hosted by Brian ClarkLet’s face it – client work can be demanding and even frustrating. But the level of suck goes up exponentially when you aren’t getting paid enough … or at all.
Today we’re chatting with Brennan Dunn about how to get paid faster, get paid more reliably, and never need to worry about whether or not that invoice you sent out will arrive before the rent is due.
Brennan also shares tactics he used to win five figure-a-week contracts, and how that propelled him from being a solo freelancer to running a multi-million dollar agency.
We’ll talk about the wisdom of retainers and of presenting the client with your own contract. One juicy tip comes up on how to deal with getting stiffed for creative work when you didn’t have a contract. Plus, the simple genius of invoicing more often and stopping work when the money stops.
The Show Notes
- Free “Charge What You’re Worth course
- The Definitive Guide To Getting Paid As A Freelancer
- Double Your Freelancing
Transcript
Paid in Full: How to Change More and Collect On Time
Brennan Dunn: Hey Guys, I’m Brennan Dunn and I help freelancers and consultants be better at running their business. And I am unemployable.
Voiceover: Welcome to Unemployable, the show for people who can get a job, they’re just not inclined to take one — and that’s putting it gently. If you’re a freelancer or solopreneur, Unemployable is the place to get actionable advice for growing your business, improving your processes, and enjoying greater freedom day to day. To get the full experience, register at no charge at Unemployable.com. You’ll get access to upcoming webinars and more. That’s Unemployable.com.
Brian Clark: Hey there, Everyone, welcome to Unemployable. I am Brian Clark, your host, and today we are talking about getting paid with our very special guest Brennan Dunn. How are you, sir?
Brennan Dunn: I’m good, Brian. How are you?
Brian Clark: I’m doing all right. Summer’s coming to an end. Kids going back to school.
Brennan Dunn: Officially done here, yeah, dropped both of them off at school this morning.
Brian Clark: You have that sound of relief. I know you love your kids, but I understand, because you’ve got to get them back to school to get your life back.
Brennan Dunn: Well, it’s not only that. Beginning of school for me is kind of like New Year’s where that’s when I get all optimistic about my schedule and getting stuff done. And my wife and I over the weekend, we did this big planning thing about daily routine both at home and with my business and so on, so I’m excited.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently. Everyone with kids, you love them to death, but it’s time to get back to work.
It’s interesting what you said, because I’ve always done this when it comes to work. I still have a semester mentality. In September, you hit it hard until Christmas and then you take a little break and then you hit it hard until summer. Except this summer, I hit it hard the whole time and I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
Brennan Dunn: Yeah, my business, it’s very much tied to the girls’ school schedules.
Brian Clark: I think that’s why.
Brennan Dunn: My working hours are basically when they’re at school, I’m working. And when they’re not at school I’m not working. Not many people are able to spend that much time, I guess, with their kids. And that’s I think one of the benefits of being so unemployable.
Brian Clark: Absolutely.
Brennan Dunn: I’ve been able to set up this way of working that supports the life I want to live.
What Is Your Background?
Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I agree 100%. Okay. But if we’re going to have that freedom and that life, we have to get paid from what I understand. You have some really great material on your site, a lot of great knowledge, a lot of great experience.
Tell us a little bit about your background. As I understand it, you started out freelancing and you evolved into more of an agency dial, and then also you help other freelancers.
Brennan Dunn: Yeah, so what happened was, I think like most of us, I had a very well-paying full-time job. And I had every intent to just keep growing. And the company, I started out kind of just a generic junior developer, and then within a few months, was basically running the technology department. And I had every intent to stay with the company and help it grow.
But then my wife and I, well, my wife specifically, got pregnant and we had always agreed that when we did have kids, we’d move back up to where her family was, up in Virginia. At the time, we were in Florida, so we had to move. I didn’t know any businesses up here. And the company I was at wasn’t very — I mean, this was before remote working became popular, I guess.
I couldn’t carry on with that job, so I kind of was forced into freelancing, although at the time I didn’t really know what it was called. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just knew that there were companies — most of them on the West Coast — that I knew the founders who were willing to pay me an hourly rate to hack on their code.
