Podcast Ep #125: Pricing with Confidence: How Lawyers Can Capture the True Value of Their Work with Etinosa Agbonlahor

John: Pricing legal work is tricky. On the one hand, we feel like it should be objective, right? Product market fit, competitive analysis, a clear-eyed read on what your service is worth. And if that were really how it worked, then nearly everyone listening to this right now would have raised their rates by about 10 to 12% over the past three years, just to keep pace with inflation. But I'll bet most of you haven't.
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Very few people are capable of taking that dispassionate a view. And that's because pricing isn't just objective. It is emotional. It's tangled up in notions of worth and fairness and a personal money story that most of us has been carrying around since long before we ever opened a law practice. And understanding those emotional elements is the key to using pricing in a way that actually increases the sense of value your clients get and the return it brings to your business and personal needs.

So today, I've brought in a behavioral economist to help us understand that story and help us envision what can happen when we finally get the money right.

You're listening to The Agile Attorney Podcast, powered by GreenLine. I'm John Grant, and it is my mission to help legal professionals of all kinds build practices that are profitable, sustainable, and scalable for themselves and the communities they serve. Ready to become a more Agile Attorney? Let's go.

A quick note. The concepts from today's episode should be useful to you no matter what kind of practice you're part of or what tools you use. If you'd like, stay tuned at the very end where I will briefly talk about how my software tool GreenLine supports the principles and practices from today's show.

Welcome back, everyone. I am excited today to welcome Etinosa Agbonlahor to my podcast. And Etinosa is a pricing expert and does a lot of work with professionals of all kinds on not just pricing overtly but some of the mindset changes that need to happen in order to price your work more effectively and really capture what the market will pay for certain types of work. So Etinosa, welcome to the podcast.

Etinosa: Thank you for having me, John. I'm excited for this conversation.
John: Me too. So give me your brief background, just so listeners sort of know how you came to do what the work is that you're doing.

Etinosa: Yes. So I am a behavioral economist, which means I study the psychology behind how people make financial decisions. I’ve worked with large organizations like banks in Australia, investment banks here in the US, worked for over a decade in that field. And a lot of the work I did at the time with those institutions was around financial well-being. So helping people, the average customer get to a better place in terms of their savings, spending, investment, better financial well-being, better financial health overall.

And as I thought about building my own consultancy, I realized that for business owners, whether you're, you know, mid market business or a smaller business, your financial well-being is directly tied to your pricing. And so pricing became kind of that door I wanted to explore more and help people understand, hey, it's not just the number, it's not just like the heuristic you use to like you know make sure you can pay your stuff at the end of the day.

It's really more than that. It can open up a deeper conversation for how you treat your customers, how long they stay with you, a lot of other things. And of course, pricing touches on mindset, touches on psychology. So pricing became a door that we really wanted to lean into as we built out Decision Alpha, which is the consulting firm that I now run. So that's kind of how we got there.

John: I love it. I have always found pricing to be just so fascinating because there are so many elements of psychology to it, both on the vendor doing the pricing and on the potential customer receiving the pricing. And I think this is real, right? There's the sort of famous wine study where they poured the same wine into three cups and put three different prices on it. And of course, people preferred the version of the wine that was the most expensive.

Etinosa: Yes. And it was more than preferred, the brain activity was higher in the parts of our brains that kind of associated with value and pleasure had more activity when they were tasting the more expensive wine. So the implication of that, it's not just like higher prices equals better, but it's that when you look at your price, your price is going to tell your customer on a visceral, physical level. Think about it, actual brain activity changing, not because the wine was better, just because of the price, right? It's going to tell your customer on a visceral level how to interact with you, how to value you, and how to enjoy or to experience the service you offer them.

John: I love that. So you wouldn't necessarily know it, but one of the themes that I've been exploring on this podcast over the last several weeks has been how to keep customers engaged with your legal services as you're delivering them, right? And in legal, we use engagement in sort of a funny way because we describe our contract as our engagement letter.

