I feel a person should be comfortable asking for money, even big money – whether it be charges against one’s services or donation for some cause. One should be child-like while asking. Asking requires one to shed his sense of somebodiness, sense of identity.
The other day I was reading an article about Osho. For those who may not be aware, he was one of the wealthiest people of his times (though he didn’t have a bank account or any personal wealth per se). One great strength of his that many people don’t know about was his extraordinary capacity to ask. He would happily ask many of his disciples to come in full time into the movement and also donate their entire wealth towards his philanthropic initiatives like building a commune to support people’s spiritual discipline.
Our conditioning with money is not easy to give up and hence we don’t ask. Money continues to be considered evil and unspiritual in our psyche no matter how much we deny. We talk about money with muffled voices. We mince words if we have to let somebody know our investments or monthly income . We often ask our clients compensation for our well-deserving services, in an apologetic manner.
All these are growth-stiflers. Often in the first few years of starting a business, in order to break the entry barriers, one has to peg our price lower than or equal to competition. So far so good. However this leads to your product getting commoditized rather than being unique. As and how your organization evolves in its life cycle, you need to move towards uniqueness. That’s when you start differentiating your offerings on value rather than price. You add features to your offering that the competition doesn’t. You offer delight to the customer not just satisfaction. This is what gives you the power to command a better price.
However, as long as you have your asking barrier still in place, you can’t take this bold step of scaling up the price of your product by a good multiple. And this is what differentiates a fast-growing company from a slow-growing one. This is what differentiates a tick-mark growth graph from a hockey-stick growth graph. If material growth is one of your goals, then your capacity to ask and command higher pricing is an indispensable tool that you need in your kitty. Think about it.