I kind of accidentally got started freelancing, and within about a year, things got to the point where I had enough referrals coming in that I could either turn away work or I could grow. I had no business background. I’d never managed anyone really in my life. And I decided to grow.
So, I hired people. At first, it was the safe route where I had subcontractors who I paid a percentage of what I was billing them out at. But, eventually, it got to the point where I opened up an office. I converted my contractors to employees. Within a few years after that, we had gotten to 11 employees.
That experience growing that agency, that’s how I learned everything. I was totally green when it came to business management. And I like to say that was my MBA. I learned the hard way how to run a company, how to look at profit and loss statements, how to deal with all that kind of stuff.
This kind of ties into what we were talking about earlier. The issue though was I was working all the time. I had this great office and we were growing and we had clients all over the world and I was traveling all the time, or I was in the office from nine to six. I’d come home, the kids would be either in bed or about to be in bed.
I realized I had created a job for myself in a way. Yeah, I was on paper the owner of this company, but I was commuting 30 minutes each way to get to the office downtown. I was there all day, every day. And I didn’t set things up in a way that allowed me to cash out on the fact that I owned the business.
So, I kind of got bit around that time by the bug of wanting to sell my own products. As an engineer, we built SaaS products for other people, for clients of ours, so I decided to build one myself. Instead of building stuff for other people, why not do it for myself?
I started a company called Planscope while I was running this agency. It’s a project management tool for people like me — agencies, freelancers and so on. And that did pretty well.
I quickly got to the point where I realized I couldn’t run an agency and run a SaaS company at the same time. So, I exited my agency. I had my business development person basically take over the company, and I completely left it. So, I kind of went back to working from home and now I was full-time on the SaaS.
What ended up happening from that was a lot of my customers would write in with support questions that had nothing to do with how to use the product or bugs they found or anything like that. They would ask me questions like, “Do you have any advice on pricing? or “Did you have any thoughts on how I could get clients?
So, I started writing about that. At first, it was just email communication with my customers, but it got to the point where I realized – well, there were two things.
First off, I realized that there was more that I could provide that was beyond project management software. I knew that there was other stuff I could provide to people. I learned a little about getting paid, about pricing, about marketing and sales and everything else when growing this company.
But, on top of that, the main reason that people quit Planscope or cancelled their account was, “I got a full time job or ran out of work, something along those lines. And I realized, “Well, if I could help them not run out of work, they’d stick around as customers longer.
So, that’s how this whole training side of my business came to be. And four plus years into the training and software business, it’s been really better than ever.
Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m having so many conversations lately with people who went on a journey that makes me feel a little bit better. Because I have this period of time, 2001 to 2005, where I made plenty of money and was growing and was miserable.
Brennan Dunn: That’s exactly how it was.
Brian Clark: This was the pre-Copyblogger days. Then once I’d figured out, “Okay, what do I want to do? What am I good at? What am I not good at? Don’t do that stuff anymore. How can you help people based on what your core assets are? And, right, everything got better — more money than ever and less unhappiness which is funny, because often we don’t feel like we can allow ourselves to do what’s going to make ourselves happy, which is ridiculous, of course.
Brennan Dunn: Yeah, I think there’s this idea (and I felt this) that happiness was having an office and having a team of employees. And, I mean, that’s all true, that all can be true.
But for me, I realized that what looked like success and what looked like happiness on the outside was really I just created another job for myself. I really didn’t have the freedom that I thought I was enabling by starting a company. I was instead kind of like an employee, but with all the risk of actually owning the business.
Start with a Contract
Brian Clark: Exactly, double bad. So, getting into this whole getting paid theme, the ex-attorney in me has to start with this: are you still running into people that you are helping out (freelancers or contract or consultants or whatever the case may be) who are not using contracts?
Brennan Dunn: Oh, yeah. I mean, a lot of people, they’re just so happy that anyone’s willing to pay them. They just have a verbal agreement, I guess, or a lot of people think that, “Well, my email correspondence is enough. Like, “That could be used in the court of law if I had to, which again, I’m not a lawyer. There might be some truth to that.
