Quote: (05-26-2018 10:28 AM)Off The Reservation Wrote:
Quote: (05-24-2018 09:08 PM)Suits Wrote:
The last week since my most recent post in this thread has been educational.
I'm more convinced than ever about the value of the service I can offer (training, analysis) and the products I'm developing.
However, I'm not completely convinced that potential clients in China will appreciate the value of what I am offering or be willing to pay the rates that I would require to justify doing it at all.
A lot more exploring yet to do. This summer is going to be a crucial time of experimenting with marketing and seeing what the response/demand is.
I'm still contemplating (and researching) the exact consulting services I want to offer (and how they will be defined), so I don't have a set of fees established yet. However, I consider my time (based on local living expenses and my own belief in my value) to be worth $90 per hour for in-person appearances/training and $50 for any work I do from home. However, my consulting services will be content based (with added value training and support included), so the total fee for most services will be higher than I would charge simply for my time, because additional physical/digital product will be delivered in addition to the time I put into providing service.
This is a great post. It's a critical issue for you and it is also instructional. Go forward without any doubt that what you have to offer is far more valuable than you are currently aware, and will be of great value to the client. When they give you the $90 they gain something worth more than $90 in return or they wouldn't do it. In other words, they want what you have to offer more than the $90.
As I believe I have mentioned previously, I took some hourly work doing some of the types of services I would like to move into doing full-time on an experimental basis. It was very helpful, because I was able to confirm that business owners would pay for this type of service with a smile on their face and never have any trouble coming up with cash to pay me. For a new business in my industry, having someone provide the finished products I am able to provide is more or less essential, so it's like paying for rent or providing salaries to sales staff -- it needs to be done or the business will collapse.
The big question was not whether potential clients were willing to pay, but whether they were willing to pay me. I was able to confirm, with no doubt in my mind that they very much will.
This is more valuable to me than most other things -- to be able to be fully confident about the recognizability of the value I bring.
More importantly, I'll be charging on a per-project basis, because I'll be delivering content based consulting where the end result is a tangible and involves the create re-use of my existing resources to build purpose built projects that would take anyone else 10X the time to create from scratch.
Quote: (05-26-2018 10:28 AM)Off The Reservation Wrote:
You may also slightly move away from the hourly model by packaging up some work as package price with a retainer. Let them know what they need, and why and tell them what you require. Get some money up front like a lawyer.
That's definitely something I will be doing. I'll break up projects into as many deliverable as makes sense and require each portion to be paid up front. With this type of work, the situation is actually much better than being a lawyer, because the precise amount of requires work is easy to estimate upfront and it's easy to divide deliverables up into fairly small tranches.
Quote: (05-26-2018 10:28 AM)Off The Reservation Wrote:
Rather than endlessly analyze make a list of all the potential clients and focus on the one who will give you money the soonest. Even if it's small or at a lower rate you get the ball rolling. Go close that deal now. One session with a client that you actually do and reflect on and adjust later is worth more than ten thousand million quadrillion hours of pre-doing pre-implementation analysis planning. Here's what most don't get when they do that - the client is the most valuable source of analysis / adjustments in your offering.
That's been the approach I've been taking. The spring experiment that I'm now finishing up has been hugely beneficial as a source of information and what clients in my industry need and are willing to pay for and how to define and plan projects. It's also taught be what type of work I like doing and what type of work I need to refuse.
The spring-time client will continue as a client. I promised initially in February to be off routine in-person service for three months and as of the end of May, that three month period ends. I've helped them out in training up staff to fill the roles I've held, so now I'll be able to concentrate on the work I want to do for them, namely the type of work that doesn't require me to be physically present.
I doubt that the potential client I wrote about most recently will be a very good fit for me, so I won't pursue that further. Instead, I'm doing a site visit with a much more desirable client who has a several fully-licensed schools in Beijing who has a full appreciation of my capabilities. I'm not sure how the meeting will turn out -- perhaps her expectations are quite different than mine and we haven't talked at length yet -- but I have full confidence that it will be of great value to me as a learning experience no matter how it ends.
I did a site visit for the other potential client (the one that I don't plan on pursuing further) and despite the outcome of the opportunity (which I felt fairly sure about even before the site meeting, it was a great learning experience and great practice for future experiences of a similar nature.
I'm in an optimal situation, because I have enough hourly teaching work to take care of myself financially as I pursue more and more consulting work. In June (in just a week from now), I'll be scaling back to just being in classrooms 4 days a week (instead of the 6 days I've been doing this spring) and if all goes well, I'll stop teaching for a while altogether in December of this year.
This always me to take the learning curve one new client at a time and learn step-by-step what works in this type of business and what doesn't.
On Value
I've had a train of though of the past week regarding this topic. With my basic needs adequately covered with my hourly teaching work, I'm in the perfect position to walk away from opportunities were the client isn't willing to pay my required fee. I'm going to be charging on value-delivered basis.
I know personally how seriously involving it is to create a curriculum system for a school. To get it right requires multiple rounds of testing and the process is significantly expedited if you already know what you are doing on day one (which I do, but I doubt many people available on the job market do).
My plan is to charge based on the assumption that I'll charge far more per hour than anyone would normally agree to pay an employee (so I'm happy), but it'll still be cheaper to hire me than hire on staff to do so (because those staff won't have my level of competence and therefore the project will cost a lot more to do when you are paying inexperienced staff a regular salary to do the work). So, the client had better be happy to, because I'm actually offering a great deal. If they think I'm expensive, then they aren't aware of how long it'll take them to do my quality of work with their own hires.