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Tired of trading your time for dollars and feeling stuck in the cycle of hourly billing? Pricing expert Jonathan Stark breaks down why hourly rates cap your income, create client friction, and keep your business from scaling. Learn smarter, more profitable pricing strategies that help you get paid for the value you deliver – not just the hours you log.
Breaking Free from Hourly Billing: Smarter Pricing Strategies for Your Business
Let’s face it – if you’re still billing by the hour, you’re putting a ceiling on your income and potentially sabotaging client relationships. I know that might sound harsh, but after speaking with pricing expert Jonathan Stark on the latest episode of the Agents of Change Podcast, I’m more convinced than ever that hourly billing is a lose-lose proposition.
“One huge aspect of the problem with hourly billing is the relationship it creates with your clients,” Jonathan explained. “Another huge one is that it puts an artificial ceiling on how much you can make every year.”
Think about it – there are only so many hours in a day. Even if you charge premium rates, you’re still limited by time itself. And worse, when you bill hourly, you’re creating an adversarial relationship with your clients from day one.
The Hidden Problems with Hourly Billing
When you bill by the hour, you’re not really giving clients a price – you’re giving them an estimate. As Jonathan points out, “It’s not really a price if I can’t decide as the buyer, if I don’t know upfront how much it’s going to cost me.”
This creates what Jonathan calls a “trust fracture” between buyer and seller. The client is forced to treat an estimate like a fixed price, and when (not if) that estimate proves inaccurate, the relationship deteriorates.
“Once the amount billed starts to exceed the original estimate, and perhaps even exceeds what the project was worth to the client, they start to get really upset. They turn into client from hell. They become micromanaging monsters,” says Jonathan.
And honestly, can you blame them? When someone significantly underestimates a project, they’re demonstrating they’re not great at estimating, controlling scope creep, or managing client expectations.
Value-Based Pricing: A Better Approach
So what’s the alternative? Jonathan advocates for value-based pricing – charging based on the value you create for clients, not the time you spend creating it.
This requires a mindset shift, especially during sales conversations. Instead of immediately diving into project details and scope (what Jonathan calls “scoping first”), you need to focus on understanding the business outcomes your client wants to achieve (“scoping last”).
When I was talking with Jonathan, he shared that he wasted 18 months trying to break this habit of scoping during initial sales conversations. But once he did, everything changed.
“The whole meeting was like, tell me about your business. What are you going to do after this thing is delivered? What are you hoping it’s going to change?” Jonathan explained.
By focusing on the transformation, not just the deliverables, you gain crucial insights that help you price based on value, not time.
The ‘Why Conversation’
Jonathan recommends asking three key categories of questions in sales meetings:
- Why this? Why do this project at all? Why not try a completely different approach?
- Why now? What changed that caused them to reach out? What makes this urgent?
- Why me? Why hire someone expensive like you? Why not do it internally or hire a cheaper competitor?
“As you uncover all of these answers, the value will become established in their mind,” says Jonathan. “You want the value, what it’s worth to them, how their business is going to be better off… You want that to come out of their mouths.”
Once you understand the value to the client, you can create tiered pricing options that represent a fraction of that value – making it an easy decision for the client to say yes.
Productized Services: Packaging Your Expertise
Another powerful alternative to hourly billing is creating productized services – fixed-scope services packaged and sold like products.
For example, if you regularly perform an initial diagnostic or strategy session with new clients, you could package that as a standalone product with a fixed price (say $5,000 or $15,000).
“It’s this high-level strategic thing that would happen before any kind of in-depth project,” Jonathan explains. “And you could use it as a client qualification process.”
The beauty of productized services is that they eliminate scope creep by defining clear boundaries upfront. They also make it easier for clients to understand exactly what they’re getting and how much it will cost.
The ‘All You Can Eat’ Subscription Model
One productized service model that’s gaining popularity is the subscription approach – offering “all you can eat” access to your expertise for a fixed monthly fee.
With this model, you define the types of work you do (web design, SEO, CRO, etc.) and offer clients unlimited access to those services for a monthly price. Clients add requests to a queue, and you work through them one by one.
“The art of this is just to keep them happy enough with the momentum and the progress every month, so at the end of the month, they’re happy with the amount of money they paid for what they got out of it,” says Jonathan.
