How I Earned A Lot More on Projects by Changing My Pricing Strategy
sixrevisions.com
sixrevisions.com
McDerment had to develop serious sales skills to pivot inbound requests for website paint jobs to strategic marketing engagements. But you don't need sales skills to establish a minimum billing increment of a day. Doing that will pull you towards more strategic discussions and allow you to dip your toes in the water of solution sales.
Incidentally, while my hat is definitely off to McDerment for pulling this off, I assume he'd be the first to tell you that this is the moral of every book on consulting ever written.
But it hasn't gotten us to the stage you're talking about - we're definitely making headway in establishing ourselves as (Python) experts, but I don't think we're really at the stage where we can sell based solely on the customer's value - building software is simply too replaceable a commodity (See note). Nor do I think we necessarily want to be there - lawyers don't sell on value, after all, nor do most professional services firms.
Also, increasing the billing increment too much and selling based on value starts taking you into "fixed-project pricing" territory, which is a whole different field. Not that it's better or worse, just different, with its own set of needs. This we discovered in retrospect after practically switching all our work to fixed-pricing, then realizing what a big difference that was (that we weren't equipped to handle).
Note: Building software is too replaceable in the sense that there are plenty of alternatives to get some software built (hiring, cheaper freelancers, etc). We certainly manage to sell ourselves as better than alternatives because of speed an expertise. But that's a far cry from building projects and selling on value, which IMO is again, a whole other field which is hard to shift into from any old software consultancy (different customers, different sales pitch, different needs). I mention this because tptacek's basic point of "switch to daily billing" is better advice in that sense - it's easy to do from just about any position with just about any set of clients, and by magic improves your life.
This is the next step after bill-by-day/week - linking your work to something they care about - using evidence collected by software.
To be fair this works even as an employee, a permie / contractor or a actual, gone next week contractor.
That and all the issues of requirements gathering up front.
1. The obvious way - in one you get paid no matter what, and your entire job is to keep the customer happy enough with you that they'll happily continue paying you. With fixed-price, you have a "semi-conflict-of-interests" as others mentioned.
2. These different incentives cause a lot more work up-front for requirement gathering, a lot more work on contracts that are well specified, etc. Btw, that also means billing at much, much higher margins to cover the uncertainty.
3. Not so obvious - doing fixed-price projects requires a lot of focus around managing multiple projects at the same time. When managing X employees on multiple projects, this gets tricky. Why? Because fixed-price projects tend to have lots of waiting: build some infrastructure, wait for design, build and deliver first milestone, wait for feedback, deliver final project, wait for bugs, fix bugs, wait for final confirmation.
So you're basically learning to juggle multiple projects at the same time. And all projects have points where their schedules shift - I've had clients who are completely desperate to get things off the ground, where I would've put 90% chance of their e.g. graphical designs being ready for us, who suddenly had business emergencies that required them to slow down. This happens ALL THE TIME, as does the converse (10 designs arrive at the same time and now you have 10 clients waiting eagerly for updates).
4. Another non-obvious difference - the kind of clients you can take on tend to be very different for these two methods. You'll tend to get more non-technical clients looking to work project-based, and more technical clients looking for time and material, especially when what you are doing is augmenting their own technical staff with expert knowledge.
To summarise, each style of billing or more correctly each type of project you can take on has its own challenges, they're not better/worse, they're just different.
Also, since an hourly rate is standard and job postings say how much they pay by the hour, isn't it common to be rejected when you ask for a daily/weekly rate?
We've never been rejected for a client for not billing hourly.
2. This is not the same as contracting for BigCorp on a 6 month java position at 600 usd pday. That's close but basically an employee without benefits
3. If you move from 100 dollars an hour to 4000 dollars a week (8000 seems to be more norm - you won't work every week) then the high price is to get then to focus on deliverables and not think o you as a person on a seat for six months but as someone who proved the last project did well
+ The minimum billing increment switching to 8x your 40x your previous increment will, by itself, scare away the worst pathological clients in the pool. (If you have a $50 hourly rate, some clients might naively assume that they can get meaningful software development done in 3 hours. Where's my website? I've paid for three whole hours. What do you mean you're still setting up the dev environment?)
