"Value" means nothing

"We deliver value." "A high value-added offer." "What makes your value." The word is everywhere, used for anything and everything, and from being repeated by everyone about all and sundry it has ended up meaning nothing at all. I use it myself. We all do. It has become background noise, the kind of phrase you can copy and paste without lying and without anyone noticing.

The trouble is that behind that hollowed-out word hides the most important question an organisation can ask itself: what actually makes people choose you, and not the outfit next door? So let's take the word back, and fill it with something real.

Nobody understands your value in one meeting

Let's start with what irritates me, because it explains the rest. There's a swarm of people who meet you, put together a surface-level audit, a quick bit of market research, and leave explaining that they've understood everything about you. "You should do this, you should do that." In one meeting, you've seen nothing. You've caught the thinnest surface, the shop window you were willing to show.

It's exactly like spending a week in a country and thinking you know it. You've seen the monuments, eaten out, taken a few photos, and you come home convinced you've understood. You've understood nothing. To understand a country you have to live there, at length, see behind the scenery, the days without tourists. An organisation is the same. It takes six months, a year, two years to begin to grasp one properly, and even then you keep discovering. The world of an organisation is always vaster than you think, whether it's tiny or enormous. So when someone promises you "value" at the end of an express consultancy, be wary: they're selling you a bit of experience and two or three generic pieces of advice, not an understanding of who you are. That has to be earned, and it takes a humility the charlatans don't have.

You're the worst placed person to see it

Here's the trap at the outset: the person least able to see your value is you. Not out of stupidity. Out of mechanics.

First because there's no time. In the real life of an organisation, your head is in operations, in the urgent problems to sort before tonight. Sitting down, stepping back, asking "deep down, what makes our real value?", nobody does it, because nobody has the leisure. Small outfit or large group, you're always more or less running tight, on time as on energy. Then there's impostor syndrome, which is always underestimated. That small voice whispering "am I really up to this?" and pushing you to shave, to play down, to under-price what you're worth.

Let me be honest, while we're on the subject: writing this article, I don't feel entirely legitimate. There are surely people more qualified than me on this, and the doubt works on me as it works on everyone. It's almost comical: here's a text about the inability to see one's own value, written by someone who stumbles over his own. But that's precisely the proof of the point. We all have that fog. Which is why an outside eye, honest and practised, is worth its weight in gold.

Your value isn't where you think it is

Now the heart of it. There's what you think you're selling, very concretely the product or the service, and there's what the client actually experiences. And sometimes the two have little to do with each other.

Take a bakery. Someone can come back every morning while finding the bread unremarkable, simply because they love the exchange with the person at the counter, the feel of the place, that small moment. Their real value isn't the loaf, it's the experience. And the opposite exists: another customer will flee the chatty baker and prefer the quiet one who leaves them in peace. Two people, two perceived values, neither is wrong, and neither has anything to do with the product itself.

I've seen this up close, in a stronger form. A director, in luxury, whose real value was an almost inexplicable ability to attract exceptional brands, houses that are highly reluctant and very particular about who gets to distribute them. An organisation of his size should never normally have had access; he managed it, through his person, his way of building a bond of trust, almost of friendship. He couldn't see it. It was highlighted nowhere. It took us weeks to dig it out, by talking, digging, observing. And it changed everything: since those houses are obsessed with how they're presented, we had to build a quality of representation worthy of them, capable of reassuring them, knowing that a badly represented brand packs up immediately.

Another director changed sector entirely, towards a different activity, a different audience. His fear was logical: "I'll lose everything, I'll have to win over a new public." And then, the sign that never lies: his old clients followed him. They came, into a field with nothing left to do with the one they'd known him for. Why? Because they came for him, not for the product. His real value was what he represented to them. He had never put it that way. The result: he kept his old clientele and won a new one, almost double.

It isn't what people buy that reveals your value. It's that they stay, that they come back, that they follow you.

The only question that counts: why they stay

Hence the question to ask before all others, the real compass: why people stay. Why they come, why they come back. If you can answer honestly, you're holding a piece of your value. If you can't manage it alone, you need to go and find the answer.

Understanding it isn't knowing how to say it

Careful not to confuse two things that are opposites: identifying your value, and knowing how to reveal it. You can have put your finger precisely on what makes your strength, and be utterly incapable of getting it across.

Because revealing it is almost never your job. The day you truly perceive your value, you stop advertising it, stop proclaiming how much better you are. That speech isn't yours to make, it's the job of social proof: the reviews, the quotes, what others say about you. You can't decree yourself wonderful, it never lands. What you can do is make it felt. Discreetly in your communication, by talking about the result rather than your merits, about the problem you solve rather than your grand values, because what people are after first is fixing their problem; that you're nice and inspired comes afterwards. But above all, make it felt in the real world, in the lived experience. That's where it all plays out. Then, if it's true, it starts circulating on its own, carried by those who value what you are.

Your job isn't to shout your value. It's to live it hard enough that others tell the story for you.

The trap, once you've found it

Say you get there, that you finally put your finger on your real value. Good news, but a new danger: wanting to make it a banner that crushes everything else. You rarely have one single value, you have several, interlocking, and you almost never come down to a single point. The trap is swinging from one excess to the other, from impostor syndrome to overconfidence, and becoming a caricature of yourself: going from "I don't know who I am" to "I hammer whatever people liked about me". What you've discovered has to remain a scent that infuses, not a slogan you drum in. A value spreads, it isn't decreed. And you have to keep looking, because there are surely other facets you haven't seen yet. A delicious detail: sometimes people appreciate precisely that you aren't aware of your value. Overplaying it kills it.

And there's one thing you don't control: who adopts you. Lacoste aimed at high society and was embraced by working-class circles. Luxury dreams of being elitist and finds itself held up as a trophy by rap. And I'm the first, with my share of bourgeois-bohemian, to be drawn to what comes from a world that isn't mine. Because deep down, we always underestimate how much people aspire to something other than what they are: we're magnetised by what we aren't. Often the value you give off appeals to an audience you weren't aiming at, precisely because it opens a door to somewhere else. And the reflex that kills is chasing that audience by addressing it directly: the day Lacoste starts winking heavily at the estates, the appeal evaporates. You don't choose the people, they choose you. Your job is to understand why, and to remain yourself.

And the price, then?

That leaves the expected question, the price one, and I'll be blunt: wanting to correlate your price mechanically to "the value you bring" still smells of saloon-bar marketing. That isn't where to look.

The only thing that counts is the fair price. A price matched to the time, the quality, and the accumulated experience, all those years spent becoming good at what you do, which are worth something too. Not dearer to give yourself value, not cheaper out of fear. Fair. And that's where the earlier subject returns: as long as you can't see what you're worth, impostor syndrome pushes you to under-price yourself, to sell off what took you years to build. The day you've finally pinned down your value, it isn't necessarily the rate that changes, it's the composure: you know what you carry, and you own it differently. The market will always constrain you, but don't make the price an existential question. Look for the fair price. It isn't easy, but it's the only honest one.

What's left when you've left the room

So forget "delivering value". The phrase is hollow, and you deserve better. Your value isn't a line on a brochure, nor an adjective you award yourself. It's what stays in the room once you've walked out of it: what people say about you in your absence, the quiet reason they come back, that small something that would make someone follow you elsewhere.

You'll probably never quite see it yourself, and that's fine. Look for it anyway, humbly, by listening to those who stay. The day you know why they stay, you won't need to say a word about your value. It will show.