This model creates predictable revenue for you and predictable costs for clients. It also incentivizes you to become more efficient – the faster you complete tasks, the more profitable the model becomes.
Of course, setting expectations is crucial. As Jonathan puts it, “If clients are coming to you with unrealistic expectations for how much you can churn through in the month, maybe they’re not a great fit for you.”
The Product Ladder: Pricing for Trust
Finally, Jonathan introduced the concept of a “product ladder” – offering your expertise at different price points based on how much clients trust you.
“The idea is to give people a price that is appropriate for how much they trust you,” he explains.
A typical product ladder might look like:
- $50: A book, workbook, or swipe file
- $500: A video course or strategy call
- $5,000: A paid diagnostic or roadmap
- $50,000+: Value-priced projects
This approach creates multiple entry points for clients and builds trust progressively. Someone might start with your book, find value in it, and eventually work their way up to a $50,000 project.
The Power of Publishing
To make the product ladder work, Jonathan emphasizes the importance of publishing your ideas regularly – whether through speaking, writing, or both.
“If you have an expertise-based business, especially service business, and you are not speaking and writing on a regular basis, it’s a missed opportunity,” he says.
Jonathan recommends a daily newsletter and weekly podcast as the “perfect one-two punch” for an expertise-based business. These channels create “asymmetric intimacy” where potential clients feel like they know you, making them more likely to trust you and buy from you.
Taking the First Step
If you’re ready to break free from hourly billing, Jonathan recommends starting with the “why conversation” in your next sales meeting. Focus on uncovering the business outcomes the client is trying to achieve.
“Find out what the business outcome is that they’re really driving at,” he advises. “They will not mention it on their own. It’s so obvious to them that they feel like you can read their mind.”
By understanding the real value to the client, you’ll be better positioned to price based on that value, not on your time.
Is It Time to Ditch Hourly Billing?
After speaking with Jonathan, I’m more convinced than ever that hourly billing is holding many businesses back. By shifting to value-based pricing, productized services, or subscription models, you can increase your income without working more hours.
As Jonathan puts it, “The faster you get at delivering, the more quickly you can hit this client satisfaction bar, and then with the time left over, you can work on the business or internal projects or let your employees go home early or take on new clients.”
That sounds like a win-win to me.
Breaking Free from Hourly Billing: Profit Strategies Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is a former software developer who is on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. He’s the author of Hourly Billing is Nuts, the host of Ditching Hourly, and writes a daily newsletter on pricing for independent professionals.
Today we’re going to be looking at how to get off the trading hours for dollars trap and developing new streams of revenue for your business with Jonathan Stark. Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.
Jonathan: Thanks for having me, Rich.
Rich: Now, although you might focus on pricing issues for independent professionals, a lot of what you preach could be equally beneficial for any type of business, especially service-based companies. What, in your opinion, is fundamentally wrong with hourly pricing?
Jonathan: Oh, there’s so much. Let’s start right with there. Hourly pricing. A lot of people think hourly billing is pricing, but that’s like saying if a roofer gives me a price for shingles, they’ve given me a price for the roof. I need to know how many shingles it’s going to be before I know how much it’s going to cost. So it’s not really a price if I can’t decide as the buyer, if I don’t know upfront how much it’s going to cost me. I can’t make a real good buying decision because I don’t have all the information and I’m forced to just go on this estimated hours thing.
So just jumping in from there, it creates a trust fracture between the buyer and the seller, because initially they’re forced to treat an estimate like a price. And then at least in the software space, which is my background, it was pretty common for the estimate to be low, it was almost never high. So once the amount billed starts to exceed the original estimate, and perhaps even exceeds what the project was worth to the client, they start to get really upset. They turn into client from hell. They become micromanaging monsters.
And honestly, they should. Because whoever has underestimated the project has demonstrated that they’re not that great at estimating or at least controlling scope creep or account management, whatever the issue is. And they’re not going to be happy. Let’s put it like that.
So one huge aspect of the problem with hourly billing is the relationship it creates with your clients. Another huge one is that it puts an artificial ceiling on how much you can make every year. You’ve only got so many hours to sell. Even if you have employees, your hours are your inventory. There’s no way to optimize an hour sold. It takes an hour to deliver, assuming you’re an honest person, like I’m sure all of your listeners are.
