WHAT THE FUNDRAISING

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113: How Money Moves in Alignment with What You Think You’re Worth with Leah Neaderthal

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“The things that are important to you are the rocks, the clients, and the revenue are the pebbles and the sand.”

Leah Neaderthal
Episode #113

Overview

In this episode of What the Fundraising Podcast we are focusing specifically on nonprofit consultants but there are lessons in here for nonprofit fundraisers too.

In this episode, Leah Neaderthal, owner of Smart Gets Paid and a sales coach for women consultants, provides valuable insights on getting paid what you’re truly worth. Many people charge for their services based on time and deliverables, limiting their potential earnings. Leah helps women break through to the next revenue level in their business by teaching them how to navigate the uncharted territories of sales and set value-based prices. She shares her wisdom on the different profitability angles we should be considering in our businesses and offers valuable tips for overcoming our fears of asking for money. Don’t miss out on the gems in this episode; grab a notebook and pen and tune in to learn from Leah’s expertise.

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Leah Neaderthal

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

  • Many thanks to our sponsor, Neon One for making this episode possible. I love partnering with Neon One because I believe they care for the whole nonprofit, and I know that my clients will be well taken care of. I also love how they work with consultants to value our time and expertise. They pay for speaking at their events, and they understand how consultants support the entire sector. To learn more about Neon One’s partner program CLICK HERE.
  • If you haven’t already, please visit our new What the Fundraising community forum. Check it out and join the conversation at this link.
  • If you’re looking to raise more from the right funders, then you’ll want to check out my Power Partners Formula, a step-by-step approach to identifying the optimal partners for your organization. This free masterclass offers a great starting point

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Get to know Leah: 

Leah Neaderthal is a sales coach for women consultants, and she’s the founder of Smart Gets Paid. She teaches women how to get more of the right consulting clients and get paid more for every consulting contract in her program, The Academy. She’s also the host of The Smart Gets Paid podcast, where listeners go behind the scenes into her actual calls with clients where Leah is tackling their biggest sales challenges, and they can learn sales strategies they can use in their businesses. Before starting Smart Gets Paid, Leah built, grew, and sold three businesses. Learn more about Leah at smartgetspaid.com.

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I teach nonprofit fundraisers to bring in more gifts from the RIGHT donors… so they can stop hounding people for money. Fundraising doesn’t have to be uncomfortable.

MALLORY ERICKSON

episode transcript

00:01:50 Mallory Erickson

Welcome, everyone. I am so excited to be here today with  Leah Neaderthal, Leah. Welcome to What The Fundraising.

00:01:56 Leah Neaderthal
Thanks so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

00:01:59 Mallory Erickson
I’m thrilled for this conversation and loved our first one. Why don’t we start with you just introducing yourself to everyone? I know most of the consultants listening to this have probably heard your name and know of you and are big fans of your work. But just for everyone to get a sense for what you’re all about, it would be great to give a little intro.

00:02:16 Leah Neaderthal
Hello, everyone. I’m Leah Neaderthal. I’m the founder of Smart Gets Paid, and I am a sales coach for women running independent consulting businesses. I help women land more of the clients that they want, get paid way more for their work so that you can run a more profitable consulting business. I work with women who are so good at the work that they do. Probably a lot of you are listening here, and the sales process, the process of actually getting the clients to do the work for feels a little bit like uncharted territory. That’s where I play and that’s who I help.

00:02:52 Mallory Erickson
And already I think the parallels between what you do and the fundraising world are so clear because I can imagine there are so many nonprofit leaders listening to this who really resonate, especially with that last sentence around, I’m so good at the work. But the fundraising part of bringing in revenue and money for the work is the piece that feels really daunting and inaccessible or they can’t figure out how to bring that same energy and that same alignment of self to that side of the work. So let’s start just peeling back the layers around money and our relationship to it. Talk to me a little bit about how you coach and teach around money and profitability with the folks that you work with.

00:03:35 Leah Neaderthal
Well, before we even go there, I think it’s so interesting to have this conversation with people for whom the work is a fundraising. Because what a lot of people find when they get into their own business is that it’s about a thousand times harder to sell your own stuff than it is to sell or ask for something on behalf of somebody else. So then you have people who your skill is asking for something for an incredible cause, and yet when it comes to your own business, it feels so awkward, it feels so weird. And all of the fundraising skill evaporates because now you’re attaching it to your own thing versus some noble cause that you are championing.

