Podcast

Episode: 271 |
Jonathan Stark:
Stop Billing Hourly:
Episode
271

HOW TO THRIVE AS AN
INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONAL

Jonathan Stark

Stop Billing Hourly

Show Notes

Jonathan Stark is on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing: he is the author of Hourly Billing is Nuts and three other books.

Definitely check out Jonathan’s website, jonathanstark.com, where you can find free resources, including links to his two podcasts, his Youtube channel, a free email-based course titled Value Pricing Bootcamp and the archive of his daily email list.

One weekly email with bonus materials and summaries of each new episode:

Will Bachman 00:00
You know, we’re used to thinking about how hard is this going to be for me? Multiply that by my hourly rate. Here’s your estimate. It’s turning it around to what’s it worth to them? come up with some prices that are going to make sense? And then figure out well, what should I do for these prices? Hey, welcome to Unleashed the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional. I’m your host Will Bachman Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, the first global community connecting top tier independent management consultants with one another. We just heard from today’s guest, Jonathan Stark, who is on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing, he’s the author of hourly billing is nuts. If you visit his website, Jonathan stark.com, you can sign up for a free email based course titled, value pricing bootcamp. Jonathan is also the co host of a podcast, the business of authority. I’ve got over 100 episodes published. And they describe their show as being for independent professionals who want to go from six figures to seven, while increasing their impact on the world. Hello, Jonathan, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Jonathan. Let’s start. Tell me about Jonathan’s card.

Jonathan Stark 01:21
Okay, that was back in I think was 2011. Okay, and what what happened was, I was doing mobile strategy consulting for a chain in the US a restaurant chain, and they didn’t back then there wasn’t, it was uncommon to be paying for things with your phone. So I was doing some research for them. And at the time, the only application that really allowed you to pay at the point of sale was the Starbucks app. And since I was a mobile guy, I had lots of phones, and I had Android phones and iOS phones. And at that time, if you can believe it or not, Starbucks only had an app, an iOS application, there was no Android app yet. And the way that it worked is you’d go up to the cash register, and they would just you just display a barcode on the screen of the application, and they would scan it, and it would check you out. So it was like, it was kinda like a prepaid card with the barcode on your phone.

Will Bachman 02:19
That’s kind of how it works. I mean, I still use it, it still

Jonathan Stark 02:22
hasn’t changed. Yeah, yep. Yeah, it still works the same way. And I was like, Hmm, this is it’s annoying that they don’t have an Android app. Because, you know, if I had my Android phone that day, I would want to go into Starbucks all the time. And I thought, I assumed that this barcode changes every time. But maybe it’s just a static photo. So I took a screenshot. And I emailed it to myself and open it on my other phone. And sure enough, I just held up the picture to the scanner, I can pay with a picture. And that blew my mind. sounds kind of silly now. But at the time, it was huge. So I blogged about it. And I said, I put $50 on the card, and I blogged about it. And I said, Hey, if anybody wants to download this picture, onto their phone, your next Starbucks is on me. And I didn’t have a lot of people reading my blog, but a few people immediately got up from their desks. And

Will Bachman 03:18
that’s one way to get more readers

Jonathan Stark 03:22
for free coffee. Right? So, you know, maybe 15 minutes later, people were messaging me on Twitter and saying, hey, there’s no money on that card. And I was like, yeah, there is I just put 50 bucks on it. And so like something like 20 people, I just gone and bought a whole bunch of coffee and minutes of me with a new person that. So I put, I felt bad because now all these people are standing in Starbucks and I stiffed them. So I put 50 more dollars on it, and boom, went immediately. And then I put 50 more on and I was like, Okay, this is ridiculous, expensive after a while. Right? So fast forward, you know, a little bit and I figured out one of my friends actually figured out that you could use the barcode quick money on the card. And that’s when the light bulb moment happened for me. And I put up a little micro site that said, Hey, you know, let’s do a pay it forward thing. I can’t afford to keep buying the internet, maybe the internet by the internet. And so I put up a little construction guide for how to download the photo and how to put money on it or take money off of it. And people, you know, just got picked up in the mainstream press. And they went crazy. It was it was unreal. For a week I think before Starbucks eventually had to shut it down. They something like $25,000 went through the card in five days was getting interviewed by MSNBC and it was enough front page of cnn.com it was it was a whirlwind.

