Keith Perhac and I recorded our 3rd podcast episode with special guest Brennan Dunn.  Listen to it (or read the transcript) for:

• why you should increase your freelancing rate
• how to discuss your value with your clients such that they’re happy to pay your increased rates
• how to scale to a multi-employee consultancy, without being bankrupted by poorly timed receivables
• three stories from successful consultants on three very different trajectories in their businesses
• how you can use drip email to sell more product (and consulting gigs, too)
• a bit about the business of selling info-products: pricing anchors, marketing tactics, list building, and more

If You Want To Listen To It

MP3 Download (~90 minutes, ~211 MB) : Right-click here and click Save As.

Podcast format: either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.

[powerpress]

Transcript: Running a Consulting Business, With Brennan Dunn

Patrick McKenzie:  Hi everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, perhaps better known as patio11 on the Internet. This is the, I think, third episode of the Kalzumeus podcast, with my buddy, Keith Perhac.

Keith Perhac:  Hello.

Patrick:  And our special guest, Brennan Dunn, of Planscope and “Double Your Freelancing Rate.”

Keith:  Woo!

Brennan Dunn:  Hey there.

Keith:  That was our live studio audience. Last time, we had a theme song. But I don’t know. Do we have a theme song this time as well?

Patrick:  I think we are totally theme‑song‑less.

Keith:  OK.

Patrick:  This is still a third‑rate podcast.

So, Brennan, recently you had a product launch. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that, and we’ll segue into the discussion about it.

Brennan:  Absolutely. So, for the last few months, I’m been thinking about putting together an info product, specifically one that is targeting, really, a passion point of mine, which is freelancers who undercharge for their services.

It’s something that really came from my own experience. For way too many years, I charged dramatically less than what I was worth, and only recently have I fixed that. And since I’ve fixed that, not only has my income gone up, but the caliber of client that I work with has gone up also.

And I really wanted to just not only spill the beans as to how I got there but also back it with pricing research that I’ve done. So I’ve done a lot of reading of really executive‑level books on the science of pricing and really targeting factories and massive companies that produce products, and I wanted to find a way to distill that into something consumable for an independent service provider.

So I took that knowledge. I took my background. I interviewed, I think, six or seven what I deem “premium” freelancers, people who either charge a lot or have, really, a very good business around themselves. They’re not just developers. They’re not just designers. They’re true businesspeople. I condensed that into a book that I launched last week.

Three Very Different Consulting Businesses

Patrick:  So, feedback that I frequently get from people when trying to tell them similar things is that “That’s great for you, but you are a coding übermensch. I am merely a PHP coder. How would I ever make that transition into being a business kind of guy?” So I think that’s maybe something that’s worthwhile for us to discuss.

Just for background, for those of you who don’t know, all three of us do consulting work on a semi‑regular basis. And without revealing anyone’s rate cards, they’re pretty up there, versus the, say, $20‑an‑hour commodity PHP coder that you might know or perhaps have in your household somewhere. A good portion of our business success has been that we started out there when we were young and stupid.

[Patrick notes:

I run a solo consultancy focused largely on selling more software for B2B software/SaaS companies, which often involves the sort of marketing-by-building you see on this blog.  Keith runs a development consultancy with several freelancers on staff, and personally does a mix of project management, strategic work, and tactical-level design and development.  Brennan does business consulting with a twist of Ruby/Rails, and has previously run a company with approximately 10 full-time W2 employee consultants.]

But we are no longer young and stupid. And our universal experience, and that of lots of people in our, say, social and professional circles, has been that, just like Brennan said, when you start charging more and you start positioning yourself as being more valuable to your customer’s business, you deal with radically better clients.

Brennan:  Oh, yes.

The Many Benefits Of Charging More

Patrick:  They’re savvier. They are smarter about using a consultant’s services. They’re more respectful of your time. They have less random problems with things. Your advice is more likely to get adopted. Everything about life gets better as you charge more. Also, charging more tends to make you a little more money. I think that’s a mathematical identity or something. Don’t discount having a little more money, because it really makes life better.

Keith:  I want to go off on that a little. You were mentioning, the more you charge, the better your client. And that is completely a perception of how much your time is worth. And I’m sure, Patrick, you’ve had experience like this; I’m sure, Brennan, you have as well; and I know I’m guilty of this as well. We have a tendency to want to give people who we know the “friend rate.”

Or it’s a new client and you’re like, “Oh, I’ll just do it cheaper this once.” And as soon as you say that, your perceived value of your time goes down so much. I’ve had clients call me up for 30 minutes, an hour, just to talk about random shit that they want to talk about, because they don’t value my time. Because they’re paying me $50 an hour and they’re like, “Eh, he’s got time to talk about whatever it is I want to talk about for a half an hour.”

Brennan:  What starts to happen is your standards start slipping when you do that. What you’ll find is clients will then start paying their invoices late. They will start doing a lot of things which hurt your business. This always happens. Oftentimes the relationship basically changes dramatically. Instead of it being a business relationship, it becomes, I don’t want to say a friend relationship, but more of a relationship that’s very fluid and has no standard.

Patrick:  Yeah. I think people treat a given business relationship with a certain, fixed amount of professionalism in it. And if you come in and set the expectation that you are a… The Japanese word is kichin to shita (きちんとした).

Keith, can you help me translate that?

Keith:  Proper? Solid, business?

Patrick:  Yeah, a solid, proper professional, like a lawyer would have with their clients.  People will tend to treat that relationship inside that solid, proper, professional schema. You’ll naturally have a certain amount of human rapport with your clients, but they’re going to expect that if they don’t pay an invoice on time, there will be negative consequences.  They will show up to meetings on time because that’s just the way we do professional things.

Whereas, if you treat yourself like somebody’s kid’s brother who’s been hired as a favor, you will get treated like somebody’s kid’s brother. And if you’re 15 minutes late to a meeting that you’ve got set up with a kid who you’re doing a favor for, well, the kid’s time is kind of worthless and he can wait. It’s no problem. And if you’re a couple of days late on paying him, he lives with his parents. What’s the problem? So, yeah.

Keith:  Right. Nothing, I think, will drive this point home more than, I’m sure any freelancer listening to us has proposed something, any idea about a website or a project that they’re doing, and then a consultant who is paid maybe 100 times more than they are comes in and says the exact same thing, and the boss is like, “Oh, that’s a brilliant idea.

Why didn’t we think of this?” Right? Because having the high‑paid consultant, having the high‑paid person, has a perceived value attached to it, so anything they come up with is generally going to be perceived in a better light.

Brennan:  It’s not only that. Their presentation is usually entirely different. So one of the problems with most freelancers is they talk in code or design. They think that, for instance, I know Ruby, therefore I market myself as a Ruby developer.

I’m doing some work with somebody who wants to kind of rebuild it an all Microsoft Access system that they have that has kind of accumulated over 10 years.

If I were naïve about this, I would market myself to them as a coder, and say: “I’m going to rewrite your code to be Web based instead of using Microsoft Access.” Instead, my positioning is “I’m a business consultant, we’re going to look at what you have currently and see where we can optimize and what that will do long term. It’ll save you a lot of money because I’m focusing on your business.”

I’m not focused on the code necessarily. I’m focused on what code do I need to write and I’m really internalizing this. What code needs to be written in order to make his business more successful? And that’s something that I see so many people mess up. They look at themselves based on what technologies they happen to know and use instead of the outcome that the clients actually hire us for which is make more money than they spend on us.

Patrick:  My buddy Thomas Ptacek, who has a zillion karma on Hacker News, says that one of the differences between freelancers and consultants is that consultants own the business objectives of the code that they write.

[Patrick notes: I am referring to this post in particular ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615 ), which is possibly the most value in the least words of anything ever written on HN.  Seriously, it is an executable roadmap to building a multi-million dollar consultancy, from someone who has done it… in under 500 words. Go read it and come back.]

Imagine you’re building a scalable content generated system or something. That’s basically like the Ruby On Rails five-minute-build-a-blog demo with a slightly different objective. But the slightly different objective is designed to directly create business value for the customer?

Brennan:  Right.

Patrick:  “We’re going to get you more traffic from Google. You are going to convert X percent of the material and a free trial that is going to convert to incremental revenue.” And rather than you delivering these scalable content system and saying, “OK, stuff can now appear on your website, so I guess I’m done,” you instrumented it out so that you can directly measure how much revenue that gets produced.

And then the crucial bit is that when you produce revenue and other meaningful results for clients, and you gain a reputation for doing this at previous clients and for this particular client, then you present yourself as someone who accomplishes these business objectives rather than someone who is coding.

Rather than doing the Underpants Gnome narrative where Step #3 is ????, you fill in the blank. Then your client proceeds directly to Step #4: Profit.  After you demonstrate that you can do this, then you charge numbers that would shock the conscience of commodity programmers.

Brennan:  Right.

Patrick:  So, speaking of numbers that would shock the conscience, all three of us are in kind of in an awkward position because there is absolutely no reason to say your rate publicly. [Patrick notes: I defend this position later in the interview.]

Let me talk about past rates. I think all of us at one point probably charged $100 an hour.

Keith and I used to work for a Japanese megacorps. Well, mine was a little more mega‑corpy than Keith’s. But Japanese engineers make nowhere near $100 bucks an hour. So, I thought $100 an hour was quite a high freelancing rate.

It turns out that if a given software company has, say, $10 million in revenue, and you successfully add a percent to that by improving their conversion funnels, then that is worth a sizable amount of money… virtually regardless of the time taken. $100 an hour no longer makes sense for your services.

[Patrick notes: Some of the things you’ll need to convince people to do to make big, motivational wins for their businesses will be literally placed outside your authority if you charge $100 an hour. My consulting clients are typically on the small and nimble side, but if I was just hired on as a commodity Rails programmer for a few weeks, it would be very difficult to convince the company to let me e.g. redesign the onboarding process. That can, by itself, raise growth in revenues by plural tens of percentage points, so if revenue was otherwise growing by say $100,000 a month, this could add over $X00,000 of revenue just within the first year.]

