Why your best work feels like cheating

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #22

He’d spent eighteen years getting good at one thing. Rare-good. The kind where maybe a thousand people on the whole planet can do what he does at the level he does it.

He was on a call with me recently, two weeks into hanging out his own shingle after a layoff, and I asked him something simple. I asked him to walk me through what he actually does for a client.

He looked off to the side. Gave a little shrug. And he said, “Honestly? It’s almost glorified data entry.”

He wasn’t fishing for a compliment. He meant it. And if you’ve been at your craft long enough, you’ve said a version of it too.

You know the feeling even if you’ve never put words to it. The thing you do best is the thing you stopped noticing years ago. It comes out of you now without any effort. So somewhere along the line, quiet and without a vote, you decided it wasn’t worth much.

That’s why you charge by the hour. That’s why you quote a number and feel your stomach pull tight, half-expecting them to laugh.

And it goes deeper than price. When you treat your best work like it’s nothing, a small voice starts asking whether you’re nothing, too. Whether after all these years you’ve really got something worth paying for. I’ve heard that voice on a lot of calls lately. Good people. Decades behind them. Secretly wondering if they’re good enough.

So here’s what I told him.

The reason your best work feels like nothing is the exact reason it’s worth a premium.

You’ve done it ten thousand times. The hard part went quiet a long time ago. The skill went so deep it stopped feeling like a skill. What used to cost you a week of sweat now takes an afternoon, and you barely break stride. So your brain files it under “easy,” and “easy,” in your own head, gets a discount.

But the person who hired you isn’t paying for easy. What feels like nothing to you is the one thing they cannot get anywhere else.

You’ve probably heard some version of this next part. I’ve heard this story told a dozen ways and I couldn’t tell you who it really happened to or where I heard it first. Doesn’t matter.

It goes like this...

A factory line goes down. Big plant. Every hour it sits quiet, the owner is bleeding money. Thousands an hour, gone.

They call in an old-timer. Gray hair, bib overalls, looks a good decade past his prime. He walks the line slow. Stops. Listens. Lays his hand on one machine. Then he pulls a little hammer out of his pocket and gives it a single tap. The whole line roars back to life.

He writes out an invoice and hands it over. Ten thousand dollars. The owner about falls over. “Ten grand? You were here five minutes.”

The old man folds the invoice once and says, “You’re not paying me for the five minutes. You’re paying me to get your line running and your money flowing back before this sinks you. The forty years are just what let me do it in five.”

Look at what the owner actually bought. It wasn’t the tap, and it wasn’t even the man’s forty years. He bought his factory running again. He bought the money pouring back in instead of out the door. He bought relief from the excruciating knot in his gut from with worry of losing his best customers. The years were how the old man got him there… they were never the thing itself.

Same with you. What people buy is never the work itself, but what it changes for them… the money that starts flowing again, and the fear that finally lets go.

They buy a higher emotional state.

Your skill and your years are how you get them there. The change is what they pay for.

I think about that old man a lot, because I watched the same blindness play out on a call last month, no factory floor in sight. Different consultant, the opposite kind of good. This one walks into a struggling company and finds the money fast.

He made one client an extra two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in a meeting and a half. The owner told him he hadn’t slept that well in three years.

You’d think the man would be flying high that he helped his client so much and so fast. He wasn’t. He said to me, “Now I’m worried. What are we even going to work on next?”

Look at why he did that. The fix came so fast it didn't feel like enough to charge for. Ninety minutes for two hundred grand felt like cheating. So instead of raising his price, he went looking for the next thing to do free... trying to earn a check he'd already earned.

Here’s something you can put to use this week.

Listen for one word. “Just.”

“I just cleaned up his pricing.” “It’s just a few tweaks.” “I just know where to look.”

Every time that little word shows up about your own work, that’s where the money leaks out the bottom. “Just” is you handing the years back for free.

Try this instead. Describe what you do by what changes for the person across from you… the change they keep, not the motions you went through. That owner didn’t buy “a few tweaks.” He bought two hundred and twenty-five grand and the first decent sleep he’d had in three years. Nobody who lived through that would call it data entry.

Something good happens when you stop apologizing for the work that comes easy. You start pricing the transformation instead of the clock. You stop piling on extra hours to earn a fee you already earned the day you walked in. And here’s the part that surprised me the first time I watched it… the client trusts you more, not less.

People don’t relax when you’re cheap. They relax when you carry yourself like the expert you spent decades becoming.

P.S. After we hung up, the eighteen-year man sat there a second longer and said the part I keep coming back to. He’d been undercharging for years for the one thing nobody else could do… and the only reason was that he was the last person able to see it. He’s going to be fine now. The not-seeing was the whole problem. And now he’s seen it.

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 She called it running with scissors
👉 The day I put on the lanyard

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🔎 Client Value Journey: Stage 2 – Engage
🔎 The "Strategic Ascension Designer" Prompt

P.S.: When you're ready, here are more ways I can help you...