So if you sell an hour, it’s going to take you an hour to do it, and there’s just no way to optimize that. It’s just impossible. So it puts this cap on your income. It might be a high cap that doesn’t bother you right now, but a lot of people who work with me are ones who’ve gotten to the point where they’re maybe a little gray on top, and they’re starting to think, geez, I’ve been making good money, but it’s the same money I’ve been making every year for a long time. What can I do about that? And that’s when they start looking around for somebody like me to come up with an alternative pricing method.
Rich: Alright. Now, I’ve heard you say that pricing, publishing, and productizing, are key pillars to this approach. Can you explain that and how they work in your framework?
Jonathan: Yeah. So let’s start with productizing, because I think that’s probably the one that’s most interesting to your audience. So if there’s something that you do on a regular basis with lots of your clients, maybe it’s some sort of initial diagnostic that you like to do with new clients, maybe that takes five, 10 hours, maybe 20 hours over the course of a couple of weeks, maybe up to four weeks. And then you come outta that with some kind of action plan or recommendations for what would come next. That could be a product I service that you sell independently over the overall project or that you even price it all or bill for it. People sometimes just do that for free as part of lending the job.
But I would say that’s a perfect candidate for productizing, where basically the idea of a productized service is that it’s a fixed scope service packaged and sold like a product. So it probably has a price on the website or at least a price that the seller knows upfront before they even talk to someone. It starts off with this whatever marketing strategy workshop or session or strategy session, whatever you call it, depending on your space, and it’s $5,000 or it’s $15,000 and that’s the cost of entry. We don’t work with anybody who hasn’t gone through this. And you could use it as like a client qualification process or whatever. But it’s this high-level strategic thing that would happen before any kind of in-depth project.
There’s a bunch of ways to productize. Another one that’s common with this group, it’s becoming more common lately, is this kind of subscription model where you offer kind of ‘all you can eat’ access to a group of clients – individually, of course – but you’d price a group of clients and say we basically do this. Here’s the list of things that are in our wheelhouse. Maybe it’s web design, SEO, CRO, setting up funnels, whatever you do. Say,“If you need anything that’s in this category, you’re covered. You don’t have to worry about it. And for one monthly price, if you have a problem, you just let us know. Or if you have a need, you just let us know and we’ll add it to the queue. And we’ll go through the queue one by one. And you can change the priorities of the things in the queue, whatever the case may be.
And the art here with the sort of all you can eat subscription model is to sell access to this. Um, it’s access to your expertise, but it’s access to someone like you, like a fractional art advertising department or a fractional marketing department. And the art of this is just to keep them happy enough with the momentum and the progress every month, so at the end of the month, they’re happy with the amount of money they paid for what they got out of it.
So it’s an extremely predictable model and it seems to be very attractive to clients, so it’s relatively easy to sell. The trick is just finding a price where you can make money, have a good margin, good profit margin, and deliver enough so that they don’t churn after the first month or two.
Rich: So this ‘all you can eat’ subscription model sounds both amazing and terrifying at the same time. So let’s just dig into this for a little bit.
So I love the idea of this, and I know that our company, we offer a wide variety of different services from branding to web design to updates, as well as things like search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization, paid search, paid social, and so on. And there are many times when we feel like we’ve done all the basics for one thing, and we would love to move on to another thing. In this case, we’re driving it. It sounds like in your description, at least in this one instance, it might be the clients driving what they think needs it. I don’t know if that’s a big difference or not.
How do I keep the client happy enough so that they’re not like, “Look, I put 12 things on the list this month and you only got to two of them? It’s supposed to be all you can eat. I need to eat more.” What is your response when somebody starts pushing back with a concern or a complaint like that?
Jonathan: There’s two things in that question. One is that you feel like there might be some things that you should do or could do in spending time on things that you’ve already done, don’t need to be done. So let’s hold off on that for a second.
If clients are coming to you with unrealistic expectations for how much you can churn through in the month, maybe they’re not a great fit for you. But also, you can just set their expectations upfront with how it works and perhaps you offer them three tiers of this subscription service and they picked tier one, and they want something from tier two, but they’re not paying for it. So this sort of oh, we need more throughput with you guys.
