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. Got a question from Ashwin Vijay Aragaban. Hope I got that right. He asks, how can I, a food photographer, practice value-based pricing or something close? When you spoke about it in other videos, it's at a larger scale. How can I scale it to a freelance food photographer level, especially when I often don't get to interact with the actual owners of the businesses that I work with? It's usually the marketing or brand manager who assume authority over the decision-making process. Thank you and love from India. Back at you. Okay, so great question. There's a couple things I want to talk about here. First is that my big thing is ditching hourly, is to having freelancers and consultants and coaches and people who normally bill by the hour or some other time increment to stop doing that for their own benefit and for the benefit of their clients. Value pricing is one way to give really profitable fixed bids for project work. When I say profitable, I mean for you and for your clients. So if you have a project, then value pricing is the way I recommend trying to price it. But you don't have to have a project. You could have something else like a productized service where you have some kind of outcome that you deliver, or maybe it's a recurring subscription to some output, some business outcome that you price, where you price the outcome and not the number of hours it's going to take you or the number of weeks it's going to take you or the amount of work it's going to take you. Price the outcome, even if it's not a project that you're value pricing in a sales interview and having a wide conversation and coming up with this company's specific, what this company specifically finds this business outcome would be worth. You can kind of generalize it a little bit more and through experience say, well, businesses that are like this will pay about this much per month or per instance for a particular kind of outcome that I can reliably deliver. So how would I decide between those two things? It's really a question of is, if you know, if you can come up with a service that is going to have a relatively fixed scope, no matter who hires you to do it, it's probably a good fit for productized service. You can probably put a price on it posted on your website and be very happy every time you saw one. If you can come up with a fixed scope type of engagement, if you're getting a lot of clients where the scope is radically different all the time, then you have to do custom proposals for them. And that's when value pricing comes in. So all I'm all I'm doing here is describing that there are different ways to stop trading time for money. And when I talk about value pricing, it's almost always in the context of a custom project where you have to have, you know, an hour long conversation, maybe two hour long conversations with a client to uncover the business outcome that they're looking for. And you're going to give them a proposal with three options on it for some sort of pretty big project, non-trivial project, three months, six months, 12 months, 18 months, a project beginning, middle and end. There's a launch at a certain point you're going to there's a success criteria. And at a certain point, you're going to be done. OK, so you don't have to value price your food photography. You can do a combination. You can create productized services that you publish at a fixed price on your website, and you can also do custom projects that you value price on a one to one basis. OK, so that's that's one thing. The next thing is when you're trying to if you're going to be doing value price, you know, bigger projects that you want to value price and you want to get past these sort of marketing or brand managers or you want to differentiate yourself from the crowd of people who do what you do and sort of justify a higher fee, let's say, which is another way of saying increase the perceived value of what it is that you personally do, then an approach is to become really famous for it. Nobody who's really famous for food photography right now was born famous for doing food photography. Over time, they became famous for doing food photography and you can do the same thing. It's not you know, you have to do good work, of course, but there are other things that you engage in to become more famous. So in preparation for this question, I googled most famous food photographers and came up with a list. Top 10 advertising food photography

...International Photography. So then I landed on this page and I thought, well, is this just sort of like a clickbait, you know, site that these 10 people decided to put together? So I looked around a little bit to give myself a sense of like, is this a real website? Is International Photography Awards a real thing? Because I'm not a photographer. I don't know. And I looked at the jury and these people seem, they seem like real people. They seem serious. They, you know, I'm just basing this on the visuals. It could all be fake, but you as a food photographer, question asker, you probably know some of these people. These might be people who you look up to. This might be an important website in your business. If it's not, go to one that is. But the bottom line is there is, let me go back, back. OK, so the bottom line is there are 10 winners. Maybe these people are famous to you. Maybe they're not. But I would be willing to bet that, you know, David Tortora, Jamie Trevesan, Steve Hansen, Mauro Turati, Ira Leone. I mean, these are good looking pictures. What do I know? They seem good to me. But these people, perhaps, maybe this is the wrong list. Maybe you have a better list. But these people are famous for this. And what that means is when someone comes to hire them, even if it's a marketing director, they are going to have a story to tell to the person who's approving the budget. If you're