And when I'm thinking about engagement, I'm not thinking about that moment where they sign on the bottom line. I'm thinking about you need the customer to be or in this case, the client to be involved with your process. You might need information from them, you might need their review. You need them to be experiencing your services as you go through them, even if you aren't at the end deliverable yet because with legal a lot of times that takes a while. And so part of what I'm hearing from you is pricing is a big part of that.

So tell me then, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on and I'm so excited to have this conversation, I work with a lot of people in all different levels of law firm where pricing is this huge source of anxiety for them. And I think there's any number of places where that comes into play. For those who are still billing hourly, pricing anxiety comes, number one, in the form of figuring out what their hourly rate should be or whether they should raise those rates. Number two, in terms of whether some of the work that they're doing is worth my rate and feeling anxiety around that.

The other place where it comes in more and more is in the transition from a primarily hourly based model to some form of alternative pricing. And that could be flat fee, that could be phase flat fee, which is my favorite. That could be subscription pricing, whatever it is, there's a different way of thinking about pricing when you have to come up with these fixed numbers as opposed to the, well, I will set what my effort is worth and then however long it takes is what it takes.

Etinosa: I think there is, yes, to your point, it's kind of a shift that's happening with regards to lawyers being more willing. I also think AI is driving some of this, right, being more willing to say, okay, if it's not hourly, what else can it be?

And I think, in addition to just the kind of the cons of the hourly model, I also think that to your earlier point around engagement, there's something about hourly that ends up almost negatively harming the customer experience because a lot of customers, unless you're dealing with customers who are very savvy and who have worked on many legal matters before, a lot of customers, this is their first time working with a lawyer or a second time.

And so they don't understand like, hey, this case might take two years, it might take a year and every month you're going to get an invoice from me stating what you owe. And by month 13 of you getting that invoice, it's going to feel a bit weird. There's a conversation and there's a lot of more effort you have to do to keep that customer happy, keep that experience and that engagement up as opposed to, hey, just so you know, it's usually going to be about this range.

You can expect this much to occur and we have safeguards if we end up billing more than that, right? There's a difference in the conversation. So I think that's just kind of like the first point around as people are becoming more amenable to changing hourly, part of the opportunities are that it can drive better engagement and a happier client overall.

But to your other point around we're moving away from hourly, now what do we do? Right? We can't just say it's 285 or 300 an hour anymore. It's we actually have to figure out what this is worth. A lot of times people get stuck on, what do I think my service is worth? And I tell my clients, that's irrelevant. You're not the one who's buying your service. It's not about you. What does your client think is worth? What does your customer think it's worth?

And that's where we need to approach, that's where we need to start from because otherwise you get stuck in this place of what in behavioral economics, we kind of call it the, it's the spotlight effect. It's that we feel our clients are walking around with magnifying glasses, you know, just waiting for something to change and they're going to flip the table and walk away and that's it. I changed my price and that's it. I'm never working with her again. It's terrible.

That's not reality. A lot of people are too busy to do that. A lot of people are working with you not because of what you cost or not only because of what you cost, but because they trust you, they trust the service you delivered, there's an excellence to it. So we need to move that mindset away from what do I think it's worth to what does my client think it’s worth? And that's where we start the conversation.

John: I love that. And one of the things that comes to mind, I have worked with lots of lawyers over the years and I think I have a couple of active clients right now who maybe come from backgrounds where their family didn't have a lot of money or they weren't used to making sort of big ticket purchases.

And, you know, regardless of what area of law they're practicing, maybe it's estate planning, or maybe it's immigration, maybe it's criminal defense, but whatever it is, as they move towards flat fee or phased flat fee and realize that there's an opportunity to sort of raise the ticket price of their legal service and it's kind of a productized service at that point. They eventually reach a level or a lot of people will reach this level where they think, oh my gosh, I would never pay that for what I do. And that becomes this self limiting belief. So how would you address that with somebody?

Etinosa: Yeah, I think that the first of all is just kind of unpacking it and understanding when you're the expert, when you're the one who has built something, you kind of have what we call the curse of knowledge, right? Because you have built it, you kind of assume that everybody else understands how intuitive it is for you, how, you know, it's easier for you to be a lawyer and to handle a matter than it is for everybody else who you're serving, right?