+ If you bill hourly, you have to account for your time in fractions of an hour. This will lead to more overhead (spend 17 minutes on a phone call? Record that fact somewhere! Maybe dicker over whether it's really .25 hours or .5 hours and whether this totally inconsequential $12 difference matters to the client.), more stress from your client reviewing your work on a minute-to-minute basis, and more friction about clients misunderstanding the nature of knowledge work. I can't just slam keys for 8 hours straight, and you wouldn't want me to do that if I could.
+ [I'll add something here in a moment but Ruriko wants breakfast.]
Good clients don't care about you charging daily/weekly. I never lost a client over it. I'm the professional, my standard practice for doing my thing is the standard way for working with me. If you can't deal with that, that's fine, there are other people out there. (Relatedly, I never, not even once, got a contract from a "job posting.")
I've read these several posts along these lines. The one huge assumption they make is that you have good clients who aren't on a budget and won't go shopping. Those clients are much harder to find as a freelancer.
Agree. And it's not even so much budget as "not a schmuck" (sorry not a better way to put that).
When I saw this, I laughed:
"As an example, if I was proposing to build a website capable of creating an additional $100,000 of profit annually, I would ask the client to make an investment of $40,000 in their website."
So we are taking a totally speculative number of profit ($100,000) and charging $40,000 to get there. You would have to either be working for a large corporation (using OPM) and have no clue to buy into a proposal phrased like that or be new in business and totally naive. The entire presentation to me smacks of naiveness.
But here's the good part. I can totally see how things like this could and do work. That said you will have to find the type of customers who will fall for something like this.
Most business people who have been around can smell a sales presentation a mile away and to many of them (me in particular) it's an instant turn off because it reaks of "you are going to be paying a lot for this that's why we won't tell you upfront the cost. Because we are going to do some smoke and mirrors to make you go for it."
Lastly, one of the reasons in favor of discussing pricing in advance of a presentation is also to qualify people. I've seen to many salesman stupidly come in and not qualify people in advance simply not realizing that the local small restaurant simply isn't going to part with $10,000 no matter what you promise or tell them (or will have contract signers remorse and back out.)
(I read about France still being in love with checks as well, although they have basically your standing with banks depend on you handling checks well. So even if they're still using a horribly outdated method of payment, at least they attach the right consequences to fraud.)
I wonder how much more efficient the world would be if we had practical small claims systems in courts that were respected across borders, so there was an official and genuinely independent way to resolve disputes over small amounts of money, and then we did away with chargebacks, reversible transactions (other than in cases of genuine error), etc. While I'm dreaming, we could fix the crazy way that many of these payments are authorised, too. If bad people couldn't sneakily take your money so easily in the first place, you wouldn't need so many protections to get it back, which could then be abused against good people if the bad person is the customer.
I don't think customers that who accept (and find value in) this proposal are necessarily fools. Writing code is a cheap commodity. Making business decisions is not, and development cost is inversely proportional to how precisely you know what you want.
A business owner who has made all the business and technical decisions, and approaches developers with extremely detailed photoshop mockups and specs can probably successfully get an app or website made for $10/hour on elance.com, and keep all the extra value.
A client who has made all the business decisions and knows what development they want on an approximate "outline" level needs to hire a 10x more expensive local developer who is willing to meet and push back on any technical assumptions. They are paying 90% for the decision-making expertise on understanding what they want, and writing code is a tiny part of the service.
A client who may see value in a $40000 website offer is one who has not or cannot make the business decisions themselves. They are paying primarily for the business or marketing strategy consulting, and the entire development side is a tiny part of the service. Perhaps the client should make these themselves to be able to use a cheaper developer, and keep more of the value - but if they can't, then an expensive offer may still be profitable.
An important point not directly mentioned in the article is: as you start doing more expensive consulting, you should also find new clients. Clients who do require the services and are willing to pay a premium for them.
While it's sometimes possible to charge a premium for a simple job, I find more honest to carefully explain the cheaper options (other freelancers, elance) to them first.
