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. Devin Holmes asks, In becoming an authority in one's field, you suggest giving away lots of free answers and advice as well as resources such as guides, e-books, and worksheets. If a consultant is really selling strategy and not labor, isn't it counterintuitive to give this strategy away for free? If a client has learned everything you have to teach, what is the client actually hiring for? How much should a consultant give away and how much is too much? Thank you and keep up the good work. Okay, I do say all the time, like share, share, share, share, share. Have tons of free options out there. Help your audience as much as you can in a way that scales for you that's reasonable. So, you know, I do a daily mailing list. Every day I write an email to a list of thousands. I do these videos. It's all free, right? But yet, Devin asked me a question. And if I can answer this question right now in this like format where I did it on my own time whenever I felt like it, probably months after he asked, then great. That's all he needed. That's all Devin needed. But if I nail it and he's like, oh, man, and I read his book and I read this other thing and I have all these more questions to ask, the thing that people are paying for when they're hiring a consultant is attention, the interactivity, the turnaround time. So if someone needs a lot of answers quickly, you're not going to get them on my YouTube channel. Some of these questions are weeks or months old. Unfortunately, I just can't get to them fast enough. But if you want free advice, you can ask me a question and eventually I'll get to it. If you've got a lot of time on your hands, you're probably not a great like coaching client for me because you're not – there's no urgency. So I suppose you could – yeah, actually that's a good way to frame it. The good clients who – the good consulting clients, especially advisory clients, there's urgency there. Urgency is also good for value pricing. It's like you can set higher fees if there's a lot of urgency there instead of doing time and materials where urgency is like – it's like a mismatch. You want to charge for your time but also do it quickly. That doesn't make sense. So having some urgency is the thing that will cause someone to engage with you directly. So if all viewers, if everybody who's watching this needed instant access to ask me questions just like these, you have to give my private coaching program. That's way more expensive. But I can only handle like 5 or 10 people in the coaching program at a time. So it has to be really expensive. But you get way more attention, way more – answers way more quickly, and that's what you're paying for. You're paying for like that loop to be closed so that the delay between asking a question and getting an answer is super short. And there's also this concept of – like I can – when I write a book or an email or any sort of free kind of – well, I don't give the books away for free. But when I'm writing and I have these ideas and I put them out there, they're very general. They're sort of abstracted to concepts, core principles of positioning and pricing and marketing and all of these things. So lots of people have trouble applying – like they'll understand like, oh, value pricing makes a ton of sense. Like I get it intellectually, but I can't put it into practice. I don't know how to apply it to my business. And that's another thing that clients will hire you to do. It's like take these general principles that they recognize are correct, but they cannot figure out how to implement, and you coach them through it. So anyway, the short answer is – well, that's already not a short answer, but share as much as you can. Help as many people as you can through sharing your expertise online. And there are going to be a certain segment of people who have this urgency that they're going to want to engage with you at a higher level. So if you have those higher levels available on your website or wherever, you talk about them in your free stuff, then they're going to want to take the next step. They're going to go deeper with you, have a smaller feedback loop or a shorter feedback loop, and people will absolutely pay for that. So I don't see any – there's no – I've never had any reason, credible reason given to me why you shouldn't share constantly, like every day. Anyway, don't worry about it. Share as much as you can. Try and help people. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, hashtag AskJonathan on LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube, and we'll add it to the queue, and I'll answer it in probably about a month. 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 –

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.