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 Sam Carlton who asks, Hey Jonathan, thanks for your content. It's really helpful to have someone to learn the sales stuff from that's from a software development background. And also it's pretty cool that you don't communicate greedy mindsets. I'm being white-labeled by two different companies right now and I love getting business but I'm still not at a comfortable place financially. Do you think white labeling is something I should limit or should I treat it more like a golden goose? Okay, so this seems to be a pretty common situation with people where they are good at something, let's say development, but they're bad at marketing and sales. So they're not attracting their own leads, they're not attracting their own clients, but somehow they land in kind of like an agency relationship or like an ongoing subcontractor through an agency that does do marketing and sales. So yeah, I mean, you're right. It's good to have that cash flow. You need that. You're not going to get good at value pricing or other ways to ditch hourly billing if you're constantly worried how you're going to pay your rent. So you need to have some kind of keep the lights on money, whether that's savings or some sort of work through an agency, that kind of thing. So once you have that, you can go into a sales meeting and address the contact, the project contact, like a peer. You can interview them instead of them just making you pitch to them or you do your dog and pony show and they'll decide whether they pick you or someone else. If you need the money, you're not going to be in a good position to have a strong sales interview and negotiate from a position of strength. So you want to be peers with the buyer. You want to be able to feel comfortable being like, you know, I don't think this is going to be a great fit. I don't see a win for you guys. I don't know why you would hire someone expensive like me to do this. I don't see how you would justify the cost to your board or to your CFO. So I don't know, maybe, you know, maybe you can clarify for me, but I don't think this is a good fit. Maybe you should go someplace cheaper like Upwork or TopTal or something like that. So you need to have some sort of financial security. Most people need to have some kind of financial security to be able to go into a sales meeting and basically like say, hey, I'm seeing some red flags here. Maybe I'll pass. Okay, so the problem with going through a sort of a white labeling situation where someone else is doing the sales, someone else owns the client relationship, is that you're not going to get better at marketing and sales. You're not going to get better at attracting clients. You're not going to get better at negotiating with them if you don't have time to work on your own business. A lot of these white label arrangements are hourly and even if they're not, they can sort of grow to fill up your entire week and not give you any time left over to work on your business. This might sound shocking, but I think people should be spending probably half their week, say 20 hours working on their business, doing marketing and sales, getting better at, you know, educating themselves about how to do a pricing conversation, how to have, you know, the why conversation as I talk about, how to talk to clients, how to create new products, create new services, publish a regular mailing list. There are all these things that you can do to sort of change the rules of engagement so that you're attracting leads directly instead of having to go through these other parties. So if you can continue working as a white labeled contractor through these agencies but limit it to 20 or 30 hours a week, hopefully 20 though, and still get by on the money, then you'll have time left over to really get better at building your own business and not just building their business. So hopefully that helps. I'm Jonathan Stark, and if you have questions for me, hit me up on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn with the hashtag AskJonathan, 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...

To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com/call. That URL again is jonathanstark.com/call. Hope to see you there.