Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly, I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a question from Design Build Solutions and it is, thanks Jonathan, is your use of advice retainers different from a design retainer or have you moved away from that model altogether? Okay, so let's define some terms here. Advisory retainers were for a long time a big part of my business when I was doing mobile consulting. Very lucrative, very useful to me and very good for my clients. And what an advisory retainer is, is that a client pays you, usually on a monthly, maybe quarterly basis, to have access to your expertise. It's true consulting. You are answering questions. They are consulting with you. You're not building stuff, you're not maintaining stuff, you're not supporting things. It's not prepayment for some hours that you're gonna do. It's an insurance policy that they pay every month to help ensure that they are making the right decisions during some tumultuous time or during some risky project. It's usually, they're usually doing something that they have to do right now and it's really important that they get it right the first time and they want to hedge their bets by paying an expert in the space to help them make sure that the project is gonna be a success the first time. So that to me, that's the sort of prototypical advisory retainer. You're not building anything, you're just giving it, you're making yourself available to answer questions. Now the next part of the question is, is it different from a design retainer? And I think the word design here is a little vague. So designers do lots of different things. It's not all design in my opinion or maybe that's an overstatement. It's not that it's not design, it's certainly a different, the design is happening at very different levels, let's put it like that. So let's say you're going to design the user experience for some new application, the next Uber or something and upfront you're gonna design the whole user journey, the workflow, everything from the signup process through to the onboarding to the free trial to the conversion to customer to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That whole, it could be that whole marketing flow or it could be that whole sales flow, it could be the user experience of the application itself, it could be the design of the backend infrastructure, the architecture of the whole thing, like how's it gonna scale, how are we gonna do disaster recovery, what happens if it fails over? There's so many, like that high level design, that early stage kind of foundational design, to me that is, that's more valuable, let's put it like that, that's more valuable than design way farther downstream from there where you're like kerning letters. I mean, that's still a design activity, but it's not gonna have the same impact as like deciding what the thing should do, or like who the customer is, or that sort of big picture stuff that happens early, early, early, and then downstream you're just like kerning letters or whatever, like tweaking a color. Those things are not, they're not not important, but they're nowhere near gonna have the same effect as like setting up a system architecture for a startup that needs to scale to $100 million in sales a year. It's just completely different level. So if we look back at the question, a design retainer, again, if your expertise is in design and you set up, it's still an advisory retainer, you're just advising them about design. So it's not that you are, you're not executing stuff, you're not creating a style, I mean, maybe you would create a style guide or not. No, not really. It's more, it's just straight advice. So like design retainer, it would be like, we've got a big design team, we've got 40 designers and 80 developers or 100 developers, and we're working on this big release of a new product. What was that? I think it was FreshBooks. They had FreshBooks and they designed a sort of a different name, a completely, a FreshBooks 2, but it was a completely different name, completely built from scratch. They sold it as an independent thing, they got their own customers, and they're like, guess what, this is FreshBooks.

And then they just sort of flipped it over. That was a huge undertaking. I can imagine a situation where they would want access to someone who is like a worldwide expert on designing user experience for a SaaS or whatever. And they want that person on call. Maybe they want that person to sit in on weekly design review meetings or something and just be the voice of reason. Make sure that the business and the design teams are communicating properly. Make sure that everything's on track to meet the ultimate goal, which is user satisfaction measured across these three metrics. And the important thing here is the difference between implementation and consulting, like advice, advisory input. So they're not getting access to your hands with an advisory retainer. They're getting access to your brains. And if that's what you're doing, even if your expertise is design and you want to call yourself a designer and call what you're doing design, you're still just giving advice about design. You're not executing or implementing or building anything. So to me, that's the big difference. So can a designer offer an advisory retainer? Absolutely. Anybody who's a professional and expert in their field and has a worldview and a viewpoint and can articulate that and has expertise and clients trust them, they're an authority. Yeah, you can totally do an advisory retainer. All right. I think that's, yeah, I think that answers the question. Hopefully it does. All right. I'm Jonathan Stark. And if you have a question, hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we'll get to it as soon as you can. See ya. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon, and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at thepricingseminar.com. That URL again is thepricingseminar.com. Hope to see you there. 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.