Will Bachman 04:55
Wow, what did what did that whole whirlwind experience, teach

Jonathan Stark 05:00
You know, it taught me that, that it’s, if you do something remarkable, it’s not unlikely that it’s going to go viral. So at the time, there was a lot of conversation about making things go viral and guerilla marketing and that sort of thing. And I had been, you know, my background when I was, you know, going to college, I went to music school, and I would always been in a band, and it was really hard to get any attention for the band or get people to come to the shows. And when I did the Jonathan’s card thing, I was like, Oh, well, if you do something newsworthy, the news will talk about it. It was just that I hadn’t done anything newsworthy in pretty much my entire life up until that point. So I was like, that was a kind of an eye opener for me. You know, it’s not about in terms of getting PR, I think it’s, it’s not about knowing the ins and outs of how things work and having connections and all that stuff. It’s like, just do something newsworthy, and people are gonna find you. I mean, I couldn’t, I had to take a week off of work. I was just constantly being interviewed,

Will Bachman 06:01
you know, and it’s like, do something newsworthy. If I can put my two cents It feels like, it’s almost like you didn’t, it seems to me that you didn’t start out intending to do something newsworthy, but it was kind of what Seth Godin talks about, which is just kind of poke the box, just just try something. And rather than just debating it, but actually just go out and experiment and try something and just sort of see what happens. And yeah, you probably didn’t do this expecting to get on msnbc be like, Oh, I wonder what would happen if I if I blogged about this and bought people $50 with the coffee, I wonder what would happen. And he sometimes can’t predict newsworthy things, but they’re certainly not going to happen if you just sit around, sit around not not trying things.

Jonathan Stark 06:42
Yeah, I mean, here we are nine years later talking about

Will Bachman 06:45
this, right? Yeah, internet famous. So I, let’s get a little bit into your current work. So you have a pretty interesting website, you go to Jonathan stark.com. And on links in the show notes, you get a website that is pretty spare. There’s no menu bar, there’s no kind of navigation stuff. It just starts with some advice. And tell me a little bit about the thinking behind the design and what you currently do in your practice.

Jonathan Stark 07:15
Okay, sure. Yeah, I mean, the website design first, it’s, I mean, I don’t want to say it’s on brand for me, but I’m a very sort of utilitarian, straightforward, tough love kind of person. don’t like a lot of bells and whistles. My background is in web development. So it’s kind of ironic that my website looks like a Word document. But I just don’t, but it stands out. Because it’s so minimalist and spare,

Will Bachman 07:39
right? That actually draws your attention. Like you’re like, what’s going on with this website? It can write. So it’s genius design, I think.

Jonathan Stark 07:46
Thanks. I mean, I see it as a service to the reader, like, do you really want to see a giant picture of my face across the whole top of the thing and the logo of everybody I’ve ever worked for? That’s me talking about me, I don’t want to talk about me, I want to talk about you. And when when you come to my page, if you have I usually start off with like you said a question. I told a heck yeah, question. And if you’re going to answer yes to that Hekia question and the headline, you’re in the right place. And if you’re not in the right place, then don’t waste your time on my site. And service to the viewer.

Will Bachman 08:16
And we should see what the question is, are you caught in the hourly trap? So talk to me a little bit about that? Sure. I

Jonathan Stark 08:23
mean, your audience probably has lots of experience with the billable hour. And I, you know, I just I think it’s honestly, not to sound too dramatic, but I think it’s a cancer on professional services, I think the billable hour is terrible for anybody who’s good at their job. It’s also bad for your clients. And if you’ve got folks who’ve worked at, you know, big consulting firms, I’m sure they can remember things like sitting around a table with 40 people billing out $200 an hour arguing over what is and isn’t in the contract when they’re, you know, 50% of the way through a project and only 10% done. So I just think on hourly billing is it’s bad for everyone. It’s bad for the projects. And, you know, so I’m kind of on a crusade to read the world. And, yeah,

Will Bachman 09:13
and you run a value pricing bootcamp. So tell me a bit about that, that service that you provide.

