You’re probably undercharging. Not by a little, either. Ann Carden, a business growth strategist and the CEO of Expert in You, told me her rule of thumb on the show: “I usually say you should be able to three to ten times what you’re making per client. It’s almost always a given.”
Ann works with professional service entrepreneurs who are excellent at the work but whose business model, branding and marketing don’t reflect it. She says she’s worked in over 80 industries and sold five businesses of her own. Here’s what she’d change first, and where SEO fits (and where it doesn’t). You can listen to the full episode on Castos.
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Getting better at the work doesn’t change the business
When I asked Ann what trips up service businesses most, her answer was that experts keep improving and keep running the same model: “They don’t change their business model. They don’t charge what they should be getting paid. They’re not working with top dollar clients.”
Her example was an interior designer, solo, doing home projects and growing slower than she wanted. Ann moved her into commercial and luxury work. “The work is the same, right? In so many ways, the work is the same.” After the shift, most of the designer’s new clients “were over six figure deals,” including high-end condominiums overlooking the Cardinals’ stadium in St. Louis.
Then she stacked it. Multi-unit buildings meant one engagement could turn into several clients inside the same building, and furnishing executive apartments opened a rental line with recurring revenue. Same skills. A different market and a different structure.
High-end clients are less stress, not more
I’ve found the more a client pays, the fewer headaches the project has. Ann hears the same thing from her clients, and she explained why with one blunt line:
“If they’re trying to figure out if they’re going to pay you or their electric bill, who do you think is going to win, right?”
Higher-level clients, she said, “value time over money. They have money. They don’t have time. And that is what you are selling. They are buying back their time.” They aren’t DIYers. A business owner with employees and a company to run doesn’t want to learn SEO for their website, because “it’s not a good use of their time.”
If you sell SEO, that’s your buyer. If your proposals are built for the person who wants to do half of it themselves, you’re pricing for the wrong client.
Credibility supports a brand, it isn’t the brand
Ann splits brands into two kinds: company brands like Apple or McDonald’s, and personal brands where the person is the business. The question to settle early is which one you’re building, because it decides what you can sell later. As she put it, “You have to have assets in the business to sell it. You can’t sell something that doesn’t have any assets.”
That’s where brand and search meet. I told Ann about a new SaaS company I worked with, Lead Truffle, where you literally couldn’t search for their name and find their business for the first month, because the query was full of people looking for truffles. It took technical SEO work to get the brand to show up. If you’re launching a name, put the brand name at the top of the list when you decide which keywords to track, and watch it from week one instead of assuming Google will sort it out.
Ann’s test for the brand itself: what’s your differentiator, and does the customer care about it? “We’ve been in business 45 years. Nobody cares. They care from a credibility standpoint, but that’s not what is going to make someone buy.” Reviews and years in business support the brand. The brand is how you’re different, who you’re for and why they should believe you.
Sometimes SEO is the wrong play
This is the part of the conversation an SEO audience needs to hear. Ann has a client who runs an interior design and architecture firm. She was paying for SEO and Google Ads, but her buyers only came through referrals and relationships.
“Your buyers would never be going to the internet and saying wow who should I get to help us remodel our hospital. It’s not going to happen.”
Same with her own coaching business: “They’re not searching for a business coach. So to pay for SEO, to pay to be at the top of, like none of that makes any sense.” You have to get in front of those buyers instead.
I don’t read that as anti-SEO. I read it as a scoping question you should ask before you sign a client: who is actually green-lighting this purchase, and do they search for it? If the answer is no, the honest move is to say so, or to aim the work at the brand searches that happen after the referral.
Premium is the first scale strategy
The biggest mistake Ann sees is misalignment. Luxury positioning with a 97-dollar offer. A cheap book funnel aimed at CEOs who will never go through one: “CEOs are not going to go through funnels… So you have to know how people buy.”
Her one action for tonight is to look at your revenue model. If you’ve been in business a while and nothing in your offer sits above your competition, “you’re already missing out on revenue and business.” That might mean adding a premium service, repositioning, or raising your prices a notch.
I asked whether that comes before or after expanding into new cities or markets. Her answer: “It should be your first scale strategy, in my opinion.” And the math is simple: “It’s a lot easier to manage 20 clients than it would be to manage a million clients at a dollar.”
Which leaves you with Ann’s own question. Are you going low when you should be going high?
Find Ann at annlcarden.com, on LinkedIn, and on the Expert in You podcast. For the SEO side of this conversation, read when SEO is the wrong channel on SEO Arcade, and for the pricing side, the premium pricing case on Jeremy Rivera SEO. More conversations like this live in the Small Business Growth hub.
