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. Daniel Moore asks, what would you say to a client that asks for free services in return for quality referrals? Yeah, this is a hard pass for me. I would say definitely no. If somebody reaches out to me to say, hey, I understand that you're really good with mobile web design. We've got a lot of really good contacts. We think that you should work for free for us and then if it's good work, if you do good work, then we will refer you to all of these people in our professional network. I'm like, no, no thanks. I would just say no thank you or say, well, thanks for your offer, but I've given it some thought and I just can't make a business case for that. So no thanks, I'll pass. And somebody who does that, who's reached out to you and then asked you for free work, both of those things, I think it's really disrespectful. They clearly do not value what you're doing or they're really immature about what it is that they're doing. They don't understand their business. Maybe they have no business model. It's a very immature and rude thing to do. That said, I do advocate for doing free work sometimes. You could do things for you. There's all sorts of good market research reasons to do it, to design and create new products, productized services. Those are all good reasons, but I wouldn't do it in response to someone who reached out to me. I would think, okay, I want to make this new productized service of like, say, a mobile retrofit where I'm really good at mobile web design. I've been doing a lot of mobile web design projects, and I think that there's a thing I can create like a productized service where I retrofit the homepage of a website so that it becomes mobile friendly by making some basic tweaks to it that then their web developer can run with and sort of propagate throughout the rest of the site. So if I think this is an interesting idea, I can sort of put together a product description for this service, sort of productized service, and think, all right, who would be a good fit for this? Maybe it's independent consultants. Maybe it's book authors. Who knows? Whatever. You pick your audience that you want to serve. You've got this idea for a product, and you reach out to three, four, five of them until you get three people, around three people, maybe more, who say, yeah, we'll do that. We'll beta test that for you. That'd be really interesting. And you say, great. So in exchange for me doing this for you, what I would like in return is feedback on my marketing materials for describing the product and how accurate it is so I can correct any of my sales materials. I'd like to get your feedback on the delivery of the productized service so that I can prove that in the future. And if you're really happy with the outcome, I'd love it if you could give me a testimonial. So what you're doing then, you're not really working for free. You're laying the groundwork to create and improve sort of on the fly a productized service that then, assuming that it all goes well, you'll get a good testimonial from. And then if things do go well and they do give you a good testimonial and you can put that on your site, say, wow, I'm really glad that this worked out well. I'm so happy to know that you enjoyed this service. Can you think of anybody in your network who might also benefit from the service? And then ask for referrals if they're happy and they've given you a testimonial. That's a very different thing than someone who's sort of dangling this carrot in front of you like, hey, you want to work for free? And then I'll recommend you to a bunch of other people who will probably ask you to work for free too. That's not good. I would definitely say no to that. All right, that's it for now. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have any questions for me, just hashtag Ask Jonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn and we will find it and I'll answer it as soon as I can. 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.

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.