Brennan:  I think we tend to be very bad at quantifying the amount of success we bring our clients.

Patrick:  Yes.

[Patrick notes: Many of your clients are not set up to measure the success you bring them.  Some are not even aware that such a thing can be measured.  In your messaging to them before and during the engagement you should educate them to the point where they can anticipate the specific change that will happen and then measure the magnitude of that.  Write the reporting logic for this if you need to – it is a great investment in happier clients and higher paychecks. (This can be as simple as convincing them to install off-the-shelf tracking like Google Analytics or KissMetrics.)]

Brennan:  And we’re very bad at charging for that. We look at ourselves as you rent an hour of my time and for that hour I’m going to write code instead of looking at the big picture. The big picture is that we can spend X weeks to build a system that will increase revenue by 1%. If they’re making $100 million, that’s a million dollar increase of revenue. And the amount of time or effort or whatever else that went into that is immaterial as long as it’s less than the net result of that investment.

Patrick:  Right.

Keith:  You pretty much took what I was going to say. I was going to say that one of the key things, and we had talked about this with Amy Hoy as well is rephrasing what you are and what you’re doing.

Brennan really touched on this and he said, “I am not a programmer. I am a business consultant that is doing X.” Reframe your value in a way that the client can understand.  Especially for non-technical customers, programmers are a commodity component which they can buy for $5 an hour on oDesk.

Programmers build tools. Business consultants solve problems. I always felt that I was solving problems with programming. However, the problems I was solving were things that other people were identifying, and the solutions I was delivering had to be adapted by other people to be used by the business.  [Patrick adds: And guess who got the credit? That’s right, the idea guy, who was smart and reported how he transformed cheap labor into a big win for the business.]

I was solving technical hurdles and technical issues. I never made the business 10%.

Brennan:  A good parallel to that is saying to a carpenter that you’re solving problems by cutting wood. The benefit is, to the end consumer, you’re building a comfortable chair or you’re doing a wardrobe that holds all of their clothing. [Patrick adds: I don’t love this analogy.  If I were a high-end carpenter, I would sell my beautifully handcrafted wooden desks as demonstrating success and status and thus helping my lawyer clients win more deals. Since IKEA doesn’t sell anything that does that, I won’t have to compete with them on price anymore!]

The carpenter tasks a lot of craftsman’s pride in how they cut the wood and what tools they use, but it typically doesn’t matter to the end customer.  [Patrick notes: Notice I just positioned the carpenter such that it does, because their desk comes with a narrative – handcrafted by an American with a lifetime of apprenticeship and only the finest sustainably organic hardwoods — and the IKEA desk does not. I’m not joking about that, by the way, I would call my trees organic trees.]

Patrick used the word commodity, which is something I used throughout the book. If I’m a $100 an hour ruby developer and I market myself as a developer who writes ruby and then a $5 an hour ruby developer comes along on oDesk, there is absolutely no reason, if I’m a commodity, that my potential client should not be hiring the person 20 times less expensive than I am.

It’s like corn. I don’t care what field corn was grown on. I want to eat corn. When we position ourselves as a commodity like corn or oil, or whatever else, it becomes a race to the bottom, which you really can’t escape until you start positioning yourself differently.

[Patrick notes: Have you noticed that people are routinely trying to sell you corn-that-is-better-than-corn?  Organic corn?  Sustainable corn?  Locally grown corn?  This is because they’re searching for a point of competitive differentiation with efficiently raised corn because the price of corn has declined in real terms over time, due to efficiency gains caused by industrialization and improved farming practices, and it will asymptotically approach zero.]

Keith:  This phrase from your book hit home with me: you said we devs have “personal vanity” which causes us to believe that how we work intrinsically matters to our clients.

I like to think that I write clean code. I write extensible code. I write clean HTML. My designs are responsive.

[Patrick notes: Ever had a designer pitch you on code which validates? I’m really glad grocery stores haven’t figured out a corn validator yet. This cheap corn doesn’t validate! You should buy validated corn, it’s like unvalidated corn except it costs three times as much and if you eat it Google will love you more.

(P.S. I am being slightly unfair in this analogy. I apologize, farmers, for suggesting by implication that corn consumption is as ineffective at raising SEO rankings as code validation is.)]

Selling Better Code As A Benefit Rather Than A Feature

Keith: Clean code doesn’t surface any value to the customer.  I know from a technical standpoint, there are a lot of merits to it, especially for people who have to come in later.  Explaining this to a non-technical customer off-the-bat is difficult.

Brennan:  The clean code you’re writing is the feature. You just need to explain the benefit. You need to explain your maintenance cost will go down.

Keith:  Right, exactly.

Brennan:  You won’t be getting as much of having somebody come in a year from now and clean up the mess. We call this technical debt. Oh, by the way, don’t ever use that prahse with your customers. It just sounds bad.

Basically, just say, “I work in such a way that the amount of money you will need to invest in the system after this initial fee as the work is complete, will be less than it would if I didn’t work that way. That’s how you position the benefit.

Patrick:  Honestly, learn the language of your customers. It’s not universal across all customers, but many customers would phrase that as a “lower total cost of ownership.” [Patrick notes: TCO in MBA-speak.] If they talk like that, I understand that you’re a programmer and you hate sounding like a guy that has an MBA. If your customers talk like they have an MBA, perhaps because they are indeed MBAs, then you need to learn to speak that language.

You need to learn to talk like: “We have a lower total cost of ownership. There is lower risk of failing to execute on our strategy in later quarters due to unbudgeted maintenance work required by this system.” Or, “the system will be insufficiently flexible to start handling newer initiatives that you want to bolt on later.” That sort of thing.

In addition to just the money thing, I think there is also a status gain in moving up the ladder from commodity web programmer or designer, or what have you, to business consultants Take a lawyer, for example. A lawyer’s professional competency is writing letters. But no lawyer in the history of mankind has ever described themselves as a “professional letter writer for hire” or a “letter writer, specializing in empty threats.”

Lawyers are smart about law being a profession and having their time and advice be valued. They reliably charge extraordinary rates for that time billed in six‑minute increments. [Patrick notes: Engineers often think this is solely due to licensing requirements and/or the ability of lawyers to drum up demand for legal services by suing people. This is not the sole point of differentiation. After all, lawyers capable of reviewing e.g. a consulting contract are ubiquitous and the work is routine, but they universally charge more than all but the most successful developers.] Also, the notion that they’re providing outsized value for the business with their relationship to the business, allows them to be perceived as more credible and to be at the table when the important decisions are made.

As you level up in consulting, you might reasonably work directly with the CEO at your smaller clients – say, one with about 30 employees.  [Patrick notes: 10 ~ 30 is the sweet spot for my practice.] One level below the CEO, you’re talking to project leads. Even as an outside consultant, you might be in charge of things that are core to the strategic outlook for the business. “With great rewards comes great responsibility” on that, and vice versa.

It’s kind of a nice place to be. You’ll spend less time having the minutia of your craft get micromanaged and more time being able, within reason, to pick the tools/processes/people you want to do your work with. [Patrick notes: Nothing like the notion of a four figure invoice coming in for a meeting to convince people to stop bikeshedding.] You’ll be allowed to succeed in your work in a way that if you’re charging $20 an hour and you’re perceived as somebody’s kid brother, you won’t really be allowed to succeed in the work.

[Patrick notes:

This is incredibly important guys. As an outside consultant, you depend on the cooperation of several people within the company for your projects to have any impact. One of your core professional skills is a) securing their cooperation and b) making them look like geniuses for doing it while c) getting enough of the credit to get invited back. There are several failure modes here, such as “Presenting a worthwhile initiative which would reflect poorly on the employee who did the work closest to that in the company, causing him to torpedo it to avoid looking bad.” You have all the fun of office politics without necessarily having an office.

Resolving political issues is itself a skill clients will pay money for. Your paycheck is, occasionally, a burnt-offering to the gods of Trusted Third Party Opinion, just like it is sometimes a magical talisman against Blowback If This Goes Sour.

In addition to picking clients with an absolute minimum of dysfunctional workplace dynamics to them, one way I like to avoid these issues is making explicit efforts to share credit for everything I do with internal employees. For example, in the (somewhat rare) case where clients don’t arrange for it, I’ll invite employees out to dinner on my nickel. I make a point of praising specific accomplishments to their bosses. When I do post-engagement write-ups internally I give them credit explicitly, by name.]

Brennan:  The really big difference is you go from being an outsourced developer to a really a close advisor that has a huge opportunity, where they can help steer the direction of their client’s company.

If you do a good job and you basically end up creating a very strong ROI, you’ll be able to use that in so many different ways in the future to your advantage, which will make your life easier. Like you said, Patrick, you’ll be able to be more selective. You’ll be able to choose to work with people you really want to work with, instead of just choosing to work with whoever happens to contact you.

Different Business Models For Consulting Companies

Patrick:  Switching gears slightly. We’ve talked about waking up from being a freelancer to being a business consultant which again that’s partially just a semantic difference, but partially not so much. Like words actually do have meaning.

Another related topic, which you two have a bit more of experience from me, is expanding from a consulting practice to a consultancy. That is not actually the right word. Basically, making the leap a solo individual producer of whatever it is that you are awesome and good at, into somebody who manages a firm which produces that thing that you were once good at.

That was a major step for businesses that quite a lot of people take, actually. I think our listeners are probably interested in it, so why don’t you guys just describe how making the leap was for you?

Keith:  I’m still in the middle of leaping, so I’m kind of mid leap. I have four people with me right now, none really doing the consulting side. I have sales and some developers with me, but mainly I’m still at the head of the consulting. [Patrick notes: Keith subcontracts work but is ultimately responsible for deliverables, project management, and client relations.]

I guess the pull of having a consulting agency is being able to do more stuff with your limited time, right? There’s definitely a monetary aspect to it as well. But at the end of the day, there’s only so many hours in a month. That means that there are only so many clients you can take.

