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 Jake Prior. Hope I got that right, Jake. And the question is, do you have any advice on how to value price social media services like content creation, advertising, etc.? All right, so this is a fun question. A couple things to think about here. It kind of sounds like what you're talking about is implementation work in the social media services space. So if you haven't seen it already, I have, I think, an hour-long video with Q&A called The Altitude of Involvement. You can find it at jonathanstark.com slash altitude. And I talk about the difference, the pros and cons of the three altitudes of involvement that you can have with a client. The lowest is support. The middle one is implementation, which sounds like what you're talking about. And the highest one is strategy. You could also think of it as design or other planning type things, architecture, that kind of thing. So your question could kind of be, how do I value price implementation services? And the way that you would do that is by coming up with a project and defining it as a project. So something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, not like an ongoing thing, like I'll do social media content creation for you forever and ever, amen. Just tell me when to stop. But have a project, like a campaign or some sort of something with a defined goal, and then you can price the goal. If you just want to do ongoing sort of monthly advisory retainer type stuff or even just monthly implementation retainer type stuff where they buy a chunk of time or they buy a chunk of output or chunk of deliverables, then I would probably just create a productized service where I create a service description on my website that is relatively fixed scope for anybody that bought it. Even if it was a mom and pop pizza place or Domino's, it doesn't matter. It's the same scope. And you price that in a way that is related to either the deliverables or the expected – basically you just price it however you want to price it so that it's worth doing to you. And you look for clients for whom the outcomes that they would expect to receive from this kind of service would be worth the price that you're charging. And there's a super important difference between what I just described and billing by the hour to do social media content creation. If somebody buys an hour of social media content creation, there's no way for you to optimize that. If they buy an hour, you have to do an hour's worth. But if they buy a post, which is pretty granular, it probably wouldn't be that small. But if they do buy a post, you can get better and faster at creating those posts and therefore increase your profit margin. There's no way to become more efficient at delivering an hour. It takes an hour. That's it. So you want to break that connection of time for money. And if you pick some other arbitrary measurement like a post or some number of words, at least you can do those things in less time and therefore increase your profits. If you're good at what you do and you deliver high-quality stuff very quickly and you're charging by the hour, you can't make any profit without raising your hourly rates, which is very difficult and makes you lose clients. Okay, so to summarize, I would say two things to do. If you want to value price, the best place to do it is either on an implementation project, especially an urgent one, or at a higher level, at a strategy level, and you can check out the Altitude of Involvement webinar to find more about that. But if you do want to disconnect your time for money doing implementation, probably the easiest way to do it is to have a price measured against something besides time that is still something you can say, I did this. It could be like a certain number of posts per week or it could be a certain number of increased followers on YouTube. Whatever the outcome is, anything but time, anything is better than time so that you can actually benefit from getting more effective and efficient at what you do. Okay, hope that helped. I'm Jonathan Stark, and 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. Thanks. 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 among 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

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.