Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. In this episode, I'm going to talk about the subjective value of money. I'm going to start off by telling a story, a little bit of backstory about me. In 2011, I sort of inadvertently kicked off a viral social experiment with sort of mobile payment thing related to Starbucks gift cards. I had discovered, it's a long story, but I had discovered that you could pay for things at the register in a Starbucks with a picture of the barcode on your Starbucks card. So I posted a picture of my card online and I invited people to download the picture and go use it to buy coffee or food or whatever they wanted at Starbucks. So the interesting thing that happened there is that people discovered that they could also put money on the card using the barcode. So what ended up happening was a bunch of sort of altruistic people would put money on the card and then other people who were maybe in more need for a free coffee or a free sandwich would use the card. And I created a Twitter account, sort of like a Twitter bot that would tweet every time the balance changed. So you could follow the Twitter account and it would tell you how much money was on the card so you would know whether or not you could go down there and use it or if it needed your help basically to put money on it. So what this led to was in a very short period of time this kind of blew up. It was on the cover of CNN, sorry not the cover of CNN, the CNN's homepage, CNN.com's homepage and I was interviewed live on MSNBC about it. So a whole bunch of things happened very quickly and the reason I'm bringing this up is because even now years later people will still post on Twitter or they will post at, there was a Facebook page also for the card where a community kind of grew up around it in a very short time. And people still ask me to this day whether or not there is money on the card or if it's still going. And I usually just politely say no or that sort of thing. But a few days ago I got an email from someone, I don't know how she found my email address because it wasn't, I don't recall it ever being associated with the experiment. But she sent me an email and I'll paraphrase, basically she was asking if the card was still available, if there was any money on it because she was a homeless person in Austin, Texas and she hadn't eaten in two days and quote unquote she was getting kind of hungry. I was like jeez, and here I am sitting in my cush office buried under a pile of iPads and phones, there's like a ton of expensive stuff around me. So I sent an email back to her and I said, is this your personal email address? Because it was a weird email address, it was actually a Gmail address with a very strange name. And she replied that yeah it was and she explained the joke of the email address. Anyway, so I was like oh it's her private email address so I can send people, you can send people a gift card, Starbucks gift card via email. So I bought a $30 gift card and emailed it to her. Like five minutes later she emailed me back crying basically in the email. She was so happy and you can imagine that she was just super, you can imagine the situation. You're just like oh my, I can't believe somebody just did something, she was saying it was super nice and she was moved is what I'm trying to say. And the reason I tell this story is because that $30 meant almost nothing to me. I spend $30 without thinking about it. I'm not proud of that, it's probably a bad habit, I know it's a bad habit, but I don't really think about purchases that are anywhere in the $30 range. And here's a person who's like looking around deciding between, I don't know, picking through a garbage can or you know. So it's just like $30 is almost a life altering thing at that point, at least it certainly made her day. But doesn't that seem strange when you think about it? Because $30 is $30, should be worth the same thing to everybody. It's $30, it can buy, assuming she and I are both in the US, if we walk into a Starbucks that $30 is going to buy me the same thing it's going to buy her most likely. But that's not the genius of money. The genius of money, currency, a fiat currency issued by the government, the genius is not that it's worth the same thing to everybody. So $30 is not worth the same thing to everybody.

But everybody's $30 is worth the same thing to me, or anybody's $30 is worth the same thing to this homeless woman. There's an important difference there. And the reason I bring it up is because your customers and your clients value money differently than you do. It seems like an abstract thing. It seems like math. It seems like $10 is $10. But it's not. $10 is worth something different to you than it is to your clients. And interestingly and importantly, $10 is worth a different amount of money to client A and client B. Client B might not even think about a $10 purchase, where client A would perhaps do anything to avoid spending $10, because they value that money, that amount of money differently. So in your travels, it's useful to, or prioritize, I was going to say, it's useful to look for, but also prioritize looking for clients who have lots of money, so the value of a dollar to them is a lot lower than it would be to someone who doesn't have lots of money. But what they don't have is lots of time. So they might be in a big rush and they want to solve a problem by writing a check. A person like that is not going to be as much of a, I don't want to say penny pincher because that's negative, but they just don't care as much. They care much more about solving a problem than they care about keeping the money in their bank account, because they know they've got plenty of other money in their bank account or they know that they can replace that amount of money very easily, much more easily than by taking the time out of their day to solve their problem that you can solve for them. So as you are looking to increase your profit margins, a good technique is to look for clients who have a lot of money. So look for businesses that, you know, if you're currently serving businesses that are two, three, four employees, try and offer the same services specifically to companies that are in a similar vertical but have 500 employees. They are absolutely going to have more money flowing through that organization. It is going to be less, each dollar is going to be less important to a business like that, almost certainly. So if you're currently dealing with a lot of penny pincher clients, look for bigger ones. It doesn't always work, but it's certainly a good place to start. That's it for today. I'm Jonathan Stark, and this is Ditching Hourly. Thanks for listening. This episode of Ditching Hourly is sponsored by my book, Hourly Billing is Nuts. Hourly Billing is Nuts is a book of essays on the insanity of trading time for money. So if you are having a hard time convincing yourself or perhaps your partner that you should stop billing for time and start billing for your expertise instead, you might want to trot on over to hourlybillingisnuts.com and look at the various packages that are available there. That URL again is hourlybillingisnuts.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.