So you undervalue that because you're an expert in it. So right away, there's already a natural inclination, a natural bias to undersell yourself because you're the one doing it and you know, you know, you know how it got built, right? So right away, there's that kind of like bias towards I built this and I know what it takes and etc. So I'm more inclined to feel like it's not worth as much as it actually is worth.

But then it also goes back to that conversation of regardless of what you think it's worth, right? And we can have the conversations of like, hey, this is why you're worth more. Hey, this is what it looks like to build a sustainable business and what it actually requires. It's not really about what you think it's worth. It's about what your client thinks it's worth.

When you go to the mechanic and they charge you a number, what do you go? Okay, sure. Or you go and get a second or third opinion, right? You go see your dentist. Your dentist says, this is what it's going to cost for you to do the procedure. You might say yes or you might go to other dentists who are other experts and give you a range that you can work with. But you don't go, well, I've done crowns before and so therefore I know what it costs. You don't know that. You don't have the expertise.

So in the same way, when you're thinking as a lawyer about pricing your services, you can't price it from what would I pay for it. It's not you who's buying it. You have to step into the customer's mindset and think, what is the value to them for my expertise? What does it help them do?

John: Yeah, I can think of any number of examples. And the one that jumps to mind for me is getting my oil changed. And, you know, when I was a kid, I knew how to change my own oil. I still know how to change my own oil. But it's worth the 40, 50 dollars to me to number one, not have to have all the equipment in my garage, number two, not have to find the dirty shirt and roll under the car and do all the things.

And so even though it is something that seems easy to me and it is objectively easy, and I might sometimes get enjoyment out of doing it myself, most of the time I'm going to pay the professional and I understand what the value of the service is. That's a very relatively low ticket item. But that same sort of thing applies and I think one of my takeaways is this curse of knowledge piece is if you're saying in your head, well this is easy for me, that's not the same thing as this is easy.

Etinosa: Right. And it's also not the same thing as this is valuable to the other person. It is valuable to your time, which might be X amount of money for you to go into a store and have somebody else change your oil for $50 because you bill way more than that. So it would be a waste of your time to spend an hour under the car with the dirty shirt figuring it out, right? So it's also understanding what is the value of this to the other person. And value and effort are never a one to one.

John: So that leads me into another common pattern that I see that I think is what in the Agile world we would call an anti-pattern, something everybody does even though it's not ideal. And that anti-pattern is when you're making the conversion from hourly to fixed fee, you basically will do the math and say, well, on my typical matter, I would take 15 hours to do this. And so I'm going to take that 15 hours times my hourly rate and I'm going to charge that as my flat fee. And for me at least, there's two problems with that. Number one is it gets nothing to what the value is that the client will pay.

Number two is it leads into this weird sort of thinking where if you somehow spend a little bit more time delivering that flat fee, your brain is telling you, I'm losing money, even though your hourly rate has a margin built into it and your flat fee also has a margin built into it. Very few lawyers I've ever worked with have ever actually lost money on a flat fee. They may have been slightly less profitable on one unit sale than they might have been had they sold that unit on an hourly basis. But almost never are they less profitable across the entire product line than they would have been had they stuck to hourly. So that's my interpretation of it. I'd love to hear how you think about those things.

Etinosa: Yes. So this is around when I put together an hourly based off of how many hours I think it would take multiplied by my hourly rate. I'm worried that if it takes a little bit more time than I had estimated in my model. This is the issue with what we call kind of like cost based billing, right? Or cost plus pricing where I go, what is it going to cost me and what's the tiny bit of margin I want to make on it. Always better to reverse and understand what is the value to the customer.

And that can be an easy thing around doing the customer research, talking to a couple of prospects that you've worked with or customers you've worked with to understand what did they save you in terms of time? What did they save you in terms of money? Understand that starting to concretify that value. That might help you then go, okay, for this estate plan based on my hourly rate, I would have charged 1750, but actually I'm seeing that based off of the value to the customer, they'd be willing to pay as much as 4500 for this.

And so my number needs to leave somewhere between that 4500 ceiling and the 1750 it cost me. So there's a critical piece of information that's missing when you sit down to work out a flat fee based just on your hourly rate and that is what is the customer willing to pay for it? What is the ceiling? The max they would go to pay for it. And that's information you get by talking to a customer, talking to prospects, doing some of that research.

