What is the value of a professional service in Singapore?

Movie star Harrison Ford said in 2010 when asked if he would ever drop his fee, "This is my job, I don't have another job. This is my craft that I have spent my whole life working at. I want to get paid for doing it; otherwise I am not being responsible and I'm not valuing what I do for a living. When I came into this business I didn't know the names of movie studios. When I was under contract at Columbia Pictures they paid me $150 a week. I only found that I was valued when I was valued. That's the way business is."

Next time you criticise an actor for being paid such large sums you may wish to think about this. However the sentiment runs true across all services, from acting to marketing, legal to my LinkedIn marketing consultancy.

Being an entrepreneur in Singapore really teaches you the value of a service and all about pricing it. My service is premium as it's so personalised and as the results make a real difference to a person and a business.

There is a real dilemma for professional service companies in Singapore like mine and across Asia Pacific, China too for example. This is between what someone is prepared to pay for and what someone knows they need but does not value and is therefore not prepared to pay the right amount for it.

I have heard many stories from every kind of agency and B2B brand here, from marketing to training, architecture to stakeholder engagement, who have been exasperated by local clients and potential clients trying to pay what they did 5-10 years ago or just not valuing the service for what it is really worth and trying to buy it on the cheap.

Singaporean companies of course know that there is always a local firm who will do it for virtually nothing just to get the business. However you do get what you pay for in these kinds of services as many people have found out. You may save in the short term but not in the medium or long term, you will end up paying more and the quality of work is often substandard.

If you look at all the online tender processes that happen in Singapore, these have some of the worst examples. The number of stories I have heard of bids going in at hundreds of dollars when everyone else is pitching at tens of thousands is just too many to find funny.

These lower bids are always from local operators. They clearly have no value for their own service as they can not possibly be making any profit from these bids, so why do they do it? Winning work for the sake of it; if it loses you money every time is the road to ruin.

All they do is bring down everyone else or try to and disrupt the process unfairly. I have even heard stories of these unrealistically lower bidders then complaining when they have lost. They do this on the basis that they should have been awarded the bid based purely on price and not on experience, expertise, and the ability to deliver. Incredible.

The people who issued the tender then have to go through a ridiculous process of justifying why they wouldn't pay hundreds of dollars for a job which clearly needed a service with a value of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in time, experience, expertise, and professional fees alone.

What a waste of everyone's time. However this trick does work sometimes and they get the work. The work ends up being terrible and then the tender ends up getting issued again having wasted months on someone who didn't know what they were doing.

All because people want to buy a low priced service if they can without looking at the substance, the experience, and whether people can actually deliver what the client wants at that price.

So why do people always try and pay as little as possible and still expect the same premium level service? It's like paying for a Ferrari or a Louis Vuitton bag and the wheels not being on or the straps not being on. You do get what you pay for in every aspect of life from restaurants to professional services, especially in Singapore.

The price of a premium personalised service will find a home in a market or section of a market that could be from different countries and situated in different regions of the world. The beauty of some social media services is that there is a massive market globally for the offering as well as amongst a niche community in Singapore. Not everyone has that luxury.

Even in Singapore and other Asian countries there will always be regional clients who can stretch budgets over several countries to justify the cost. There will also be more worldly clients who are happy to pay the price because they know that you get what you pay for and if you "pay peanuts you tend to get monkeys" as the saying goes.

There are also other premium priced service companies who will pay a premium price because they also know that you get what you pay in the service sector as that's what they offer.

If you want a premium, tailored personalised service with direct results that take care, thought, longevity and a more strategic thought-through approach, then that needs to be paid for. The best lawyers, accountants, management consultants, trainers cost real money. Why shouldn't marketing agencies and consultancies?

One of McKinsey's marketing points and brand values is that they are deliberately higher than anyone else. The quality and value of their service is higher and therefore you should pay higher fees. If you don't like it, then you can always buy a substandard service for less money but it won't be McKinsey you've employed.

If local firms want to work for nothing, that's up to them. However the reputation of Singapore as a country where many companies will not value a service correctly will ultimately damage the economy and the firms here, both local and MNC.

Experienced talent costs, expertise costs. These can't be employed on the cheap. If you think it can, you will reap what you sow, pay your lower money and take your chances as they say. Don't blame anyone but yourself when it all goes wrong and your expectations are not matched with the service.

There is no winner in the low cost game in professional services. There is a client who thinks that they are getting something for virtually nothing whereas they are really just forcing their countrymen into working for nothing, getting less experienced people on their work, and forcing the service provider into cutting their own costs to compete. That way lies madness.

As Harrison Ford said, "This is my job, I don't have another job. This is my craft that I have spent my whole life working at. I want to get paid for doing it; otherwise I'm not valuing what I do for a living."