I want to give you a trigger warning here I'm about to mention a word that's, in my view one of the nastiest words in the human language, but it's important for our conversation. It's a it's a word that really upsets me. I consider it basically obscene, but you're going to hear this word if you're a freelancer. And I want to warn you, and I want to give you some tools for dealing with this when people use this awful, awful, obscene word. The word is discount. There's no word.

I won't say there's no where there are very few words in the English language that I hate more than the word discount. Because when someone asked for a discount, what they're really saying is, hey, TJ, you deserve a pay cut. Now how do you feel nobody likes to pay cut. Now I don't begrudge anyone asked me for a discount if I ask for discounts all the time. Say I'm a hypocrite. I'm dealing with purchasing products and services.

But I hate it when people ask me for a discount be one thing if I were a huge, huge company, and I had thousands of trainers and I could just say, well, I'll give you this 23 year old trainer, I'm hardly paying this person anything and you're a bulk customer fine. But when someone hires me, they get me typically. So when someone asks for a discount, it really gets my my dander up. So what I try to do is stress value. And what I say to all my prospects is Look, I want you to purchase the training that you think makes the absolute best sense for your people. I want you to get the best value of any training option out there for your people and I don't want you to hire me unless you think I'm the absolute least expensive for the value either provide to you.

And then I go back again and again, again, all the things I provide that are different, that are more thorough, that are comprehensive. So I try to change the conversation around. But I also have different product offerings that are less expensive. I'll say to them, okay? If you don't have enough money to afford it, I have an option that's several thousand dollars less expensive, but you don't get me you get a junior trainer. And you don't get any of the intellectual property.

You don't get the follow up and you don't get this. You don't get that but you get the day of training. Typically, when I phrase it that way, they're like, No, no, we really want the full service and quite often they drop it and are happy to pay the full amount. So I'm not saying I've never discounted, there are exceptions. But here's the thing I found. The second you give someone a discount You have established your value.

So don't ever. I mean, 50 years can go by you don't, don't ever expect that person to pay your full price. There are some people in the world, they'd rather pay $100,000 and get a $2,000 discount than to pay full fee something that cost $2,000. There's just some people, that's their mentality. And you may have to be creative. Sometimes they'll say, okay, they'll ask me about one and negotiate.

I'll say, Sure, I'll negotiate. Would you like to start? What are you offering me? And they're sometimes taken aback because they think I've just arbitrarily gonna cut my price. That's not negotiation. That's one person just giving themselves a pay cut, pay cut for absolutely no reason.

So I recommend see what else they have to offer. There have been times I don't like to do it, and I haven't done it in a while. where someone says, Okay, I only have 80% of your fee. But I can give you a full page ad on our catalog for the convention and it's going to be seen by 5000 people and we're charging other customers $5,000 for that ad. No, I won't work purely on trade. But I will sometimes do partial trade as long as they're paying cash and they're paying up front.

With everything else. You have to be very careful because if you're doing any kind of a trade and you don't get it up front, you don't want to be chasing a client saying Hey, yo, you promised me these free meals and you're out there restaurant. So be very careful about trade because you cannot pay your rent in trade. Now, if someone has a service and you really do need it, you really would use it and it is something you would otherwise spend cash on. Then There's nothing wrong with that. Just be sure to talk to your accountant, make sure you don't get into any problems with the IRS because it is still compensation.

So please, please keep this in mind, people are going to ask you for discounts. Your first response, I believe should always be to stress the value to stress, you think they should get the absolute best value for their money. What I tell my clients is, if I haven't convinced you on the absolute best value for your money, you shouldn't hire me. And I say it with a smile in my face and on my voice in my voice. And I get them to lie. I don't want them to feel like I'm being confrontational.

But it is a matter I take seriously because it will destroy your margins work and get out then your other clients will feel ripped off when they find out. They pay twice as much as someone else. So try to Focus on that. Now here's the other thing I found is sometimes someone says, Well, I have X amount of dollars for a trainer. And I said, okay, but I'm also providing you intellectual property and online training courses. For for a year.

Do you have an extra education budget? Oh, yeah, we have an education budget for that. So maybe they pay 70% of my normal normal Training Day fee from one pile. And the other 30% comes from the intellectual content, and it adds up to my normal fee. So sometimes you have to be creative. Again, it's all legal.

It's all ethical. In my view, it's all aboveboard, but it's just charging them in slightly different ways. So that's my advice on how to handle discounts.