Have you ever tried to define how much you are worth? Most people underestimate their skills and undercharge for their work and services.
As many of the people that follow my blog know, I tend to enjoy the art of storytelling. It always seems to convey the message in a more powerful way. So today won't be that different.
There was once a wealthy man who had purchased a printing press from a foreign company, he has always wanted to start this business and he had finally reached a point on his life where he could afford such a business venture.
The purchase was not small, as some of you might know printing presses come in all sizes for different levels of production and he was not about to start off small. Since the wealthy man had spent so much on his high end printing press he thought to himself it would be wise to save some money on other areas of the business.
It took about two weeks for the technicians he hired to put everything together, but for some reason the machine was not working right. Some pages presented offset letters, the colors were a bit off as well and there was a horrible noise coming from one of the moving levers that sounded pretty intimidating.
The wealthy man was not about to give up, so he demanded his young and resourceful technicians to figure the problem out, after all he was paying them a good salary to provide maintenance and care for this machine. It would be another week before the business owner was ready to ask for help outside of his young but knowledge hungry technicians and he decided to call the authority on these machines.
As you can probably guess, in this story there was an Engineer who had been working with these machines for decades and he knew all the ins and outs, he had probably worked on more machines than anyone could even imagine. The problem was, at least in the eyes of the wealthy man that this Engineer's services were not cheap.
The Engineering showed up of course, walk around the machine, moved a couple of levers as if he was testing the quality of but not really adjusting anything yet. He finally found what he was looking for, took out a small screwdriver and adjusted one small screw.
As if it was an act of magic, the machine worked to perfection and five books had been printed before he was done telling the wealthy man what his service call would cost.
"My service call will cost you $1000 dollars Sir, I'm glad I could help you today"
The Wealthy man's face turned red, he felt this Engineer was being abusive, he felt he was being dupped, after all he had adjusted one screw.... He quickly replied "I should report you for abuse.... unless you can provide me with a breakdown of how you came up with that number I won't pay you a dime".
The Engineering looked around, took out his small invoice pad and wrote it up.
Service Call #872
Screw Adjustment $0.99
Knowing what screw needed to be adjusted $999.01
The wealthy man read the invoice and his angry face turned into a smile, he knew he was in the wrong. "I'm so sorry Sir, I will have the check made out to you in just a few minutes"
Before signing off, and before I forget... Happy St Patrick's day to you all, the tribe of good intent!!!
Much success