A good follow-up to yesterday’s post about 37 Signals: they recently wrote a great piece about how to justify how much you charge your customers for your services. The basic gist of the article is that you are charging not for your time, but for your expertise. I particularly like the Picasso anectdote, and this great one from Adrien in the comments thread, which I have never heard before, but apparently its pretty old:

A machine in a factory has malfunctioned, and the engineers on site can’t find the source of the problem.

So they call on a retired worker who had spent a long time working with the machine. He comes in, walks up to the machine, looks at it for a minute, pulls out a piece of chalk and draws a circle around the screw that needs to be tightened.

He then writes them a bill for $5’000.

“$5’000, that’s ridiculous, all you did was draw a circle around a screw!”

So he writes them a new bill:
- drawing a circle around a screw: $1.
- knowing where to draw it: $4999.