Jonathan Stark 09:20
Sure, value pricing is just one of the ways that I teach people to disconnect time from money. But it’s a it seems to be the one that captures people’s imagination, because it seems so hard to understand. I think it seems a little mystical people are kind of confused by it. And the pricing really does the exact opposite of what people are used to doing, especially in an hourly basis. But I would say in this space, the most common way to get paid for what you do is a cost plus or time and materials model where a client comes to you or prospect comes to you and they say hey, you know, we hear you’re really good at this thing. By Giving your name. And we want you to, you know, what, what’s your hourly rate, we want you to work with us what’s really great. And if you think about it in that way, what you’re really thinking about is your costs. So, you know, you talk to them, you get an idea of what the what you think the scope might be, you put together an estimate of how many hours you think it might take, and you give it to the buyer, and the buyer has to make a purchasing decision based on your estimate, which is fine, if you’re good at estimating. But if it turns out that you’re going over your estimates a lot, then you’re gonna have unhappy clients. And that was the experience I had back in 2006, I was running a boutique, Dev shop development shop software development, and we build by the hour, and I was the VP and I had to try to make sure everybody was getting their hours. And are you tracking your hours? Did you estimate hours for this new project? How far are we through the the estimate, I was just constantly talking about hours, you know, floating with clients about whether or not something should be billable, and just hours, hours, hours all the time. And I was dissatisfied? Because I was I wasn’t feeling confidence in my ability to make my customers happy. I wanted to satisfy my clients. So we needed to come up with a way to do that. And I went looking for a way to do that. And came across value based pricing, which was absolutely the answer for projects. And the way that it works is the exact opposite. So instead of at the beginning of a project or the beginning of a sales process, I don’t talk to the client about the scope, I don’t care about the scope, what I want to know is what business outcome are they trying to achieve. And through what I called the why conversation, I’d get down to, you know, some desired outcome and a rough idea of what that’s worth to them. And then I’ll and then based on the value to them, not the scope to me, I’ll come up with prices for a proposal. So I usually give them three options in a proposal based on the value, not on the scope. And I’ll say okay, this is probably worth a million dollars a year to this company. My contribution will be you know, some percentage of that. So I’ll come up with three prices like 10,000 20,000 50,000. And then and only then do I start thinking about scope. My cost, because my current, you know, everyone’s cost anyone listen to this, your process your time. So when I look at that, I would say all right, I’ve got, here’s this point, they value this project, probably that’s not an exact science, but it’s probably worth you know, a million dollars a year to them, or $100,000 a year to them or, or $10,000 a year to them, whatever it is, I’ll set some prices that are a fraction of that value. And then I’ll come up with a scope that fits within those prices. So I’ll say I gave had a budget of $10,000. What could I do for this client to move this needle that they want moved. And that might be advisory, it might be training, it might be something very low, you know, very low labor for me. But if I had a budget of 22,000, maybe I’d do something a little more collaborative, maybe I would go on site once in a while, maybe I would do something a little bit more, that would require more of my attention. Or if I had $50,000 as my budget, what would I do? So it’s the exact opposite of what we’re used to doing. You know, we’re used to thinking about how hard is this going to be for me? Multiply that by my hourly rate, here’s your estimate. It’s turning it around to what’s it worth to them come up with some prices that are going to make sense? And then figure out well, what should I do for these prices?

Will Bachman 13:41
Often, clients have not done the math and actually thought through what the value is to them, as I’m sure you’ve encountered many times. Yep. Yeah. Occasionally, it’ll be you know, tied to it, like, Hey, we want to increase sales by 10% or something. And so the math is kind of easy, but sometimes it’s, well, we want a new website, or we want to, you know, develop a new strategy or something, right? So it’s a little bit disconnected. So can you give us a concrete example sanitized is fine, but give us a real example from a real client experience? Either you know, yourself or from one of your the consultants that you coach and walk through how you got to a number from something that’s somewhat amorphous like that.

