Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Implementing the sorts of things I advocate on the podcast and elsewhere on my mailing list and books and so on and so forth, these things take practice. You can't just flip a switch and do this stuff. The reason you can't do that is because hourly billing, it permeates your entire business, it permeates the way you think, you probably have internal systems that you maybe built by yourself or you paid for that track hours and fill out timesheets and then they flow into invoicing and reporting after the fact for profitability and maybe even into your accounting software. That sort of level of tooling I think is pretty common and it reflects the way that our brains have become conditioned to think about trading time for money, that it's a good thing, that it's the only thing, it's the only way to sell these kinds of services. It takes time to change that to both your thought process and extricating all of that hourliness from your systems and coming up with new systems where it's not baked in like that. What that means is if you're going to try and do some of the things I advocate like sell productized services or have a live conversation with a client and try to talk them out of working with you, it's going to feel very risky. In fact, probably it's going to feel too risky to do that if you're getting very few leads. If you are sort of familiar with this feast famine cycle that hourly billers tend to go through and you haven't gotten a real lead in six weeks or maybe a month or maybe even six months, when one finally comes through the door, you're probably not going to want to try something brand new on them. You're going to revert to what feels safe, which is whatever got you to where you currently are. But the problem with that, of course, is that if you don't try new things, nothing new is going to happen. So you'll remain stuck in this hourly trap, as I call it, that you've been stuck in. So it can be very helpful to implement these things and to get experience with these things and to practice these things by first increasing the number of leads you're getting so that you're getting a few leads a week. Imagine that, getting a few leads a week. If you knew that you were going to get three, four, five more leads next week, you'd be a lot more confident in experimenting with someone this week and say, oh, you know, I think these people might be a good fit for a roadmap. I'm going to try and sell them a roadmap. Or I'm going to try and talk these people out of working with me because I'm not convinced that what they want me to do is really going to be that valuable for their business. And you can kind of, I don't want to say get away with that, but you can bring yourself to do that, convince yourself that it's okay and have the confidence that it takes to do that if you're pretty sure that you're probably going to get three or four more leads next week. So, you know, if it's not a good fit or it doesn't work out or you, you know, strike out, you know, on a few calls this week, it's no big deal because next week you'll have a few more. Okay, so there are two ways to increase the leads that you're getting. One is outreach. I'm not going to talk about that today. We'll talk about that in the future. But what we're going to talk about today is educational content marketing or to put in layman's terms, teaching. So once you've identified a target market, so let's say that your target market is credit unions and your ideal buyer is the CMO of the credit union. Once you have identified an ideal buyer, you can set about educating them. All right, so here's a list of 10 ways you can freely share your expertise with your ideal buyers. You could speak at a conference that they attend. You could guest on someone else's podcast that they listen to. You could guest blog for a website that they frequently read. You could write for a magazine or a periodical, maybe even get a column in a magazine or periodical that is specific to your industry or their industry. You could build relationships with people who are already trusted by your ideal buyers. So maybe a sort of partnering with someone who is not a competitor, but maybe adjacent to you in maybe a workflow or, you know, if you do strategy, then maybe someone who does implementation, that sort of thing. You can open source some code that would be of use to your ideal buyers. You could publish screencasts that they would find educational. You could publish your own podcast if that's something that you feel comfortable doing. You could host a webinar or a webinar series or you could do monthly webinars or every other month where you invite in people who

your target market who would be perfect for you and just educate them. You could host a meetup that would be of use to ideal buyers in real life. You know, maybe an actual meetup or a coffee or, you know, sort of like in Boston there's a thing called Mobile Monday that I've been to a bunch of times. You could start something like that, a recurring event. In Providence, there's another one called Providence Geeks. And you could either host that meetup and speak at it or you could, you know, sort of start a regular thing where you're a key figure. Okay, so it's no accident that I keep using the term ideal buyer, ideal buyer, ideal buyer, and also target market. A lot of these things turn into way more work than they're worth and they don't really amount to much if you're constantly shifting focus from one industry to another or you have no focus whatsoever because it's really difficult to deliver value to someone in any of these sorts of contexts without knowing who you're talking to because you don't know exactly what language to use, you don't know how much shared sort of worldview you have in common, and you don't know exactly which pieces of your expertise are going to be the most valuable to them. This is, I think, as an aside, I think this is where writer's block comes from. So if you've ever been staring at your, you know, at your text editor trying to update your website, you're like, I'm going to write a new homepage and you just get this wicked case of writer's block. It's almost certainly because you have no idea who you're talking to. It's much easier to, you know, the words will just flow out of you if you had someone in front of you. Like Seth Godin says, no one gets speaker's block because when you're speaking to someone, you know all these things, you know, how you can help them, what their biggest problems are, what your shared worldview is, what sort of language to use, because, you know, you're talking to, you know, your colleague versus your mom versus a client. So if you pick that ideal buyer, it's like you can just picture them in your head as you're crafting any of your marketing materials or putting together a podcast or, you know, writing for a magazine, whatever the way that is that you choose to educate them, you'll know what language to use and it becomes much more valuable to them and therefore much more persuasive and it builds trust and you'll start getting more and more leads. So to loop back to the beginning, this is going to end up bringing more leads into your pipeline. It takes a little while for these things to build up, but it doesn't take forever. You know, six months of doing this, especially if you do some of the more aggressive ones, you're going to be getting more leads than you have probably ever and you'll be able to start to experiment using things like productized services and having Y conversations and value pricing project work and all those sorts of things to take yourself to the next level of profitability. That's it for today. I'm Jonathan Stark and this is Ditching Hourly. Thanks for listening. The next time someone asks you for your hourly rate, remember to 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.