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 Ashwin1000 who asks, how can I, a food photographer, practice value-based pricing or something close? When you spoke about it, it's at a larger scale. How can I scale it to a freelancer level? Okay, so where do I start? The first thing I would say is that value pricing works best for projects. And by project, I specifically mean a non-trivial collaborative enterprise designed to achieve a particular outcome. So you're collaborating with a client, you're working with them over time to achieve some goal. It's got a beginning, a middle, and an end. There's a launch, there's a done point, there's some goal that's meant to be achieved with this particular campaign of collaboration and activities and that sort of thing. It's not like a quick thing necessarily. There are going to be surprises along the way. And that's a good thing to value price because since it has an end point or some desired outcome, you can price that. So as a food photographer, I've got no experience with food photographers, but I can imagine that there are certain kinds of clients who would have a project that's around food photography. Maybe Gordon Ramsay is launching a new magazine or is going to do some sort of show that requires a lot of food photography or a video podcast or something. I don't know. But knowing what you know about the food photography business in general, think about what sorts of projects that exist. It's not just like show up and there's going to be a bunch of food laid out or fake food or whatever and you just shoot it and you're done and you leave. And the quality is high. Maybe that's why they picked you instead of someone else or maybe your price is lower and that's why they picked you instead of someone else. But that's not a project. That's a task. That's something you come in and they tell you to do. They know what they want you to do and you just do it. And the quality is high. Maybe that's why they picked you instead of someone else or maybe your price is lower and that's why they picked you instead of someone else. But that's not a project. Okay, so if you want to do value-based pricing, look for projects. I don't know what those might be, but perhaps you do. Okay, so now if you can't think of projects or that project is just one thing, so whether or not you can think of a project that you could undertake with a client, there are other things you can do that are not as big or complicated as projects. And I would usually consider these to be a class of services that I'd call productized services where the scope is basically the same for anybody that comes along. So it's like a predefined scope and whether you get a local pizza place like some mom and pop Joe's Pizza or Domino's comes along, the thing that you're going to do for them, you're going to take your expertise with food photography and you're going to apply it to their situation in some way. It doesn't change scope whether you're talking about a single location, local pizza place or a national chain. What that might look like for you, I don't know. It could be food photography for blog posts, let's say. So they do periodic blog posts and you will do food photography for all the posts for six months out. And yeah, I don't know, this is kind of hard. Yeah, it could be though. You could say, okay, you've got six months of blog posts. You show up at the place where they prepare the food. I don't know how that works, but you show up at the place, you shoot enough stuff for six months of blog posts and they own the photos, they're pre-sized to the size that they would need. And you say for, what would that be? Six times four, let's say. So like, I can't do six times four, 24, nice. You do like 24 shots for these different things, different blog posts or whatever the content pieces are. They're pre-sized, maybe you upload them to WordPress for them, maybe you schedule them out or you put them in a particular place where the content marketer is going to schedule them out. But whether it's Domino's or Joe's Pizza, it's the same amount of work. And if that is the kind of thing that lots of people need, you could put that on your website, you could say, food photography for blog posts, for bloggers, or Instagram is really what you'd probably do. Food photography for Instagram influencers and for six months, it's, I don't know, $3,000 or just some price that you publish. And then people who are,

either Food Network celebrities or Instagram food influencers, whatever, they would come along and they would say, you would drive them to your site one way or another through ads or social media or outreach or blog posts or podcasting, whatever you do. You would put out this content to these sorts of people and they would get attracted to your website. And then on the website, they'd say, oh, for 3,000 bucks, Ashwin will do six months worth of photography for me and I don't have to do anything about it. And it's only $3,000. That's a pretty cool deal. It's not gonna be a great deal for everyone. Some people would be like, that's crazy, that's way too much. Other people are gonna be like, wow, that's a bargain because he does great stuff. I like his other work and I know I need this done and I don't really wanna spend my time that way. I wanna be interviewing people or something like that. So, okay, so we've talked so far about value-based pricing for projects. If you can think of a project, you could try and value price that. And then I tried to come up with an idea for a food photography productized service. So maybe like food photography for influencers on Instagram and it's a fixed scope no matter who buys it and you publish it at a particular price on your website. So both of those two things are, they are disconnected from time. So you're not charging for your time. You're not charging for photos. I wouldn't charge for photos. That's just a deliverable. You want some kind of outcome that you're selling. You want the outcome that you would sell with the Instagram thing is a beautiful Instagram feed that attracts more likes or hearts or whatever they call them on Instagram. And the outcome of the project, the value-based project thing would be whatever the desired outcome of the project was and you would price your contribution to that outcome. So those are just two ways to think about disconnecting your time from your money and selling outcomes instead of hours or deliverables like individual photos. All right, hope that helps. I'm actually gonna think more about this. This would be interesting if I do, I might do a follow-up on this one too because I could come up with some better examples maybe if I had more time. Okay, so that's it for now. I'm Jonathan Stark. And if you have questions for me, you can hashtag at Jonathan on YouTube, Twitter or LinkedIn and we'll find it and add it to the list. 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 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.