Jonathan Stark 14:28
Right? Well, you get it, you get it from them, and that’s what the why conversations designed to do. So if someone came to me and said, like, you just gave the example like, Oh, you know, we want to I think you said redesign a website you know, some even if or whatever if something like that, or you know, we want to do a big rebranding or we want you know, we want you to run a strategy retreat for us. If that’s the request, then you in a polite but thorough way you ask them why? Why do you want to do what’s what’s the point? Why not not do that that’s going to be a big expense? Why would you hire someone expensive like me to do that when you could just do it internally? Why do this now, why not do this in six months? Why not study it? You’ve known about this for 18 months, how come you haven’t done anything about it yet, what changed? So what you’re trying to do is, because as you rightly point out, the client, a lot of times is way down in the weeds, and has not thought tactically, is only thinking tactically, and hasn’t sort of taken for granted that there’s going to be some business benefit at the end. And what I want to do is interview them to gain the confidence that I actually can help them make their business better than I found. So if I’m not confident that I can move some needle, that it’s going to satisfy them and make, you know, put a huge smile on their face. And, you know, they’re gonna build a statue of me outside of the building, it was such a great investment, I want to find out what that that success criteria is going to be, before I even decide if I should take on the work. So if they came to me and said something like, Well, you know, we want we want our website redesigned, or we want the whole thing rebranded or something, I’d say why. And if you think you know, it’s not easy, it’s not as easy as saying, Oh, my hourly rates $200 an hour, this will probably be about 1000 hours, yes or no, that’s easy. But it puts you in this outlet trap that you mentioned from my website. If you turn it around the other way, and you get good at uncovering the root motivation of what the buyer is hoping to achieve in their business, then you’ve got, then you’ve got something that gives in my case, would give me the power to satisfy them. So they would say, Well, you know, the website, it’s not, it’s not converting Well, where’s it not converting? It’s not converting well on desktop or mobile. Mobile was my thing when I was doing tech consulting. So I’d say, well, what’s the problem with the website? Well, it doesn’t look good. Well, is that a big deal? And they would say, well, it’s kind of a big deal. And I say, Well, how big a deal? Well, it’s a big deal. Because, you know, we’ve got an ecommerce store. And there are, you know, our cart abandonment rate numbers on mobile are like 95%, on the desktop, it’s like 50%, if we could move those numbers, even a little bit on mobile, which is an increasing percentage of our traffic, then it would, it would be huge for our bottom line. Now we’re getting somewhere. So you know, like you said, a lot of these things are upstream. A lot of the things that folks listening to this do are upstream, you know, branding, strategy, architecture, process creation. But at some point, the client believes, or they wouldn’t be talking to you, if they didn’t believe that there was something that you could do, that was going to help them move some kind of needle. In a b2b sales situation, or b2b service situation, the client always thinks there’s something you can do to help them. You just want to figure out what needle it is that they’re trying to move, and then you can start to get a grip on what might be worth to them.

Will Bachman 18:06
How do you coach freelancers who say, yeah, this is great, I totally get the concept makes sense. And I, I’m, I know how to have a wide discussion and so forth. But my clients, if I try doing all that, you know, kind of Jedi mind trick on value pricing at the end my clients that Yeah, that’s great. But the bids we’re getting from other folks are hourly, and we just need to, you know, be able to compare you versus them. So that’s, that’s all fine. That I mean, that’s all fine and great. But we just need to know, like, you know, to do go to procurement, I just need to know what your hourly rate is. So come on, what is it?

Jonathan Stark 18:43
Yeah, I would say I don’t have one, I would have said that immediately on the first phone call. Because you’re right, some some organizations, government higher ed, a lot of times they have policies in place where it does actually require that they get an hourly rate, because that allows them to at least operate under the perhaps delusion that they can compare apples to apples, and get air quotes the cheapest one, when in fact, we know from lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit that you know, these sorts of big projects, especially software like in the space I’m in, they go over. So when you say oh are you know whatever, Deloitte hourly rate is a little less than McKinsey. So let’s go up Deloitte, that’s that’s meaningless, then anyone listening to this is going to know what I mean. But the real problem that you’re that you’re bringing up there, and if you if you are working with clients for whom a fixed price would be acceptable, and they can get it through procurement, and you have qualified them before you even go into the white conversation. Then the problem that you’re pointing out is one of differentiation. They want to compare you apples to apples with, you know, this management consultant, that management consultant, you are a management consultant. We are looking for a management consultant. And if there’s nothing that’s meaningfully meaning Different about you to them. It is apples to apples. So the problem there isn’t a pricing problem. It’s a, it’s a branding or marketing problem where you’ve not differentiated yourself from what they see as their alternatives.

Will Bachman 20:13
Alright, so Walk walk me through give me kind of a Cliff’s notes version of your value pricing boot camp, if someone you know attends that. What are what are some of the highlights of the different exercises and so forth that you walk people through?