not even talking to them, you know, maybe if you're Ira Leone, maybe you get to talk to the person at the top of the food chain who does approve the budget. But if you're still talking to a director level person, that person can say, we hired Ira Leone or whatever his name is. Sorry, all these names are hard. Maybe, you know, that is higher value. It creates a status, a higher status for the person who is the director, who would be talking to you and hiring you to do the work. But it's also creating status for the person that they're talking to, the head of the agency or the head of McDonald's or whoever's food you're photographing. Nice one. Photographing. So anyway, the idea here is, this is the second idea. The second idea is if you want to have really high profitable or you want to grow your project fees for doing a photo shoot, let's say, one way to do that is to become very, very well known to become a brand name. Nobody that's a brand name food photographer right now was born that way. You can do that. It takes time, but you can do it. Carve out an issue for yourself that one of these people doesn't already have. And you do it. You can be the whatever, the the the world's best fast food French fry photographer, whatever, something like that. And then once you have a name for yourself, the perceived value of what you do will go up. You can say that's crazy or not crazy, but it's true. So, OK, so that's the second thing. The third thing we could talk about would be to get try to get past the gatekeepers, the marketing, the brand manager and say, you know, I would love to do this for you, but I don't understand what the desired outcome is like. Yes, I can take these pictures for you, but you could get anybody to do that. Why would you hire someone expensive like me to do it? And they would say, oh, you're going to be expensive. Yes, I am expensive. But, you know, but I deliver results to my clients. And here's some testimonials on my website of results I had delivered to my clients. And when I say results, I don't mean pretty pictures of food. I mean, they sold more French fries. I mean that their restaurant was packed solid after they posted your your photos on their Yelp account. What are some results that you've delivered to past clients, business results that probably have some numbers in them, even if it's even if it's five star, two star? You know, we went from two stars to five stars. That's completely subjective, but it's still a number. Or that whatever their their reservations doubled. They were Michelin rated after the pictures. They showed up in twice as many publications after the pictures went live on the website. Look back at the results, business results that you've delivered to clients. And when you're talking to new clients, you say, look, I want to deliver results like these like I did for these companies to you. But I need to know what those results are. If I have any hope of doing it. So what kind of results are you looking for here? And if they can't answer that, then you could suggest, well, I understand that you don't have this information. Who does have this information? Because I won't know what to do. I won't know what I'm trying to achieve if I don't know the answers to these questions. I could take pretty pictures all day long, but that's not going to give you a result necessarily. It would be it would be totally coincidental if just pretty picture of French fries gave you a result. What result are you looking for? So if they can't answer that question, then you can try and talk to someone who's above them to who does have.

that question. Why is this food photography going on at all? And the issue that you'll come up with, come up against, I should say, is that someone might have already decided the strategy. They don't want to waste their time sharing the strategy with you. They've already decided what the french fries need to look like. Just shoot it like this, please. And that scenario is not a great scenario for someone who's trying to grow their business or have higher profits. That's a fine scenario if you just need some money to pay your rent and they're going to tell you what to do and you're just going to do it. That's fine. I mean, that'll keep the lights on, but that's a trap. Eventually you'll end up trapped by that. So if you're just going to do the hands work of being told what to do and do a good job of doing it, then bill by the hour. I don't care. Bill by the photo. I don't care. But you can't keep doing that forever. You'll end up trapped by it. So if you need to take on a job where the whoever, the advertising director or the owner of the food company is telling you what to do, we know what we want it to look like. We know that you can do it. We saw your portfolio. Just give us a bunch of pictures of our food that look like the other food. You could say, fine, I'll just do that and don't argue about it. Don't try and get strategic. Just do what they tell you to do. Take the money and in your additional free time, carve out some free time for yourself to either come up with a productized service and sell that or go back to your pre-existing clients. Find out what results with numbers. Find out what results with numbers that you delivered for them, what your contribution to that was, and continue to try and get more famous. Because the more famous you are, the more leads you're going to attract, the more perceived value people are going to have in your work, and the more you're going to be able to charge because you're actually delivering more value. All right. So great question. Thanks for that. I'm sorry if I went on for a long time. I'm not sure how long that was. But if you, dear listener or dear viewer, have a question for me, just hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we'll get to it as soon as we can. 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.