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 Josh Mogai. I hope I said that right. And it goes like this. It's in response to a previous video. And Josh asks, what should one do in a similar case but the difference is you had established a business goal but in between the project, they want to change or add to the tactics slash deliverables previously agreed on. All right, so what Josh is talking about here is a previous video. I was probably talking about scope creep and how to define the business goals instead of the tactics or the deliverables that you're going to deliver so that the business isn't going to kind of move the goalposts on you as you go because it's pretty rare for a business to just completely change what their business goals are, especially in the context of whatever it is you're working on with them. So Josh is kind of like bringing up kind of an edge. It's a little bit of an edge case, I think. So what he's saying is a prospect has come to you, a prospective client has come to you, you've had a conversation. You've uncovered their business goals. There's some tangible or intangible business outcome that they would like to achieve. There's a change they would like to make. It's not that they want 10,000 lines of code or a whole bunch of copy written. It's that they want to, I don't know, be competitive with their largest competitor or they want to ensure that their biggest clients don't leave or they want to decrease the number of customer service phone calls or they want to increase their brand repute or they want to win some awards, but they've got some kind of business goals that you believe that you can contribute to achieving. And you've agreed to that, you've uncovered it. And now he's suggesting that at a certain point, the tactics or deliverables that you would, the tactics that you would use to reach that business outcome or the deliverables that you would create to reach that business outcome might change throughout the course of the project. That's totally normal. And that might feel like scope creep because you thought you were gonna do one thing and then you're gonna do something else. But when you're value pricing a project, which is my recommendation for project work, you've priced the outcome, not the stuff you're going to do. So the faster you achieve the outcome, the less it costs you to deliver the work. So if you together, it might not even be the client, you might decide that the deliverables should be different or you might decide that the tactics should change because you've learned something along the way. Well, it's in your best interest if you believe that those tactics are gonna get you to the desired business outcome more quickly than if you stayed the course, then it's in your best interest to change tactics. Does that maybe take more work than you originally thought? Maybe, but staying on the course, the wrong course that you originally guessed at before you started working would be worse. So you're actually doing yourself a favor and the customer a favor because you agreed on a business outcome and you more or less said, eh, probably if we do these things and give you these deliverables, that will lead to that outcome. But along the way, you learn that that was a mistake. You were wrong. The things that you, or you believe that you were wrong, that the things that you were planning on doing aren't the right thing. This is normal. It's normal for a project that's non-trivial. So something bigger than three to six months, it's normal to learn things along the way and kind of iterate as you go. As long as you are iterating toward a specific outcome, it probably won't. In fact, it's hard to imagine how it could spiral into a bigger spiral. You're gonna be spiraling into a smaller spiral as you get closer to the goal. So could this go horribly wrong? Of course, but generally it won't. Generally it won't. If you've got a really clear business outcome, you understand your contribution to that outcome and you want to satisfy the customer, deliver really positive, 100% customer satisfaction, really positive experience for the customer, it makes sense for you to change tactics along the way. It's pretty normal. In fact, it's been my experience that when I write a proposal for a project to someone, I'll usually list some deliverables in there because usually when you talk to someone in a sales interview, they're gonna talk about, I think we need to do this and I think you need to do that and we'll probably do this with Google Analytics and do the CSS like this and use jQuery or whatever the things are. And I'll put them in the proposal so that the client understands that I heard.

said and that I'm going to, that we communicated, that the message was received. But that's not the emphasis of the proposal. The emphasis in my proposal at each option, because I'll always have three options with three different prices, that the deliverable, sorry, the benefits of each option are the focus. So I might say, yeah, I'm going to, I don't know, create a style guide. It'll probably be up to 20 pages, but probably not more than that. It'll take me at least three weeks to put it together for you. I'll need to have access to, you know, all the details, the tactical ideas, the details. But the benefits of this, that's the key piece. The benefits of having this style guide will be that X, Y, and Z, whatever the benefits to their business would be of having that particular deliverable. If it turns out over the course of the engagement that the deliverable actually isn't going to help or needs to be shifted, no one ever goes back to the proposal and is like, hey, you said you were going to do X, Y, and Z and you didn't do it. No one's ever going to say that if you reach the business goal some other way. No one even remembers what was in the proposal. They just remember what they're trying to achieve. What does the home run look like? What do they remember your contribution to that being? And if you reach that by waving a magic wand that you suddenly found, they'll be just as happy. So I hope this answers your question. I feel like I understand it, but if I kind of misunderstood, then please follow up in the comments and be sure to hashtag it with Ask Jonathan so we don't miss it. Great. So if you, dear viewer or dear listener, have a question for me, just ask it on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn with the hashtag Ask Jonathan, and we'll add it to the list. Thanks. Bye. 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 one of 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.