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 Alex. How can you handle a situation where, I'm going to paraphrase, how can you handle a situation where you're dealing with a gatekeeper who's just taking orders from a decision maker and passing them on instead of having a two-way conversation that would reveal the why of the project? So I'll sort of paraphrase the background here. The situation is that you've been contacted by someone who's looking for a quote. You probably got an email where someone said, hey, we're looking for someone who does what you do. What's your hourly rate? And maybe they've even got a little bit of, they probably haven't even told you anything about the project in that initial contact. And the person, at this point, you don't know if the person is the economic buyer or just some gatekeeper that's been tasked with finding a whole bunch of people who do Rails development or iOS development or market research or data analytics, whatever the thing is. So you want to find that out. And Alex's question here is suggesting that, okay, it is a gatekeeper and you're asking them, you want to have a conversation with them around the why conversation. You want to ask them why this? Why now? Why me? And if the gatekeeper is just out there trying to create a big list, they basically have a to-do, create a big list of people with their hourly rates that can do this stuff for us. They don't even have the information that you would need to get a sense of the value of the project to the business. And I think it's really important to not start taking money from a business unless you are confident that you can deliver positive ROI. It's like, why would you, you know, it's like a surgeon who just like starts cutting. It's like, well, let's first decide what we're trying to, what is the change we're trying to make here? Like, what's your current situation? What's the desired future state? Can I even help achieve that? Maybe you don't know if they could just give you this task list of like, we want you to do X, then Y, then Z, how much will it be? I'm not going to take that money unless, because I don't know if I can satisfy some business goal. If I'm just being told what to do, they might be telling me to do the wrong thing. And I don't want to do that. I don't want to get to the end of an engagement and then be like, you know, we really should have told you to do something else. I mean, thanks for your time and everything. But, you know, we're kind of disappointed. It's not your fault, but, you know, didn't really, it was kind of a waste of money. I don't want that. So I want to know up front. I'm not going to start up front unless I know that there's some goal that I believe that I can help them reach. And I believe that it's a good goal. I might just be like, no, that's never going to work. I don't see how that's going to work. Maybe it will, but I just don't believe it's going to work. So a gatekeeper almost never can answer these questions. So what I would do is I would insist that I get them answered before moving on. And, you know, you do it in a polite way, but a firm way and say, you know, let's say you just got the initial contact. You get the sense that you're talking to a gatekeeper for whatever reason. Maybe it's in their title. It says executive assistant. Obviously, they're not the economic buyer. So you could say, OK, let's I would love to help you with this. This is in my wheelhouse. The things that you're looking for. I'd like to have a meeting with with the people. I would like to have a meeting to talk about the project and the kinds of questions I'm going to ask are these. These are the kinds of questions I need to get answered before I know if I'd be a good fit for the project. And I put questions in there that that the gatekeeper can't answer. And so maybe they get back to me like, well, first, we just want your hourly rate or I don't you know, I don't know. Let's talk about those on the phone. But I would insist that like someone who be there that can answer those questions or I'm not I'm not going to waste my time with the phone call. Another way to do it would be to to say that you can kind of like I don't like this, but you can kind of play the fear card and be like, you know, look like let's say you end up on a phone call and then you discover that it's a gatekeeper. You're actually talking to the person and they can't answer anything. And you say, well, I mean, look, you're sort of responsible for getting this project going right now. Say yes. And are you going to be involved with the project throughout? You're kind of managing it, shepherding it through the process. Yes, that's what I'll be doing. All right. Well, wouldn't it be good to know what a home run is going to look like so that we don't get to the end of the project? And it's like a failure on your record. Wouldn't you like to get to this end of this project and be able to say that you managed a project that revolutionized the business? Wouldn't that be better for your career or for your resume or for your?

Presumably, they're going to say yes. So you're like, well, look, in order to have any hope of doing that, other than just dumb luck, we need to talk to your boss about why they're doing this. So you're kind of like educating them and training them about the fact that they are not being results-oriented. They're not being goal-oriented. So it's an art, not a science. But basically what you have to do is you have to get past the gatekeeper. If you don't, it's a recipe for failure. There are just way too many assumptions. Any kind of significant project is going to have a million decisions that you're going to have to make based on assumptions. So if you have a lot of assumptions up front about the goal of the project, it's going to be really, really unlikely that you're going to be able to have a huge win or a slam dunk. It would just be dumb luck if that happened. So getting that stuff squared away up front is critically important. One last thing. If you can't get past the gatekeeper but you really want the gig for whatever reason, maybe you need the money or maybe it's a really nice client or marquee client that you'd like to work with, you can price the proposal really high. Not ridiculously high, but at a point where you know that the person is not expecting it to be that high so that they have to get approval from someone farther up the chain. So you're almost using the proposal as a tactic to start a new conversation and probably write a new proposal. So you talk to the gatekeeper, this list of things they give you, you give them a fixed price. It's shocking to them how expensive it is. And then to come back to you and be like, how could this possibly be? You'd be like, well, these are the goals that I imagine, that I'm guessing you guys are going to get from this. If those goals are wrong, let's find out. But if these goals are right, this is a reasonable price. And they'll be like, I don't know what the goals are. Well, again, I've been saying we need to talk to your boss, so either take this to them and get their opinion or we can set up another phone call. And if my goals are wrong, if my goals for this project are wrong, we can fix that. And then I can give you a new proposal that's more appropriate for what you're looking for. So it's a process. It's not easy. So a lot of times if you, I mean, sometimes it's not even worth it. So I would need to have a sense that the project is going to be a pretty big opportunity for me. It's like, this is a huge opportunity. I have this sense that the company really needs it. And I know that it's a strong possibility that there's going to be a six-figure, maybe even seven-figure proposal on the table. Then I'll work to get past a gatekeeper. I'll be patient and sit back and I'll play a longer game. But a lot of times I would just try once or twice an email to get a real decision maker scheduled for a phone call. And if I can't do that, I'll just be like, never mind. Maybe I'm not a good fit for this. Okay, hopefully that helped. If you have a question, hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we will find it and add it to the list. 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.