But the way I look at it, if you want to look like a professional to anybody you’re working with, have a contract. To me, it’s a no-brainer. But yeah, a lot of people, they just handshake agreements.
Brian Clark: That is not good. Even though I have shaken…
Brennan Dunn: Even people who are like, “Why am I not getting paid on time? or “Why am I always stressing out about cash flow?
Brian Clark: Well, here’s something interesting and you probably know this. If you are any sort of creative freelancer, you’re a writer or a designer, a coder, anything subject to copyright, if you don’t have a written agreement with the client that also contains a work for hire provision, they don’t own your work.
Brennan Dunn: Just licensing, right?
Brian Clark: Yeah, so don’t do this. Start with a contract. But if you find yourself in a pinch and you’re not getting paid, because you don’t have a contract, then that’s your main leverage. “Okay. Well, you don’t own that design. You don’t own the content. You don’t own the code. Generally, you’ll get paid in exchange for that work, for hire provision.
But the smarter way to do it is to say, “Hey, here’s my standard agreement. Of course, for you to own my work, you need this written document and there you go. You’re going to get it signed every time. But the reason why you use your form, of course, is because you keep it simple, you keep it clear and you dictate how you get paid, right?
Brennan Dunn: Yeah. I think a lot people just go into freelancing directly from being an employee. And when you’re an employee somewhere, you don’t bring your own employment contract.
Brian Clark: No, not at all.
Brennan Dunn: That’s all given to you. I think that’s really the root of a lot of the issues I see with, especially, new freelancers where they don’t really take ownership of the fact that they’re now running a business. And instead, they just treat things the same way they would treat getting hired at a company or something where it’s very skill-driven, “Here’s my resume.
But they don’t really think about the level of professionalism I think that comes with having a structured way of selling and onboarding a client. And part of that selling and onboarding is having what I call a “Master Services Agreement, but a contract or whatever you want to call it.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I noticed somewhere on your site that I think you may provide that form of agreement you use to people who take one of your courses, I think.
Brennan Dunn: With Double Your Freelancing Rate, I do include, because I went all out. I mean, I wanted airtight, so I actually spent $13,000 on a law firm to prepare my Master Services Agreement.
Brian Clark: I can tell you that’s a little steep, but it better be a good contract.
Brennan Dunn: Yes, I might’ve gotten ripped off to a degree, but it’s pushed through millions of dollars of work and I’ve never had an issue with it.
Brian Clark: Yeah. No, when it comes down to it, it’s a level you were at with your agency. Most freelancers I think can get away with maybe a two-page. It’s certainly better than going out there with nothing.
Brennan Dunn: And what I tell people… A lot of people who, for instance, will get Double Your Freelancing Rate, which includes the contract, I tell them, “Bring it to your lawyer, still get it signed off by them, have it be amended for maybe whatever local laws might apply, especially if you’re out of the United States or somewhere else. But it’s so much better, I think, than just having a blank slate and saying — because let’s face it, most of us aren’t doing anything really unique when it comes to the legalities around how we work.
Brian Clark: Yeah, the legal issues related to freelancing are tried and true and well-tested. And people are afraid to engage a business attorney, because they think it’s going to be so expensive, but not really in most cases. The expensive part is when things go wrong and you don’t have the proper documentation.
Brennan Dunn: Well, it’s like insurance. Everyone always is like, “I don’t want to pay for insurance. And then they get a vast medical bill and they wish they had it.
Recurring Revenue
Brian Clark: Yeah. So, in addition to having a contract, I’m always hammering on freelance writers who are doing content marketing services for clients to get a particular type of contract, which is called a “retainer contract. Because content marketing, it doesn’t end. It’s not a campaign, it’s not just website copy. You’re supposed to be doing it month after month. And that’s how you pitch it. Therefore, you get what I consider the holy grail.
Back when I was a solo attorney, which was my first successful gig after quitting the job, I was really good at marketing. I got a bunch of clients, so I just picked the ones that gave me the most stable, simple work I could, because I was working on another business. But even if this is your main gig, retainer agreements have to be regarded a step above piecemeal work. I think you would agree.
