An offended optometrist got in touch recently and asked, “Why is it acceptable to charge so much for a pair of glasses?” Clearly this person thinks if someone is being charged as much as £1000+ for a pair of glasses they are being ripped off. Let’s talk about this because you also will have to help some of your staff over this mental hurdle. I personally have no interest in convincing closed-minded, cynical, holier-than-thou optometrists of anything. They are neither curious nor interested in learning. All they want to do is stubbornly cling to their beliefs that they have arrived at without any study or reflection or experimentation. So I don’t waste my breath. But with your team, your goal is to develop them and help them with anything that is holding them back. Walk them through these points and discuss them.
- Value is in the eye of the beholder. You are not your client so don’t go projecting your beliefs on the client. The client is the only one who gets to vote if what you’re offering is valuable to them or not. Maybe through persuasion and trickery you can get someone to over-spend once. But they’ll have buyer’s remorse and never come back. They certainly won’t return year after year and bring their friends. Study Jones And Co’s Google reviews to see what our delighted clients say. That tells you more about the value we deliver than anything I could say.
- You can race to the bottom, or you can race to the top. Look in the mirror. If you are not Doug Perkins or Jeff Bezos, you are not going to win a race to the bottom. Charging the lowest prices possible is not a game you can win if you are a small business. It you think the only way you can help your client’s lives is by charging them less money, you are not thinking straight. Open your eyes and open your mind! The race to the top is about doing things as well as they can be done and providing more and more value to your clients through an exceptional experience, fun, superior products, highly trained passionate staff and enough staff to really pamper clients, world-class customer service where you are happy to move heaven and earth for your clients and so on. You cannot provide the most value and charge cheap prices. It’s impossible. Accept that.
- Your practice not doing well serves no-one. If you don’t have the balls to provide incredible amounts of value and charge what you’re worth, that will lead to a business that is struggling. You won’t be able to afford to hire or keep good staff. You won’t be able to reward them for helping you grow the practice. Customer service will go down because you’re restrained by finances. You won’t be able to keep investing in and improving the practice to better serve clients. On the flip side the practices that are not squeamish about charging what they’re worth will have more profits which mean they can hire more people (employees and their families like jobs), provide better service (clients like this), create a nicer practice (clients like this too), be a less stressed boss (employees like this), pay more taxes (governments like this), be a shining star business in your community (good for your town), and give more to charity (great causes like your support).