Setting up Wordpress could be "strategy" or 2 hours of sysadmin work depending on the involvement of the client. If they know that they just want a Wordpress setup, they could get the service for cheap elsewhere, and it would be appropriate to inform them of this before accepting. If they want a "website that my assistant can update", then choosing a platform for their requirements may be the experience in technical decision-making they are paying for, and actually setting it up Wordpress is a small part of the service.
"As an example, if I was proposing to build a website capable of creating an additional $100,000 of profit annually, I would ask the client to make an investment of $40,000 in their website."
Exactly. Leaving aside the sleight of hand of comparing hypothetical/perceived benefit with actual cost, what you've really got here is a consultant offering you $60,000 of benefit this year. If another consultant can do the same job but only charge you $20,000, then they have offered you $80,000 of benefit this year. Assuming both are being honest about the expected benefit and can do work of a similar quality within their quoted budgets, so one really is just pricing higher arbitrarily, who are you going to choose?
Value-based pricing is interesting to discuss, and it's certainly a more rational and business-like way of handling engagements than billing your time out hourly in something not so far from an employment relationship. However, the value added is benefit minus cost. Unless you really are the only game in town, you can't just raise your rates until they are 99% of the value you claim to generate for your client and argue that it's still a good deal for them because they're 1% better off if they use you than if they hadn't. That ignores the third option of using someone else.
That third option is a possibility for almost every client of almost every consultant. If you as a consultant have the sales and marketing skills to find clients who will believe that they don't have that option and convince them that you really are the only sensible choice and they should pay your inflated rates accordingly, then good for you. However, please don't pretend that winning jobs at those inflated rates has anything to do with some natural value proposition rather than simply being better at sales and marketing.
Maybe it becomes more ethically dubious when the consultant is taking advantage not of the client's ignorance in the field where they're paying for advice but of their ignorance of the consulting market itself in that field. Even then, it's the natural position that a new customer doesn't know the sellers' market, and a large chunk of sales and marketing is based on trying to convince uncertain prospective customers to buy from you and not someone else, so again it's hard to find any objective standard for what is fair and what is unfairly taking advantage. (This is a major argument for licensing practitioners in industries where bad advice can be particularly damaging, such as healthcare, law and accountancy.)
One thing that is very clear is that the value-based pricing approach only works if you can find some credible and quantifiable means to demonstrate the value you might offer to a client. If you work in a field like conversion optimisation, that's easy enough. If you (or your consultancy including colleagues/subs) are building an entire system that will have concrete benefits for the business, you can probably do it too. If you build software in general, maybe as part of a wider team or making incremental functional changes to an existing system as many freelancers/contractors do, then it's not the same situation.
This is why it sometimes irritates me when a handful of HN celebrities post repeatedly about raising rates and changing the basis for charging as if everyone can do it, even in response to someone who would obviously have to fundamentally change the kind of work they do before the advice would make sense for them. It sets false expectations, and potentially damages the careers of people who go out to customers/clients with unrealistic expectations and wind up missing out on reasonably profitable work. Worse, it could tarnish their reputation and leave unhappy clients behind, because even though they did what they said they'd do, the client later discovered they'd paid well over the odds and felt ripped off. It's never happened to me, because I choose not to work that way, but I've seen it happen to others and the results are never pretty.
Exactly. An similar example might be me. While not an HN celebrity I do get referrals for what I do from people who are celebrities (could do an entire post on how that went down actually). I do it because it's a) fun (it's not the main way I make money - very time consuming) and b) I do it to plant seeds for future things (contacts with important people) as well.
Consequently I am able to say "I want $x for a strategy and research fee and $y upon successful completion of the task". So far I've had no kickback from anyone so I just have to evaluate and try to maximize x and y perhaps and raise to make more iic. The "research/strategy" though appears to work even w/o the celebrity connections because of my other obvious qualifications and what I do.
There are lessons to be learned from how I operate but they would probably be more centered around how I got to that place rather than "here is how you can charge what I charge". Otoh if I wanted to become an HN celebrity (I don't at least not now for sure) I could spin this any way I want. I could make anything the "thing" that should be paid attention to.