Jonathan Stark 20:31
Sure. Well, I mean, I would point out that it’s a free email course, it’s not something I charge for it. You don’t have to fly to Providence, Wareham, or anything like that. It’s something that people can just sign up for and get a taste of, because after doing this for years, I know that it is it, even when you think you understand it, it takes a long time to change your mindset, away from that constant desire to estimate scope during the sales process. It’s a real hard habit to break. So the the email course, I think it’s a six or seven day course, that has lessons that are meant to change the way you think about it to open your eyes to this mind shift that needs to take place and create lightbulb moments around, you know, first, I talk a little bit about, you know, what’s wrong with hourly billing in the first place, and kind of point out a few things that hopefully would be persuasive. And then I talked about the difference between a fixed bid based on time and materials, which is very dangerous for a seller, and a fixed bid based on value pricing, which is not as dangerous for the seller. You know, and I go through it’s, it’s mostly it’s less prescriptive, and it’s more meant to be eye opening. But it just basically, I’m illustrating the concepts and trying to explain value pricing in plain English, where that it’s exactly what it says it’s the reverse of cost plus use instead of starting with cost, marking up your cost, presenting that as a price. and hoping that it’s less than the value to the client, you do it the other way, get into a sense of the value, then come up with a price and then pick a scope. That’s going to make sense for you.

Will Bachman 22:10
Okay, that’s cool. So and and that’s that course I think you can get right there at Jonathan Stark calm, right, you put in your email address, and it comes right to your inbox. Yep. Yeah, that’s my homepage. Fantastic. So so it’s tough for you to make a living with free email course. What? What if someone wants? wants some some more coaching? Do you work one on one with freelancers? Or tell me a little bit about your practice?

Jonathan Stark 22:36
Yep, I have a variety of products and services that are available I’ve written. Let’s see 1234 self published books. hourly billing is not sort of my manifesto about why hourly billing is so bad. I have a you know, another book about it’s called the freelancers roadmap that gives kind of a step by step how to, that’s kind of a follow up to our the billing is not hourly billing isn’t that doesn’t really teach you how to do things. It’s more about opening your eyes to the issue and the possible solutions. And then the freelancers roadmap is a guide. But as I’ve grouped coaching, and I do workshops, and I do private one on one coaching, you can find that all on my site, but I would urge people to sign up for the mailing list, because once they go through the value person Bootcamp, they’ll get a sense for whether or not they think I’m worth paying attention to at all. And if so I do a daily, you automatically get funneled into my daily broadcast message, which I’ve been writing every day for three year, three and a half years.

Will Bachman 23:38
Wow, that’s amazing. That is quite a commitment to stick with it. And so you have this portfolio activities, you’re writing books, you’re doing group coaching, and one on one. And are you still running kind of the development shops still in the software world are mainly focused now on on working with freelancers,

Jonathan Stark 23:54
just freelancers and consultants. Yeah, I worked with a couple of sort of boutique dev shops. But I did spin down all of the mobile strategy consulting in I think, I think I took on my last new client three years ago. And that tailed off in 2019. So yeah, just all in on my mission to rid the world of hourly billing,

Will Bachman 24:16
and what sort of freelancers or consultants are you? Are you typically working with? What kind of what field what focus? Do they have?

Jonathan Stark 24:25
Yep. Yeah, I mean, Mike, because my background is in software, and I’ve been doing it you know, I was a software developer slash consultant slash trainer slash speaker for like 15 years and written a few books for O’Reilly, so I’ve got a lot of connections in that space. So it’s probably about 50%. People who are successful independent software developers or they run a small firm, but they’re doing well but they they know they’re in the trap like they’ve been doing it long enough to just like, Huh, I seem to be working harder than ever and not getting ahead. kind of frustrating. But I but in the past couple of years, it’s really broadened into also designers, marketers, copywriters even started to attract some lawyers and accountants, those sorts of things. So it’s about it’s about half and half software type people and a mix of other folks are sort of in other knowledge based professions.

Will Bachman 25:21
And how, what have you been doing on the marketing side to just generate awareness, raise your visibility and to, and to get people to find you.

Jonathan Stark 25:31
I just create and share as much content as humanly possible. Every day, I wake up thinking, you know, who can I help today? And I try and help my list as much as possible, I get lots of replies, every time I send a message. And people ask for help I try and help them as much as I can.

Will Bachman 25:49
I don’t know much about the world of independent professionals or small boutique shops in the software development world. Tell me a little bit about how do clients find boutique firms or independent software developers? Are there intermediaries in that space? Or they’re kind of platforms where they connect? Are they going on GitHub and finding someone like our, how are they connecting with clients?

