Not Playing the Game: how to price work no one wakes up wanting, and still have clients come to you

Christian Hunt started his own business the way the books say to: fixed prices, a pitch for every opportunity that came along. He lost deals for being too expensive, won others for being too cheap, and wasted time on work that served nothing. His conclusion: a wrong yes costs more than a no. The talk shows how he built a business around work nobody searches for: behavioural science in compliance, which he calls human risk.

What the talk covers

• Why the usual playbook fails: nobody wakes up wanting what he offers, so there is no client avatar to chase. By his account, clients come for one of three reasons: something went badly wrong, someone new in a job wants change, or someone has long sensed that things do not work without knowing why.
• Show, don't sell: no cold outreach, but a podcast, keynotes and videos. What he puts out has to be what clients get when they hire him. It repels the wrong people, so his few conversations are with likely buyers, often at higher prices.
• No pitches: in his experience price decides them, and entering one signals that your work is comparable to everyone else's. He stays out.
• Pricing for different budgets: speaking, training, consulting and coaching. Only the speaking fees are published, and the most expensive offer anchors the rest. The same session, he finds, sells for more as "speaking" than as "training".
• Be recognisably yourself: he commutes between London and Munich by train, turned that into a talking point, and tries ideas out in public. Clients such as the Royal Air Force came to him, he says.

Q&A

Rejection? Rare in conversations: prospects screen themselves out online. Is this a luxury position? He agrees it can be: he tested the idea inside his former employer first.

Who it's for

Freelancers whose work is hard to explain, scope and price.