 

00:04:23 Mallory Erickson
And I would even probably argue because we both had Vanessa Bonds on our podcast, which I love that alignment, and she talks about this too, around the fear, around asking and how much greater it is when we’re asking for self, when we’re asking for somebody else or for an organization. And what I had said to her at one point was, I think sometimes for nonprofit leaders it does feel like asking for self. I think at the bigger organizations it can feel more like they’re asking for others. But I think this is why the overhead conversation can get so tricky, because they feel like they are asking for their own salary, for their own pay, or if their identity is so interwoven with the work of the organization. Like who they are is so deeply connected to the programs, either because they have a shared identity with folks who are receiving, are now the beneficiaries of the program. It almost starts to blur those lines a little bit. So I think what you’re saying is super interesting and I definitely see that all the time with fundraisers who leave the sector and then start their own practice and then they’re like, wait a second, this is a lot harder. Yeah, I see a lot of fundraisers who feel that sense of identity from the beginning. I just want to say that because I think it’s really interesting.

00:05:38 Leah Neaderthal

You’re totally right. Everyone has a different relationship to the work and the business of the work. And it does come down to a lot of key factors, one of which is our relationship to money. So you had asked, how do you teach on that? How do you coach on that? And I will tell you it’s complicated. It is. But you can’t talk about running your own business and running a thriving business, a profitable business, without talking about money. Now, I will say that I think about money. I think about profitability in a different way than I think a lot of coaches or whoever out there. And I think the way that I coach around it is really accessible for especially people coming out of nonprofit. Because I think about profitability in three ways. First is financial profitability, making great money to support your business and your life. And that’s how a lot of people think about profitability for their business just around money. I think a lot of listeners will be familiar with this idea that you can make good money or great money, but also work way too hard. We can’t look at the business only in terms of financial lens. And also when I talk with women who come from the nonprofit space, that conversation about how much money do you want to make or what are your financial goals or what have you, can feel really uncomfortable. I hear a lot of I’m not really in it for the money and what have you, and I see your face, I was like, we’re putting a pin in this for sure. And so I agree, you can’t talk about this when you’re running your own business just in terms of money, but you also can’t overlook that. So the first way we think about it is in terms of financial profitability, most people stop there, but I go a couple of steps further. The second way I think about profitability is professional profitability. So doing the work that you love with clients, you really enjoy being known for the right things and having people come to you for the right things. That’s professional profitability. And then the third is emotional profitability. Are you having fun? Are you feeling optimistic? Do you have the Sunday scaries? Or are you really excited every week? And are you feeling good about where you are and when you want to be? So that is the entry point to the money conversation. I think it takes some of the pressure off, because in this conversation, I would never tell somebody, well, you just have to keep drive and make so much more money or whatever, because you have to balance it from those other pieces.

00:08:05 Mallory Erickson
Yeah, this is why I love your work so much, because I found when I was really building my business so I had a little one at home, she was eleven months when I started my business. My business sort of started a little bit accidentally. I just offered something free that exploded. And then inquiries around one on one work started to flood in. And I was looking for a business coach, and I felt like what every business coach was telling me was about how they could make me more financially successful. And for me, at that moment, I was like, the path to financial success looks really clear, but the path to financial success mixed with professional and emotional success, like, in your framework, doesn’t feel as clear to me. I’ve always known how to overdrive it and hustle my way to success. I know I can do that, but how do I do that and snuggle my baby and not be posting on Instagram at the same time or worrying about something else and having that sense of synergy and harmony in my life? And so I love, love, love the way that you talk about this. A few minutes ago, you said something that really sparked something. You saw my eyes light up, which was that statement, I’m not in it for the money. To me, when you said that, I got this gut punch around our discomfort, caring about money, both in the business side and the nonprofit side, that we’re just I had someone on a podcast recently say I said, well, what if the campaign is around how much money you’re trying to raise? And they were like, the campaign should never be about how much money you’re trying to raise. It’s about impact. And I was like, Why are we so afraid to say that this campaign, we’re trying to raise $100,000? So talk to me about how you think about that.