It’s, “Oh, you picked tier one. If you’d like to upgrade to tier two, that’s perfectly fine. We’d be happy to do that.”
And there’s another thing that’s if you are a partner level person and you did an initial strategic kind of engagement upfront with them, you might be in a position, trusted advisor position, where you do have more input on these things. You’re not just an order taker. So it could be that the principal has a monthly or biweekly meeting with the key person, the founder, CEO of their client, and you make a plan for, okay, here’s our big picture. We established in the initial engagement here’s the big picture plan. Here are all these things that we both agree need to be done to reach that plan. And here’s what we think we can do in the next two weeks, or the next four weeks or the next month.
And this is very common in the software space where you’ve got either employees or an agency or some kind of firm and you have these sprint meetings where every two weeks you’d sit with a product owner or something like that and you’d say, “Okay, what’s the backlog? What are the things that still need to be done, and how much do you think you can fit in this two-week chunk?” And like I said, the art is getting enough in there and finishing it so that they feel like, yeah, okay, this is going well, we’ve got momentum. Maybe I would’ve liked to have more, but this is worth it.
And I suppose the flip side of this is if you’re a people pleaser on the agency side, it’s very dangerous because you start adding things over the offer. I almost said ‘over-engineer, that’s a software term, but in your space, you’d just be over-delivering, filling up your time, because you have time and that’s not a good thing to do.
So the beauty of this model is that, like all non-time-based models, I mean it’s monthly, but it’s not a time-based model, is that the faster you get at delivering, list your Facebook ad, A/B testing, whatever, the faster you get at doing that or the more tools that you empower your employees with to get that stuff done fast, the more quickly you can hit this client satisfaction bar for the month. And then with the time left over, you can work on the business or internal projects or let your employees go home early or whatever or take on new clients, because your capacity is now increased.
Rich: Okay. Alright. It does sound like you need to be willing to draw some lines with clients, for sure.
Jonathan: Oh, hundred percent.
Rich: Or set expectations.
Jonathan: Yes, a hundred percent. That’s the beauty of a productized service is that you can list all of that stuff up front and have that conversation first. And if this isn’t going to work for you, that’s fine. We’ll find someone else who will be a good fit for.
Rich: Okay. Now, if we do want to shift to this value-based pricing, what are some of the things we should keep in mind?
Jonathan: The main thing is that it’s very difficult to switch your mindset from scoping first, to scoping last, which is what you need to do. So if folks are used to billing by the hour, at least in my case, back when I used to do that 2003, 2004, 2005, in a sales meeting with someone, a new client comes along, they’re like, “Oh we heard great things. We loved your book. We want you to work on this project that we’ve got.” And back in the day when I billed hourly, I know that what is going to happen next is I have to write a proposal. And that proposal’s going to be based on an estimate of hours, and I want it to be as accurate as possible so we don’t end up disappointing the client later.
So I spend the entire meeting, I would say, waste the entire meeting, talking about what they want me to do and what needs to be done. And then I’d be thinking, okay, they asked that in an inexpert way, but I’m good at this, I understand what they meant. And I’m listing things like number of screens, number of tables in the database, fields in the database, the entity relationship bot. I’m basically solving the whole project in my head. I’m planning out the whole project in my head.
And then after the meeting’s over, I’ll sit down and write an estimate lay. I think this will be a hundred hours at $200 an hour. Multiply that out. That’s the estimate and I give that proposal. And the problem here is that I didn’t spend one minute back then, I didn’t spend one minute in the meeting finding out why they wanted this done, why they wanted it done now, and why they were intending to hire someone expensive like me to do it.
So I could do everything that they asked for, and I could do it in a way that was aligned with best practices in the industry and deliver it to them, and it wouldn’t move the needle for their business at all or anywhere near as much as they wanted, because no one ever told me, and I didn’t insist on finding out what was the point.
So it’s very difficult to stop scoping in the sales meeting. It took me about 18 months to finally break that habit. It’s very hard. So once I did that though, the whole meeting was like, tell me about your business. What are you going to do after this thing is delivered? What are you hoping it’s going to change? Obviously, if you’re planning on giving me a million dollars, there must be some reason why? It’s going to be better for your business. What is the transformation? How is this branding or this marketing or this design, how is this going to make your business better?
