I heard the Picasso story again today. If you haven’t heard it, basically it goes that Picasso was at a café doodling on a napkin when an admirer of his asked to buy his sketch. He finished it and asked for a million Francs. The person, in disbelief wondered how on earth he could charge so much for a sketch done in a few minutes. To which Picasso replied, that he drew it in a few minutes but his ability to create a piece of art in such a short time took 40 years. That’s what the admirer would be paying for: the mastery.

How does one charge for mastery?

When we get to the root of the issue, the admirer wasn’t paying for the time it took for Picasso to sketch on a napkin. They were paying for his dedication to a craft and his artistic mastery built over decades. Those decades allowed him, with ease and little time, to create a tiny work of art on a café napkin.

We pay for ability. We pay for experience. We pay for results and performance. The master plumber might do in a fraction of the time what an inexperienced plumber needs 3 hours for. Would time be a fair assessment to establish the price? Time can go the other way too. Some things require more time to yield something of high value. Growing things like orchids. Creating hand stitched or intricate items. Holding a plank. A cruise. The passage of time differs between things in this world, but what we are after is the desired result.

Thus, time is not always the right measure by which we should charge for services. It becomes especially so when ability and mastery comes into play. Why is it so common to do so? Because the relationship between time and money is clearer than the relationship between value and money. Value can be a bit nebulous to pin down. What’s not? The ticking hands of a clock that never waver.

Who is the time for, in your packages?

It seems that an hour for a standard photography session is the average. At the start, you may have found yourself going more than that because you weren’t confident in the results after an hour. Into your journey, you may have started to find that you can finish in 20, but then there might be an awkwardness of having to keep things going for another 40 minutes because the client paid for the time. People like to get what they paid for. If you promise 60 minutes tied to a price, but shoot for only 45, clients feel they paid for 15 minutes and may want their money back. Giving ranges may attempt to resolve the problem, but I have an opinion on why ranges are generally bad for business.

Will a session where you spent an hour automatically result in images better than a session that took 30 minutes? The whole mini concept breaks this mythology, where most of us can perform, and produce our art just as well in 10 minutes. Then why sell one hour sessions? Not for the time — but for a benefit and/ or result — a more relaxed experience, adding outfits or changing locations. And what’s the benefit to us to charge in that manner? Let’s take a gym example. Gym 1 charges you by month, and doesn’t promise or guarantee any results. Gym 2 charges you by the result - washboard abs. For some it may take a month, for some 3 and for some 7. Which would you prefer?

Manage your time, price your value

Yes, we all need to manage our time. We need to set schedules and set expectations. But given that sometimes we need more time and sometimes less to accomplish any given task, it would be more ideal to charge by result or by performance rather than time. Your mastery allows you to reach the result, and the mastery takes the time it takes based on what it is that you are mastering. This is the critical point - Picasso still needed time to draw. Simply, the price wasn’t based on it.

The other benefit of charging based on the mastery, the experience, the performance and the result is that a client can’t easily convert that into a unit price. Their attention is called to the totality of the service rather than the pieces. If Picasso charged per brush stroke then the value of the full art piece would be lost, similar to what time does; reduce the art to its pieces where a finished art piece is bigger than the paint on the canvas. Just like our photographs are more than settings or composition or light. They are memories, pointers to love, creation of legacies, celebrations of people.

Pricing the priceless requires a bit more work than pricing for time. You must consider what education you have and assign a price to that. The years of experience. Your ability to produce consistently each time you shoot. The journey points you take your clients through. The level of service and attentiveness. The quality of your results. It’s hard, but worthwhile. What helps?

First, put your impostor in check. Impostor syndrome is normal, but you must cast it aside and allow your objective, rather than subjective self to manage your business. Click here for three ways to overcome impostor syndrome.
Determine how unique your combination/ totality of service is within your market. This requires some digging, beyond Facebook. For example, if everyone is shoot and burn and you are offering a bespoke experience with unique art, price can go up.
Price out any physical elements like art and albums, with prescribed markups. Consider also permits or fees for special elements and add a factor to include your time and authoritative evaluation and/ or practice at said location to ensure beautiful results.
Things like education investment can be considered. You could for example start with the base price of the cost, and then add a 2x or 3x factor based on the fact that the education propelled you into new levels of work. I invested recently into a 1k levelling up course for weddings, and the value already in just a few modules has delivered beyond the price. I might 3x that to 3k and then add that into my cost, based on how many sessions I do. If I aim for 10 weddings next year, I would add $300 per wedding because I am confident to convert that education into $300 value (and more) to each wedding client).

Remember, every famous artist probably went through this same process. If the story of Picasso is actually true, how did he arrive at 1 million Francs? A combination of supplies, time investment, education, practice, confidence in ability and the amount people paid him before, or what others commented on the level of his art. It’s not perfect, but we can move towards this, and not settle for only charging time for something as precious as what we offer. Give it a go. In fact, pricing yourself higher than you’re comfortable with can have the magical benefit of actually moving you to uplevel your ability, skill and mastery, and vanquish the impostor, in a bit of reverse psychology. Find more on that here!

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