If you want to increase that, the only way to do it is to increase the number of people working with you. So that’s where I am in it. I just in the midst of trying to start it. Brendan, I know, has successfully completed that subquest, I guess.

Brennan:  There comes a point, where if you do good work and you’re providing positive benefits for your client or clients, that you’re going to get more work than you can handle. There are two paths you could go down. The first path is to just say, “I’m booked. Maybe we can try to squeeze you in, in a few months after I have some more availability, or I can refer you to some people I know and trust.”

So that’s path number one. That path doesn’t really warrant itself to positive financial growth. [Patrick notes: Slight disagreement with Brennan here. If you’re at capacity, charge more until you aren’t. This really does have substantial financial rewards to it. A lot of the “consulting doesn’t scale!” objections are really “consulting doesn’t scale beyond mid six figures” and, well, at that level many people might say “Scaling, hmm, nice to have but not really a hard requirement.”]

Brennan: You delay the project, which hurts your customers, but you still get the same amount of money as delivering the project immediately.  Instead, you can offer your customers predictable scheduling for more money by going down the second path, which is, “OK, I’m not going to turn you away or delay this project. Let’s try to figure out how I can get subcontractors or even employees to help me handle the surplus of work I have.

So that was the path I went down, that second path, and I went down it at first using what I really do think is the prudent path, which is pull together a network of independent contractors who you trust, who you know, who have the same standards that you have, and basically, strike a deal with them saying, “I’m going to handle the sales and marketing, the invoicing, the money collection.

You will get to focus on your craft. In exchange I will be taking a significant percentage of the project rate, and I will give you the rest.”

That’s the easiest to define because there’s a very clear bottom line. It’s basically they work an hour. You get paid X. They get paid Y. So that’s what I ended up doing for a while.

And then I ended up making the move to basically taking out a lease on an office, which I really didn’t need to do, but I ended up wanting to do that, and you start actually hiring full time employees, which I would not recommend doing if a cash flow issue, where cash flow tends to fluctuate month‑to‑month dramatically, because one thing about employees is they’re fixed expenses.

Patrick:  Huge fixed expenses. [Patrick notes: The fully loaded cost of an American developer can easily be in the $15,000 to $20,000 a month range to keep on the payroll.]

Brennan:  Exactly, with variable income, in October you might have a lot less active projects than you would in September. So that also includes having either yourself or bringing on somebody on who is competent in business development, because you will need to always keep your pipeline full, especially as you scout more billable employees.

And you’re going to quickly realize that you’re really going to need stop wearing the hat of a technician, and start wearing the hat of a business owner. Your life will revolve largely around accounting, and payroll, and possibly even legal things, and maybe even HR…Or really, not maybe HR, definitely HR. It becomes a much different ball game.

Keith:  So was that a hard transition for you, because I know all three of us really started as programmers. I mean we started programming because I assume that’s what we loved to do. I know Patrick and I loved programming. I assume, Brennan, you love programming as well. Was it really hard for you to switch into that more business managerial role?

Brennan:  It was, because I ‘m really not that great of a manager. It’s really never been…

Keith:  I think your success begs to differ, but…

Brennan:  Well, no, I, frankly, there are people significantly better than I am who would have done a much better job than I did at times. You know I made many, many mistakes. I made mistakes hiring. I made the biggest mistake I ever made was thinking everyone works the way I do. Just the mistakes where in the dozens. Mistakes that really ended up costing me a lot of money.

So for the first really year and a half after creating this consultancy, I made less money than I did as a freelancer. That sounds strange, right? How it could be possible that when I have 10 people I’m making less money than I was when it was just myself?

It didn’t make sense on back of the napkin calculations. But I had fixed expenses and highly variable income:for example, I’ve had to cut a refund before due to us basically really messing up when we were hired to do something.

And it is ultimately the consultancy owner’s fault. They’re the ones who need to own up to it, but you’re really responsible for other people’s actions, which I’m really not the best at, but you know it took some time to really get to be comfortable with that.

The Difference Between Charge Out Rates And Employee Wages

Patrick:  So I think folks who might be a little early in their careers or less experienced with this might not have a very reality‑based view on like the difference between, say, charge out rates that a client is getting charged and what the business pays for that. So this was news to me so I’ll go into what I’ve learned about it for the edification of people here.

When I was just getting started with my consulting business back when my rate was $100 an hour, I remember talking with one of my clients who also runs a consulting business, and I said that this math sounds very attractive:

I want to hire someone on at $80 an hour, charge him out at $100 an hour, and pocket the $20 difference.  $20 * 40 = $800 a week profit for doing nothing.  Yay.

This math is catastrophically wrong. [Patrick notes: Hat tip to Thomas and Jason Winder, who warned me off of this.]

It is not possible to have a business be successful on that sort of margin, for a variety of reasons. You’ll have collection issues on invoices. Employees always cost more than the sticker cost even if you’re paying them strictly on an hourly basis. [Patrick notes: Substantially more if they’re salaried employees, because the fully-loaded cost with healthcare, benefits, vacation, employment taxes, etc, can be 150% to 200% of their salary.] It’s unreal.

The actual number that that math works out at is employing someone at $40 to $50 an hour and then charging $100 for their time. If they’re a salaried employee, less than that, since they’ll have to be paid every month regardless of whether you have the pipeline for that or not.

The kind of universal experience of everyone when they first staff up to two people at the company, or three people at the company, is there is a few months where they do sharply less well than when they were doing in their solo practice. As a solo consultant doing very well, you typically have 80% to 100% utilization at the senior partner’s rate.

Then pretend you bring on two guys as full-time employees and pay them market wages.  For a Ruby on Rails developer who is billable [Patrick notes: “Billable” is a term of art meaning “of sufficient quality to be allowed to work on a client project without intensive supervision” – green developers are not billable], that would be $8,000 a month, cash, which – crucially — costs you $12,000 a month, because you have pay for taxes, health insurance, various overheads on paid vacation, all that fun stuff.

So if you staff up to two people, your fixed cost is $24,000 a month for those two people. At 50% utilization, if you’re charging less than $6,000 a week, you’re losing money.

You should be charging north of $6,000 a week, but that is neither here nor there.

So the way that you eventually make money under the model is to consistently get your utilization rate up into like the 70, 80 percent, and then only hire up once you’re basically exhausting everybody.

Keith:  Exactly.

Patrick:  This was not obvious to me, so I’ll tell you what smart people have told me. It is my natural inclination that when the business gets upside it shares a substantial amount of that upside with the employees. This is incorrect: employees trade most of the upside of the business for predictable paychecks every two weeks.

The actual way that successful consultancies work is: If you promise your employee a salary of $100,000 a year, or $8,000 a month, you make payroll come hell or high water.

If you can’t pay payroll then you don’t eat, but you still pay payroll. As far as there is a sure thing in the business world, the sure thing is that you make payroll every month. In return for that, when your business blows it out of the water, your employee does not get an automatic 20 percent raise.

They get the sort of three to five percent raise that salaried employees generally expect, and then you get to take home a bit more money in return for all the risk that you’ve taken earlier in the business.

[Patrick notes:

So, for example, in the case where we have one senior consultant and two employees he has brought on:

Senior consultant: 50% utilization at $10,000 a week, with remainder of time devoted to prospecting

Junior consultants: 75% utilization at $6,000 a week, $12,000 monthly fully-loaded cost

The senior consultant “earns” approximately $32,000 a month.  This math scales straight on up with headcount and utilization.

This has interesting implications.  One fairly obvious one is that two friends who found a consultancy and scale to five employees will, fairly quickly, end up more than modestly wealthy, with (probably) less execution risk than doing a product company.

]

Brennan and Keith: That sounds about right.**

Brennan:  I can’t begin to tell you how many times I missed paying myself. When you have a consultancy it is an expanded freelancing operation, and there’s always risk in freelancing with clients paying on time. Many of us, myself included, tend to naively assume that everything will just work well, that I will invoice, and within 30 days I will get a check for that amount, and everything will go smoothly.

What you tend to find is that that is the furthest thing from the truth. Your employees will largely not expect this, especially if you’re recruiting from bigger companies that have massive lines of credit, or a lot of cash in the bank, who have never had any payroll issues.

When you have a small consultancy, you probably will have payroll issues, and it’s very hard to approach an employee and say, “Oh, by the way, I know I’m supposed to pay you twice a month, but you’re going to need to wait.” Even one day really starts to breed… I don’t want to say hostility, but…

[Patrick notes: Cultural side-note: Keith and I, who have largely internalized working at Japanese corporations, both went literally sheet white when we heard Brennan mention missing payroll as a possibility.]

Keith:  Well, it makes them nervous. Not being able to hit payroll, even by a day is like, well, what’s going on? Should I start polishing up my resume, start looking for somewhere else? It’s like it gets really nerve‑wracking.

Brennan:  And that’s exactly what happens, and the thing I wish I would have done in hindsight was have…I heard from a very reputable source that whenever making a hiring decision, even if you know you have the work for them immediately, it’s good to kind of set aside probably about $30,000 in savings just for that one employee just as a buffer.

And the biggest thing that most freelancers who turn to consultants, or consultancy owners mess up on isn’t really having the work, because nowadays there’s more demand than supply, it’s making sure that your cash flow situation is working well, is working fine. And cash flow issues are the biggest way to really mess up a good thing.

Patrick:  Young technologists coming from a consumer background know that PayPal exists, credit cards exist, and therefore expect transaction processing to be more or less instantaneous. It therefore follows that a) the traditional 30‑day terms that you extend to your clients are absurdly generous, because it should be very easy to pay people within 30 days if you have money, and that b) if you actually give people 30‑day terms than they will invariably pay within 30 days.

This is very at odds with how the world actually works. Coming from the three people here, do we want to have a complaining about clients anonymously session? What’s the longest it’s taken for an invoice to get paid?

