Table Of Content

Table of Contents About This Course p. 4 Preface p. 7 1. Understanding Your Clients Why Do We Become Freelancers? p. 10 What Do Clients Want? p. 13 Case Study: Steve Corona p. 17 Qualifying New Clients p. 21 The Pain Behind The Project p. 29 Quantifying The Financial Upside p. 33 Case Study: Eric Davis p. 40 Getting To A Solution p. 44 Working With The Wrong Clients p. 51 2. Your Rate Trapped In The Middle Of A Project Pitch p. 55 The Science Of Pricing p. 57 Case Study: Tim Connor p. 60 Avoiding Commoditization p. 64 Reducing Risk p. 68 i Case Study: Ryan McGeary p. 74 Project Billing Structures p. 78 Value-Based Pricing p. 87 Determining Your Rate p. 91 Being Confident In What You Charge p. 94 3. How To Close The Deal When To Propose p. 97 Structuring Your Proposal p. 104 Case Study: Brook Riggio p. 115 Packaging p. 119 Case Study: Stephen Ou p. 128 Handling Pushback p. 131 4. The Path Forward Selling Retainers p. 135 Productized Consulting p. 146 Case Study: Jim Gay p. 153 Raising Your Rates On Existing Clients p. 156 What Does Tomorrow Look Like For You? p. 159 My Standing Offer p. 167 Acknowledgements p. 168 ii About This Course This course — and the wording here is intentional — is meant to help you better understand your clients. Once you know why clients hire you and what they’re expecting, you can deliver a better product at a premium. My goal is to bring you through the entire lifecycle of a client relationship, from first meeting through project handoff (and beyond.) What you’re reading now, on your computer or e-reader, is one part of this course. This guidebook is meant to inform. Beyond this guidebook, how- ever, I’ve included additional resources that are meant to get you to act. Are you familiar with the 80/20 rule? The idea, when applied to something like an instructional course, is that only 20% of people will actually do something as a result of learning something new. This means that there’s a very good chance that you’ll go through this course and afterward make zero changes in your business. Now, I have an ulterior motive for wanting you to actually use this course and raise your rates. I want you to be a success story. This course is self-published and bootstrapped — I have no publisher or agent working on my behalf to sell as many copies as possible. What’s sold this course over the last two years are recommendations. 3 So to improve the likelihood that you’ll digest this course and raise your rates from 20% to something considerably north of that figure, I’ve also included the following: ★ Worksheets: You received a PDF with worksheets. These are meant to help you externalize the inevitable ideas and thoughts that will be spinning around your head after we conclude certain key parts of this guidebook. Ideas have short half-lives, so I’m going to ask you to write many of these ideas out. The act of committing thoughts and actions to paper — whether virtual or real — will make you more successful. ★ A Followup Accountability Course: A unique advantage of self- publishing is that I have your email address. Had I sold this at a bookstore, I’d receive a royalty but not a customer. You’re now registered to receive a series of what I like to call “nudging” emails and additional content, which you’ll begin to receive automatically in a few days. The intent of these emails is to ensure that you’ve made progress, and many of these emails will ask you to reply — and I personally read and respond to every reply I get. Again, I want you to succeed. I want you to become so wildly successful that you can’t help but tell others about my work. :-) ★ 7 Written Q&A-style Interviews: These are friends of mine who go above-and-beyond the average freelancer. You’ll hear in their own words what led them to charge a premium rate. 4 I also have a higher-end package, which includes: ★ 12 Case Studies With Successful Students: These are all people who have taken this course and are now charging significantly more than they were before. I made it a point to interview people from all walks of life — a nomadic marketer in Barcelona en route to Bangkok, a just-out-of-college web developer, the owner of a thriving agency, and more — so that you can relate to and better understand the challenges they faced and how they overcame them. ★ Proposal Writing And Retainer Templates: Don’t reinvent the wheel. I’ve packaged up a ready-to-go proposal template and retainer template that you can use with your clients. ★ Video Course On Retainers: I extracted this mini-course from a 6+ hour workshop I hosted with my friend Patrick McKenzie. We’ll cover retainers briefly in this guidebook, but this mini-course expands on productized consulting through recurring retainers. 5 Preface There are three ways businesses make more money: ★ Get more customers. ★ Increase the amount each customer pays you. ★ Increase the frequency your customers pay you. This course focuses on the last two bullet points. While much of what we’ll be discussing over the upcoming chapters will, as a nice little side effect, help you get more customers, our focus will be on making you more money from what you already have. We’ll start with understanding your clients and their needs. Etymologi- cally, the word client comes from the Latin word for “protection.” We’ll take this definition to heart throughout this course, and learn how we can provide for our clients in a way that surpasses simply delivery a commodity service. Next, we’ll talk about pricing. We’ll look at the various forms of pricing, and how by reversing risk and better positioning we can raise our prices. We’ll also explore what value-based pricing is and is not. We’ll close the section by talking about personal confidence as it relates to what you provide your clients and what you charge, and I’ll help you come up with your new rate. 6 After we explore pricing, we’ll move toward closing the sale. A lot of time and effort is spent getting to the point of being able to furnish a proposal, so it’s in your best interest to optimize your closing rates. I’ll walk you through exactly how you should structure and write your proposal, and how you should deliver your proposals and respond to pushback. Finally, we’ll talk about ways to make money that don’t involve selling an hour or your time for a fixed amount. This last section will help us increase the lifetime value of our clients, and give us stability and predictable revenue so that we can march forward in confidence. The Origins Of This Course When I started out freelancing, I really had no idea what I was doing. The only other time anyone had ever paid me any serious amount of money was through a formal employee-employer relationship. I thought I was selling my technical abilities, and I figured those abilities should have some sort of predefined price attached to them. So I asked around… how much should a freelance web developer charge? What should I do to get hired? How do I get paid? This course is everything I’ve learned about pricing, clients, and sales and marketing as it relates to selling consulting services. I learned this the hard way — as I grew my company from a solo freelancing gig to a brick and mortar agency with full-time staff, an office, and plenty of expenses, I had to to systematically increase my revenue. I had to make more money, or go out of business. 7 1 UNDERSTANDING YOUR CLIENTS Before talk about pricing, it’s important to understand why clients hire you and what they’re looking for. I’ll cover how you can take any project that’s brought to you and identify the problem behind the project, what the solution should look like, and the financial impact the problem is making on the client’s company. 8 UNDERSTANDING YOUR CLIENTS Why Do We Become Freelancers? You’re a freelancer if you decide that you have better things to do than to be tied down to a 9-5 job for the rest of your life. And the dream is pretty enticing. Workdays spent surrounded by the sounds and smells of the neighbor- hood coffee shop. A portfolio of clients that are yours, and yours alone. Total control over when you work and who you work for. And total freedom — you’ll work wherever you laptop can find a Wi-Fi connection. The Sobering Reality Given enough time, we all realize the life of the freelancer isn’t exactly what we thought it would be. We need to market. We need to sell. We need to negotiate. We need to sometimes put up with late payments, delayed projects, and outright nasty clients. Work just doesn’t fall squarely into our laps. If you became a freelancer because you were a salaried X, and you one day woke up and decided to be a freelance X, you soon discover your job is much more than your craft. You’re running your own business now, and this business has a lot of moving parts. I created this course because, like you, I one day decided to go out on my own. 9