What FedEx is really selling

My hairstylist once charged me twenty dollars to color my hair. When I told her that was insane, she shrugged. “I just threw some color on. It didn’t take long.”

When I throw some color on my own head, it does not come out looking like that. The whole gap is sitting right there in her shrug. She was pricing the twenty minutes it took her. I was paying for the fact that I walked out looking like a better version of myself.

My landscaper is the same. He hasn’t raised his rates in years. When I told him he should, his eyes went wide. “But it takes me the same amount of time. Sometimes less.” Right. It takes him less time because he’s good at it. It would take me three weekends and the yard would still look like I’d lost a fight with it. He thinks he’s selling the hours. He’s selling me a yard that never get a letter from the HOA.

You are not selling the task

Neither of them could see the thing they were charging for, because they were standing too close to it. The work is easy for them, so it feels like it shouldn’t cost much. But nobody is buying the ease. They’re buying the result they can’t get on their own.

I do this constantly as a customer, and I’m glad I do. I could color my own hair. I could mow my own lawn. I hire out both, and a few other things besides. I hired a dog trainer because one of mine came with more issues than I know what to do with, and what she really sells me is a little less of the low-grade panic of living with a dog I can’t manage. I hire a roofer so my husband never gets on a ladder, which is a roundabout way of buying the certainty that I won’t end up a widow over a gutter. None of it is really about roofs or grass or hair. Each one solves something underneath.

FedEx is not in the shipping business

I did brand work for FedEx, so I’ve thought about this at the scale of a company that ships millions of things a day.

FedEx is not in the shipping business. Plenty of companies will move a box from one place to another, usually cheaper. What you pay FedEx for is the part that isn’t printed on the label. It’s the quiet confidence that the thing you sent will be where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, and that you won’t spend three days refreshing a tracking page with your stomach in a knot. That certainty is the product. The box arriving is just how they hand it to you.

Every business worth paying has a version of this. There’s the surface thing you do, and the deeper thing people are buying. The closer you get to naming the deeper thing, the less your price has to apologize for itself.

Your thing is not a commodity

When you price the task, you compete with everyone who does the task. When you price the relief instead, you’re the only one in the room, because nobody makes that exact problem go away for that exact person the way you do.

So the stylist should be charging a lot more than twenty dollars, and the landscaper more than whatever rate he’s been stuck on. What they sell was never measured in minutes.

The people who complain aren’t your people

When someone tells you you’re too expensive, read it as information, not a verdict. They’ve told you they came to buy the task at the lowest number, and you’re selling the thing underneath it, so they were never going to be your customer.

Let them go find the cheap version.

Your job is to be clear enough about what you really solve that the people who want it can find you and recognize it fast. That’s most of what branding and messaging are for in the first place.

The part where I admit I still do this

I’m writing this mostly at myself. Earlier today I caught myself about to wave off a fee because, “Oh, that’ll only take me thirty minutes.” Thirty minutes that pulls on years of knowing exactly which thirty minutes. I’ve done the math wrong on my own work for most of my career, the same way my stylist does it on hers, pricing the clock instead of the result.

The knowing is the rare part. The thirty minutes is just where it shows up.