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 Ashwin 1000 who asks, how can I, a food photographer, do the 100% upfront deal for my clients? Usual fixed price terms are 50% upfront. Well, I don't want to sound glib, but the answer is just ask for it. I'm not against 50-50 terms. The thing that I am against is sign-off. So let me back up for a second. The idea of proposing a project at one of three prices, so you've got, hey, client, you need a project done. It's food photography. Okay, here are three ways that I can help you. And they're incrementally different levels of complexity. And with these three options, it'll be more easy for you to pick something that I can help you with that suits your budget, timeline, other resources. Okay, great. And then at the end, it says, option one is $1,000, option two is $2,200, and option three is $5,000. Payment terms are 100% due upfront to schedule this in my calendar. You can make payment, whatever, send a check here or pay online. Okay, so the main purpose of asking for 100% upfront is to have something to negotiate other than the price. So if somebody is price sensitive and they see that or maybe they're, you know, for whatever reason, they're going to have a reaction to it. They're going to say, oh, geez. First of all, a lot of people are just like, yeah, fine. Here's the check. There you go. Let's get started. Other people are going to be like, oh, I don't know. How about 50 upfront and 50 when we're done? And the problem with that, like I said before, is I'm not a fan of sign-off with software projects especially. Maybe it's different with food photography. It depends on what you're selling, how you're selling it, what outcome you're selling. If you're just selling deliverables, then you know when you're done. But with software projects, especially bigger ones, especially when they're sort of important, bet the business, mission critical types of projects that are urgent and you have to get them done the first time, there's so many moving parts and so many people involved that it's virtually impossible to say on launch day that the software is done. It's completely done. There are no bugs. There are no corner cases. It's almost impossible for that to happen. I've probably never seen it. So since you don't know exactly when it's done, the idea of sign-off is silly. So the idea of deadlines is almost silly. I mean, whatever. It's a separate topic. But anyway, the point is with something super complicated, it has a lot of moving parts and there's just a lot of people involved and there are going to be problems with it. So if there's sign-off, then that puts this sort of artificial pressure on everyone to agree that it's done when it's really not done. So I don't like that for software projects. So I say, I try to talk the client out of it because it's bad for them. I say to them, look, what I'd rather do, that's great. We can do 50-50 terms. Totally cool with that. I want to work with you here and negotiate. But let's do 50% upfront and 50% in 45 days or 60 days or 90 days, whatever makes sense, like roughly the halfway point of how long you think the project will take. And they'll usually say, okay, that's cool. We can do that. And if they say, well, I don't know about 60 days, then I'll say, well, pick whatever date you want. Pick when you think the project's going to launch. And I'm not promising it's going to launch on the date, but pick whatever date you think is reasonable and that'll be fine. And we can get started on Monday. So give them all the control to pick the timing on the second payment or if they want to break it into three payments on these particular dates. The thing that you want to stay away from that causes aggression between the two parties or friction between the two parties is when there are milestones or deadlines or sign-off because it puts tension into the project team and you don't want to have tension in a project team. So with food photography, I don't know if you've got big teams. I don't know if there's a ton of complexity here. Maybe you're just 100% cool with selling a deliverable and at a particular point, 50%, sorry, the second 50% on completion. Maybe you're cool with that, a certain number of revisions or edits on the Photoshop, in Photoshop or something. It really depends on what you're selling. But the idea of asking for 100% upfront is to give you something besides the price to negotiate to make the deal more attractive to the client so that you can meet them halfway on something because you cannot lower your price. If you lower your price, then you have created a bad client. If they ever hire you again, they're going to ask for a lower price again. And then you get into that game of like, well, now I have to set the price higher than I want because they're going to ask me for a 20% discount. That's just like a slippery slope.

So the 100% upfront gives you something to negotiate away. So it's fine to negotiate it away if it's a complex project, stay away from milestone payments or deadline payments and just have them pick whatever dates they want. Okay, that's enough on that. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have questions for me, just hashtag AskJonathan on Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube, and we'll add it to the queue. 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.