A goal can be inevitable, yet at the same time hard to predict. If I control my diet and exercise, sooner or later I will get into shape. Pushing through a day of hard exercise won’t do much. Two weeks will also not do the trick, maybe not even two months. But it probably won’t take more than two years.
It’s the same with you persist in using your expertise to solve real problems for people around you. People usually hope that a single event where they went “above and beyond” for a client will help them earn more – that rarely works, just like heroically skipping a single slice of cake won’t work.
However paid or unpaid, tough or easy, publicly or privately: helping with issues clients perceive as hard to do is bound to get you their trust and confidence.
At that point, whether that was your plan or not, you will start to have negotiating power by leveraging their reluctance to find someone else to really on in this. It’s a question of “when”, not “if” it will happen. That is why it’s important to periodically raise your fees when you spot an annoying pattern in clients of a certain type, or you keep applying your expertise to a single problem for long enough.
If you never test the limits of your hard-earned leverage, you might get stuck in thinking you are significantly weaker than you really are for so long that clients start to feel confident in exploiting your work.