You are what you charge for.

That’s a fundamental tenant of The Experience Economy.

If you are selling things like investment advice, IT solutions, dining, construction, then you are a service provider.

But as we know from the Progression of Economic Value (POEV), clients are willing to pay more for experiences than they are for services. Clients want their services fast and cheap so that they can spend their time and money on experiences they value more highly.

We will pay $2 for someone to brew and serve us a cup of coffee, but we’ll pay $6 or more for the Starbucks specialty drink that we can enjoy in their comfortable coffee shop.

That’s the key to becoming an experience stager rather than just a service provider. Charging for the time that clients spend with you. It’s About Time. That can be admission to an event or a monthly subscription or something else.

By providing an experience, you find clients who are willing to pay more than they would for a service that they can likely obtain somewhere else.

But there’s another level of the POEV beyond experiences that clients are willing to pay even more for. That’s transformations. Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore talk about that near the end of the Experience Economy, but without a lot of detail. They’ve written more about it recently and even talked with me about it.

What is most valuable to clients is not your service. It’s not even the experiences you stage for them. No, what’s most valuable is the transformation you guide them through. They employ your service because they want something different. They want to become something different. They want to transform.

Go back to the coffee example. People will pay far more for a class that transforms them into a coffee connoisseur or home barista than they will for a short experience in a coffee shop.

If you are an investment advisor, people don’t ultimately want the advice or even the experience of working with you. They want to become wealthy. To be transformed into a wealthy individual.

Transformations is the topic of Joe Pine’s next book. And guess what? You can follow along as he writes it. He’s sharing his thoughts on Substack, and you can join me in subscribing to see his ideas develop into a book.

You’ll also learn how to give your clients what they want the most: transformation.