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 Matt Olpinski who asks, is there ever such thing as additional scope on a value-based project? If the client pivots their whole business model mid-project, which requires significant changes or revisions, do you just keep working under the original price? Okay, so this is an extreme example of scope creep. There's a couple of things here. First of all, when you do a value-based project or any kind of fixed-price project, there's going to be some changes. You definitely do not know everything you need to know at the beginning of a six-month development project or any kind of collaborative project between you and a customer. There are going to be surprises. You know that. You know there are going to be surprises. You know that things are going to change. You're going to learn things along the way. You're going to pivot. You're going to do all sorts of things. So you want to price yourself so that there's enough margin over and above your costs, which include your time, so that having these inevitable changes aren't going to be a big deal. Another thing to insulate yourself against scope creep, and this could be true with any kind of fixed-price project, but it's easiest to do with value-priced because with value-priced you have to ask these questions up front. As long as you've defined the desired outcome, the desired business outcome at the end of the project, so whatever it is, the business outcome is they want to be ready to get funding from investors or they want to double the amount of traffic to their website or they want to fill their CrossFit gym with the marketing efforts that they're going to do. Whatever the thing is that they want, your scope's going to change along the way. It might get bigger. It might get smaller because the way that you achieve that outcome is going to morph over time as you get closer and closer to the goal. It's very unusual for someone to change their desired outcome in the middle of a project. So it would be super weird for a business to be like, oh, yeah, I know we hired you because we wanted you to pre-sell 75% of the spaces in our CrossFit gym or we wanted you to create a prototype that we could use to go get funding from Silicon Valley or somebody in Silicon Valley. For them to change that mid-project and be like, you know what, never mind, instead I'm going to open up a bakery and we want you to go figure out how to build all of the internal systems for the cash registers or something. I mean, that would be really bizarre, and that would be a bad situation. So two things to think about here. When you're talking to a client in the sales interview, when you're having a Y conversation, you're asking them what a home run would look like, you're asking them how are we going to measure progress along the way to keep the car on the road as we're driving to this destination, if you're getting the sense that this person is a flake or they've pivoted five times in the last year and they might completely change what they're going to do in six weeks and the project's going to take at least six months, then it's probably not a good fit for a value-priced engagement. But if the business seems reasonably stable, maybe they have a little bit of track record, they've clearly invested a lot of things into a particular direction already, they're already executing on a clear strategy, then they're not going to suddenly decide that, oh, we don't want to achieve these goals anymore. It would be really strange. They will do things like if your goals are to go down this punch list of features that they want built into their website or into their web application, they'll change those all the time if that's the only scope that you have. Those change a lot. So you want to stay away from those kinds of goals. They're not goals, they're deliverables, they're tasks, they're to-dos. Those are going to change a lot. Tactics change all the time. And if you don't have a clear desired business outcome from the engagement, which is the thing that you price, if you don't have that, then you have no insulation against endless tactical changes. So if they're just throwing tactics at you and there's no overall strategy, there's no overall objective, then you'll get in trouble because there's no goal line. There's no winning. You can't satisfy them. There's no way to hit a home run because there's no wall for the ball to go over. So you need to know what the wall is, where the wall is, so you can actually try and hit the ball over it. If there's no wall or goal or desired outcome, then, yeah, you're going to have scope creep like crazy. And, in fact, you would have had nothing to value price.

So that's why I say that really engaging in a true value price project kind of insulates you from scope creep, not changes, but scope creep, because they're not going to change their goal unless they're a complete flake. They're not going to change their goal constantly throughout the project. It would be super weird. Okay, hopefully that made sense. Let me know in the comments if you've got follow-up questions. But that's it for now. I'm Jonathan Stark, and if you have other questions, you can hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and we'll find it and add it to the list. See you. 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 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.