Keith:  Infinitely.

Brennan:  Yeah, I would have to say never paid is the longest.

Patrick:  Let’s scope it to invoice from clients you are happy to do business with. Good people. What’s the longest it has ever taken to get paid? I think my record is nine months.

Brennan:  And you’re still happy to do business with them?

Patrick:  Yeah.

Brennan:  All right. My record was six months, but I can tell you a pro tip that has basically solved all of my cash flow issues, and the pro tip is to prepay everything.  You simply do not do a week of work unless that week is paid in advance.

I don’t know when it became standard to say, “I’m going to do all this work for you. I’m going to shoulder this risk. And then I’m going to have this window of a month before I see anything, any sort of compensation for that.” And yet that is the standard payment term. [Patrick notes: This is “Net 30” – the client has one month from the invoice date to pay.  It is a very standard payment term.]

Brennan:  I know especially if you’re working with a big organization where your client who you talk to each week probably isn’t the one who signs the check, Net 30 is standard. Smaller clients, though, can be moved.

I made the mistake once where I billed twice a month, so on the 15th and 30th of each month I would send an invoice.

They had 30 days to pay that invoice. With one client I had sent two invoices covering four full-time employees.  Our client ran out of money and stuck us with $60,000 of unpaid invoices.

Sure, you can go the lawsuit route. You can do a lot of that kind of overhead work, but the problem is, according to my attorney, because they’re behind a corporation, all they’re able to do really is request that their business’s bank sends the amount that they owe. You can’t go their house. You can’t go after their personal assets.

[Patrick notes: By the way, has Thomas convinced you to incorporate prior to doing business with serious businesses yet? If that company had not been incorporated, Brennan would have had legal recourse against the owner’s house.]

What I’m starting to do now, positioning‑wise, is telling people, “I’m not in the business of debt collection, and I’ve had to be a debt collector way too many times, so if you want to work with me, you’re going to need pay me a week up-front. If the check clears, then we will work that week.” That solved everything, honestly.

Patrick:  I’ll put a little asterisk on that. If you work at any company which is large enough to have a purchasing department, as a sole consultant or as the owner of a small consultancy, it is highly unlikely that you will have sufficient pull to pull that off. I’m just putting that out there.

Some of my mentors have made that abundantly clear for me. I don’t typically get companies of that size, but my more successful clients are right on the cusp of this: they have a standard contract for consultants, and you get what the contract says. It’s kind of a take it or leave sort of thing. The purchasing cycle is what it is.

On Consulting For Large Companies: Payment Terms Are More A Suggestion Than A Rule, Really

Conversely if you’re working at any company that has a purchasing department, you should be charging more money than you can even countenance.

Keith:  And the other side of that is, and this is in my experience. You guys might have different experience, but I’ve worked with a lot of larger companies, and I’ve never worried about them paying on time. Like the big companies, they have the purchasing department. You send the invoice. They’ll generally pay. Let me rephrase that in saying I have had them dispute the amount of the invoice before, but I’ve never had anyone just completely not pay.

Patrick:  Large companies may not fail to pay, but there are a lot of big companies where the purchasing department as a matter of policy has a understanding of how that 30‑day clock works that is different from the way that, say, a normal human being or a computer understands the way that 30 days is measured.

For example, you might assume that it’s 30 days after the date on the invoice, because that’s what actually printed on the invoice. The purchasing department might assume that’s it’s 30 days from the start of the invoicing cycle after acceptance of delivery, and those two numbers are very, very different things. That can be like a three‑month difference.

Brennan:  Right.

Patrick:  So if you’re dealing with, say hypothetically (not a client), Bank of America, you will not budge the Bank of America purchasing department, because they just don’t care. They’re not graded on paying you in a quick fashion. In fact, to the extent that their department has any KPIs, it’s paying the money that is owed as slowly as possible. As long as they’re not getting sued on a weekly basis, they just don’t care.

Brennan:  Right. Which when you have fixed expenses monthly within your company, and it’s not just your income on the line anymore, that can be very risky, and that’s why make sure you have the cash. Make sure your cash flow situation is good before you start getting reckless is my best advice…

Patrick:  And with large companies like that, they know that dealing with them is a pain in the butt. That’s one of the reasons that they pay so much for this kind of service in the first place.

Man, this is like freelancer tip number one. Never underbid with the goal of getting more business. It never works out well, ever.

Brennan:  Exactly.

Why Businesses Are Happy To Pay More For Contract Labor Than For FTEs

Patrick:  There is a reason that a fulltime developer costs $100,000 a year, but the same developer working on a contract basis costs bare minimum $8,000 a week. Everyone knows that there is overhead and risk involved. You have to make that back somewhere. Conversely, the business, they care more about themselves than they care about your financial situation.

The things they get out of having a person available is that, even in America, which is a very many America states are employment-at-will [Patrick notes: I misspoke and said “right to work”, which is related to unionization]. “At will” means they can fire you at any time for any reason [other than a few exceptions explicitly contrary to the law or public policy]. It generally takes a lot of time to onboard a new employee, both in searching for them, going through the candidates, hiring somebody, training them up, getting them actually productive on the project, evaluating their performance, seeing that it doesn’t work out, and then firing them.

Even though a business can theoretically fire an at-will employee in a day, typically it takes from three to six months after you’ve reached the point where, OK, it’s clear that it’s not working out. You just need to get all your ducks in a row to avoid a possible lawsuit.

One of the reasons that companies come to consultants like us in the first place is that we can credibly promise that the business needs that they have will be delivered like two weeks from now. There is a number that they write that number on a check and, bam, it gets done. And in return for bam, it gets done, the number on that check has zeroes in it, lots of zeroes.

Brennan:  One of the core things I really tried to include in my book is the mistake I see a lot of people making with basically, reverse engineering their prior salary to come up with their rates should be.

Patrick:  Oh, god, yes. Particularly if your prior salary is $2800 bucks a month. High‑five to Keith and I.

Brennan:  I mean there is a ton of these rate calculators where you plug in your mortgage, and you plug in all your living expenses, and then it’ll print out some sort of number. I didn’t want to say it outright in the book, but that’s really the self-centered way. Deducing a rate from your needs ignores how your client receives value from the work you do for them.

And that is why the selfish route, the route based on, “OK, I need $5,000 a month to live, therefore my rate will be whatever that will be.” Many people make this mistake. I get to see many consulting rates because I run PlanScope, a tool for consultants, and folks enter their rates as part of the normal use of the tool.

And with one simple SQL query I was able to really get a grasp of, OK, what are people charging across the board? There is a chasm in rates between $50~75 and $150+.

I wanted to really understand why it was like this. So I reached out to a handful of these different people, some on the high end, and some on the low end, and got to know them and their businesses.

[Patrick notes: The money graph in the money post about money!]

Brennan: It is almost surreal how the people changing three times as much are not three times as better developers. The reason for the huge discrepancy is how they communicate their value and how they refuse to allow fear and uncertainly to rule their businesses.

Patrick:  Keith and I have both been consulting for about two years now.**

Keith:  More of a year for me, actually.

Patrick:  I think the difference between my first going rate and my current going rate is more than 7.5x. I think Keith has also ranked up quite a bit. I’m not 7.5 times a better Ruby on Rails programmer or A/B test implementer, or email marketer than I was two years ago. I’m better, but not seven and a half times better.

What I’m seven and half times better is identifying the right clients and then communicating to them that working with me is going to do wonderful things for their business and then actually delivering on that.

And to be honest, I’m probably undercharging by a lot, even at my rate, which is quite healthy. (I won’t say the number out loud, because there’s absolutely no good that can possibly come out of quoting your rate publicly, but it might be shocking to a lot of people who read my blog, which it’s funny.)

It’s like how many times do you read something and it’s like, “OK, I’ve made X company Y percent, which we all know is over a million dollars”, but if I were to say or put a number on what my week cost, a lot of people who like me, and who want me to succeed, would be like, “Oh, wow, that’s way, way, too much for only making people a million bucks.”

Keith: Well, of course, because you’re just the bingo card guy, right? I mean you make bingo cards for teachers.

Brennan:  I don’t agree that rates should be completely private. I found that when I started to publicly put my rates out there it’s helped me really initially get a much better…And it might be different for you because a lot of your referrals they come via referrals through they know about you.

You know I was talking to one of the owners of Thunderbolt Labs last week in Dublin, Randall Thomas, and we were talking about one of the things…I referenced him in my book, and I say they put publicly on the front page of their website. They say, “This is what we charge per hour. You need to book us in pairs of two. And this is how much it’ll cost if you want to train you for a few days.”

And in talking with him regarding this same thing. And in talking with him I realized that it provokes a lot of interest. People see a high number, and they kind of scratch their head and say, “Wow, he must have a lot of cajones to be putting this large dollar sign on the front page of his website.”

Because the traditional way of approaching things is be vague. Get people to contact you. Now you have a lead and then pull their price right at the last moment. And that’s like standard sales, right? You know it’s hard to acquire a lead, therefore don’t put any impediments between you and having a new lead in your CRM.

But what we found is it’s reduced the amount of qualifying we’ve had to do, which is always a good thing, and it’s allowed us to get off the bat a different client who treats us differently than I think they would otherwise.

Keith:  Right.

Brennan:  It’s hard to test a consultancy website because gauging conversions might not be as easy as it would be otherwise for a product site, but it’s something to try out. I’m starting to be swayed in the direction of publicly putting up your rate. It’s like on a menu.

Keith:  You talk about pre-qualifying the customer and vetting the new clients. I’ve had so many clients that because I don’t say my rate upfront, we have the huge discussion. We talk about the proposal and everything, and I’m like, this is how much it’s going to cost, and they’re like, “Oh, we don’t have that type of money.”

And there goes 5, 10 hours, 15 hours of my time, having thought about all this, and you chalk it up to a loss. I mean that’s just how the business runs, but to be able to prevent them, like you said, saves a lot of time, and a lot of headache and heartache.

