A professional does not sell time. A professional sells value. Hourly billing, more often than not, fails to capture the professional's true value. A parable: A client calls with a project that needs to be done well and very quickly. She is willing to pay a premium to get the project done in three days. Fortunately [...]
Hourly?
Taken in downtown Hackensack, New Jersey.
Here's the thing about being in your own business: You get to choose. You get to choose your clients. You ge to choose the work you do. You get to choose your work schedule. You get to choose your employees, who become your coworkers, maybe even your friends. You get to choose your partners, though [...]
What if you had to double your fees? How would you explain it? Which customers would stick with you? How would your marketing change? How would it affect your brand? How would your volume change? How would your need for resources change? How would your manpower needs change? Would it actually be better? It may [...]
Two of the most basic tenets in football are keep your head on a swivel and keep your feet moving. These are not simply bromides: they apply both to the gridiron and the pressure cooker that is business today. Keep your head on a swivel reminds us to be situationally aware, constantly scanning the field for [...]
There is an old joke in business: Good/Fast/Cheap. Pick any two. What if you took one off the table? What is everything you offer has to be good? Then it can be fast, but not cheap. Or it can be cheap, but not fast. So you get paid well for working under pressure (which feels good), [...]
You only get four, six if you are lucky. If part of what you sell is creative or problem-solving in nature, you may have noticed that the flow state required is not something you can keep up all day. The reality is that human beings can only sustain this level of deep work for about [...]
After the startupworkgrab, you know, the first months or years when a new business will take any paying work, there has to be a time of self reflection. You now have some data and you need to ask yourself some questions. I suggest that you pose these questions as negatives: What work is the least [...]
