The Flinch

You worked out the new rate months ago. The spreadsheet agreed. Your peers charge more for less. And the number on your website hasn't moved.

Anyone watching would call that a pricing problem. But the pricing was solved months ago. Something else is holding the number down.

Try this. Picture typing the new figure into a proposal — an imaginary one, no client, no stakes. Now picture them opening it. Reading down the page. Reaching the number.

There. That small pull-back, just before you imagined their reaction. Maybe you even felt the urge to round it down a little.

That's the flinch.

Notice what it isn't: judgement. Judgement needs something to judge and this fired before anything happened. No client objected. There is no client. It's an old lesson about what happens when you ask for too much — learned somewhere that had nothing to do with this work or these people and it goes off every time you reach for the number.

So the rate stays where it is. And it gets explained as timing, or the market, or wanting a few more testimonials first.

Take the gap between the two numbers and multiply it by every client this year. That's the flinch's annual fee. Quietly collected, never invoiced.