00:09:48 Leah Neaderthal
I guess. A couple of years ago, I saw somebody had posted something on LinkedIn around job searches. And it’s something tongue in cheek around how you can’t ask about salary because then you’re just in it for the money or whatever. And somebody posted I wish we could stop pretending like we don’t go to work for money even though it was about job searches. It’s so relevant to running your own business. We could pretend like we don’t want to do work for money. And I also wish we could pretend that all the things that you do want to do that are more important to you, right? Providing a great life for your children, providing a great life for yourself, taking care of aging parents or traveling the world. I wish we could pretend that that doesn’t take money, but it does. We also have to look at, then what is important. Maybe it’s important that you take every Friday off. Maybe it’s important that you go to every recital or soccer game or that you can take a month off and take your family to an airbnb in Italy or what have you. Those are the things that we can then structure around. And what’s really important, I think, is putting those things first. If money is not the driving force and nobody says it has to be, then let’s plan for that. So we ran an exercise at the end of last year. It’s the planning exercise for the coming year. This is an exercise we did in my program called The Academy, and we use the analogy that everyone’s probably heard some version of, like, you take a jar and then you fill it with rocks. You put the rocks in, and then you fill it with pebbles, and the pebbles go around the rocks and the sand. I feel like it’s in every business book, right? So where most people get tripped up in the planning process in their own business and this is where a lot of coaches start, too, is like, you start with the rocks, right? How much money do you want to make, how many clients you want to work with, et cetera. And then you build around that. But because we’re looking at not just the money, we started with different rocks because the rocks are you and the things that you want in life. So we made a list of what are the vacations you want to take, the birthdays you want to take off for. Have you ever planned something and you realize it’s on your, like, a work thing and you realize it’s on your birthday? Or have you accepted a meeting request and you realize it’s on your birthday? One of my clients was like, oh my God, I can’t wait to actually have my anniversary to go out to dinner with my husband because I’m not going to be doing some sort of big deliverable. And so you’re the rocks. The things that are important to you are the rocks. The clients and the revenue are the pebbles and the sand. And so that’s a process that tends to feel really a lot more aligned with people in the sector and people who say, I’m not in it for the money.

00:12:38 Mallory Erickson
Okay, that’s so good. And that advice is a really good exercise, I think, for fundraisers, too, especially smaller shop fundraisers that are trying to put together their fundraising plan for the year. And instead of starting with that top line revenue, thinking about what type of weekly schedule is ideal for them, how much time do they want to be giving over these other priorities that they have? What are the things that they need for them as humans to optimize their brains, their energy, their bodies to feel good in their work? And then the fundraising strategy can also be borne out of that. I get a lot of questions that are like, what’s the best way for us to do blank? And I’m like, that question has no universal answer. It depends on who you are, what your organization does, what your current lines of revenue look like, what your offerings are like, in your case, the services they’re offering. So I just love the way that you broke that down as you were talking made me think about nonprofit leaders also in their own salary negotiations or advocating to the board about their own pay. When you were talking about making space for self and your desires around your life and your vacation. I can imagine you have some people who experience some narratives around, like, but I don’t deserve that, doesn’t get this. And so who am I to be able to get this? Especially, I can imagine for folks coming from the nonprofit sector where there’s a lot of martyrdom narrative around the sector, what do you find?

00:14:13 Leah Neaderthal
Yeah, by the way, when I first started my first consulting business, it was a marketing and website design company, and our clients were nonprofits and social enterprises. And so I have a lot of experience with the narratives that are taking place inside the company or inside the organizations. And coming from corporate, I had to adopt a beginner’s mindset to really understand the mindsets and the motivations. And it’s really interesting to now see that in practice. In some of that I work with who come from and are selling back into the nonprofit space. To answer your question, everybody who starts a business or runs a business comes with their own personal mindset, beliefs, our money mindset, our money story, our limiting beliefs around money, et cetera, which is like a whole arena that you could spend years dealing with. And it is a personal interest of mine to unpack that. I think that people who come from nonprofit have another set of constraints because you have worked in a space that there’s just a lot of scarcity. Every dollar that goes to overhead doesn’t go to the work. There’s a rating tool that rates you on how much you spend to run the business, which I know we don’t have to go down that rabbit hole, but there is always like a do more with less mindset. And that is very hard to shake both in how you run your own business and what you’re willing to invest in how to grow the business. But also, as you were saying, I don’t deserve it. I don’t know that people would say it like that. You and I know that’s what they’re really saying, but it’s a really big shift. It’s very hard to do. And there are a lot of people who are very committed to this belief that nobody will pay their prices, nobody will pay what they’re asking, they can’t charge very much. There’s a lot of people who are very committed to that belief set. And I can tell you literally 50 ways to get paid more without doing more. But if you don’t believe that you deserve it or you don’t believe that your clients can afford it, any of the beliefs that go with that, none of that is going to work. When people ask me what you teach, how is it different in the nonprofit space versus the corporate space or whatever, a lot of the strategies are universal. How do you lead a sales process? How do you work with stakeholders? How do you message your business? The additional work that needs to be done is around the mindset piece for people who come out of nonprofit.