Because I want to first do no harm. I want you to, at the end of this engagement, I want you to say this is the best money we ever spent. It was expensive, but it was worth it, and it was such a huge home run for us that we built a statue of Jonathan outside of the building. Like, you want to amaze them. So it’s very difficult to amaze them if you don’t know upfront what’s going to amaze them.
So I, at least in software, there are a hundred, a thousand ways to skin the cat. When they would give me a project, and it was just all scope and order taker type of stuff, there are a thousand ways I could do it. So I would just do it in the best practices way, but that might actually paint them into a corner for their business goals.
So the key is to find out what their business goals are immediately before you write a proposal. Once you have the business goals, the home run, what would a home run look like? Then you can guesstimate a value for that, at least within an order of magnitude. Like a company like this with a project like this is looking at increased revenue by $2 million a year or whatever, even if it’s just a hundred thousand dollars. And then from there, so you scope, you’re going to scope less, you get the value, maybe it’s worth a hundred thousand dollars to them in real numbers. And then I’ll say, okay, let me create three prices, $10,000, $22,000 and $50,000. And inside of each of those budget buckets, how much scope do I want to put in there to move the needle for them on this particular desired outcome at a level of effort that I’d be fist pumping happy to do?
So for $10,000, what can I do to help this company get closer to that incremental $100,000 in revenue? I can’t do everything, but I can do some things. Maybe I give free access to a course. Maybe it’s training, maybe it’s a DIY kind of educational type of thing. And then at $22,000 I can add some more things in there. What would I be super happy to do to help them move the needle for $22,000? Maybe I give them some access to one of my marketing people or whatever you would do in your space. You just bring in more scope.
And maybe the top tier, it’s $50,000. They get time with the principal every other week, aligning on goals, make sure that the project is going in the right direction. Whatever. You just put in more and more involvement on your end as the price goes up. And if you’re even in the ballpark with your guesstimate at the value, and you’ve set prices that are a fraction of the value, a 10th of the value, they are probably going to be considering at least one of them. And a lot of times, depending on how you price it, they’ll pick option two. And then you’re off to the races.
Rich: Okay. So it sounds to me what I’m hearing is, first of all, you need a client who’s less worried about all the details of the project. Because you’re trying to move away from that. So you need somebody who, along with you, is focused on the outcome and the results, rather than here is the minutia and the bullet points that I need involved in this particular project.
Jonathan: Yeah. That’s a red flag. Red flag. If they’re telling you how to do your job, they’re hiring an expert and then telling the expert how to do their job. Red flag.
Rich: Okay. Good to know. Alright, so as we’re having these conversations with our prospects and clients, what are some of the key questions you found work to really understand what they need, and also to help them understand the value of what we’re going to bring to the table?
Jonathan: I call it the ‘why conversation’. There’s three categories of questions that I ask in a sales interview. The first one is, why this? Why even do this? Why not do this? What would happen if we didn’t do this? Sorry. So let me list them first.
So it’s why this, why now, and why me? And the first one is like, why do this at all? Why not do this in a completely different way? Isn’t there some work around that we could do? That sort of thing. Try and talk them out of doing this project. Yes, I know you called us in. We’re a marketing firm or an ad agency, you want us to do this particular thing, but let’s just confirm that is the right medicine for the malady and it’s not just going completely deliver no results.
The next is ‘why’. Now if this is not an urgent thing, it’s not a great fit for value-based pricing. You can certainly still do that, but the more urgent it is, the higher the value will be to them to bring in an expert to help them.
So if they’re like, oh, we’re just thinking about, we’re just kicking the tires, we’re putting on an RFP and we’re getting some names, and that’s when I lose interest immediately. But if I ask him a question like. “What changed that caused you to reach out to me? Something must have changed.” And if it hasn’t, then it’s probably, they’re just tire kickers. But something probably changed. Amazon just came into our market, or AI is eating our lunch, or there’s this window of opportunity in the market that I’ve identified, I’ve identified this opportunity in the market and the window’s going to close because the competitors are going to dive in there and they want to gobble up market share. Okay, so now I know it’s urgent to do something. I agree that the thing that they want to do is probably at least maybe not. it’s either the right thing to do or a reasonable thing to do.