John: Yeah, and it's really about what are the contours of the value that you're bringing to that customer because as you just said, there's a lot of dynamics to value that aren't monetary.

Etinosa: Yes. There's the trust piece, the peace of mind. There's so many elements to it. There's also the, especially if you're in things such as estate planning, where it's, okay, I know that my generations are going to be taken care of. I know that my family is going to be administered to properly if I was not here and I have that peace of mind. What is the monetary value I place around that? How do I translate that to a number? And what does that mean for the lawyer who's helping me with that?

So it's not just, this is what I used to charge per hour and so it took me 10 hours to do it and so therefore this is what the flat fee is. There's such an opportunity to understand what does the customer think? What is the value to them? And that's where my margin needs to live.

John: And that can vary based on so many things. And I would say different metropolitan areas have different price ceilings based on their relative affluence and things like that. There are ways to design your product and service offering in a way that is going to maybe even meet different layers of the market. And you might adjust slightly the level of service you offer. Maybe it has to do with your turnaround speed. Maybe it has to do with the complexity of the document stack that you create. Maybe it has to do with the number of check-ins you have, right?

So really building towards I'm going to charge a premium price for more of a white glove experience as opposed to a more run of the mill piece. There's a lot more levers that you can pull when you're building flat fee or phase flat fee productized services than when you're just doing the straight cost plus that hourly always is.

Etinosa: Yes. So we have a pricing model at Decision Alpha. We call it the Decision Alpha pricing model, very original with the name. And it has four steps. And the very first step is what we call mapping monetization zones. And that's doing exactly what you just talked about, which is we sit down and we understand, yes, the core service you offer is estate planning. But people interact with that in different ways.

There's the real estate investors who have seven different houses and so they needed everything in trust and different beneficiaries. It's going to be a little bit more complex. There's the folks who have RSUs and they're not quite sure when they're going to vest and things like that. That's a different kind of conversation. There's different ways people are using that estate planning service.

And so maybe you're able to then parcel all of that out into there's three tiers that we offer. If it's this complex, it looks like this amount. If it's that complex, it looks like the other amount. If you are a real estate investor, doesn't matter what other tier you're in, it's going to look like this amount because we want to walk through all the trust that you need to set up and make sure everything is right.

So instead of just having that one flat conversation with yourself and saying, oh, it's going to be $4500 for every, you know, trust that comes in, you have the opportunity by mapping those monetization zones, start to build in more of a custom, more opportunities for you to drive, you know, sure, higher revenue, higher profit, but drive a more sensitive and more nuanced pricing model within your business.

John: Well, and there's a lot of things and I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but there's so much more interesting opportunities for specialization once you start to think that way. And regardless of whether you are part of a large practice or whether you are part of a small practice, you personally only have so much finite capacity in your day.

And we lawyers have this amazing thing, which is a law license that permits us the exclusive right to practice in certain things that other professionals can't tap into and we can leverage that. And I say that out loud, even though I have a huge access to justice bent, and I wish there were more lawyers doing more affordable work at the lower end of the market. I understand that as high-end professionals, we do have an economic incentive to move ourselves up market as well.

And it makes me think of a divorce lawyer that I worked with years ago. She was still billing hourly. She lived in a moderately small town, not a small, small town, but a mid-sized town, and it happened to have a large employer that was a biotech company. And she realized that after handling a few biotech people with their divorce, they had a relatively complicated retirement plan.

And she became an expert in how to understand the retirement plan and was able to build a very good specialization on handling divorces just for employees of that biotech because there was a particular niche. And because she could exploit that niche, she was able to raise her rates.

Etinosa: Yeah, so there's something around being able to specialize and differentiate and this exercise of just even the mapping out the monetization zones allows you to start to figure out what those threads are that you can pull.

John: So what are the rest of the steps from there? So we map the monetization zones.
Etinosa: Yes, then we move into the willingness to pay. And so the way we talk about it is if you think about your pricing structure like a house, everything that goes into your price is like a house. You've got your floor, that's your cost floor, which is what does it cost you to keep the lights on every day? Needing insurance, whether or not you're selling anything or not, you're going to have insurance.