00:16:37 Mallory Erickson
Yeah, that is really interesting. There are a few things that you said in there that I just want to double click on. One is when you said that thing around, I can tell you 50 ways to get paid more without doing more, but if you haven’t addressed this, they’re not going to work. The exact same thing is true in fundraising. Everyone wants the strategy, everyone wants the tactic. And I’m constantly saying like, okay, this is 25% of it because I can give you the template. But if we don’t address your beliefs, the resistance that you feel around fundraising, all the narratives that are holding you back, it’s just going to be another template that sits in your to do someday drawer that you’re not going to take action around. And so I think mindset and some of this belief work sometimes I think gets positioned as this like, nice to have. And I’m like, this is the core. This is your ability to do any of the other things that we talk about. And so I love that you phrase it there that way and that sentence that you said do more with less. So I want to go there for a second because that is so true. And I found that being a provider in the nonprofit space, like a service provider to nonprofits when I started my business, this consistent request for me to do more with less as well nonprofits trying to get me to add things to my offering for the same price or price my services. Less partners in the space, wanting to work with me, but wanting me to. Whether it was sponsors on a podcast or speaking partnerships, do more marketing or give them more impressions for the same amount of money because of what they could find elsewhere. This podcast over here will give me that many impressions for that amount. And I really had this moment in my journey where I was like, I have two options. I can participate in a race to the bottom and I can consistently be trying to do more for less and be the person who does the most for the least. Or I can be really clear about what I uniquely do and what I offer that nobody else offers and double down on that and remove the comparison analysis as much as possible. And we do this actually inside Power Partners too. We have organizations asset map their organizations and then learn how to leverage their different assets for funding. I have a feeling you do something similar just based on the way that you talk about these things. Tell me about it.

00:19:16 Leah Neaderthal
Like what you said about I don’t want to be in a race to the bottom. And the concept I just want listeners to sort of walk away with in this is you and I, your clients, my clients, we’re not going to change the sector as much as we would want it to be changed. Right, but it’s clients job to ask for these things. It’s so easy for us to be like, that is a ridiculous request. I don’t care what that other podcast did or I don’t care what that other consultant will provide or what have you. Clients are going to client, clients are going to client. They can ask for what they want. But you’re exactly right. It’s you get to make the decision. And I think one of the mindset shifts when you start your business or when you’re running your business, is resisting the automatic yes, something that we inherit from working in these organizations or working in the companies. Just because somebody asks doesn’t mean you have to say yes. And I know that sounds like, well, obviously like duh, but think about the extent to which we feel so put upon with these requests when the shift is really okay, now, what are you going to do about it? So I teach value based pricing, which means getting paid for your value, not your time. And one of the ways you do that is to value jam the offerings. What we don’t want is to name a price and say it’s this many hours and to have the client say, well, X amount per hour, that’s really expensive. What we do is we craft an offer, a service set that includes we want to answer the question, number one, what is required to solve this problem? What are the core activities that are required? Additionally, what are other things that we can include? We can value jam that are high value for the client and low lift to me, the consultant. Coincidentally, when we do that, we are also enabling the client to get better results because we’re not just saying, my time is the only thing that’s valuable here. And so when you put those things together, you give it literally a value based name and then you price it based on the value to the organization. That’s how we start to do a few things, get paid for the value, not your time. You start to, like you said, differentiate from other similar providers and sort of mitigate the question on, well, how much does this one thing cost? You eliminate cherry picking. And when you do that, that’s how you go from these sort of smaller numbers to much bigger numbers, and the work gets more profitable. So a nonprofit consultant that I worked with was creating a proposal, putting together an offer, and with all of the work and everything, she was about $7,000. That’s the number that she came up with. And we shared with her a few techniques, a few strategies. She told me a little bit more about the value to the organization. And using some of the techniques that we use in value based pricing, she went from 7000 to 37 five. And the proposal was accepted. And that organization became a client using this strategy. Same client, same general goal, and same general work, but pricing for value, not for time deliverables or anything else.