And the last thing is, why would you hire someone expensive like me? Why not do this internally? Why not get some interns to do it? Why not send it to one of my competitors who are less expensive? I’m probably the most expensive person you’re going to talk to. There’s a lot of other ways to do this if you can do it more cheaply and you feel like you’re going to get the same quality, I would recommend you do that. So why are you considering me and not all these other options?
And as you uncover all of these answers, the value in their minds, not how much value I think I’m going to bring to the table. the value will have become established in their mind. So I’ll say at the end of this project, “What would be a home run, just so I know we’re both going in the same direction. I’m driving you to the right destination. What would be a home run?” And they’ll say something like, “Oh, if we even increase our sales by 20%, that would be a massive home run.” You’re like, okay, what are your sales now? And then you go, perfect. In your head, you’re like, oh, I’m super confident that I can do that because of the state of their current situation, I’m very confident that I can do that. Okay, great.
Now that’s the value in their mind. You want the value, what it’s worth to them, how their business is going to be better off the transformation. You want that to come out of their mouths. You want them to do the calculation, and the way to do that essentially is by. Going through the ‘why’ conversation and trying to talk them out of doing this project now with you. And they’ll have to convince me that it makes sense for them to hire me. And in the process of doing that, they will have convinced themselves. And then I just write all of that down and put it in the proposal. And it’s basically, they write the proposal. The only thing I do is put some prices on it and decide on what scope I’m going to do at each level.
Rich: Alright. So you teased the idea of a product ladder, which I know is something that you talk about as a way of offering this value-based pricing. Can you walk us through an example of how the product ladder works for businesses?
Jonathan: Sure. Yeah. So the idea is to give people a price that is appropriate for how much they trust you. So you’ve got some expertise. This is true for soloists, but it’s also true for a firm or an agency that you could do this. The principals could do this, or just the team as a group could do this. So what are we great at? What’s our unique worldview? What’s different about us?
And just think, okay, these are our superpowers. And say, how could we package them up at for $50? That’s probably a book or workbook, or a swipe files, or some kind of boilerplate, some sawdust that has been created in doing client work that you do anyway. Collect this stuff together, clean it up, and package it as a book or e-book, workbook, something like that. A short video.
And then what could we do at the $500 price point? That’s the same thing, it’s solving the same problem, but it’s doing it in a more thorough way. So a lot of times it’s some sort of video training video course. It might be something that you use as part of those initial strategic product or service we talked about earlier. Might be, first you watch these videos, then when you’re done with those, we’ll start off the engagement. So at $500 you’re probably looking at, it could be a strategy phone call or a phone call with a principal just for some kind of clarity – not a sales call – but where you’re actually attempting to give them information that they’re going to take away and use immediately. So at $500 you could do something like that.
And then at $5,000, for a lot of soloists, that’s probably some kind of a roadmap or initial paid diagnostic where you audit whatever. With me it would be audit their code base or audit their security systems or whatever, and then come up, okay, here’s what I found. These are my findings. These are my recommendations, my prioritize list of things that you should tackle. You can take this and take it as someone else to fix them. I don’t care. That’s fine with me. Or you can, if you’re interested, I can give you a proposal to fix these things. And so maybe that’s the $5,000 price point.
And then at the $50,000 and up, that’s where you’d be looking at value price projects, probably.
Rich: Alright. So I know that you work primarily with independent professionals, but we’re talking about also businesses today.
Jonathan: Yep.
Rich: Do you have any advice for people who are part of a company? For example, if I am going to create my own product ladder, am I creating it as Rich Brooks, who may be the most well-known person in my company? Am I creating it as part of Agents of Change? Am I creating it as flyte new media, my digital agency? Does any of that make a difference?
Jonathan: It can, but you almost never have the information or the data that you need to make the decision when you need to make it. So it could be that you lump everything under Rich Brooks, richbrooks.com. You’re the sort of face of the brand and it’s your social media account and everything.
And then later, at some point in time you want to sell. And geez, it’s my name, everybody only wants to work with me. So you might end up regretting it. That’s possible. But you don’t know. You don’t know in advance what’s going to happen.
