Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I'm going to tell you a little bit about my squirrel guy. If you're on my mailing list, you might have heard about this already, but I'm going to add a little bit of extra information, so please stay tuned. Okay, so we've been living in our house for a little over 10 years. In the entire time, ever since we moved in, there's been a family of squirrels living in our garage. It never really bothered me that much because we have a freestanding garage, so they weren't getting into the house, and we don't really store much of importance in the garage. It's just like shovels and firewood and other things we should probably just throw out anyway. But they have kind of trashed the place and it was getting worse and worse, and they started trying to get into the main house. And we had a couple in our attic, and it was becoming a problem that I felt like I had to do something about. So I asked around and I found a few wildlife services people, and I was finally able to get someone out to take a look. So this guy named Ed, a really nice guy, came to the house, and he had me walk around the garage. On the inside, the outside, I showed him where the squirrels were getting in and out. There was like a hole they had chewed through the eaves on the back of the garage. And after he had spent about 10 minutes sort of scoping out the site, he went back to his truck and wrote up a quote. The quote that he gave me was a quote to do a bunch of work. It was not a quote to get rid of my squirrels. So this quote was an entire 8.5 by 11 page just full of Ed's really small handwriting, and he was talking about things like white coil stock and mushroom vents and custom roof guards. And, you know, these are words that obviously make sense to him and probably the service people that were going to come out and do the job, but they don't make any sense to me. I don't know what a mushroom vent is going to do if he installs it. I'm not sure I need it. I don't know what effect it's going to have, really. All I really wanted to know was that after he was done, I wasn't going to have squirrels anymore. That's my goal. That was my desired outcome. And for me to make a value decision about the price that he gave me, I was kind of uncertain because nowhere on the quote did he guarantee or even say that the squirrels would be gone. It was just presumed, I suppose. I was left to connect the dots that him installing a mushroom vent was going to solve my problem. But he never actually said that, and he certainly never guaranteed that outcome even for, you know, a short period of time like six months or three months. It didn't say. I don't think the word squirrel was on there. So, you know, the price was not insignificant. It was over $1,000 for him to do this work, and I was left to assume that it was going to, A, solve my problem, and, B, last for a reasonable amount of time. So, you know, fast forward a month later, he did his thing. The squirrels had been gone, so it did work out, and, you know, he seemed like a trustworthy person, so it was fairly safe to assume or it felt safe to assume that these things that he said he was going to do would eventually result in what we actually discussed on the phone and in person. But I think it's important, or the moral of the story here, is that for professional services providers, you know, software developers or illustrators or marketers or really anybody else, you should spend time focusing on the client's desired outcome. Tell them that you're going to do some stuff, you're going to get rid of the squirrels, and you guarantee that they'll be gone for some period of time. You know, so we are going to build you a website that is going to achieve your goals. So find out what the get rid of the squirrels issue is for your client. Maybe it's increased conversions. Maybe it's promote an event and get people to sign up for an event. Whatever the thing they're marketing on their website is or selling on their website is, find out what that squirrels out of their garage goal is and sell that, price that, talk about that in your proposal. Make that the focus of your discussions because once everyone's thinking about the business outcomes instead of the amount of time you're going to spend working, it's a great way to increase your profits because you can say, look, I can deliver this outcome. I can get the squirrels out of your garage. I can do that very quickly, and it will cost you $2,000. Does that sound good? And I'll guarantee that they'll be gone for a year. If they come back within a year, I'll come back and get them out again free of charge. So you need to find out what that is in your client's world and price and sell that. I do think I've sort of an additional point to make here though, which is that the deliverables,

In Ed's case, the work that he was going to do, installing the mushroom vent and putting whatever it was, white coil fencing, whatever white coil stuck on my garage roof, those things aren't totally uninteresting to me. You know, I had some concerns that perhaps there would be some damage to the garage if he was doing his work, or maybe the squirrels would be trapped or injured, or I wouldn't want zombie squirrels flopping around in my driveway. It would be totally horrifying my kids. So the methods do matter in that I want to make sure that the methods that the person uses aren't going to be maybe unethical or scary or distasteful to me in some way, but I don't really care about them from a pricing standpoint. I just want to make sure they're acceptable to me. So in your case, dear listener, you might want to put those methods into your quote so that, you know, I'll make sure you don't use jQuery because we don't want to have that dependency for some reasons that matter to us. But that's not the point of the project. The point of the project is to update the website so that it's blazing fast on mobile devices over 3G because what that's going to do is increase our conversion rate. We believe that that's a leading indicator that will increase our conversion rate on mobile, and that's what we care about. So the methods that you use aren't totally insignificant, but they shouldn't really be the focus of your proposal. And in the case of my squirrel guy, Ed, he had a huge focus on his methods, his deliverables, the things he was going to do, the activities he was going to undertake, and very, very little focus on guaranteeing me that my desired outcome would be achieved. So again, focus primarily on delivering that desired outcome to your clients, price that. You don't focus as much on your methods, and you can completely remove time from the equation in terms of a pricing method. And what that does is it decreases your costs and therefore increases your profits. That's it for today. I'm Jonathan Stark, and this is Ditching Hourly. Thanks for listening. The next time somebody asks you for your hourly rate, this is what I want you to say. I don't have one. To learn what to say after that, visit valuepricingbootcamp.com to sign up for my free email course. Again, that URL is valuepricingbootcamp.com. 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.