Top of the house, your attic, more or less, is the willingness to pay ceiling, which is this is the maximum amount anybody is going to be willing to pay for my service. In between those, the different floors, you might have your competitors, right? What does everybody else charging? Maybe everyone else is billing at $600 an hour, maybe other people are doing flat. What is the competitor world?

But also, in addition to competitors are alternatives, meaning if people weren't using you, what else would they be doing? And that could be, don't have an estate plan, but I put a beneficiary on all of my bank accounts. So what is that? What time, what did that cost them? What does that look like? You're starting to think through, what is the world of how people value me? In the willingness to pay part, we also have an instrument that we use to help to start to get some numbers around, well, what would be too high for you to charge? What would be too low? What would be a number that you as a customer, you're willing to pay, right? We think through all of those levels.

And all of that range feeds into, right, here's what we could possibly charge, right? Here's what would be too low, here's what would be too high. And there's different strategies within that about where we want to land. We do the willingness to pay, we have the exercise, we get some real numbers. Then we move that into the third part of the framework, which is where we start to actually frame the price around how you want your customers to behave, right?

So if I'm a lawyer and I'm thinking through, I want customers who not only will work with me on a matter, but then maybe they, I want to have passive quote unquote passive income coming in every month. Maybe I start to think about, well, I have this price, but if people then agree to stay on a subscription with me, I don't know, for whatever, let's say it makes sense for you, the law you specialize in. People want to stay on a subscription with me every month and just pay me a little bit of money as a retainer, I'm going to drop the price. I'm going to give them a discount on the matter itself in exchange for them coming onto the subscription.

Because I've thought about what I want them to do long term, I've thought about the behavior I'm trying to drive, I can change and play with my price up front to drive that, right? So that's where some of the behavioral economics comes in. That's where we do things like thinking about partitioning, right?

A lot of lawyers will go straight for, I'm $300 an hour, take it or leave it, that's it. And we say, no, you might be $300 an hour at this level, but then maybe you have like base fees and other things that you consider and put into the contract that your customer knows about, because we know that they're going to think about all of those things differently. So they're not going to see everything as one big price, they're going to go, oh, it's this much for this and that much for that and the other thing, and they're not really going to total everything in their minds.

So there's ways we use the understanding of how people interact with numbers and work with numbers to then help you decide how do I show my price to the customer? How do I frame my price to drive the behavior I want my customer to stick to or align with? So that's kind of the third part of it and we can talk about the final one later.

John: Well, and I imagine that requires a lot of discovery, a lot of discussion, and really sort of doing some work as part of your sales and marketing or onboarding cycle to really get to what are the key value drivers for that customer. I can give you an example that I've been involved with a few different business law practices. And business law is one of those practice areas that lends itself well to subscription services.

But rather than just have an open-ended subscription, I will often recommend that they have a one year subscription with a clear road map that says, you know, hey, you reached out to me because you wanted business formation and I can sell you just business formation, but have you considered that I have this package and over the course of the first 12 months of your business, not only will we take care of your formation, we'll also make all the regulatory filings, we'll get you a trademark registered, we'll set up a couple of contracts that you can use as templates, things like that.

And we're not going to do it all in month one, we're going to say this is your highest impact item now, and then once that's delivered, we're going to move on to the next impact and the next impact and so on. And I think what really appeals to customers of that is it's a road map. And so yes, they're going to get these physical things or these at least tangible things as they go, but what they're really gaining from the subscription is the expertise that says, yes, for people like you who are building businesses like this, these are your checkpoints along the way.

Etinosa: Absolutely. We actually worked with an IP firm to build out that same thing and understand, a, how do we roll people who come in the door and just want your help with filing a trademark? How do we make sure that they're leaving with the trademark and also a subscription to work with you for as long as possible? But then also where in the conversation do you introduce that idea? How do you roll people onto that when you've helped them with the first issue.

And so yes to your point, it's also being able to offer that road map of, hey, these are the different checkpoints, this is what you can expect. But then I think that back to our point around the difference between what you value yourself and your expertise as and what other people value it as, people will pay to have access to an expert at the time that they need it.

