One of the things that’s going to help you improve your pricing is this supply and demand concept. If you are generating a lot of marketing, you’ve got a lot of prospects coming in and you’re really busy, you will be able to say with confidence that your prices are going up if a lot of people want your work and that you need to be able to sift and sort a little better and so you want to raise your price by doing that.

I would encourage you to work on your inner game. If you have a concern, and this is a common concern, so it’s not just you. There’s a lot people out there, a lot of handyman businesses and a lot of business owners in general that discount themselves. They don’t have the confidence in order to charge their worth. It’s an inner game issue. It’s not really a reflection on what’s going on in the marketplace. You would be surprised at what the marketplace will bear.

So you want to work on that. Here are some of the recommended readings that will work on your inner game. Some of these are classics; there are some newer ones out as well. I’ll mention these as the classics, four that I want to discuss, but there are additional ones that you can go and find. Things you’ll discover as you continue down this path; and if you need a recommendation, let me know. Go to the LearnToBeRich.com website, and contact me and say, you know, I’ve read all four of these books, are there any other ones you recommend? And I’ll go ahead and put up a new page with some recommended reading.

Here are the four that I would definitely recommend. And by the way, if you read these things and you come back six months later and you read them again, you’re going to discover that somebody snuck in your bookshelf and actually changed the books on you, because you’re going to get different things the second, third, fourth, fifth time you go through and read these books. A lot of the information is going to be new. You’re going to be in a difference place, and so you’re going to hear different things. You’re going to read different things that didn’t make sense to you before, and that they all of the sudden make sense to you now. So, here are some of my recommended readings.

“Psycho-Cybernetics” by Maxwell Maltz is a really good classic book on personal development, setting goals, understanding how you work mentally. You definitely want to read “Psycho-Cybernetics” by Maxwell Maltz.

Another book is “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. This one’s a personal development classic. I highly recommend that you read that. It’s a relatively easy read – most of the chapters are a relatively easy read. I’ll tell you how important this book is to me. I have a weekly mastermind group meeting that revolves largely around reading this book. Every week we get together; we read another chapter, and we talk about this book, and then once we get through with that year a lot of times we go to another book and then come back to this. We’ve been meeting for years now, mostly discussing this particular book and applying strategies from the book. That one is “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill.

Another one is “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. That’s by Dale Carnegie. A great book on developing interpersonal skills, on finding ways to encourage people to know, like and trust you, ways to know, like and trust other people by understanding them better. A great sales book. I would definitely recommend picking up “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.

The last one on my list is “The Aladdin Factor” by Jack Canfield and others. This is a great book about learning how to ask for what you want – really great motivational stuff, really great practical stuff on learning how to ask for what you want. That relates directly back to your pricing for your handyman business. I would definitely recommend going and picking up those books.

Go pick up one to start with. And if it’s only one, pick up one that’s interesting to you. Go ahead and pick the one that sounds best to you based on what I told you or go read the back covers in your bookstore. Go to Amazon.com; it doesn’t matter where you get it from, just go ahead and order it. A lot of these books you can get from your library; they were printed in mass quantities, so occasionally you’ll find them at discount bookstores like Goodwill, Habitat for Humanity. Places where people go and donate things, and then that business sells the donated good to raise money for a cause like Goodwill or Habitat for Humanity – those guys will all often have books and occasionally you can find one of these on the shelves there too. So I definitely recommend those for recommended reading.

Until my next post,

James

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