A plumber hit a pipe four times and charged $200. Everyone thinks he overcharged. He didn’t. And the invoice he wrote explains why you’ve been undercharging your whole career.
There’s an old story I keep coming back to.
A man calls a plumber to fix a pipe. The plumber walks in, looks around, listens for about ten minutes. Then he picks up a wrench and hits the pipe. Three or four times, same spot. Problem solved.
He hands over the bill. Two hundred dollars.
The man loses it. “Two hundred bucks? You hit a pipe with a wrench. I demand you explain this invoice.”
So the plumber takes it back, rewrites it, and hands it over again.
Hitting the pipe: $2.
Knowing to hit the pipe: $99.
Knowing where and how to hit it: $99.
If you’ve ever had a plumbing problem and you are not a plumber, you already know the punchline. Doing it yourself is the most expensive option on the table. It isn’t what you do. And you don’t do it enough to do it well.
I’ve been on both ends of that invoice
I think about that story more than I’d like to admit. Because I’ve been on both ends of it.
Early on, I was the angry man with the invoice. I looked at experienced people getting paid real money for what looked like almost no work and I thought I could shortcut it. Read the books, watch the videos, skip the tuition. Why pay the plumber when I could swing the wrench myself?
So I swung. And I broke the pipe.
I’ve lost more money trying to save a fee than I ever saved. Every single time, the “expensive” expert turned out to be the cheap option, and my do-it-yourself discount turned into the most expensive line item of the whole deal.
What the angry man can’t see
Now I’m on the other end of the invoice. And here’s what nobody tells you about it.
I can walk a deal and know in ten minutes where it’s going to hurt.
Not because I’m smart. Because I’ve been wrong about that exact thing before. The pipe I tell you not to buy is the pipe that flooded my basement in 2009. The number I tell you to recheck is the number that lied to me on a deal I was sure about. The ten-minute read isn’t a gift. It’s a receipt for fifteen years of getting it wrong until I finally got it right.
That’s the part the angry man can’t see. He’s looking at the five minutes. He’s not paying for the five minutes.
He’s paying for the twenty years that made the five minutes possible.
The swing was always the cheap part
Here’s where this lands for you, whether you sell deals, advice, design, or your own two hands.
The market is trying to convince you that the swing is the product. That the deliverable is the thing. That if the work looks fast, it should be cheap.
It’s lying to you.
The swing was always the cheap part. Two dollars. The value, the real value, the part worth charging for, is knowing where to hit and when to hit it. And that knowledge has only ever been bought one way. By hitting the wrong pipe, expensively, until you learned the right one.
You’re not overpriced. You’re carrying invoices nobody can see, every mistake you survived, every deal that taught you something the spreadsheet couldn’t. Stop discounting the ten-minute read like it only took ten minutes. It took your whole career.
What this means for you tonight
So here’s the one thing to do today.
Look at the last time you undercharged. The quote you softened. The fee you apologized for. The “oh it only took me an hour” discount you handed someone who’d have happily paid full freight.
Now ask: was I billing for the swing, or for knowing where to hit?
If you’ve been charging for the swing your whole life, that’s the tell. You’ve been invoicing $2 for work that was worth $200, and quietly resenting it, and blaming the market.
The market isn’t the problem. The invoice is. Rewrite it.
Charge for the wrench. Then charge for the years that taught your hand exactly where to land it.
In your corner,
Russell Westcott
#Inspire #Encourage #Love