So that's also another thing people are willing to pay for is, I don't need you right now, but I want to know that if I ever needed you in the month of February, I can pick up the phone and you're going to answer me right away. I can send you an email and I'm going to get a response within 24 hours. That also is a level of value within that subscription program that people are willing to, yep, as long as I have access to you, that's more than okay.

John: 100%. Yep, I think that's right. And again, it varies depending on practice areas, but there are definitely practice areas where that lends itself. Okay, so what's the fourth part of the program?

Etinosa: Yes, so the fourth part is, we call it testing and scaling, and we say pricing should always be a feature, not a reaction. Meaning a lot of times when especially with business owners, they're coming in to work on their price because something changed. Inflation went up, so the rent went up, or you know, people are becoming more sensitive, something changed and so now we want to work on our price. That is not the right way to do it.

As you deliver more value, as your practice is maturing, as it's taking you less time to get the same thing done, as you're hiring more people, as your business is growing, it is hygiene to sit down every so often and just look at what do we charge? Is this still the right amount to be charging? Do we need to introduce new services? Do we need to revamp or repackage some of our services? Do we need to bring another an assistant lawyer in and maybe they charge at a lower level, but we're able to make the numbers work, right?

So we talk about being able to test and refine your pricing often. So, you know, I think every six months, sit down, look at your price, think about it. It doesn't mean you change it every six months, but it does mean that you keep pricing top of mind and that it's a feature of your business. You're intentional about it. It's not something that you react to and run to chase when everything kind of goes out the window.

John: I love that too. It's something I often talk about, the sort of deferred maintenance on a law practice. And it's easy to continue to defer those things because they will never rise to the level of urgent right up until they do. And once they're urgent, I always use a metaphor of, you don't feel like you need to replace your roof, but if you let it go long enough and then the storm comes in, you're going to spend a lot more time cleaning up the damage than you would have had you been proactive about that replacement. And the whole thing with a roof or any sort of deferred maintenance is you just have to put it on a schedule. And you have to then honor that schedule.

And like you said, that doesn't mean that you're replacing your roof, you're not changing your pricing model every six months, but making sure that you carve out just enough time in your busy day, your busy life, your finite capacity to say this really is worth half a day twice a year to really make sure that we are being intentional and proactive about what we charge.

Etinosa: Yes. And part of the reason, just going back to the why is this important is at the start, we talked about financial well-being. At the end of the day, if you think about your business as a farm, you do all the work to plant the seeds and till the soil and you show up and you do with matter after matter after matter. Pricing is how you reap your harvest. And so if you let that just go on autopilot, you're going to get to a place where you're putting in all this work and yet you feel like you're burning out because your price and your harvest isn't commensurate with all the value you put into the farm.

So at the end of the day, your financial well-being is at the heart of this, the financial well-being of everybody you employ and everybody who you're responsible to, your family is also at the heart of this. So it's why it's deeply important to be intentional to John's point about sitting down twice a year and just look at what are we pricing? What are we charging? Do we need to change anything to make this continue to be sustainable for us?

John: Yeah. Well, so I would love to sort of wrap up to bring it back to that because I think you've given us some really good ways to think through pricing on a structured basis. But those are a little bit practical, tactical, and I would love for you to sort of tie it back to the emotional piece of what would your advice be, and maybe this is twofold, I'm thinking out loud, but certainly for a practitioner, a professional who has some concern or anxiety around their own money needs and how they can honestly evaluate what they should expect to get out of their legal business.

And that can be whether they own the business, that could also be whether they're a worker in somebody else's business and figuring out how to maximize their salary, income, bonus, etc. inside of that program. How do you recommend people really kind of do that soul searching and have that honest reckoning with their own money story and their own money needs so that they can really not sell themselves short when it comes to delivering their professional services?

Etinosa: Yeah, so I think there's two parts to this, right? The first one is that internal money story and understanding your money story and your money script, and then the second part to that is then being able to externalize and understand what is the value of what you're offering. So I'm going to answer the two parts a bit separately.

