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 Shacko who asks, how are you handling traveling expenses when value-based pricing is used? Oh, this is a nice tactical question. I include them. That's one of the benefits of working with me and it's another thing that I can sort of say, like, yeah, I'm expensive, but it's all inclusive. You're not going to get some weird expense report from me every month where I stayed at the Ritz or whatever and all of a sudden I'm out raiding the minibar on your tab. There are a lot of reasons for including travel expenses. First of all, from an administrative standpoint, it's just a lot less work to deal with. This administrative loop of tracking receipts and sending them to the client, getting approval and waiting for the check and like, oh, they paid late, now your credit card, there's fees. Doesn't that sound tedious? That's not the kind of relationship I want to have with my clients. That's like acting like an employee if you're turning in expense reports. You want to act like a peer. You don't need them to pay for your plane tickets. I'll fly whoever I want, wherever I want. If I feel like first class, I'm going to do it. I don't want your approval. It's not your business anyway, so I just include it. There have been rare occasions, I think only one, where I had a real long-term client who I started after years of working with them. There was a change in their business where I had to fly internationally on a regular basis. And I paid for many of those trips out of pocket, and they were paying me a lot of money, so it was fine. But after a while, I was kind of like not loving the international travel anyway. But after a while, I was like, look, I don't want to make the international travel arrangements. I'd rather have you guys do it. You guys pay for it. They're better at it. They were from the country I was flying to, so it was way easier for them to set it up themselves. It was actually getting really complicated for me. I didn't have a VA at the time. So with that one exception, I let them just, they just said, here's your ticket. Here's where you're staying. Here's your information. So they had their own travel, internal travel agency. So it was not a problem for them. They just set it up for me. I just got my instructions, show up here, go there, get to where you're going. And they weren't cheap either, so they weren't putting me in awful hotels. They would put me in really nice hotels that they were staying in too. That was one exception where they handled the international travel, but the rest of the time, I just took care of it. So if you're super concerned about it, I don't know where you live, but if you're in the US, I would say domestic travel is totally included because it can't get totally out of control if you're just in the US. It's not that big. But I think the important thing is to present yourself as someone who is not acting like an employee and have to justify their expenses to some procurement person or some accountant. No, just take care of it. Roll it into your pricing. Charge enough that you don't even care about it. Charge enough that a few thousand bucks one way or the other doesn't even matter. Okay, so hopefully that answers your question. It's a pretty straightforward question. So if you, dear viewer, have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on LinkedIn, YouTube, or Twitter, and we'll add it to the queue, and I'll get to it as soon as I can. Bye. 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.