Patrick:  Not to be persnickety, but: If it takes you five to 10 hours to get to the point where you understand if someone is willing to drop $10,000 bucks, that might be an opportunity to improve your qualification process. Obviously I’m out of the price range of a lot of people who come to talk to me for this, and that’s OK, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a period of longer than an hour where I was totally in the dark about whether someone was a good prospect for a consulting relationship or not.

Keith:  I’ve had clients where I have given a vague estimate at first just to test budgets, and no batting of eyes, no nothing, and then when I come back with the proposal, which is exactly that, they’re like “Oh, by the way, we have no money.” So I think there are people who, maybe not purpose, but they either think that our time is not worth so much or they just want to get a free consultation. [Patrick notes: After a certain level, free consultations are a cost of doing business. This is just non-billable overhead which goes into lining up the 70%ish of your schedule which is billable. This is, again, why you set your rate so high. Proper rates pay for a lot of coffee dates and free proposals.]

Brennan:  So one thing that really helps is when somebody contacts you saying, “I might be interested in hiring you,” have kind of a list of a few questions you send them, one of them being, “Do you have over X amount of dollars for this project?” You’re not publicly putting out your rate, but you would be amazed how many people have contacted us as a consultancy where it’s very obvious that we have a lot of people on payroll, saying, “Hey, what can we get for $1,000? ” (This is clearly unrealistic.)

And unless you want to be putting up with things like that, the quicker you can qualify, the better, because the last thing you want to do is to kind of lead them on and then spend all this time. And one of the reasons I’d do putting my rate public is it makes it less likely that people will try to negotiate that.

It’s a lot like if you have a restaurant, and you charge $10 for a sandwich, it’s rare that people are going to say, “Can you give it to me for 8?” You know you have in effect a set price I’ve found that people stop trying to go lower.

Patrick:  I have the endless respect for both of you. I think it would not really work out very well for me. One reason is that my rate goes up on a fairly regular basis, and I don’t want my rate from three months ago being quoted as evidence against me in a future negotiation. [Patrick notes: For similar reasons, no divulging salary histories.]

And also the client pool is kind of heterogeneous. I don’t know if I actually pronounced that word right, because English is not my native language anymore.

My favorite clients are in the Fog Creek zone: successful, independent, closely held companies. In rough terms, most of my clients have eight figures of revenue and two to four dozen employees.

But that’s not 100 percent of the people I’ll ever do business with, right? Say that, hypothetically, Google decided to call me up one day. If Google calls up and asks for my thoughts on making AdWords 2% more effective, the rate that I quote Google will not be within an order of magnitude of the rate that I quote anybody else.

Keith:  And that goes back to the value, because the amount of value…Google’s about at what, adding two percent to Google’s bottom line is not the same as adding two percent to a company that’s only making a million a year, for example.

Brennan:  Yeah, I think that’s a very valid point, and I think…I mean I know for a fact you and I do very different forms of consulting. I deal with a lot of unknown startups and people who are single founders, or they are the CEO of a smallish company. It’s harder to gauge whether they can afford me, it’s very easy to Google Fog Creek and know who they are. I don’t know, but I think if I were doing more of the consulting you were, I might not publicize it as much or at all.

Patrick:  I think my favorite post that was ever on Hacker News was about this guy who was saying that all the animals get together, and they try to discuss what’s the best way to be an animal, and the lion say, “Oh, you need to run fast, eat things, and spend most of the day sleeping,” and the ants say, “Oh, you need to add 10,000 of us,” and the monkeys say, “you need to eat fruit and live in trees.” [Patrick notes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940 ]

What’s the best way to run a consultanc?. There are a lot of successful ways to run a consultancy, a lot of successful offerings that you can have for clients, charging models, yada, yada, yada. With that said, there are some definite failure modes like charging too little money, and there are also things I think are wins for almost everybody.

One which I would like to suggest to both of you, because I know you both charge an hourly basis, the best tip I’ve ever gotten was to start charging weekly. It makes life so much better, both because it tends to make scheduling better. If you charge hourly, you will often end up having weeks that don’t kind of cleanly bucket, right? That decreases your effective utilization rate, which like we discussed earlier has major impacts for the business.

Another being that people have a kind of very constrained dynamic range for the amount of money an hour of someone’s time is worth. They typically know what every hourly salary they’ve ever worked for is, and they’re all low numbers. And they know what every other hourly employees’ numbers are, and those are low numbers, too.

It gets difficult once you get past $100~200 an hour to continue increasing one’s hourly rate, and people feel inclined to make adjustments to that hourly rate in ways that seem reasonable when you’re talking about a number, that low number, but they’re huge with respect to the business.

Like if you quote 250, they might say, “Ah, 250’s a little tough. I can do 225.” And that’s 10 percent off your bottom line right there.

If a client needs a small win to feel good about themselves or to bring back to their bosses, I would much rather have them slice a few hundred dollars off an invoice rather than slice $25 off an hourly rate. [Patrick notes: If a client actually tries this, offer to cut scope rather than cutting rate.]

Brennan:  Right.

Patrick:  If you’re quoting a weekly rate, $25 moves your outcome not at all, whereas if you’re quoting an hourly rate, it moves it quite a bit.

Brennan:  So I’ve actually starting shifting towards a weekly rate also, and one thing I would advise everyone is to A/B test your new leads. ou should always be experimenting with different tactics about whether you’re pricing by the day, the hour, the week, and everything else.

[Patrick notes: I have to be the picky statistician here and complain that it is virtually impossible to A/B test this because unless one is negotiating hundreds of deals in parallel one will not have statistically confident results from this experiment in any reasonable timeframe.]

Brennan:But one of the things I’ve found, and here is kind of a punch list for why weekly is better. First of all, if you’re charging hourly, you might as well just be a contracted employee, and they’re going to get very particular about scheduling. They’re going to…

Patrick:  That is so true.

Brennan:  Look at line items. They’re going to start being very particular, because frankly you don’t have a product. You’re selling time. Whereas when you approach it as a weekly flat rate product, that’s really what you have, and there’s no nitpicking that goes on with, “Well, you know, I actually like the way Bob worked over Jim.”

Or, if you have any product management overhead, every client on earth hates seeing that as a line item, you can include that in that one set price without needing to justify those line items come invoice day.

Patrick:  Right. Here’s a fact of life: clients will not always have their act together. I was working at a particular consulting site, and my point of contact for whatever reason was not going to be available for the next couple days. I said to them, “All right. No problem, I’ll just use your WiFi, and I won’t invoice you for the next two days.

Someone older and wiser said, “Shut up. Never offer free work ever again. If you’re working on a weekly rate, and the client doesn’t have their act together, that’s fine. The client is paying for not having their act together.”

Whereas if you’re working on an hourly rate, if you send someone an invoice that has a line time of 16 hours of “waited for Bob to get back from vacation,” your client is going to be very, very pissed off.

Brennan:  Exactly.

Patrick:  If you’re not well established enough or you’re not comfortable enough to go up to a weekly rate, even going up to a daily rate it will get you all the scheduling benefits and you won’t be micromanaged like you’re a teenager working for a restaurant anymore. [Patrick notes: Ever felt the need to itemize a consulting bill with entries like “Conference call about the email migration: $46”? Why? Do either you or your client really benefit from that level of detail?]

You’ll also tend to catch the benefit of things that were previously getting lost to inefficiencies in the business.

One of our mutual friends, Amy Hoy, runs that time tracking software, so I don’t want to smack on time tracking too much, but I think that time tracking is a technological/process patch on top of a hole in the business model, which is that if you are explicitly selling time then accurately tracking the time is really, really important because you will be leaking time out of your bucket, and then that leaks money for the business.

If you switch to the daily rate then your entire time tracking solution is a calendar that has circles or checks on it. No matter how the business or your particular schedule for that day or importantly your clients schedule for that day works out, you will stop leaking quite so much value in sort of like dead weight loss of the business.

Selling Info-Products

Patrick: So we’re about an hour and ten minutes into the interview, and there’s one more topic that we would like to talk, so let’s move a little bit away from the making awesome consulting businesses thing. So Brennan, you just released a product that is online course/eBook offering. Keith has significant experience working with info products as well, and I am dipping my toes in that water later this month with an online video course offering teaching people how to do lifecycle emails better.

Let’s talk a little bit about what we’ve learned about that, but before we get into what we’ve learned about it I know I had a comfort issue with this before I got started. What’s the difference between what we are doing and the scamming info marketers who are hawking books on AdWorks about how to make money online with the tip that some mom discovered in their spare time?

Keith:  Absolutely nothing. Nothing. We are just as horrible as them.

Patrick:  Stab in the face, Keith, stab in the face.

Brennan:  I remember I posted something that got to Hacker News, on how I had originally sold, I think the first 2000 dollars in sales. It had a link to the sales site. There were people who said, “Wow, you look like a scammer,” because I use bolded fonts and italics in some places and I lead things in with questions like, “Are you unhappy with your rate? Does doubling your rates scare you?”

These are the tried and true marketing tactics that need to be done if you want to quickly capture somebody’s attention and then convince them to keep reading. We joke and we laugh at a lot of these infomercial products that you see on late night television, or you see these little landing pages for “how to work from home and make a million dollars.”

I think the tactics we use tend to be pretty similar. You have a clear call to action. You have a headline that captures people’s attention. I don’t think there’s a clear difference in medium between us and them.

Keith:  I think there’s a difference in product.

Patrick:  Right.

Keith:  I also think we provide value outside the products themselves, by for example educating the community outside the scope of our products. The sleazy marketers, they really don’t give anything back. I know, Brennan, you talked about how you had used your email list and how you had emailed peopled and funneled peopled and made your 2000 dollars in presales.

I mean, Patrick is pretty much famous for always talking about his sales numbers and what he did and what his actual sales numbers have been, as far as Bingo Card Creator.