On the first part of understanding your internal money story and your internal money script, it's first of all realizing, you know, the story that the fish was swimming and the older fish goes by and says, how's the water boy? And then the fish is like, what's water, right? The context, the context, understanding what is your water? What is the thing that you're living in that you've always taken for granted and assume that that's the way the world is, right? What is that money script?

And so it's usually useful to have a guide that can ask you questions and help you kind of probe as you're doing this. I usually don't plug my book in like conversations like this, but I do have a book, it's called How to Talk to Your Parents About Money. In the first two chapters, there are questions that help you start to unpack some of those money scripts.

So I recommend you can do that because it asks you not just about your scripts, but what biases are you more liable and more prone to. There's different, there's scripts, there's biases, there's a psychology, there's how you were raised that all impact what you think is normal with regards to money, but it's just in your world, it's not normal for everybody else. So the book can help you kind of go through that and unpack and understand that.

Another great book is called The Heart of Money, it's by Deborah Price. It also walks you through some of those money scripts. It's geared more towards couples, but it's kind of a thing that you might do with a business partner and work through together. So I also recommend that if you want to do it, you want to work with that with a partner on that one, I recommend that book as well. So sitting down, understanding your money scripts, understanding what is the water you're swimming in, that kind of helps you start to address some of those anxieties.

On the other side, knowing what's your worth, talk to customers, talk to clients, do some research, you know, you can hire a pricing company, or you can just actually get a couple of people who have worked with you before and say, hey, I'm trying to unpack and understand what is the impact and influence of my work. We've got a survey, can I take you out to coffee and ask you a couple of questions. It's going to be super valuable.

You're going to be able to price in ways that maybe even your competitors aren't pricing because they don't realize that they're also leaving money on the table. So I think for those bits, there's two approaches to those, but the point is you want to get more information that then feeds into the strategies you're adopting in your pricing.

John: I love it. And one source that I would add to talking to others that can be really useful for lawyers is talk to your referral sources because they often have a cleaner understanding of the money story or the money, the value proposition of the clients that they would refer to you and they might be a little bit more upfront about some of it than the clients themselves might be. Etinosa, this is so helpful. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Etinosa: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

John: A lot of what Etinosa and I talked about today comes down to confidence. The confidence to charge what your work is actually worth instead of shrinking your number to match some story in your head. But it's hard to price your work with conviction when you're not fully confident in how you deliver it. When your process feels vague or inconsistent, that uncertainty has a way of showing up in your pricing and billing. You hedge, you discount, you undercharge.

One of the great things I see in teams that adopt GreenLine and an Agile way of working more generally is that they build a strong foundation for their delivery workflows that gives them the confidence to communicate and capture the real value of their legal work. And GreenLine gives you the platform to create a defined process for each matter type and to embed your quality standards and communication checkpoints right into your workflow. And it gives you an internal communications framework that can get you off of overwhelming channels like Slack or email or teams so you can focus conversations on making sure your quality standards actually get met for every client and every case.

We want you to have the structure and support you and your team need to stand behind your pricing in a powerfully confident way because confidence in how you deliver gives you confidence in what you charge. And that's exactly the kind of footing Etinosa is talking about today.

So I'd love to show you how GreenLine can help you build confidence in the delivery systems for your law practice. Or frankly, if you just like to explore how a more Agile approach to lawyering can improve your confidence regardless of what tools you use, I'd be happy to talk with you about that too. To schedule some time with me, head on over to greenline.legal and hit that book a demo button. Or just shoot me an email at john.grant@greenline.legal and we can set up a time to talk.

All right, I would like to thank Etinosa again for joining me today. I'll have links in the show notes to Etinosa's website and her book, How to Talk to Your Parents About Money. And the first two chapters of that book in particular are directly relevant to the money scripts that she and I talked about today. I'll also put a link to the book, The Heart of Money by Deborah Price, which Etinosa recommended as a companion resource.

If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with a friend or colleague who might be struggling to get their own pricing right in their law practice. And as always, it helps other legal professionals find this show if you could take a minute to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or YouTube.

As always, this podcast gets production support from the fantastic team at Digital Freedom Productions, and our theme music is “Hello” by Lunareh. Thanks for listening, and I will catch you again next week.