The Soul-Crushing (and Life-Giving) Work of Pricing Yourself

I was raised by two small business owners. Growing up, I watched as both my parents provided services—my father a veterinarian; my mother a caterer—and then sat at their desks and drafted up invoices.

“Well, she’s a good friend,” my mother would say, discounting yet another birthday cake.

“He always pays on time,” my dad would say, rounding down the cost of a c-section he performed.

As my parents’ businesses grew, invoicing became a monthly event in which I would work beside them, sometimes late into the night, as they did their calculations, printed invoices, stuffed envelopes, and licked stamps. Then I’d help open the returned envelopes filled with checks and log them into the computer, taking note of all the current invoices yet to be paid, and the long overdue ones I knew my mom would begrudgingly have to turn over to the collection agency.

I participated with them in the cycle—provide, invoice, log, sue?—for 18 years before leaving their ledger behind for college and my own career. And like all cycles one experiences in childhood, I was doomed to repeat it.

Now I work as a college professor. As part of that—and sometimes on the side of that—I’m paid to do a variety of services like write books or give keynotes. I’ve become an expert in negotiating (it’s what I write about and speak on) so I have literally spent a decade figuring out how to price my books and talks so that I can tell others how to price their services or salaries.

I’ve given keynotes to rooms of thousands, webinars to massive companies overseas, spoken to a variety of college campuses, helped author our Mayor’s Pay Equity Pledge, and I’ve coached a little over 500 clients and students to negotiate their salaries (and/or other things they value).

Essentially, I’ve continued my parents’ legacy of doing the soul-crushing work of pricing myself.

But you want to know something?

I might be a fraud.

A few months ago, I got a call for a type of speaking engagement I don’t typically do. It didn’t involve stripping or racketeering or anything like that; it was just a format I’d never been asked to do, so I didn’t quite know how to price myself.

Now, I’m not green. I’ve given hundreds of talks, so I’m not new to saying, “Here’s my speaking fee.”

This time felt different though.

When I got on the call with the man arranging the event, I held my breath and said my fee. Despite worrying what I quoted was astronomical, his face broke out in a smile.

“That won’t be a problem,” he said, before arranging his face in a more neutral expression.

When we hung up, I felt the taste of sick in my mouth. Just ten minutes earlier I was convinced he would say, “Oh Meg, that’s so far out of our budget” (something I’ve heard lots and lots of times) and instead I felt like a fool, as if I had just said to him, “I’ll work for food.”

For days I felt a gnawing in my stomach. I apologized to my assistant for leaving money on the table. I cried while telling my husband about it because I felt embarrassed. “How can I spend all my time speaking, teaching, and writing about knowing your worth and negotiating for more when I can’t do it for myself?”

And my husband, in his wisdom and kindness, said that if someone like me who has this much experience still finds it this hard, maybe knowing your worth and negotiating for more simply is hard.

While I agree with him, there are a few things I’ve learned from a decade of doing this that perhaps might help us all feel a little bit better about the soul-crushing (and life-giving) work of pricing ourselves.

Understand Relativity

One of my first very well-paying keynotes was in San Diego a number of years ago. I was so excited about the size of the event and conference center where I’d be speaking that I invited my mother to tag along and witness. I was delighted to watch her eyes widen at the massive hotel room (and its view of the ocean) they had booked for me. Her jaw dropped when she realized they were paying for any incidentals, and she giggled when I used that perk to order us champagne. She couldn’t get over walking around the conference center and seeing the massive posters with my name and face on them, and she was damn near beside herself when she saw my speaker gift came in a Tiffany’s box.

As we were being shuffled into the massive room where I’d be speaking, the event planner said, “A-Rod just finished.”

My mother and I looked at each other and back at her. “As in Alex Rodriguez?”

“Yep!” she laughed with an eye roll. “He had a whole entourage with him. It was a lot of work to get him.”

I was beaming with pride as I looked at my mother. I was being asked to speak at an event that had also asked A-Rod. My mom looked back at me with a slightly different expression. And then she whispered: “I wonder what his hotel room looks like.”

This is the easiest trap to fall into. We’ve all been victims of it.

By all means, we should look around for benchmarking when it comes to our salaries (and ladies, make sure you benchmark to a man’s salary). And we should never accept less when we deserve more. But I do think there is a value in understanding the relativity of money. A-Rod packed a room. He deserved the penthouse suite.

I’m not there.

Yet.

The Negotiation is Rarely About Money

After every talk I’ve ever given, I get a question that I truly don’t know how to answer. It’s not because I don’t understand the question; it’s that the answer is nuanced.

Once, a woman at the back of the room walked all the way up to the microphone and said, “Yeah, Dr. Morgan, I’ve got a boss who really has it out for me, but I’m also in sales and would like to flip my commission structure to territory volume after I’ve been doing 10 years of a draw against base despite the company preferring gross margin because I’d rather maintain my preferred stock option than convert to a common equity trade at cap, but our HR department is outsourced in SE Asia so the time difference makes this tricky. What should I do?”

The first dozen times I got a question this specific, I tried really hard (but failed) to answer what I thought the question was. But over time, I came to realize that my failure wasn’t due to my lack of specific industry knowledge (God help you people in corporate sales). Instead, I began to listen harder to the nuance of what was said: My boss really has it out for me.

I could attempt to answer the question about the best stock option structures, but the real issue is that this person is working for someone who doesn’t have their back. And the attempt to increase salary is the unconscious solution to that problem.

I’ve learned, after fielding so many salary questions, that money is almost never the real issue. Raising our fees or our salary is often an attempt to feel valued, or seen, or appreciated, or powerful. And it’s fine to want those things, but it’s tricky to try and do that through money.

Now I coach almost everyone that money is money and everything else is everything else.