So I think both of you, and I try to do this as well, are very open with the business aspect of what you’re doing. I mean, info products are info products. There is no way to really draw that clear line between scammy and not scammy, other than how each individual person feels. But at the same time, I feel that you guys give a lot more back to the community, showing how you are building this, showing how this is working, and teaching other people who have not bought your product.

Patrick:  I think that there has to be an element to the discussion: does the product actually provide value? The biggest difference between what we do and what the typical ClickBank funder does is that the “Three Quick Tips for Slimming Down Your Tummy” will not actually work. The big difference between us and them is that our advice actually works.

Keith:  I don’t know. Have you seen my tummy? I have a six‑pack right now.

Patrick:  I do not want to see your tummy, Keith.

Keith:  It’s beer. The six‑pack is beer.

Patrick:  We’re not selling to un‑savvy folks who typically get taken to the cleaners with “Make Money Online.”(99 percent of them will not make a single dollar.)

We’re selling to savvy and, frankly, very, very skeptical professionals, who are capable of evaluating claims that we make on how our advice will make their business better, just like they’re capable of evaluating claims that two weeks of our consulting services will create a software product that will make their businesses better. What we sell works.

Brennan:  I took Amy Hoy’s “30×500″ course, and one of the principles in the course is what are called e‑bombs, which are education bombs.

Especially to the audience that I’m marketing to, you can’t just throw them a sales site, right? What I’ve found to work really well is to basically give a lot of information away for free, whether it be…”If you’re looking at writing a book, here us some of the things I ran into when I was writing my book, and here is what worked and didn’t work.” What you’re doing through that is you’re breaking down any initial trust barriers that people intrinsically erect.

Basically, what we’re doing is we’re getting people to trust us. And then the natural segue is to say, “If you appreciated what I had to say here and this jives with what you’re looking for, I also have a product that will do X, which you might be interested in.” And that’s the proverbial call to action. And you can do this through blogging. You can do this through a lot of different outlets.

I think the biggest instrument to success, both with PlanScope and now the book, has been doing that. I mean, I’ve done articles for freelancers on how to estimate a new project or something, and that will get shared to quite a few people.

And then, basically, what I’m saying is this philosophy that is in this post, if you like this post, it’s represented in this product that I’ve built and you might enjoy it. And I’ve found that to be a huge win in terms of, not only is it a free avenue for sales, because it’s your time that you’re spending writing these educational blog posts, but they really establish yourself as an authority in subject X, and that helps tremendously.

Patrick:  I already hate myself for what I’m about to say. I’m going to say that it’s Content Marketing 101. Why do I hate that?

Number one, because I hate the word “content.” It auto-commoditizes the valuable information and insight you had to share.

And number two, because I think that’s unnecessarily disparaging, because that is a tactic that, indeed, will actually work. Many savvy people don’t necessarily use this to nearly the potential that they could be using it to.

But there are variations on that that have made it more effective, in my experience. One of them is, if you write a post of interest to your market or to people who are adjacent to your target market, a more effective call to action at the end of it is to ask people to sign up for a newsletter rather than asking for a sale.

Offer an immediate incentive for their email address and permission to contact them. Tell them that over the course of the next few weeks you will send you things they will enjoy.

And given that you have just proven that you have some level of expertise in something, people will tend to think that the incentive that you were dangling in front of them it’s likely to be valuable.  (Naturally, you should make it valuable.)

So, you will get their consent to get email from you. And then converting people via email, just absolutely rocks full stops over the conversion rates you will get on websites. [Patrick notes: There is abundant evidence for this in the industry, but I’ll give you a fuller breakdown in a later post about my email course. Spoiler: email converts to purchases 70x higher than… well, wait a few weeks.] And you get to control the entire experience. You get to kind of like be within their decision making cycle over weeks rather than over minutes.

You get to produce more trust with them and ethically and every possible way.

To see more, sign up for my email list.

Keith:  Not too subtle there.

Patrick:  Brennan covered this in his book, but consultancies also benefit from this tactic. “We’ll give you some sort of like report that we’ve prepared about your industry or your use of solving some problem in your business in return for your email address.” This is an epic win for selling services.

Within two hours of starting my email list back in May, I had an email address from a CEO at a company which was, to put it mildly, an awesome prospect. Since he had asked for email from me, I proceeded to – naturally – send him an email. It worked out well for all parties.

Even if I never had a sort of product to offer the list, the list would be worthwhile for my business purely for the lead generation value. [Patrick notes: Much like my blog and HN participation, I’d continue writing even if it was never worth a dollar.  It is one of my favorite hobbies.]

Brennan:  Especially for consultancies, our clients – often MBAs or other business people — tend to not think email is as bad as some of us.

Patrick:  Oh God yes.

Keith:  Oh, yeah.

Patrick:  I think engineers radically over-report their own distaste of email. I have a very like engineer focused audience. A majority of people who are on that blog are kind of squarely in that wheelhouse. Many of them report that “I hate email!”, but 4,000 of them signed up for a weekly email from me. I ask people to reply if they like it, and that nearly breaks my inbox every single time. People routinely tell me things like, “I have never liked getting email from anyone else. But, man this is awesome.”

This is not because I produce emails that are better than anyone else in the world. It’s just because everybody, regardless of whether they say they hate getting email or not or they hate being marketed to, is happy to receive things which produce genuine value for them.

Keith:  Exactly.

Patrick:  So, we are not talking about tricking anyone to sign up for this.

Let me give you a quick pro tip here. If you write a newsletter, where everyone gets the an email at the same time, this puts you on a content treadmill. You constantly have to play “feed the monster”, just like a blog, or your list gets stale and you (and they) lose the value from it.

How To Avoid The Content Treadmill

Patrick: I started with nothing written for the email list. So, the first week I wrote something. I think it was on software as a service pricing. And then the second or third week I wrote something on selling to enterprise businesses.

I then set up an autoresponder where anyone who signs up for the email list today, gets the email about software service pricing, which is totally new to them, tomorrow.  This means that I’m not on the content treadmill with respect to new users: they have several weeks of buffer. I only have to continue producing for existing users, and as I do so, my buffer for new users gets longer.

This means that those “archive” emails (MailChimp’s term, not mine) have created value for thousands of more people than they would if they had been buried in the archive somewhere or, like many of my blog posts, were written once and they’re totally not discoverable unless you had been paging through the archives from 2008.

Speaking of commoditization of content, the perceived value that people get from an email versus a, say, blog post, is very, very different. My experience has been that, over the years, I’ve developed a style that works for me. I typically write 2,000, 4,000, or 8,000 words on a subject at once. I focus more on producing an opus than I do on producing bite-sized easily-consumed daily updates. [Patrick notes: While I do like short-form writing I find that I do it much better on forums than on my own properties. And, obviously, even 8,000 words is substantially less depth than a book.]

The typical reader on my blog will be on the blog for about three minutes, which means they’re either skimming or they’re not reading much of it, or they’re absolutely superhuman with their reading speeds, and then it’s done, and maybe they’ll be back in two weeks. But if I send the same caliber of stuff to the email list, I get lots of really good comments that are both motivational, and I love getting my praised button pushed.

Also, the comments really indicate that they’ve read it, and reacted with that email. I ask people explicitly, “Write me back, and tell me about the change you made in your business as a result of this advice,” and people have written me back and said things like, “As a result of the software and servicing mail, we changed our software pricing. It increased sales by 90 percent,”

I got a blog post out of that one.  That made me happy.  Not that I was happy to get a blog post, I’m happy because a business and its employees benefited from that decision.

Brennan:  When you’re reading a blog post, you know it’s a web page, right? You know you’re looking at something that is sitting up on the Internet. It’s not personalized, it’s not for you at all. Emails are how we communicate directly to people, and when that content shows up in their inbox, especially if you start it with, “Hi, ‘first name,’” or even, “Hey there,” if you don’t have their name, that, I think…

I’m speculating here, but I’m willing to bet that the psychological implications that emails are usually targeted to me makes me more willing to read through it, and to absorb the content, than I would be if I just stumbled upon that same exact email put as a blog post.

Keith:  It also depends on the positioning of the email. I’m on all my clients’ email lists, and I actually work with my clients building email funnels for them. Even though I know it is my client, and I know that I’m signed up on their list, so I’m getting about 10, 12 emails of theirs every day from their blog posts and stuff, really looking at the way that the emails are structured, I feel an emotional response depending on that.

I have some customers who want to put their blog name first, and then the title after that, or whatever, and when I see emails like that, they don’t have the personalization, and the subject line says title of blog, and then blog title, or post title, and it feels like a form letter. Those generally get deleted right away, and then there are other ones that it’s like, “Hi Keith, how are you doing?” Or, “Hi Keith, I just saw this great email or tweet,” or, “I just saw this great blog post.”

I see it coming from my client. It has their name in the center. It has “Great blog post” as the subject, and it says “Hey Keith” in the front. I think, “Oh, they’re emailing me,” and I feel like the email is personalized – even if I wrote it or designed the funnel it is in.

I know that it’s automated, but at the same time, there is just that visceral response, so I think you’re right on with that. Email is the way we communicate with people on a one‑to‑one level, and even if we know that they are for mails, it still connects with us.

Patrick:  Also, people have a much different mindset when they’re in their email client versus being in their browser. If you think what’s probably above and below the email that you’re writing versus what’s above and below the blog post you’re writing, what is above an email that someone is reading is probably important work.

Knowledge workers spend all their day in their inbox because that’s their job. Accordingly, anything in the inbox is, likely, Important Work.

There’ll be their boss asking for a status report above it, and a client asking for feedback on yadda yadda below it, and then your email is sandwiched in between there. It kind of inherits the presumed importance from all the other stuff that’s in their inbox that day, whereas if you write a blog post, people are probably going to be consuming through Twitter, or some sort of aggregator, or an RSS reader.

