Today we’re having a crazy interview, but in the best way. We’ll be talking to Julia Kelly, she’s a caricature artist, and the first one we’ve had on the show. She also has a degree in Accounting, so she loves the numbers side of things. We go through how she and her team charge hundreds…
This week on the Business of Freelancing Podcast I am very pleased to welcome Ed Gandia to the show. Ed is the “go-to” guy when it comes to high end freelance writing. In a time where commoditized writing is far too frequent, Ed has mastered finding a niche for yourself and selecting only those clients who will…
Value-based pricing is all the rage. “Ditch hourly!” and “Sell on value!” are stock responses on just about any Q&A thread on freelancer pricing — and these are themes I’ve written about here for the last decade. But longtime students of mine are quick to point out that I don’t personally always value-price my consulting. In my pricing course, I encourage many…
This week I sat down with Scott Yewell to talk about how he recently closed his first six-figure project. Scott’s a partner at Blackfin Media, who for the last 14 years has been building small ($1-10k) website projects. A few months ago, Scott joined my Consultancy Masterclass and made a lot of changes. He walked away with the class…
As I’ve been working my way around the Internet this summer teaching the fundamentals of the DYFR framework, I almost always end up getting asked the same question from people after I describe my method of writing proposals: What if I can’t guarantee my client a specific return-on-investment (ROI)? A quick refresher if you’re new: One…
Most articles on the web that talk about small business cash flow or money management or whatever else tend to focus on one thing: “spend less.” Often the advice is around the importance of saving money (duh!) or reducing the number of lattes you drink daily (silly). This is not that sort of article. Today I…
Whenever I tell people about how I stopped caring about what other people were charging, and am now charging my clients 10x what I was charging just a few years ago, I’m almost always asked the same question: “How do you find clients who will pay that?” The right response really should be, “What are…
“Everything is negotiable. Whether or not the negotiation is easy is another thing.” The problem with selling time is that the buyer knows margins are high. When I ran my consultancy, I was constantly pressured to negotiate down our rates. Our formula was pretty simple: We had a client rate, and then we had what…
This is the Freelancing Minute for Friday, February 14th (Valentine’s day!) 2014. When you’re creating a proposal, it’s important to contextualize our offer (what we’re building or doing) with the problem and the solution. In this short clip, I seek to define the differences between the problem, the offer, and the solution.
A few days ago, I got an email from a new student of the January Masterclass. He’s been talking with a prospective client and after applying a lot of what we covered in some private coaching sessions, he was able to figure out that this client stands to make at least $100k a year after…