Table Of ContentTable 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
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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
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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 relation-
ship, 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 some-
thing 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.
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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 in-
cluded 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.
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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.
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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 sec-
tion 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.
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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 pro-
posal, 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 in-
crease 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 sell-
ing 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.
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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 pro-
ject, what the solution should look like, and the financial impact the
problem is making on the client’s company.
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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 cli-
ents. 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.
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