Discounting fees on your clients behalf?

Check out this great blog: Women and Money: Where chicks make “cents”, by Kathleen Burns Kingsbury. In her post, Who’s money is it anyways, she talked about fee setting and the fact that many business owners will reduce their fee if they think the other business owner can’t afford it. She wrote,

To me the idea that a client needs a reduced fee based on no hard data says more about the business owner’s relationship with money than the clients. Therefore, I challenged each group member to think about where the responsibility lies for making spending decisions. Is it with the business owner or the customer?

I think part of the problem is that we get our own money issues mixed up with our perceptions of our client’s money issues. No good can come of this. Spending decisions should be made by the client, not us acting on their behalf! Women take on way too much. When you decide what is in a client’s best interests, well…. That sounds like a parent-child relationship, not a professional one.