What founders get wrong about the value they sell

It’s still relatively rare for a woman entrepreneur to say out loud that she started her business for economic reasons. A friend wrote exactly that in her newsletter a few years back, she left a comfortable consulting job not to move to Bali and live in a van, but because she wanted to earn more money. I found it refreshing in a world where women owning explicitely their ambition is still not a basic standard. Men say it all the time and that’s not a problem. I don’t have statistics, I’m drawing on nearly ten years of listening to and reading founders’ stories, but you get the idea.

There’s something clarifying about that honesty. When you work for someone else, you’re building their dream. Working for yourself means working for your own. Gen Z seems to have understood this more clearly than any generation before them: when you work for a company, you are a means to an end. Knowing your worth and asserting it isn’t arrogance. It’s just accurate.

So how do you do that when you’re working for your own dream?

Espiègle is now over seven years old. When I left my last corporate job, I didn’t leave because I’d done the math on my earning potential. I left because I was at the end of my rope. My reasoning at the time was roughly: if I can push myself this hard for people who barely value me, imagine what I could do for myself. Worst case, I’d go back to pulling pints in a bar, which I actually did in the second half of 2022, and it did me a world of good. But that’s another story.

Along the way, I learned how to price my work. I tried everything : flat fees, project rates, packaged offers from A to Z. I sold my expertise in a lot of different ways, and I heard a lot of opinions about it. That’s too expensive. You don’t spend that much time on it. You get paid for that? People made me doubt my value by doubting the value of what I produce. They tied the quality of my work to the time I spent delivering it.

That’s the trap. And there’s a paradox that explains it perfectly.

The paradox that gets expensive

The story is simple. A locksmith charges €100 for a service and delivers it in one hour, the client is happy. A year later, the same client needs the same service. The price hasn’t changed but the locksmith has upskilled and now completes the job in 30 minutes. The client is not happy. They can’t understand why they’re paying the same amount for half the time.

There’s a similar story about Picasso, I’ll let you find it. Go sharpen your curiosity.

What both stories reveal is how quickly people equate the value of a service with the time the provider spent on it – when in reality, what’s being sold is expertise, know-how, years of practice and refinement that made that quality possible in the first place. The locksmith isn’t charging for 30 minutes. They’re charging for everything that made those 30 minutes possible.

This is also exactly what feeds toxic presenteeism in companies. Employees won’t dare leave early, even when the work is done, for fear of being seen as lazy when in reality they might just be more efficient. We’ve built entire workplace cultures around the performance of effort rather than the quality of output.

What this means for how I work

The skills and capacities I’ve built over seven years of running Espiègle have compounded. I move faster, I think clearer, I see things earlier. The quality of what I deliver today is not the same as what I delivered in 2019 and neither is the price.

Today I work exclusively on project fees and monthly retainers. Not hourly rates. Not day rates. Because the only model that prices my expertise honestly is the one that prices the outcome and the thinking not the hours, not the presence.

I still encounter clients who find me too expensive. I no longer waste time justifying my value. I worked hard to build my expertise and I keep studying, reading, and training. I know what my work is worth. If someone doesn’t perceive that value, that’s not a pricing problem. It’s a fit problem.

There’s a market for every price range, just like in beauty or fashion. I’ve chosen my positioning. I no longer make the mistake of squeezing into the budget of clients who aren’t ready to invest at the level I operate. I’ve become unafraid to say no and I keep redirecting people who aren’t a fit toward colleagues who might be.

Knowing your worth isn’t a mindset exercise. It’s a business decision and the sooner you stop pricing your time and start pricing your expertise, the clearer everything gets.

If you’re not sure where you stand right now, in your business, in your positioning, in what you’re actually selling, the Moment of Truth quiz is a good place to start. It takes under ten minutes and gives you your major blindspot and a full clarity framework to work with.

Want to go further? The Deep Dive Day is a full day working together to build the structure your business actually needs.