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 Being Raj who asks, how to deal with little jobs like fixing a CSS mistake or a client who wants to do a bunch of fixes or small tasks and expect to pay like $100 or $200, even if it's okay money like $50 an hour? Okay, a couple things here. So first of all, I don't think it says, yeah, it doesn't say specifically, but let's say that a client comes along and they have a project for you and you give them a quote for the project. You value price it however you do it, but you give them a fixed price, whether it's time materials or value, hopefully it's value-based because the price will be higher. And if you do that, part of justifying a higher fee could be that for 12 months, there's a bug-free guarantee after the project is over or after the project launches, whatever the end point of the project is. So what that means is when little fixes come along later on, because there's usually, there's almost always little fixes on any kind of website or internal application, workflow application, there's always going to be something that somebody missed or some quarterly report that's not running right for some reason. So when you do the proposal, you can build in the certainty that there will be little tweaks later on into the price and just guarantee for 12 months like bug-free fixes are free for 12 months. Of course, you're going to increase your price though to kind of compensate for that. So let's just say you were going to do a $10,000 project and you wanted to say, well, I know there's going to be stuff after that and I don't want to nickel and dime them later because that makes me look cheap and it's going to make them angry and it kind of reflects poorly on the, it might reflect poorly on the work that I did. So if you're confident at what you do and you like to write really clean, maintainable code or markup or styles, style sheets or whatever, and you believe that you're good, well, why wouldn't you stand behind your work and guarantee it? Like, yes, platforms will change and plugins will get out of date and little things will break, but they're small. They're usually all small things. It's not like a huge undertaking. So even if it's not your fault, little things are probably going to go wrong over time. And so you can say, look, we're going to do this project together. I'm not sure how long it's going to take. It'll be at least three months, but it could be as many as six. Since I don't know exactly how long it's going to take, I'm not going to charge you by the hour. There's going to be no clock ticking. I'm just going to give you a price for what you're looking to achieve. And I'm going to execute that. And at a certain point, it's going to be done. And after it's done, I'll give you for free for 12 months, I will fix anything that breaks for the entire time. No new features. We're not going to build new features. But if something breaks, there's a plugin conflict or a security patch that needs to be done or a little CSS fix, I'll just do it. And for a project that you would normally have charged, say, $10,000, you can say, well, it's going to be $18,000. Here's the project, and then I've got this bug-free guarantee for 12 months. It doesn't have to be a bug-free guarantee. It could be whatever you would stand behind. But bug-free guarantee, I think, fits this situation specifically. And if they come back to you and like, well, geez, this seems really expensive. And you could say, well, yeah, it is. It's probably the most expensive quote you got. But you're probably not comparing apples to apples. Because if you're getting quotes from other people, they're probably estimates. They're probably based on hours. And even if they said $5,000, go back to them and say, well, are you willing to guarantee that it'll only be $5,000 and you won't go a penny over? Will they stand behind their estimate? They probably won't. So it's not the same thing. I'm standing behind the price. I'm saying it's going to be $18,000, not a penny more. We're going to get the ball across the goal line that we've defined here. And then you've got this insurance policy. For 12 months after that, if anything goes wrong, you're not going to have to worry about it. It's like a warranty on a car or a washing machine or something. So almost nobody is going to offer those kinds of insurances or assurances. Or you can think of it as like a warranty or a guarantee or an insurance policy. Other people are not going to stand behind their work that way. So if you do a project and normally after projects you get these little nickel and dime sort of requests that half the time you just want to do for free because it's not even worth writing an invoice and tracking your time and all of that stuff, just start building that into your proposal.

and say like for some period of time after we're done then we'll do you know we'll just fix whatever so you don't have to worry about that stuff. We don't want to nickel and dime you for these little fixes. Okay so that was that was my first thought. So you've got a project and it's the little fixes that happen after the project. But what if it's not a project or what if it's you know say a new client who says hey I got your name from somebody I understand you do CSS we've got a bunch of little tweaks I need done could you could you fix them for me what's your hourly rate? My first reply to someone like the first possible reply is just like no I don't do that kind of stuff but you could have a conversation with them and say you know what's the problem here why do you need these things fixed why do you need them fixed now why would you reach out to someone expensive like me to fix this stuff why don't you just do it don't you have an internal person that can do this don't you know somebody that can like tweak your CSS why would you reach out to a professional who you know with a reputation in the industry that you know to fix these little things like why does it even matter why not leave it like the way that it is and perhaps you'll get into a conversation where they say you know our clients are really complaining about this and our competitors are starting to you know are iterating very quickly and putting out really good stuff and we're starting to feel that that these little you know these buttons being a little bit off and you know this unreadable text here because the background colors are wrong it's starting to damage our brand it's starting to create doubt in the minds of our clients we're not seeing as many conversions we believe that it has to do with this sort of these little discrepancies then maybe you have a project and say well okay I know you came to me because you wanted these couple of things fixed but it seems like your real problem is that you're experiencing a lot of customer churn or your sales team is nervous that you're not going to be able to close deals or your competitor is going to eat your lunch because they're iterating very quickly and doing a good job so maybe there's a project here you can turn this request for these little fixes into something a little bit more meaty that you could value price and do over like a three to six month period where you collaborate with them to do some sort of more less of a band-aid a little bit more of a fundamental fix so that they're set up so that these kinds of bugs don't show up again in the future so on and so forth okay so that's a possibility a lot of times when people come to you and they just want their toilet unclogged they don't want to hear about a bathroom renovation though so if so it's probably unlikely that that would happen but it could another thing that you can do is say if you do if you want to be in the business of doing just this kind of work where like hey did your did your web team leave you in a lurch or did they you know did you have a falling out with them or did they flake out disappear go dark you know basically did you did your web designer or your web developer abandon you or are they too expensive or they don't want to do this little work you could build a whole sort of service around just doing these little kinds of things where you jump in you fix you know for some amount a month maybe they pay you 500 bucks a month and they throw all these things into an issue tracker and every month you just plow through as many as you can I don't think that's I don't love that but that's better than than individual one-off types of things so let's say you get a recurring like 500 or whatever the number is some amount of money per month to do support and maintenance for their website and if there's nothing to do there's nothing to do if there's nothing to do for a few months in a row maybe they change their mind and they don't pay you anymore but if there is stuff to do and you're there sort of you're sort of on the clock not on the clock but you're on the payroll is what I mean getting a monthly recurring amount and maybe you put some limits on it like up to x number of fixes so and so forth then you could sort of have this standing situation where you've got this sort of standing financial recurring relationship with a client to come in and do support and maintenance again I think this is a really hard this is a hard kind of business to grow without scaling up with bodies and outsourcing to you know a bunch of low-cost employees it's it's tough to scale that up so it's not my favorite approach but it's certainly better than then you know someone coming in and saying hey can we give you 50 bucks to change the color of all these buttons that's that's just say no I think I started off by saying like a lot of work like this when it comes along just refer it to someone else say just go to Upwork and find someone on Upwork it's not worth your time or money to really be focused on this kind of thing because it doesn't build your business in any way it's just a little bit of money for a big distraction okay that's probably enough enough on that I'm Jonathan Stark if you have questions you can hashtag ask Jonathan on YouTube Twitter or LinkedIn and we'll find it

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