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 Jody Solis, or Solis-ay. And the question is, how long do you give clients post-project to declare they're unsatisfied and collect a refund? My concern, though the occurrence is probably unlikely, is that a client will run into an unrelated issue causing the project to fail, get buyer's remorse, and look for every possible way to make right on their own poor decision. Okay, this does happen sometimes, but it is very rare. I've seen it happen where somewhat unscrupulous clients, or maybe they're not unscrupulous, but a client gets really excited about an idea. Perhaps they don't think it through. They write a big check to someone. The thing completely fails. Now they're getting money pressure from other aspects of their life that are really, really critical, like mortgage, family, health, those sorts of things. And then they get desperate and they try and do all sorts of – now they start to get a little bit sketchy about them trying to recover this money that they probably shouldn't have invested in the first place. So that does happen. It exists. But I've probably only heard about that two or three times in 10 or 15 years. I'm sure it's happened quite a bit more than that. But I talk to a lot of people about running projects, and it's not that common. But if you're in a meeting with someone early on and you get the sense that they're real scattered or they're not super – I don't want to say businesslike, but I would just put your feelers out there looking for someone who hasn't really thought through their business case, can't give you a clear objective that – what they're trying to achieve, can't make a case for why it would make sense for them to invest this money with you. If you go and listen up to my answers about the why conversation, you can check ditchinghourly.com for my podcast. And I have an entire episode on the why conversation, which is how to go into a sales interview with a new prospect, a potential client, and try to talk them out of hiring you. You need to be confident in that meeting that them giving you some amount of money is going to deliver a return on investment for them. You can deliver positive ROI. You can give them 100% customer satisfaction. They will be glad that they gave you $10,000, $50,000, $100,000 because the return that you gave them was much better, whether it's a tangible return or an intangible return. They are happy they paid you. They don't have buyer's remorse. So if you get a sense in that meeting that they haven't really been rigorous in their thinking about why they're considering investing this money with you, I would be – that would be a red flag for me. It would be like – at the end of the meeting, I'd be like, I can't really – thank you for all your time, but I'm just – I'm missing something. I just cannot make a business case for you to pay me a million dollars to do this for you. And I would actually say a million dollars in a kidding way, but I would say, why would you pay me all this money? I just – I don't see the business case. So vetting – basically, this is a long way to say you want to be confident that you can deliver positive ROI in the sales interview. And if you don't have that confidence, that's a scary engagement for me because of the exact reasons that you point out. Now, the specifics of the question though at the beginning, how long do you give clients post-project to declare they're unsatisfied and collect a refund? This changes from thing to thing. So if someone say – to put it another way, different products, services, and productized services, I would have different guarantees for. So for example, for a retainer engagement, which is an ongoing monthly thing for which clients would pay me five figures, like a lot of money that I wouldn't want to return after say a year, I would say in the first 30 days, I guarantee professionals. I guarantee you're going to like the way this is going. We'll have a good sense for how each other works in the first 30 days. If either one of us is unhappy with the relationship at the end of the first 30 days, I'll just refund your money and we'll part ways. No hard feelings. So for a long open-ended advisory retainer relationship, my guarantee is in the first 30 days. After that, no refunds. Something like a course, if I was giving a training course, either an online training course, like a prerecorded one, even not a prerecorded one, but online course where I didn't have to fly somewhere, I would say free retakes. So if you take the class and you're not happy with it for whatever reason or you couldn't make it, something came up, something real came up, then I would give free retakes for up to a year, something like that. So it really depends on what you're offering. Let's just see here.

It doesn't say exactly what Jody does, but let's just say it's typically a project project, you know, so it's a non-trivial amount of collaborative work with a client that is meant to achieve a certain outcome. In my case, it would have been, years ago it would have been, software projects. And I would say at the end of that, I would give a bug-free guarantee, not a money-back guarantee. I would say at the end of this project, I think it'll take at least six months, maybe more, but at the end, once we launch and everybody has declared victory that it was successfully delivered, then for the next 12 months, anything that comes up bug-wise, I'll fix it for free because I stand behind my code, I stand behind my understanding of your business logic, and I'll just fix it. Now, that said, I'm going to charge more than anybody else would have charged them for that project, but having the bug-free guarantee is going to make them trust me more, it's going to put a lot of the risk on me and not them. It ensures that I've got a financial incentive to write really good code and not junk. I'm not going to leave them high and dry after launch. So what kind of guarantee you offer and what the sort of compensation is, if invoked, will be different depending on what it is that you're selling. So hopefully that helps. If you have a question, you can hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we'll find it and add it to the queue. 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.