There are lessons to be learned from all of this of course but I fear that someone just starting out may have a much harder time seeing the 50% they should pay attention to and the 50% they should not.
So if you are going to quote by the job, be sure to put in limits in case it goes over your time budget so you can renegotiate.
Also I would not recommend having a "friend rate". Your workload just goes up exponentially with a proportionate decrease in pay.
If anyone could play devil's advocate on the article, with solutions to warning signs, I would sure appreciate the insight! (Not that I disagree with the article, just, my track record is really tiring me out).
Those are fixed-bid projects, not time & materials with time increments of days or weeks.
But the real reason I am commenting is to point out that your results - 3x overage - are exactly the rule of thumb that gets cited for fix-bid: Take your expected level of effort and triple it.
You can only do this if what you offer is not a commodity. Otherwise, what you charge is the minimum of expected value and the market rate for the work you do.
When I sell, I'm still linking it to business value--I just make sure it's pegged to hours, which is my most direct cost (other than my time, which I make sure ends up being a very high number if calculated as an hourly rate + profit on developers) Clients know it's typically not me doing the actual implementation work, but because I've linked the overall solution to business value and presented it as an investment--which it is--it doesn't matter.
The problem I have with fixed bid projects is overages and who pays for them. In this business, they're quite common and quite often not the fault of an idiot programmer--but if you do fixed bid, you'll have to eat these costs sooner or later unless you are very good at estimating (I don't know anyone that is...)
To be honest I wouldn't know how to guarantee a client that a new web site would earn them 100000$ more. I suppose that is simply SEO territory.
Additionally, this is not about playing games -- it's about finding what is valuable to a client and delivering it.
If SIAI approaches me to buy $WIDGET and Google approaches me to buy the same $WIDGET, I'm charging Google an order of magnitude more than I'm charging you.
This seems a little off to me. Would you tell the client that you're outsourcing?
But so what? You talk to your client about a prospective engagement, then you build a "dream team" proposal that puts you on the hook for the performance of the whole project and makes you the single point of contact for all project matters, but then uses the specialized expertise of partner firms as a sales point. You sell with the subcontracting arrangement, not in spite of it. It's not something you sneak in under the wire.
I reviewed it at my blog -- http://chester.id.au/2012/09/12/review-the-strategy-and-tact...
Essentially, the core insight is as per the blog post. Identify what you are worth to the customer, prove it, then charge based on that. In the book Nagle, Hogan and Zale give examples of quite dramatic price changes where the customer agreed with the reassessment of value. The sellers could prove that a new product would quintuple productivity, so asking for a doubled price was damn near an act of charity, not highway robbery.
Also useful was their treatment of calculating the cash effect of pricing changes. Financial accounting 101 calculations can sometimes be misleading about the best pricing scheme.
Not sure what you're saying?
I would suggest talking in terms of features / business outcomes.
EDIT: Note that I'm not claiming that people who use milestones are evil. The problem is that milestone billing for software creates lots of incentives on the client side to underestimate and underspecify work, because the contractor eats most (if not all) of the cost of identifying those problems and negotiating to get the milestone revised to include them.
It's essentially an advertisement for freshbooks and agree with the "motivational" aspects complete with the obligatory testimonials (which I'm sure will or have been reciprocated). The story telling to me is annoying like a childrens book.
The "I'll show you how" uses this single example to make the point of why the information is valuable:
"I completely revamped how I ran my design firm to the point where I worked 19 days in one year and generated over $200,000 to fund my side project."
So we have n=1 here and no further data to back up the initial claim (could be elsewhere so if it is someone please correct me) of how all of this works.
I wouldn't base writing a book on making 1 or 2 smart moves that worked to generate $200,000 (I've done that by the way and over the course of many years so at least I could back the claim up with n= a much larger number btw.)
This is not to say these ideas don't work (some of the ideas do have merit) but we don't exactly a long history here of these tactics working from the author since it seems that after making that money he switched into starting freshbooks.