Imagine you design logos for a living. A graphic designer with ten years commercial experience, many of which at a big agency, some of which working for yourself.
You're great at your craft and you know that your work can bring an upturn in sales for your clients almost immediately.
So the small shop down the road comes to you, telling you that they normally make about £500 profit per month but want to grow that to around £1000 per month and a major part of their plan is to rebrand.
You know that, using your well-tested and proven logo design process, this will take about five days of hard work on your part.
What do you charge them?
Maybe your hourly rate is £50 per hour. Five days is 40 hours - that's £2000.
A few days later, the marketing director of a multi-national company comes to you. They're doing a rebrand for one of their smaller divisions - a division that makes £10,000 profit per day that they want to boost up to £30,000 profit per day. And a major part of their plan is to rebrand.
The work is actually pretty much the same. Five days. 40 hours.
But the upturn - instead of helping them increase their business by £500 per month, you're helping them increase their business by £20,000 per day.
So is it fair to charge them the same £2000 for the work?
(Actually the work won't be the same; there's less room for error and much more research needed on the larger scale project but let's ignore that for now).
Even though the skills and experience you will be using are the same, the outcome that you are giving to the client is completely different.
And the client doesn't care about your skills or experience.
They only care about the outcome.
So charge for the outcome. That's what the client wants.
In the first case, you're effectively charging 4 month's upturn.
In the second case, what about charging 4 day's upturn? That's £80,000.
To a huge multi-national, bringing in those types of profits, that's nothing. And if you do help them get to £30,000 profit per day then it's also completely worth it to them.
There's no deception. There's nothing unethical about it. You're not cheating anyone. Everyone is getting the outcome you want.
It just takes utter balls to ask for it.