For example, I like to think that my blog posts are worthwhile. They sometimes show up in aggregators like Hacker news. For the 30 things that are on the top of Hacker News at any given time, if one of my posts is up there, it should be a lot better than 15 of them. It’s probably a lot better than more than 15. If it wasn’t, I shouldn’t have written that article. [Patrick notes: Because attention is a perishable resource and because I don’t like attaching my name to drek, I throw out about one post for every one I publish.]

If your writing is seen in a context where the stuff around it is dross, it is more likely to be perceived as Internet dross that I should bookmark and maybe read if I have extra time to waste. If it’s seen in the context of important work, then it’s going to inherit that aura of being important work itself.

This is why I literally see 10X more engagement for email versus blog posts.  That is an absolute figure: my typical email gets seen by like 3,000, 4,000 people, versus my typical blog post getting seen by 20,000 plus. So 10X engagement on one‑seventh of the audience is, what, a comparable 70X engagement? That isn’t an exact number, but it would blow your mind.

Brennan:  It’s incredible how when I first launched the book, I didn’t launch it into a vacuum, because I had my products mailing list. Within half an hour of the initial email I sent out to everyone on it announcing my book, and letting them to know how it would benefit them, or could benefit their business, and chances are, if they used my product, they’re a consultant.

Within half an hour, there was over $1,500 in sales.

Patrick likes the term “printing money”, and sending an email to a carefully cultivated list is one of the best ways to do that. [Patrick notes: I will provide substantial data on this later, but suffice it to say “Yes!”] I know for a fact I can write an email right now delivering some immediate value to my subscribers, upsell the book through it to a related list, my opt-in mailing list, and it will generate sales. Having a strong, healthy email list that trusts you and is used to engaging with you is a very good thing.

I think the way a lot of people mess up is they build an email list, and then there is silence for months, and then they try to sell you. It’s like, “Silent. Silent. Silent. Sell.” They wonder why MailChimp starts yelling at them about their unsubscribe count being so high. It should be a gradual trip to sales.

Keith:  I don’t want to go too much into that, because that’s one of the big things that Patrick talks about in his product, but…

Patrick:  Let’s go into it.

Keith:  You want to get into it?

Patrick:  Yeah, why not?

Keith:  All right. All right.

Patrick: “Create outstanding amounts of value, and then charge only the two percent of people who want to pay for it.” [Patrick notes: I’m echoing back to a thought from the recent Ramit Sethi interviews here.]

Keith:  Sounds good. Sound good. So we actually talked about this when we did our mentoring talk about email funnels, and…

Patrick:  Backstory on that. Keith and I went to Silicon Valley last year to 500 Startups, where I’m a mentor. We talked with their incubator companies about how to improve their marketing. Many of the founders are from technical backgrounds and just now becoming business owners, and we thought we could help them out a bit about acquiring customers.

One topic we discussed extensively was drip campaigns. Keith, what is a drip email campaign?

Keith:  A drip email campaign is pretty much what you had described. You take emails that you have already, or emails specifically customized for the drip, and when a person signs up to your newsletters, it doles them out over a set period of time. Let’s say you have a two week drip campaign, so the first day they sign up, they get one email. Then on the third, the seventh, the eighth, the 12th, or whatever days you want, they get another email.

The purpose of this is to eventually sell them on a product, but what you do over the drip, like Brennan said, and like Patrick said, if you just are radio silent for a month and then you say, “Hey, buy my product,” no one’s going to buy your product. So what you do is you… Well, you’re the one with the product, Patrick. Why don’t you explain it?

Patrick:  Just for a total avoidance of doubt here, people are only getting these emails because they’ve explicitly asked to get emails from you, typically because you’ve given them some sort of incentive, with the quid pro quo for that incentive being that you are going to get in touch with them. You can position the drip campaign such that the drip campaign is, in itself, very valuable.

A great example of this that I did for a client of mine, which I can talk about publicly, is for WP Engine. They do high‑end WordPress hosting, so there is a page on their website that you can go to for an automated diagnostic of your WordPress site, and they’ll just say, “It took 4.7 seconds to load. You could make it load faster if you turned on gzip. Here’s how to do that,” yadda yadda yadda.

On that page, it will ask you, “Do you want to take a free one month course in improving the speed, scalability, and security of your WordPress site? If so, give us your email address and click “Yes,” and they get a very high opt‑in rate, because it’s clearly aligned with the thing that brought people to the page in the first place.

So what does the drip campaign do? The goal is, we’re going to educate, persuade, and only then sell. We’re going to start by just giving people outstanding amounts of value in terms of educational content that we’re delivering for them.

For example, in the WPEngine thing, we’re going to send you an email about various under‑the‑hood server/code tweaks that you can make to your WordPress site that, since you’re not a technical person, you probably weren’t aware of, and that these things will make your site faster. “gzip is a setting. Here’s how you turn it on, and here’s where you’ll need to make that setting in Apache’s httpd.conf. It will always make a site faster. If gzip is off right now, turn your gzip on. This always wins.”

That sort of thing is a win for the user, and they will see it being a win. Then we come back to them a couple of days later.

“Previously, we talked about increasing the speed of your site. Scalability is subtly different from speed, we’ll explain to you why. Here is the sort of architecture you would use to make a WordPress site more scalable, so that it would stay up.”

For example, Hacker News crushes WordPress sites on a fairly frequent basis, including mine more than once. Grr. Apache KeepAlive needs a stab in the face.

The email will explain that Apache KeepAlive is kind of a stab‑in‑the‑face option if you want your WordPress site to survive.

Anyhow, the idea is that we’re gradually building a trust in the user via educating them about this stuff. They start to trust us as an expert about this, because hey, we are experts about it.  We’re experts who are in their corner.

After we’ve established that we are credible experts on this thing, then we say, “OK, you have these problems. These are connected to this thing we have been talking about. We have a solution to these problems. Let’s talk a little bit about that,” and now you are no longer just some anonymous page they flipped to on the Internet.

You are their trusted expert at this field. You’ve been in their inboxes for the last two weeks making their lives better. They are much more inclined to trust representations that you make about your product. For example, if you just come up to someone and say, “You should probably pay $200 a month for blog hosting,” people will have significant reservations about that. I know I would.

I actually do pay $200 a month for WPEngine, simply because they convinced me, over a period of time, talking to their CEO, that the optimizing the speed and scalability of my site was just a black hole of my time, and that I should just let them take care of that. The drip campaign lets you do that credibility boosting thing in a scalable fashion over many, many thousands of customers without you having to continually do sales discussions.

It leads into sales discussions a lot, because you can tell people in your drip emails, “Hey, do you have any questions about this? We love getting emails from you. Just hit reply.” This is the best of both worlds: a low-touch self-serve offering for customers who can make the decision by themselves, and a low-friction entry into a high-touch sales discussion for customers who require a bit of guidance.

Applying Drip Marketing To Services Businesses

Brennan:  These same exact principles, by the way, apply directly to consulting. I think actually, Patrick, you’re the one who mentioned this as an idea, but if you do something like how to go about hiring your first web developer, or how to make sure that you’re basically business‑centered educational material for people who are on your list and might end up hiring you, the more you do this…

We post to user groups, and conferences, and things like that. I’ve closed six figure deals in 15 minutes because there’s no sales needed. I’ve educated them enough about this arena that they’re entering into, hiring people to build custom software for you. I’ve educated them, and I’ve inadvertently swayed them over into the way I think about that. I become the benchmark.

Patrick:  Star this, guys. It’s probably the most important thing in the interview. If you’re in the position of educating someone, you largely get to determine their outlook on all further things in that space. If you are already someone’s trusted expert on the subject at issue, it really isn’t even a sales discussion anymore. You sit down at a table and you’re just talking. It’s just the natural outgrowth of the discussion you would have earlier.

If we talked for the last couple of weeks, and I’ve explained why A/B testing is a win, and told you how I would structure an A/B test routine for your company, and how you can make your organization do more A/B testing and whatnot; if the CEO sits down with me and opens a page on his laptop, and starts saying, “What would you do on this?”

Then that is suddenly a sales discussion, but nobody at the table perceives it as being a sales discussion. It’s a foregone conclusion. I’m winning that engagement.

Brennan:  I tend to be naturally shy. If you don’t want marketing your freelancing business to be like selling a car, this approach will make it so, like you said, it’s not even sales anymore. It’s then you’re figuring out the details of a transaction, and the need to convince has already been done, and that’s really what sales is, right? You’re convincing somebody to buy your product.

The sales has already been done through valuable material that you’re giving away to these prospective clients, and that has worked wonders for my business.

Patrick:  Same here.

One of the make‑my‑bones steps for my consultancy was publishing so much on my blog about the sort of things I do, first for myself and then on behalf of clients.  My field is largely “ways that engineers can improve marketing outcomes”.

I have a certain amount of expertise in that area, and I am seen as having a certain amount of expertise in the area. (Note: This are, sadly, not co-extensive. There are many underappreciated geniuses who couldn’t sell an engagement to save their lives, and many poseurs. Don’t be either.)

It makes the sales discussion radically easier. It’s not even sales at that point. It’s more like order taking. They’ve come to the decision that they want to do this. You are the natural person that they would want to do this with, because they trust you and feel a bit of soft social obligation to you. If you have a favorite teacher from college, wouldn’t you want to do business with them, versus a random person who happens to be in the same industry?

Also, you’ve so informed their thinking about this subject that you’re the benchmark everybody else up against.

I’ve occasionally won engagements over highly regarded firms in the industry. I have asked, “I’m just curious, can you help me help out my business here? Why did I win engagement over competing firm X?” Clients have literally said, “Oh yeah, we had a talk with that guy, but he kept disagreeing with you.”

Keith:  Oh, that’s awesome.

Patrick:  But the only person who’s going to agree with me 100 percent of the time is me, so that literally means that I’m the only person that can get hired for this job.

“Oh, that’s awesome.”

Brennan:  Well, here’s the thing. Patrick, imagine cloning yourself, and this clone has none of the comments you put on Hacker News, none of the blog posts you’ve written, none of the podcasts, and they are offering the same exact service as you are. The amount of work they would need to put in to get probably the kind of rates you justify would be…

Patrick:  It would never happen.