Meaning, get your salary to what it should be for the job you are doing, the market you are in, and the skills you bring. Everything else—feeling valued, seen, appreciated, powerful—is a very different negotiation.

Money is a Need, Not the Lead

I frequently teach strategic planning at the graduate level. So, when I consult with CEOs, I’m often called upon to review their organization’s strategic plans. Without fail, every strategic plan I’ve ever reviewed showed “grow funding” as a main pillar of the plan. A few weeks ago, I met with a CEO and said, “Look, I get it, you need funding. But everyone does. Funding is a need, but it’s not the lead.”

I’m not trying to downplay how much organizations—nonprofit or corporations—need donations or revenue. Of course they do. But seeing it on dozens and dozens of plans over the years, I’ve come to realize that when organizations place funding as the lead (rather than just a need) they run into the same problem I mentioned earlier: identifying the solution before understanding the problem.

Most financial experts will tell you that, psychologically, to be able to save money well requires a goal for the savings. We must have a purpose, a goal, a dream in the lead. Then we can save the money we need. If you start with just saving a lot of money without centering the goal, you will likely burn out on the purposeless endeavor. Or, even more likely, never know when enough is enough.

So while I know organizations need funding, and individuals need a good salary, when we let that be the lead, rather than the need, we give too much power to something that in and of itself is not purposeful. It’s like grocery shopping while hungry. Hunger is a need, but if you let it lead, you’ll find yourself throwing Little Debbie cakes in the cart and get home without any helpful ingredients for the rest of the week.

Look for More than Just Money

I recently met with a couple of women who are new to the world of keynote speaking. They were asking lots of excellent questions about how to price themselves, how conferences set budgets, how to tell if a speaker inquiry even plans to pay—all the trappings of the very tough world of getting paid to speak.

I told them my best answers to all their questions but then reminded them of something it’s taken me a bit to learn: look for more than just money.

I once looked at speaking engagements as paid or unpaid. I set myself in such black and white terms that when I had agreed to an unpaid event, I mentally accepted that I would be “giving” but would not be “getting” anything in return. That did a disservice to the event and to me. After all, resentment doesn’t do anyone any good—least of all me.

To change that, I started looking at events differently. When I wasn’t going to be paid for my time with money, I found other ways to get compensated. Sometimes that was asking the event to buy a book for everyone in the audience. While I don’t get much royalty off a book sale, it allowed me to get my writing into the hands of more people, and I always delight in any audience member getting something for free. Or, if the event organizers couldn’t purchase books, I might ask if I could have the contact info of the audience members so I could send a follow-up email. Or if they’d pay to bring in a photographer or videographer to capture footage we could both use.

Point is, I started looking for other ways to be paid.

Now, let me be clear, I still turn down most unpaid speaking engagements (usually because of time constraints), but when I do accept unpaid events, I look for other ways I can be compensated.

Perhaps you work at a job that doesn’t pay you what you need monetarily. What other ways can you get paid? Can you learn from your boss? Can they send you to a conference? Can they pay for you to get a certification? Can you form strong relationships with the network the company has?

Look, always get that bread. But when you can’t, look for all the other ways you can get paid and cash out.

You’ll (Hopefully) Never Outgrow Free

And, perhaps most importantly, I had a realization this month: I’ll never outgrow free.

God willing.

There is an idea within us all that we will reach some stage (metaphorical for some, literal

for others) where we no longer have to deal with whatever the thing is we no longer want to deal with.

For me, and other speakers, we think there will be some moment in our careers when we will no longer be asked to speak for free. And, more than that, if we ever were asked to speak for free, we for damn sure wouldn’t do it.

At the end of last year my mother told me she had an idea, which I would soon realize meant she also needed a favor. She wanted to put on an event for a women’s group to which she belongs in my hometown—where she and my father still live—and invite the organization’s chapters from neighboring cities to attend. She envisioned a beautifully catered lunch and a chance to gather together women from around the region. And so, would I please consider coming to speak to the group? The unspoken subtext—for free.

Of course, woman who gave me life, of course.

Over the next few months, I witnessed my mother work on the invite list, the lunch menu, the decorations, and the programs. When I showed up to the event, I got to see all the many women in my mother’s life, women who represent decades of nurtured relationships, and the love among them.

After I spoke, I was flooded with hugs from women who’ve known my mother longer than I’ve been alive. For weeks after the event I received handwritten thank-you cards from women who had brought my mother pre-made dinners after she gave birth to me. My mother, a woman who has managed to keep a large circle of female friends for decades, was so proud of the event that she even wrote up a summary of my talk for the hometown paper.

Are you getting what I’m saying?

So many amazing and beautiful moments came out of doing that talk. It cost me nothing and gave me everything. Look at what all I would have missed if I was sticking to some, “I don’t speak for free” policy.

Look, we all deserve to be paid for our time and paid what we are worth, but I know doctors still get asked for free medical advice at dinner parties or in line at Starbucks. My good friend, who is also my department chair at the university, still takes on so many student projects—despite her rise up the ranks—because she loves it. And I’d just bet good money Gale King asks so many favors of Oprah.

The goal is not to outgrow doing things for free; the goal is to grow into understanding how much you can get when you give.

I always say my journey with negotiating started when my oldest daughter was born. As I said on the TEDx stage, and wrote in my book, watching her negotiate so confidently for everything she wants inspired me in my own personal and professional negotiations.

But the truth is, my journey started while sitting on a chair in my dad’s clinic watching my parents pore over monthly invoices, wondering if they were charging what they were worth.

My parents could have chosen 8-5 jobs that provided a steady paycheck and gone about their careers with much less agony over what their value was.

Instead, they chose paths that gave them freedom and forced them to wake up every day and consider their own worth.

I think the trade-off was worth the price.

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