00:22:38 Mallory Erickson
Okay. There’s something there. I wonder about the relationship between what you’re talking about and fundraising. So one of the things that’s more challenging about fundraising, of course, is that one of the ways to think about value based pricing in the nonprofit sort of fundraising sphere is like focusing on impact as opposed to outputs. But we also know that oftentimes the impact, the real impact that you’re aiming for is not going to have a feedback loop that is fast enough. If you think about sort of replacing impact with value, it’s not exactly one to one there because the impact feedback loop is a longer turnaround time. But what you were talking about actually made me think that where the nonprofit can be increasing their value, there is in the different ways they’re offering to connect with their donors or bring donors together or in sponsorship benefits. Like, there’s so many different ways for them to be increasing their value to the donor. And there was this piece that you said that really made me think sometimes when I think we say something is possible for a small dollar amount, we really start to doubt the quality of that thing or whether or not that thing can actually happen for that amount. So when I hear from an organization, give $10 in order to blank, I’m like, $10 is not going to solve that problem. And I can imagine even with major donors and I’ve seen this trying to get someone to give an organization $10,000 and making all these huge promises around the value of $10,000 when if that problem could really be solved for $10,000, we probably wouldn’t be dealing with it the way we are today. And it’s probably going to take like $4 million to even start to address that. Is that something you’ve come across at all? Or are there ways that you think about positioning different money conversations that increase the confidence of the buyer that we might learn from the fundraising perspective too?

00:24:49 Leah Neaderthal

Yeah, so where you start the conversation is really how a conversation continues. And the piece that I think is so critical is starting the conversation at the level of value by having even when you describe what you do in speaking on your website, on your LinkedIn, what have you, positioning it in terms of a painkiller, what we call the painkiller statement. And the painkiller is positioning your work to solve your clients number one problem, as opposed to tactical description, which is I do fundraising consulting or I do nonprofit consulting or I do graphic design or what have you. The mistake I see a lot of people making is they describe their work in terms of what they do, and then they find that they’re sort of arguing back up the chain to, why can’t my client see me as a strategic provider? Or why doesn’t the client see the vision of what’s possible in this work? What’s possible in their business or their organization? When this work is completed, it’s because the consultant didn’t allow the client to see the value. And so there are a number of things you can do all throughout the sales process, even into the work itself, to help the client see, understand what is possible, what problems can be solved in doing this work. But it starts with that very first statement. And when you can do that, you start the conversation at the level of value. You position yourself as an expert instead of just a service provider or freelancer or what have you, and you start going with the client in the same direction towards the future that the client wants. And this is in for profit nonprofit. It’s exactly the same. And I’ve seen it especially with some of my clients who do nonprofit consulting. When you can position your work in terms of value, it opens up a lot of opportunity and it also shuts down a lot of the nagging questions in the sales process that you’re talking about.

00:26:52 Mallory Erickson
I love that, and I really appreciated what you said earlier around like clients are going to client and it’s their job to ask questions or to push back or to ask for what they need. It makes me think about this other piece that you and I have talked about before, which is that one of my concerns in the nonprofit space sometimes is that if someone has gone from being inside the nonprofit space to being a consultant or a coach, and they haven’t addressed their money beliefs and then they’re becoming a fundraising consultant, they’re perpetuating a lot of limiting money beliefs and passing them on, even potentially to the fundraisers that they work with. And I’m curious if you see that or how you think about that in terms of supporting your clients who then have to turn around and sort of support other clients in the same type of work.