The flip side is if you create a company name. I’ve seen people regret that, where it’s too limiting where the company name is something ABC Copywriting, but then they want to branch out and do more positioning or branding or messaging or sales messaging, and it’s just like the name of the company is just too much of a constraint.
And honestly, at least in the solo space, I’ve seen people regret the business name decision more frequently than their own name decision. It could be different with a firm. McKinsey is the guy’s name and they’re doing okay, so it’s not the kind of thing that you can’t deal with.
The thing that’s maybe a more practical litmus test for helping make that decision is like, what are you, what channels are you going to use to promote the business? Is it going to be video, is it going to be social media? If so, it’s going to be way better if there’s a face. It’s going to be way better if, and maybe it doesn’t have to be the owner, but someone needs to become a celebrity in the target market that you’re going after. And that will help. That helps a lot.
So if you’re doing, I’m a huge fan in the sort of publishing. At the beginning we mentioned publishing briefly. If you’re not speaking, if you have an expertise-based business, especially service business, and you are not speaking and writing on a regular basis, it’s a missed opportunity. People should be sharing their most insightful content in writing and in some sort of speaking format daily, if possible. So that, for me, that looks like a daily newsletter I’ve been writing since 2016. There’s over 3,000 posts. It’s a weekly podcast where I’ve got probably over 1,000 episodes across two different podcasts. Or guest appearances or speaking appearances or online events, virtual summits. People need to hear your actual voice in their ears.
Or if you take this approach where you use your name and there’s a face to the brand, people hearing your voice like they’re hearing me right now. Dear listener, do you get a sense of me? Do you get a sense of whether or not you’d want to work with me? I’m sure some people are like, he’s too casual, this isn’t going to work for us. We don’t like his personality. And there are other people that are like, I totally get this. I could have drinks with this guy. It’s not polar. Some people are very polarizing, but it does split the audience and create this asymmetric intimacy where they feel like they’re friends with you. They feel like they know you because they do know you.
So I think the podcast and the, so either a podcast but some kind of speaking. For me it’s podcast and mailing list. It’s the perfect one-two punch for an expertise-based business to on-ramp people right onto your product ladder. So they listen to you, they read you every day. They love the ideas, you’ve given them insights that they can’t unsee, and oh look, he’s got a workbook that aligns with all of this for $50 bucks. I’d be crazy not to try that. They try it, it was totally worth the money. They move up to the $500 or they jump up to the $5,000 or the $50,000.
Rich: Awesome. If someone’s listening and they love the ideas, they love hearing what you’ve had to say, and they’re ready to move into value-based pricing, what is the first step? What is one actionable step that they could take today to start that process?
Jonathan: Total self-promotion, they could go to valuepricingbootcamp.com and sign up for my newsletter. There’s six days to describe how it works, but there are really good books on this too. You could try, Implementing Value Pricing by Ron Baker. There’s Value-Based Fees by Alan Weiss. Both people have been talking about this since the eighties. One is management consulting and the other one is accounting. So it might not be as applicable, you can probably figure it out. So those are good things they could do.
But if you have a sales conversation coming up with a new prospect, I would urge you to start to practice asking more questions about these ‘why’ conversation questions like, why this? Why now? Why me? And find out what the business outcome is that they’re really driving at. Because they will not mention it on their own. They will not think to mention it. It’s so obvious to them that they feel like you can read their mind and you have to uncover it, they will not volunteer it. And just practice that.
Rich: I was going to mention your value pricing bootcamp free six-day email course to teach you how to make more money without working more hours. And you can find that at jonathanstark.com/VPB, as in Value Pricing Bootcamp. Of course we’ll have those links in our show notes.
Jonathan, if people do want to learn more about you, if they want to engage with you, besides the email course, where can we send them online?
Jonathan: Yeah, just same site, jonathanstark.com And if you sign up for my list, you can reply to any email that comes from me personally, and I respond to every email. Yeah, it’s a good way to get in touch.
Rich: Fantastic. Jonathan, thank you so much. I’m going to get started working on some value-based pricing right now.
Jonathan: Great. Thanks, Rich.
Show Notes:
Jonathan Stark is a pricing consultant with a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. His books and podcast are both excellent resources if you’re looking for new pricing strategies and break free from the constraints of trading time for money, while also increasing profitability and client satisfaction.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.
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