Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly, I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got a question from my group coaching community, aka Ditcherville, that was about me and my mindset, so I didn't feel uncomfortable sharing it here on the podcast. The question was, what mindset shift has had the biggest impact on my business? If you'd be curious to know the answer, stay tuned. The next question is, what mindset shifts have been most impactful on your business and your coaching clients' businesses, other than not billing hourly? I would say the biggest one, there's a few, but maybe the biggest one is that you can measure anything. Anything can be measured. If a client comes to you with a problem, the reason they know there's a problem is because they can tell the difference between where they are and where they want to be, and that delta can be measured. You don't know how to measure it, but they do because they're looking at something. They're in some situation that they don't like, and they do know what it will be like when they're not in that situation, and they will be able to tell when they're in the new situation. How can they tell? Because the difference between state A and state B is detectable. If it wasn't detectable, they wouldn't know they had a problem. There would be no problem. In fact, that's what it's like when people have an obvious problem, but they don't consider it a problem. Their entire CPA firm is 100% paper-based, and a software person like me would come in and say, this is a huge problem, but there's no difference. They don't see a future state that they want, so there's no gap. There wouldn't be anything for them to measure to see the difference. When someone comes to you, by definition, they know something's wrong. Something's broken. They have a problem, or they wouldn't be wasting their time talking to people about how to solve this problem. Even if they're asking you for deliverables, I want you to write us a white paper. They think that white paper is going to solve a problem for them. They usually don't volunteer what that is, so that's what the why conversation is for. They come asking for a deliverable or some kind of input, some number of hours, or your time in general, and you need to push past that and find out what benefits they're trying to gain from those inputs. If somebody came to me and said, oh, I heard you're a great copywriter, you're a great writer, I want you to write a 30-page white paper for us. It's bizarrely specific. I'd say, okay, great. What do you think needs to be in it? I'd ask them all the questions so they could exhaust their brain dump around what they think they want. They know that they want it, but I need to find out what they think they're going to get out of it, how their business is going to be better. I would say, okay, great. I've got all this information, so there's a million directions I could go with this. Let me step back, and if it's okay, I'll ask some bigger picture questions about the business context that this white paper will drop into. How will you know that the white paper is good? What's the first thing you're going to do with the white paper after I deliver it to you? Oh, we're going to post it on our website. Okay, is it going to be behind a login or something? They're going to say, no, no, it's not for capturing email addresses. It's to make the CTO more famous. Oh, to make the CTO more famous, why is that? Well, we believe that she's not currently seen as a thought leader. It's like, okay, well, how do you know that she's not a thought leader? Well, she never gets invited to these conferences, or she never gets quoted in the big magazines, or she, you know, whatever. She doesn't have that many followers on Twitter. Oh, okay, so what just happened is they sort of revealed to me why they think their CTO isn't a thought leader, and they did that by telling me what they're looking at that caused them to believe that. They could be right or wrong about whether or not it means the CTO is a thought leader, but let's just say you believe that they're right, and you believe that you could do something to increase the number of Twitter followers, you could get them invited to the big conferences, you could get them quoted in the press or, you know, do some PR stuff. Now, all of a sudden, they came to you with this self-diagnosed or self-prescribed solution to a problem that they didn't even reveal to you initially, and now you've dug in and said, okay, what are you going to measure to know that this worked? Like, I can give you white papers all day long, but who cares? What are you going to do, hang them up as decoration? No, you're going to want to use them for something. Well, what do you want to use them for? To increase the thought leadership reputation of our CTO. All right, how are you going to know that it worked? And they'll say, well, I don't know, and you'll say, well, how do you know the CTO is not a thought leader? And then they'll finally reveal what they're looking at that reveals to them or makes them believe that they have a problem. So you can measure, you can always, always, always find something to measure by asking them the why conversation and find out what they're looking at that reveals to them that they have a problem. And then,

Then they obviously think you can solve it or they wouldn't be wasting their time talking to you or that you can at least contribute to the solution. So then you need to ask the other why questions. It's like, well, okay, why do you think a white paper is going to contribute to this? Have you considered anything else? And then why someone expensive like me? Why did you, you know, I'm probably the most expensive white paper ghostwriter in the business. Why not just have the CTO write it? I mean, wouldn't that make more sense? And you've got to get all those sort of objections to your objections. And then that's what you make your proposal out of. It's like, okay, you know, you're not, your CTO is not a thought leader because of these metrics that you're looking at. And if those metrics were moved to numbers that are kind of like these, maybe doubled the Twitter followers, maybe, you know, two invites to big conferences per year or whatever. And then the reasons why the CEO thinks that a white paper will contribute to this and how that they would measure, you know, how they would measure the response to the white paper in order to believe that these other things would happen down the road. Now you've got a basis for something. So you can measure everything. The reason a lot of times people don't, they say, oh, you can't measure beauty or love. And it's like, of course you can. You can't measure it exactly down to the unit, but you can detect changes. And that's still a measurement. The purpose of a measurement is to decrease uncertainty. Like you don't actually know how tall you are or how much you weigh. You know approximately how tall you are or how much you weigh. It doesn't have to be specific to be useful. It doesn't have to be exact to be useful. It depends on the application, the reason you're taking the measurement. So like if you need to measure, you know, granite countertops to fit in your kitchen, you better get down to like the 32nd of an inch. But you don't need to measure yourself to the 32nd of an inch because there's no useful reason to be that specific. So you can still have a very broad measurement of like beauty or love or whatever or, you know, business impact or whatever, thought leadership. But you can make that, even if the measurement is very broad, you can still detect a difference and that is the thing that you value price. So realizing that measurement doesn't need to be exact to be useful and that that is the basis for all value pricing, that was probably the biggest eye-opener to me. And I completely credit How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard. That book is amazing. So you might want to check that out if this sounds interesting. And then the other big thing, I won't talk about it forever, was scoping last, scope last. I used to scope first all the time because I just couldn't get my head out of the cost plus or time of materials mindset. Even when I was giving fixed prices, it took me a while to get out of the habit of scoping in the sales meeting. Instead of that, you need to scope last. The whole meeting is around finding out what they are measuring, what they're going to measure to detect that you contributed to their success. Once you have that, only once you have that can you set a value for the project. You're guesstimating, but you can guesstimate in the ballpark the value of the project to this particular client. And then you set a price and then you scope literally last. So if you find yourself sitting in a sales meeting thinking like, oh, this is going to take me forever, that's because you're already jumping to solutions. Don't jump to solutions. This takes practice. This took me a long time to, it probably took me a year to get out of that habit. You literally do not worry about how much time or effort it's going to take you to do something in the sales meeting because you don't know yet what you're going to do. You don't even think about what you're going to do until you have some prices. And then you say, well, what could I do for $10,000 to move this particular needle? What could I do for $22,000 to move this needle? What could I do for $50,000 to move this needle? So that was a big thing. But that's really a subset almost of the fact that you can measure anything. So that was huge for me. So hopefully that helped. That's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark, and I hope you join me again next time for Ditching Hourly. Bye. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to JonathanStark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is JonathanStark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.