00:27:46 Leah Neaderthal

So the first thing is, I think that anybody, if they’re going to start really looking at this and addressing them so that they can go out in the world without these money issues or narratives, like as a little monkey around their neck is getting curious. Now, nearly all the women I work with and I’m sure the women you work with, the people that you work with are curious about themselves and others in the world around you. And so, first of all, you have to be open to why am I having the reaction I’m having. It’s sort of a personal fascination to me around how our experiences as young children and then as adolescents and early in our careers, how they play out in our business. I did a whole podcast episode with Rachel Simmons about this, and it’s just a personal fascination and that’s woven. Into a lot of my work. And so being able to shine a light on it, not to judge, not to wave a magic wand and fix, but just to get curious, because those sorts of stories also show up in other arenas too. There’s an exercise we do in my program called The Awkwardness Mantra, which is creating a mantra to use so that when there’s some awkwardness in a conversation, particularly a sales conversation, so we don’t feel like we have to jump in and speak, right? Because what happens then is you say some things that you’re trying to fill the space, and maybe you say some things that aren’t the most interesting or you talk yourself out or something or what have you. When you go through that exercise, we have to look at what is the story we’re telling ourselves about why we need to jump in and what comes up in that conversation. I mean, for me, it was that I grew up in a family where there just needed to be harmony at all times. There’s never any conflict. There needed to be harmony at all times. And my mom did a great job of this, and I inherited it. A great job of making everybody feel comfortable all the time. Now, you could argue there’s some other stuff going on there, whatever. But the way that played out with me is that the story that I was telling myself in those awkward moments was that it’s my job to fix this. It’s my job to make everybody comfortable. So my Awkwardness Mantra is, it’s not my responsibility to fix this. So again, when we sort of continue this exercise with my clients, we had women who said I was the big sister. I am the big sister. I always had to take care of my little siblings. And so that’s what comes up here and causes me to jump in. Somebody said, I am one of many children. I always had to speak up to get what I wanted. I had another woman who said she grew up in a very difficult household, and her problem wasn’t that she spoke up too much. It’s that she spoke up too little because she had learned at a young age that speaking up got you in trouble. So it’s this kind of curiosity, first and foremost, that you have to bring to this and apply it to what are we telling ourselves about money? Not just in our childhood, but even early in our careers, there’s a concept that’s woven into the work that I do, where what feels so uncomfortable for a lot of people is that this idea of asking for money now, ironically, fundraising consultants typically don’t have a problem with this. It’s sort of ironic, this thing that so many people struggle with. However, when you get into for your own business, we want to shift that narrative. And so the concept that underpins a lot of my work is that you are offering, not asking. You have something of tremendous value. That value has a price, and you are offering that to your clients, not asking to be hired. And when you can shift things around that way, it allows you to approach this process in a way that feels really aligned with your clients and makes the money. Not about how much money am I going to get or how much money am I going to make, but what is the value of solving this problem for an organization that really needs it?

00:31:41 Mallory Erickson

Okay. The folks who are familiar with my work are probably laughing hysterically because the Power Partners mantra is that great fundraising is not an ask, it’s an offer. Because I think the same thing happens with fundraising. People feel like they’re in this begging or favor or guilt. They’re in these getting someone to do something they don’t really want to do, but they’re doing because you’re asking. And I love what you were talking about in terms of your own exploration and the way you’ve incorporated into your work around understanding our historical lenses that have led to this.

00:32:19 Leah Neaderthal
Yeah. Root causes, because they do play out sometimes in ways that we can see every day and sometimes in ways that we don’t expect. Yes.

 

00:32:26 Mallory Erickson
And I just started studying something called the polyvagal theory, which is the growing body of research around our nervous system and sort of how our vagus nerve forms both in vitro but then throughout our lives. And the different experiences we have that really program are what makes us feel safe, what makes us feel unsafe, and how we create safety for others. And what’s so interesting about what you’re talking about, what I’ve really started to learn through that research is when things feel good, like when money moves, it’s because we’re connected. So whether that’s a coach or a consultant to a client, whether it’s a fundraiser to a funder, when those interactions feel good, when it feels like a real offer, is when we’re connected. And in order to actually connect, we have to be able to show up as our most aligned self. We can’t say one thing and believe another, say one thing and feel another without that also transferring to the other person. And so what’s been super interesting about this sort of investigation for me is that I went into it thinking it was about how to help fundraisers create more inner safety for themselves, to be able to deal with rejection and risk and all the things that bubble up around fundraising. But what I unexpectedly learned was, like, when people are fundraising, the way I talk about empower partners, when people are selling, the way you talk about in your program, it’s actually making the client or the donor also feel safer because they’re feeling connected, they’re feeling in sync, they’re feeling this genuine transfer of energy. And that’s also, I believe, part of why they’re in, because they’re like, this feels good, this feels real. Everything’s matching up and making sense for me, and I trust you. That’s how trust is built. Anyways, I just thought you’d appreciate hearing about that because I think it’s so relevant to this.

