Good, fast, or cheap: choose two of three.

A while back, I wrote an article on Freelance Switch about overcoming price objections (how to do it tactfully and confidently). If you're interested, you can read that article here.

As business owners, we often struggle with pricing: we don't want to underprice ourselves, but we don't want to scare clients away, either. In one of the comments to the article, freelance graphic designer Colin Wright brought up a great way to think about pricing: the project triangle. 

What's a project triangle, you ask? Let me explain, via Colin's comment:

"A good way to deal with questions about your hourly rate or project quote is to refer them to the Project Triangle.

The Project Triangle has three sides: Good, Fast and Cheap. The idea is that any freelancer can be two of the sides, but not all three. I focus (with rare exceptions) on being Good and Fast, and my clients appreciate that, which is a fact I will tell any client who I haven’t worked with before that doesn’t know that about me.

Provided this is true about how you work (it would be very embarrassing to not work Cheap, but also not work Fast or do Good work), it will likely help explain why you are competitive in the market without leaving you with no other response than to put down the competition."

I don't know about you, but I try to work good and fast. I'm interested to hear how others handle pricing issues?