Jonathan Stark 26:15
Yeah, the ones that are doing better, typically are word of mouth. So they kind of get sporadic word of mouth introductions, which is, is okay. I mean, it’s great. It’s great to get referrals and word of mouth. But generally, they don’t have a system in place to make it predictable. It’s very random. That’s, that’s probably the most common way for folks who are successful. Another way that can be found is if they are a software developer in a particular platform space, like Salesforce, or pi, or, I don’t know, FileMaker, or something like that, then they’ll get, they can get some marketing, it’s sort of piggyback off of the platform itself. So Salesforce might have Salesforce does have a directory with software developers who might be, you know, in the area of someone searching for a Salesforce consultant. So that’s another way if you’re sort of on a platform specialty, you can piggyback on the platform itself. You know, they’ll have you speak at their conferences and that sort of thing. But toward the sort of lower end of the spectrum, people are hustling for jobs, they are checking job boards, back in the day, they would be looking for things on Craigslist, you know, that was probably the complete bottom of the barrel. These days, there are marketplaces like Fiverr, and top towel and 99 designs. And most people, I don’t think most buyers are going to get all that’s not a bad idea. To tell you the truth. I think you mentioned GitHub, mostly that, in my experiences where a recruiter would go to look for an employee. And there are certainly job boards and marketplace like that word if people are looking for software developers as employees. But generally, for folks who are looking for some kind of freelancer, they’re going to ask their friends, you know, you know, good rails developer, or they’re going to look on some setup sort of platform marketplace, like, you know, salesforce.com slash partners or something like that. And then after that, it turns into this sort of lower value marketplaces where everyone you know, it’s like your name, your hourly rate, sort by price, pick the cheapest one. So it’s, it’s not great. Yeah.

Will Bachman 28:38
Give us some success stories of freelancers that you’ve coached and kind of what sort of transformation they’ve seen in their in their own business.

Jonathan Stark 28:46
Sure. I don’t want to I mean, it’s gonna probably come across as bragging. But I asked

Will Bachman 28:50
I asked him to brag, brag brag away.

Jonathan Stark 28:53
Yeah, I mean, I have a coaching student this in 2019, he, he runs a firm, maybe six employees or seven employees. And, you know, we’ve been working together we started working together in 2018. And in 2019, he had his best year ever by a longshot while working less working fewer hours. In one of the one project he closed, he said it was more than double the highest priced project you’ve ever sold. And it was about the same amount of work as the biggest project you’ve ever done. And and that project, actually wrapped up at the end of 2019 was very successful for the client and for his client and for me from the student. Other students who credit me with buying them their house where they increased their prices so much that you know, you get paid cash for a down payment on a house. You know, it’s it’s shocking how much of a change it is when you disconnect your time from your money. It’s It’s amazing. Like they’re basically people are you know, software developers, but I think all professionals, if you’re good, if you’ve been doing it a while, and you can point to results that you’ve provided, you’re almost definitely leaving money on the table. I can give you more examples, I have a copywriter I’m working with who’s sending out proposals, a copywriter sending out proposals, that where the top tier option is, is in the six figures. I mean, it’s unheard of.

Will Bachman 30:23
Very interesting idea. So, so the, it’s really about changing the mindset. And instead of starting first with the scope, and then being with V, start with the value, come up with some prices, and then figure out okay, for that price, what could I What could I accomplish? How can I help? Yeah, how can I help? Jonathan, we mentioned your website a couple times, Jonathan Stark, calm, any other ways that you’d like to put out there for people to find you online?

Jonathan Stark 30:50
Sure. I mean, that’s definitely the best way if you go to my site. But for folks, obviously, people listening to this, listen to podcasts, I also do a show with a co host, called the business of authority, which I think would be hyper, super relevant to this particular audience. It’s about basically about turning yourself from saying things like I am a management consultant into I am ve fill in the blank. So how are you like, what are you the one and only at and once you’re a go to person like that, once you’re an authority in a very specific thing, people are going to come to you, you’re not going to have this downward price pressure, the value that is perceived from the buyer is going to be much higher. I mean, this is I mean, anybody that worked in McKinsey knows this, you know, they they’re, they’re paying you’re paying for or any of them really, once you leave, and you don’t have that brand behind you. It’s a whole different can of worms. So that’s what that is. So if you go to the business of authority.com, you can listen to I think we’ve got 100 and 120 episodes or so.

Will Bachman 31:58
So if you have not been listening, you’ve got some catching up to do. Now, that sounds like a really relevant show. So we will include that link as well in the show notes. So Jonathan, this has been a fantastic discussion. I encourage people to check out and sign up for your free course. Why not? It’s free, and get a taste of what john has been talking about on the show. Thank you so much for joining. Right well

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