00:34:27 Leah Neaderthal
And that’s why in our first conversation, we were like, we’re so aligned. I think that’s fascinating. And of course, you’ve given me, like, 18 things to just put on my list of things to learn about. And it’s the reason why we talk about selling. Yes, sometimes selling feels weird because the only examples we have are people who sell to us. And a lot of selling is terrible, but we have a different choice. And when we talk about it, in my world, you’re selling with someone, not at someone. And that’s a really big difference.

00:35:03 Mallory Erickson

Okay, that is just the perfect way to end this. Tell everyone where they can find you. And I think you have a special gift for consultants who are listening to this too, where they can go and grab a resource from you. Tell everyone all the best ways to connect with you.

00:35:17 Leah Neaderthal
Yeah. So you can find me on LinkedIn. That’s where I’m most active and sharing strategies and tips throughout the week. I have a podcast called the Smart Gets Paid Podcast, which you can find on anywhere. You listen to podcasts where we’re going behind the scenes, and you can listen in on my actual coaching calls with clients as we are working through and solving some of their biggest challenges in getting clients. And then, of course@smartgetspaid.com, my website. But I did want to share because it came up around 50 ways to get paid more that wasn’t hypothetical. I actually do have a guide. It’s called get paid more without doing more. And it’s 50 ways that you can get paid more for your next consulting contract without adding scope hours or deliverables. And you can find that@smartgetspaid.com paidmore.

00:36:07 Mallory Erickson
Amazing. Thank you so much for this conversation today and everything that you do to support this ecosystem. I’m really grateful.

00:36:14 Leah Neaderthal
It’s so fun to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

00:36:23 Mallory Erickson

Okay. There were so many parts of this conversation that I was jumping up and down in my chair around here are a few of the things that I want to double click on for you right now. Number one, know your worth. Refrain from charging for your services based on time and deliverables. It should be based on your value. And the same thing is true for nonprofits because of grant writing and foundation funding. We get way too into the nitty gritty around how much things cost, but we should be thinking about the value that we’re providing, particularly when we’re talking to major donors and corporate partners. That’s where your assets come in. Number two, if you have a good relationship with your money, you can work on that ease in your business as well. And if you feel restriction around money in your everyday life that is going to show up in your business, too. Number three, business and profitability is only partially about money. There are other things you need to consider, like are you doing something that you love? Are you having fun serving your clients? Does the business allow you to be where you want to be at a given time? I love the way that Leah talks about the rocks and pebbles and all of the different forms of profitability that she talks about. Number four, how often do you say no? A lot of times in business, we find it difficult to say no, but then we have this automatic yes, which does not give us the freedom that we want or deserve. And again, the same thing is true in fundraising. Not all money is created equal and we do not want all money. And so we need to stop having an automatic yes when we see that shiny object for that moment, the ability to raise that money and really check in with ourselves and make sure that that is actually in alignment with us and something we want to be doing and moving money towards. Number five, whenever you’re selling something to anyone, remember you are selling with them, not at them. And again, this has total application to fundraising. This is where it’s all about alignment first, methodology instead of money first. This is about partnership, win win. Doing something together, solving each other’s problems. And I love the way that Leah talks about that in terms of sales. Okay, for additional takeaways and tips inside this episode, head on over to malloryarickson.Com/podcasts to grab the full show notes and resources now, including some of the resources that Leah mentioned on this show, like 50 ways to get paid more without doing additional work. You’ll also find more information there about our amazing sponsors. Thank you for spending this time with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, we would love it if you would give it a rating and review and share it with a friend. I am so grateful for all of my listeners and the good, hard work you’re doing to make our world a better place. And if you miss me between episodes, stop by and say hello on Instagram. Under. What the fundraising? Underscore. Have a great day and I’ll see you next week.

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