(This is a guest post by Jonathan Stark, a speaker at the upcoming Double Your Freelancing Conference. Don’t have your ticket yet? Buy your ticket while they’re still available and join Jonathan and 13 other speakers in Norfolk, Virginia, this September 16th – 18th)
In 2005, I was making a little over $90,000 USD annually as the VP of a boutique software development firm. It was a good company and I loved my fellow employees, but I was miserable. I spent most of my time arguing about invoices with clients, hounding developers to log their hours, and responding to RFPs with estimates that almost always turned out to be low.
Then one day everything changed. In a flash, I saw with total clarity that billing clients by the hour was hurting me, my company, and our clients. It was the source of just about every problem that we faced as a company.
Best of all, I saw an alternative: value-based pricing. I left the hourly firm, set up my own consultancy, and in the first year I doubled my income using value-based pricing. This year, I’m on track to do triple what I made by the hour. All while working with better clients, on more interesting problems, with lower labor intensity, and almost zero administrative overhead.