do a project for free/cheap now, show the client how great you are, and then you will get a bigger piece of the pie later.”
My experience suggests this is intuitive, but bad advice - because it runs against psychological principles.
This Should Work…In Theory
In theory, this approach is a win-win for everyone.
The prospect gets to test you out and see if you can do the work.
You learn about the client’s needs, build relationships, and customise your approach to attract bigger projects later.
And while this works for some of the largest management consultancies (working for governments and NGOs), it typically fails for solo consultants due to one simple problem: pricing = perception.
Pricing = Perception
Don’t Set A Low Anchor Price
One way to think about this is through an example.
Imagine you need a copywriter for your website. You post an ad and get two responses.
Person 1: “I’ll do this one for free so you can see how good I am.”
Person 2: “My fee is $13,750 for the project.”
Who do you think is the better copywriter?
For most people, it’s response 2—even if they know nothing about the two copywriters.
That’s the problem with ‘free’.
Free is associated with cheap, and cheap is associated with bad.
If you're in dire straits, you might accept the free help, but you always want to hire the more expensive option. That’s because people intuitively think that the higher the fee, the better the quality.
But even this overlooks a bigger problem - you’re not thinking the same way people at large organisations think.
Organisations Care More About Outcomes Than Costs
Low fees imply higher risk
Because many solo consultants are naturally cost-focused, they assume organisations are as well.
That’s not the case.
Organisations are collections of individuals - most of whom have performance targets to meet within any given period. They’re hiring consultants to help them hit those targets within that time frame.
And this points to the problem with the ‘foot in the door’ technique.
The consultant feels they’re offering a low-risk way to test them out and see whether they’re good enough to take on a larger piece of work. But they’re actually presenting themselves as the ‘high risk’ option.
But the risk to the potential buyer isn’t losing money, it’s losing time. They’re scared of hitting their annual targets.
Remember, these folks aren’t spending their own money. They have a budget, for sure, which naturally sets an absolute ceiling for what they can feasibly spend. But if they don’t hit their targets, they could well lose their jobs.
The buyer doesn’t want to test you out, and if it doesn’t work, hire someone else to do the job. They simply don’t have the time for that.
They need to get it right the first time, or they face the consequences.
This means they’re far more time- and results-conscious vs. budget-conscious—at least in larger organisations (more on smaller organisations later).
When you offer to work for free/cheap, you’re counter-intuitively presenting yourself as the high-risk option (lost time) vs. the low-risk option. Clients care far more about your ability to deliver the results they need than your fee.
It’s Hard To Escape A Low-Value Perception
Perhaps an even bigger problem is that once clients have an anchor price for you, it’s tough to shift that perception.
That’s not just a perception of you; that’s a perception of what the work should cost, too.
Which means not only are they less likely to hire you for bigger projects later, they’re unlikely to hire someone else at a higher rate either. How often have you hired someone at one rate and later been willing to pay them a much higher rate?
To some extent, it poisons the well for everyone.
The critical lesson is that it’s tough to escape being seen as the cheap, high-risk option once you’ve set your value proposition at that level.
Your Fee Reflects Trust
It would be easy to read this and think, ‘Oh, I should significantly increase my fees so clients trust me more. ’
As I’ve written before, increasing your fees is often terrible advice.
Your fee reflects the volume of work on the project and the degree to which you can be trusted to deliver it.
I know you feel you can be trusted, but you have to be able to prove that to a client.
A consultant with a hundred case studies, testimonials, visible artefacts, and a gazillion other trust signals on their site should be charging a lot more than a consultant who is just starting out. If the newbie tries to match those rates, they’ll get crushed by the competition.
The fee you charge doesn’t just reflect the quantity of work you must undertake; it naturally reflects quality too. And that quality, in the eyes of the buyer, refers specifically to trust.
Raising fees alone doesn’t earn more trust; you have to raise fees in line with the evidence you have to support that fee.
The Other Problems With The Foot In The Door Technique
In addition to the above, there are other problems with the ‘foot in the door’ technique.
You will attract the worst types of clients. The only organisations that will ever want you to work for free or cheap are those you probably don’t want to be working for.
They are the organisations with few resources, high demands, and those most likely to question your work to avoid prompt payment. They are often the clients you want to avoid to have a sustainable consulting practice.
Organisations commit time where they commit budget. It’s often hard to deliver great results on free projects because the client doesn’t set aside the time needed to make them a success. You don’t get the same level of collaboration or internal access. You will usually find the person you need to work with is ‘too busy’ and doesn’t make time for meetings. This doesn’t happen when they spend $40k to hire you (well, it does, but it happens far less often). (See: The Free Breakfast Problem).
Things can change quickly. Projects can be put on hold, sometimes indefinitely, and you might be left with nothing for the time invested (not even the results to show for your work).
Likewise, the person you did the free/cheap project for today might be gone tomorrow (along with their entire team). And then what did you get? Money talks.
Great Consultants Don’t Audition
I can’t think of any time when working for free resulted in more client work. This is also why I don’t offer free audits (and you shouldn’t either).
How often has a free audit honestly resulted in a good client? It’s simply not the type of clients you want to work with who want to spend time doing it.
Great consultants—the real top-tier people in almost every sector—don’t audition.
They don’t work for free. They don’t need to. They understand that if you can’t sell a project at the desired price point, you don’t have a pricing problem - you have a perception problem. You don’t solve either by reducing your fee. Reducing your fee is rarely the solution to any problem.
Good luck!
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The observation that "organisations commit time where they commit budget" is super insightful. I work with enterprise companies and the planning effort to even get to a live project is substantial: by the time something starts, there is budget, political backing from senior leadership, and committed resources.
That results in a vested interest in making it successful even if the project has issues. When something is free, there is less of this institutional momentum needed to start, so it's easier to kill.
On a related note, my local alumni club has found that charging even a nominal amount for events ensures people who sign up actually attend -- even a $5 fee gets people personally invested in seeing their commitment through.