Episode Transcript

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome back to the show predicated on the journey of life and business.

For this episode, guys, for this rant, I guess I’ll start calling them rants To be honest, I actually want to talk about self worth. But in a way, where I think, you know, I guess this would be classified as impostor syndrome. I don’t really know What that is. I just heard the term. So you correct me if I’m wrong. But anyways, going into this, I want to talk about how when Andrew and I first start a company, we did not believe in ourselves to the point where we thought it was ethical to charge customers for What we were worth. Now think about that. We did not think that we were worth the work we were doing. And we didn’t think that we were worth the service we were providing because we started a service company, right service based company, and we were the technicians, we were the only two guys doing it.

We didn’t have any employees didn’t have any funding, we didn’t have any of that stuff, right. And by funding, I mean, like, cool, it’s me. And then like, that’s our funding, our sweat equity is our funding and, and so anyways, when we started, we actually struggled with charging What we were worth, because we’re like, oh, no, we don’t know if this is ethical or not. And part of where we had problems with is, we would look and see, and we’d be so concerned about the clients budget, and we’d be so concerned about What they can afford that we would, we would actually sabotage ourselves trying to help them not go into debt to hire us, because we didn’t believe in debt. Now, think about that. We are totally outside of ourselves controlling things that are not within our control. And all it did is hurt us.

And I’m saying this because I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s anybody else. I’m assuming there are other people out there who have in have thought about man, I don’t know, if I’m worth the money I’m charging. You’re not the deciding factor of that. Right? The buyer decides how much you’re worth, the buyer decides those things, right? If you are charging a certain price, and he’s saying, hey, like you’re in charge of What you’re going to What you are going to sell, you’re in charge of pricing. Now do not get me wrong, don’t hear me wrongly or incorrectly, when I’m saying this, right, you’re in charge of doing those things. But the market is going to talk to you and the people are going to talk to you. And if you’re worth the money of What you’re charging, you’re gonna get hired for What you’re asking for. If you’re not, you won’t, and let that talk to you.

The other thing is, is when you’re starting out, especially if you’ve never done business before new in business, and in there’s two different types like of starting businesses, by the way, you either have worked in a company for for a type of business, you’re going to start and so you’re going to mimic and copy What that company is doing. There’s nothing wrong with that, or you’re starting out on your own with something you’ve never done before. Andrew and I did that we never worked in corporate, whole long story for another time. But the point of that was is we didn’t know What was normal. And we didn’t know What was culturally normal and abnormal. And our self worth was there. Like, oh, we don’t know if we’re worth this.

And I think it’s so important that if you are going to start charging, let your customers tell you no, that’s way too much. Okay, cool. And then you go on to the next sale, and the next sale and the next sale, right. But don’t sabotage yourself because you’re not believing in yourself. Don’t sabotage yourself, because you’re so worried about the customer, and about their decision making process that you are actually going to sabotage yourself and hurt yourself longterm Andrew and I did that. And I think it’s so important to really see like, this isn’t just like this. This can be translated as so many things. Like you’re just in relationships with people friendships, right? And you’re sabotaging yourself, because you don’t think you’re as valuable as you are.

And I think one of the biggest things that is so important in business is one, you have to believe in yourself, you can do this, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve done it or not. That’s not where you base your belief off of whether you’ve done it or not. Now that helps. But you can do this if you want to do this. And there is nothing special about me about Andrew or other business people where we’ve made it and nobody else can. I don’t think that’s true. You can learn whatever you need to learn and become the person you need to become in order to achieve success in the way that you want to. It’s going to look different than the way I do things. But that’s true of anything.

And so when it comes to charging price, and when it comes to doing these things, I think it’s so important to really know your worth and know that you’re worth this without without even having to think about it. Because you’re worth your work. And if you really care and have empathy, and you’re actually really caring about doing a good job and providing quality. You’re not gonna have any problems with pricing out your services or your product, and you’re not going to have any problems with customers later if you actually really care about those things, and so anyways, just pro tips and I also believe it’s easy to learn the hard way. I mean, easy. It’s better to learn the easy way than the hard way and that’s one of the things you can learn from my stupidity across this.

Anyways guys, I’m way over so I’ll catch you later. Peace