Brennan:  … A mountain.

Patrick:  I want to clarify this, because this is something that Hacker News‑ers sometimes get wrong. When I say “Internet famous,” that is always tongue-in-cheek . They’re the right couple of thousand people, but only a couple thousand people know who I am. The fact that I have that Internet reputation is not the sole driver of the consulting business.

One of the main things that drives the consulting business is the “hush hush” discussions between CEOs on what happened the last time I got hired for an engagement. Getting in the door at the first couple of high profile companies was helped, quite a bit, by having a bit of a reputation due to publishing/speaking/whatnot.  But these days, people hire the results, they don’t hire the comment history.

Not Internet famous and don’t have a portfolio of results? There are ways you can get around that, for example, by networking. But Keith and I live out in Ogaki, in Gifu prefecture, which is a place that we love, but it’s kind of the middle of nowhere relative to tech companies with 10 to 100 million dollars in revenue, and there are not really solid options for networking with… We’re not exactly rubbing elbows with Joel Spolsky on one hand and Paul Graham on the other here in Ogaki.

So to the extent that networking matters, and guys, capital N, capital M, “Networking Matters,” it’s Internet participation was a major greaser of the wheels that got it going. After and concurrent with that, being able to execute and actually deliver the kind of results that my clients are hoping for is majorly important.

Reputation alone is not sufficient. If I routinely failed to execute my career would fold up like a origami crane, but happens to be case that at least some companies working with me get a substantial amount of value out of that.

BTW, every time the company gets a substantial amount of value out of it, I immediately attempt to get a public case study out of that. You can do this, too, and your customers will often be inclined to say Yes if you present it correctly.

I never ask clients, “You should totally help me get my next 10 engagements.” It’s typically, ” Why don’t we get a mutual win here out of talking about this, such that you get your name in front of my audience, and and I get my name in front of your audience, attached to a number, like, say, I made you a million dollars.”

That sort of thing works.

[Patrick notes: This works even if you have lower profile clients. Even if your largest client is a pizza shop, then do an interview with the owner on how pleased they were about your new website and how often people are ordering the special promoted on the homepage. You can climb the ladder up from pizza shops to insurance agents to real estate brokers to bank branches to…]

Keith:  You say that it is for getting your clients. It is a mutual win, because let’s take WP Engine, for example. I had worked with WP Engine before you started using them, and we had actually talked about that a lot, and I had never seen them on Hacker News until you blogged about them. And now I see them once every week or once every two weeks or so. They get mentioned for something. So there is a huge positive‑feedback loop for getting the case studies up there.

Patrick:  [Patrick notes: Keith just scared me here, because it is easy to listen to that and hear “Hire Patrick, it gets you on Hacker News” rather than “Hire Patrick, the article about you making a million dollars will get you on Hacker News”, and I want to sell results rather than attention.]

I enormously respect the Hacker News audience, so I want to clarify: I have never and will never take money for placing somebody on Hacker News. I do generally talk about things that are interesting to me on my blog. Particularly when clients give me the go‑ahead for actually talking about what we did and how it worked out, I will often blog about that. [Patrick notes: I, similarly, want those posts to rank not because they’re attached to my name but because I’m going to go in-depth about strategies and tactics which actually worked and which are generalizable to other businesses, like those of HN readers.]

There are also lots of clients who we don’t talk about their stuff publicly, either because there’s nothing, really, to talk about [Patrick notes: I can only write “We did an A/B test and it increased sales by 2%” so many times], or, surprisingly for me, given my philosophical take on the matter, some businesses treat my advice as strategic information which they don’t want their competitors to have.

I’m generally a “share all the information and the pie gets bigger” kind of guy. If you’re competing with Bingo Card Creator, you can literally pull an entire business plan for that off my blog, and a couple of people have done that .Some of my consulting clients are not quite copacetic with that kind of open‑source philosophy regarding core business initiatives.

My single biggest win ever for a client will never see the light of day. This saddens me.

This is one of the reasons why I don’t just do consulting full‑time. I was paid wonderfully for that engagement, and it was great fun. We created a lot of value. The world is better off for it having happened.

But there is a clenched fist in my stomach right now. I really want to tell you what we did, because it was awesome, and I can’t. They bought my soul. OK, they didn’t buy my soul. It’s just professionalism/NDA/I want to work in this town again, and as a result, I can’t talk about it. But I really want to talk about it.

I do consulting. I like consulting. I don’t want to have consulting be the focus of my business for forever. Right now, though, consulting is the center of gravity of my business. That’s what I make more money doing. It makes a heck of a lot more money than Bingo Card Creator.

I don’t talk about my Appointment Reminder revenues publicly, for a few reasons. That could be its own episode.

Man, I’m talking way too much about me..

Keith:  We can beep you out. Just beep out every other words.

Patrick:  Let’s talk about something more interesting than me.

Keith:  Yeah, we’re at the two‑hour mark. So yeah, why don’t we start wrapping this one up. I actually just want to mention one more time: Brennan, I just want to say it was great you coming on the show and talking about this. I also want to say, I read your book. I know Patrick read it as well. The book is $39.

Patrick:  I paid for a copy.

Keith:  I paid for mine as well. Yeah, we did not get comped on this. And it was worth every penny.

Patrick:  Man, I tell everybody charge more. But I got to tell you, Brennan, charge more…

Keith:  Charge more. Charge more.

Patrick:  Because it’s absolutely ludicrous. Literally, the value proposition is you’re going to take this and double your freelancing rate. Presuming that your freelancing rate is already above $50 an hour, you’re going to make this back in your first hour. It’s totally a no‑brainer. You should buy it before Brennan gets sane.

Keith:  Right. Yeah. He’s actually mentioned he’s going to raise the price, so before he does that, you should go buy it. And honestly, in the first five pages, I had three new ideas. Right? I got so much value out of that book, and it was only $39. It’s just a no‑brainer. Go buy it, honestly.

Patrick:  Brennan, you want to give out the URL for listeners? We’ll put it in the show notes as well.

Brennan:  Absolutely. It’s http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com. It’s a very simple, straightforward website.

Yeah. We could talk another two hours on pricing info products. But unfortunately, books have a range attached to them that people are willing to pay because it’s a book, regardless of what they get out of it.

There are a lot of things that I want to do now that I have an audience of people who have, really, the same world view. They’re consultants and they feel they’re undercharging, just like I feel I am undercharging with the book.

And there’s a lot, I think, of value that I can deliver to them, especially since I’ve gone from being a freelancer to, at my peak, having a consultancy of 10 employees. The current lifetime value of these purchasers is $39. But as an aside, there’s a lot more that I think I can give people that will mutually benefit both sides of the equation.

Patrick:  Absolutely.

Brennan:  I do think, possibly even before the podcast is released, that the cost of the book will go up.

Keith:  Well, give them a special price for just this podcast, then.

Brennan:  Patio11 is the coupon code, which will get you the book for $39.

Keith:  Very nice.

Brennan:  We’ll keep the price for the podcast.

Patrick:  I love talking to small businesses, because we can totally make a decision like that without talking to somebody.

Keith:  Brennan, don’t you have to talk with your suppliers and your distributors and everyone about that? You can just make that decision right there?

Brennan:  No, I don’t.

Patrick:  I don’t know if the CEOs are going to approve that, and you have to run it by marketing first. Is that messaging on‑brand? And do we have rights to the “patio11″ name? Maybe we should circle Legal in on this. Let’s get in a meeting.

Brennan:  But no, seriously. I’m extremely passionate about this because, for the first two and a half years, really three years, I charged really low. And the word “free” is in freelancing, and people become freelancers because they want some degree of freedom.

And unfortunately, when you’re trading in a 40‑hour‑a‑week job for a 40‑hour‑a‑week contract that makes you maybe a little bit more but not much compared to your prior life as a salaried employee, you’re not going to get any noticeable freedom. Sure, you can say you own your own company, but at the end of the day, you’re still working full‑time and making not much more than you used to make.

So that’s really what inspired me to really put the pen to paper and get this book out there.

Keith:  It’s a great book, Brennan. It was really good to read.

Brennan:  Thank you.

Patrick:  Awesome podcast as well, I think. Especially, even folks who have no interest in either the marketing of info products or the consumption of info products, go back to the sections on consultancy, as there are some really core stuff there for taking your business to the next level. So, Brennan, thanks so much for making the time and talking to us for almost two hours now. Yeah. So, let’s see. Next time, we will have a different special guest, hopefully, probably within about a month from now.

Keith:  Hopefully, yeah.

Patrick:  So thanks so much, everybody, for sticking with us with this podcast. Please drop Keith or I an email with what you liked, what you didn’t like, and how we can make this better for you.

Keith:  And everyone, honestly, go buy Brennan’s book. No‑brainer. The coupon code is patio11. Good for $39.

Brennan:  I don’t know how to set up coupon codes. I’ll do it before the podcast comes out.

Keith:  Yeah, the podcast will probably be a week or two before it gets up, knowing our schedule.

Patrick:  Well, all right. Thanks, everybody, and we’ll see you next time.

Keith:  All right. Take care, guys.

Brennan:  Bye.

Keith:  Bye.

[Patrick notes:

Easily clickable links:

DoubleYourFreelancingRate (use coupon code “patio11”)

Patrick’s course on Hacking Lifecycle Emails launched after this podcast was recorded but before it was released. A later post will cover the business aspects of that. If you run a B2B SaaS business, it is worth a look. (Some of it can be adapted to a consulting practice, as mentioned by Brennan during our discussion about drip email campaigns, but the ROI isn’t nearly as obvious as it is for those of you doing B2B SaaS.)

Want to get a weekly(ish) email for me about the business of software?  Sign up here.  You’ll also immediately get a 45 minute video on improving the onboarding experience of your software, which — let me use a favorite expression — prints money for many of my clients and confidants.]