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# What your price funds

**James Walls** · June 16, 2026 · 5 min read

About twenty-five years ago I founded and ran a photography business with a partner. We were doing good work, getting good bookings, charging good money. Then a photographer I’d come to know, Simon Hoyle from Southlight Studio, said: “You’re not charging nearly enough for your work. Think of the most you can charge, and then double it, and when that works, double it again.”

We did. Not all at once, and not without nerves about it, but we did. What surprised me wasn’t what changed about the money. It was what changed about the work.

The higher price let us invest in every job. Better preparation. Better gear. More time with the bride and groom before the day. More care on the day itself. A different standard in the development of the photos afterwards. The price wasn’t extracting from anyone. It was funding what the work needed to be in order to be worth what it cost.

The other thing that changed was who turned up. The clients who came in at the new price didn’t argue with it. They were thoughtful about what they wanted from the experience. They expected more, and they were right to. They were investing in something that mattered to them, and they wanted the work to reflect that.

## What you are actually selling

Here is a definition that has stayed useful.

Value is *the bridge* between where the client is now and the future they’re working toward.

It gets more real with every step you take together, and the distance closing is something you can both see. That is what makes it worth paying for, and worth more than the hours it took.

There is a substantive side to it, which is what the conversation usually covers – the thing built, the mistake avoided, the opportunity spotted. And there is a side that gets named less often, which is what carrying that future actually feels like for the person paying. Less guessing. Less alone with the hard decisions. What they are paying for isn’t the deliverable handed over at the end. It is the path getting clearer underneath them as you go, and the proof, step by step, that they are moving.

Once that definition is in front of you, the pricing question changes shape.

## Why hours can’t price it

Plenty of good businesses price by estimating hours and working backward. Even the ones quoting a fixed fee are often doing it under the bonnet: this will take me about ten hours, my rate is roughly X, so I’ll quote something that lines up. It looks like value pricing from the client’s side. It is hourly pricing wearing a different label.

Hours measure the wrong side of the transaction. Hours measure your effort. They don’t measure what your effort produces for the client. The same outcome can take many hours or few, and either way the client gets the same result. Worse, pricing on hours tells them you are charging for your time, which makes you a contractor – someone they can compare on rate against anyone else willing to do the same work.

What the client actually gets is distance covered toward something they couldn’t have reached alone. That is what the price is for, and it doesn’t track with how long it took you.

## The conversation before the number

If the price has to follow the distance, and the distance has to follow the end state, then the end state has to come from the client. Which makes the first conversation the only place the price can be set properly.

Many clients haven’t put that end state into concrete terms. They have a felt version of it, and the specifics are personal. One wants to play more golf. Another wants a Friday off that doesn’t require a week of recovery. Another wants to be the chairman rather than the operator. Another wants the business to be worth something they can sell in a few years. Another has hit a ceiling they can’t push through and doesn’t yet have language for what is on the other side of it.

The work of that conversation is helping them hold those things up to the light long enough to name them as the destination. Twelve months. Two years. Five years. What does success actually look like on each of those horizons, and what does it feel like to get there? The answers aren’t a template. They belong to that client and no one else.

It cuts both ways, too. If you are not the right people to walk it with them, taking the work does damage to them and to you.

## What the price funds

When you price for the distance covered instead of for the hours, two things change.

You can afford to invest in every piece of work properly. The preparation. The thinking between sessions. The willingness to sit with a difficult question rather than rush past it. Cheap pricing forces cheap delivery, and cheap delivery means you are never quite there. Higher pricing funds being there.

And the price changes who you end up working with. Clients who want to invest at the level the work represents are different conversation partners from clients squeezing every dollar. Not better people. Different fit. The ones you will work best with treat the work as something to use, not something to ration.

A client can feel, without ever being able to name it, whether they are being billed for your time or invested in for their future. It shapes how they show up. Billed by the hour, they ration you, they hesitate before they call, they wait until the problem is expensive before they raise it. Priced on where they are trying to get to, they use you, and the work compounds because nobody is counting the meter while they do.

So the pricing model was never only about what we earn. It quietly decides what the relationship is allowed to become.

We didn’t rewire everything at once, either. We didn’t have the nerve to, and we didn’t need to. The courage came one conversation at a time – the next client whose aim we actually understood, and the conversation about where they were trying to get to before any conversation about price. Each one taught us something the last one hadn’t. The number could always follow, once we’d seen what we were really being asked to build.

## Two questions to sit with

- If I doubled my price tomorrow, what would I have to change about the work to make it worth that – and why am I not doing those things now?

- Do my clients ration me or use me, and which did my pricing teach them to do?

### See how your own numbers are being run

Seven quick questions, a gut answer to each – no email asked for, nothing you answer is saved. Useful whether or not we ever speak.

[See Where You Sit →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/financial-scorecard/)

More on the pricing question itself: [Our pricing was set years ago – is it still right? →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/questions/is-our-pricing-still-right/)

First published in The Stoneforge Newsletter on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bridges-we-build-james-walls-qpv6e), June 16, 2026. Revised for this edition.

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