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. Got a question from Zach Stevens who asks, a client I've designed many big projects for also has smaller projects like flyers and other ad hoc marketing collateral that frequently come up. They're not maintenance projects, but they're definitely not as high value as creating a logo, website, or brand strategy. Is it worth diving into a value-based discussion for something small? Should these become productized services? Okay. Quick answer, yeah, they probably should become productized services or you don't do them at all and you somehow empower the client to do them on their own. Maybe you help them hire someone, maybe you put them in touch with someone who's more junior and is really still building their career or you have someone that you can outsource those things to, not because you're going to make a big profit off of it, but just to nurture the client relationship so they don't have to deal with all of that stuff. You're probably better at knowing who to look for and how to judge their work and how to manage them. Perhaps then the client runs a pizza place. They don't know how to manage graphic designers or whatever you're having created. So you could do a couple of different things there. Don't take it or empower the client to do it through another person. Maybe you manage them, maybe the client manages them. Or like you suggested, you could potentially turn it into a productized service where if you do have some way to define a scope in advance that the client can just sign up for. So it would be a service that perhaps you or someone you outsource it to still executes, but it's a fixed scope thing. So you need to come up with some way to define a scope for this thing. So if it's with a particular client, you could look back historically and like, well, every season they have a new promotion. In the fall, it's back to school, then it's holiday, and then it's whatever, and then it's spring or Easter, whatever. Maybe it's a retail organization and they've got this predictable calendar of things that they need done. Then, I mean, you could do a productized service. You could do it on, yeah, I would probably do it as a productized service. So every once in a while they could do this, just say, hey, we need a new flyer, whatever, a seasonal campaign package. We need all new marketing materials for the seasonal campaign package. Maybe you could do that. If you feel like you can make it fixed scope and could sell the same thing at the same price to multiple clients, then that would qualify as what I would call a productized service. And yeah, you could do it like that. The question is, why would you want to do it? Maybe if it's just to nurture the client relationship and they think it's important, I'd probably just go with like outsourcing it or putting them in touch with someone that's part-time that can do it, getting them an employee, something like that. But maybe if you're like, yeah, I can definitely think of a way to productize this, then sure, that seems fine. You don't want to make it too, when you have a productized service, you don't want it to be too small. You don't want it to be like 100 bucks or like real atomic. You want it to be a bundle of scope, like a small, a very smallish kind of product project. So it's kind of hard to really talk about whether or not it should be productized here because I don't know exactly what's involved, but it's possible you could do the productized thing. One thing before I finish here, I want to talk about the reason why a value-based discussion is probably not worth it for low value or low priced engagements. And the reason is it's a stressful kind of emotionally challenging kind of push back and forth with the client. And especially when you've been working with them for a long time and it's a small thing, the idea of saying like, why not not do this? It doesn't make any sense. They're like, well, you know why we need to do it. It's our fall campaign. Back to school is happening. So we have to do this. The value-based discussions and the why conversation make the most sense for big projects, especially when they're risky, especially when they're urgent. When it's not that big of a thing and the client's not that worried about it or it's not that urgent or it's just not that big, then it's like a lot of effort to go through to come up with a $500 price tag. It just seems like a waste of everybody's time. It's almost like more energy to have the value conversation that it would be to crank out the flyers. So emotional energy and stress. So value-based discussions and the why conversation make the most sense with a big project. And often, geez, usually a new client too. Yeah, usually a new client. Not always.

I'm trying to think of examples, and I do have a bunch of students who do have periodic, real long-term clients who do periodic project work. So yeah, it doesn't have to always be a new client. But value-based discussions are better for big projects, like high five figures, mid to high five figures, into six figures and even seven figures. Those are usually the best fit clients that are doing projects like that are the best fit for value. And if you can package up your expertise in some productized way or even an info product farther down, or maybe give them templates, that'd be another thing. You could give them some sort of starter materials and sell them like a $500 package of all the marketing materials, templates for custom Word templates or whatever they're, InDesign, whatever they're using. That might be another way to do it, like a straight product play. Okay, hopefully that helped. I think I touched on a bunch of different things. It's kind of a general question, so maybe you'll be able to get something useful out of there. All right, that's it for this time. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, hashtag AskJonathan on Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube, and we will find it and add it to the queue and I'll answer as fast as I 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.