Brennan Dunn: Yeah. So, I actually have a retainer agreement for recurring contracts. But then you also have my statement of work, which is usually for transactional work like, “We’re going to build you a website and that’s it.
But yes, I don’t know if we want to dive this far into the rabbit hole, but I love recurring retainer work, because it’s the closest thing that I think a lot of people who are ultimately selling their time have to that assurance that comes with having a SaaS product that a thousand people pay $20 a month for or something. Because it’s predictable revenue, which most transactional work, like building these one-off websites, doesn’t actually give you.
Brian Clark: Yeah, no, absolutely. Yes, I guess recurring revenue is the holy grail, whether you’re in software, membership sites, but clients as well. And I’m always trying to impress upon people: find a way to improve your business model to where you get paid every month and quit having to hunt and gather constantly, which can be entirely too stressful.
Brennan Dunn: I always tell people too, it really depends on the kind of work you do. But usually retainers that lend themselves to optimization or insurance are easily sold.
What I mean by that is optimization could be creating new content each month or AB testing their website or managing their newsletter or something like that. And insurance could be more, “We’ll manage all your backups. We’ll make sure that your WordPress is always up-to-date and everything like that. Those are things that lend themselves naturally to some sort of recurring model.
Brian Clark: Or just being available at any time.
Brennan Dunn: Smart person with domain knowledge who has access to your server. I mean, that’s valuable in its own right.
What’s the Story About the Non-Paying Client?
Brian Clark: Yep, absolutely. Again, going back to the legal days, you can have the best contract in the world and you can be entitled to win, but if someone doesn’t pay you, even though you can sue them and you can win in court, and you can collect attorney’s fees, it is not a fun thing.
I know you have a particularly painful story involving about $80,000, and a client who wasn’t paying you. Tell us a little bit about that one.
Brennan Dunn: Yeah, it was actually a little more than that. What ended up happening was the company was growing and I think at the time of this client, we had maybe eight employees. And half of us were booked out to this one client, they were a startup out of Boston. They had money and they needed this social network built quickly. So, we dedicated four people to it.
I mean, we were billing — I think our rate at the time was about $8,000 a week per person. So, the bills were going up, all right. And they were getting paid. We had a net 30 payment policy, which is pretty typical. Which means we send an invoice and we should be getting paid within 30 days. But we invoiced bi-weekly. So, we invoiced every two weeks, which meant at any given time we could have two invoices out.
What ended up happening was we were a few months in, they paid us a good amount of money and then an invoice passed over 30 days. So, I just assumed, “Maybe these invoices aren’t being mailed, they’re going to their inbox. Maybe it just got lost and I need to remind them. So, I emailed the client and he replied back saying… well, he phone-called back saying like, “I need to have a heart to heart. We actually don’t have the money yet. We’re fundraising, so that we can pay these invoices. We should be raising some money hopefully within a few weeks.
But he was like, “You need to understand, Brennan. I’ve put my whole house, my life on this business. I could lose my house, my kids are in school. I might need to pull them out of the private school they’re at. It was basically the story that is true of any entrepreneurial endeavor. I mean, there’s a degree of risk and reward.
What he was attempting to do was say, “Look, I’m risking a lot, ergo, you should risk a lot too. But how I had to reply to him was like, “Look, you have everything to gain if this does well. But this is a client-vendor relationship. We’re providing a product and we need to get paid for that product. This isn’t an equity deal or anything like that.
The fact of the matter is, or a long story short, we ended up with a little over a hundred thousand dollars in invoices that were outstanding that we knew we wouldn’t get. On top of that, we had to halt everyone who was currently working. And that meant there was an opportunity cost there where we didn’t have anything at the moment for them to work on, because we assumed for the next few months, they’d be working on this project.
I think he was sincere in the fact that he was actively fundraising. But I’d been in the business long enough at that point that I knew that these things don’t happen overnight.
So, that was the most stressful time probably of my life, because I had payroll to make. I factored these invoices into the cash flow that would make that payroll possible. Here I now have half my team on the bench. It was really, really stressful. This is actually what instituted us switching to weekly billing, switching to an upfront model where we got paid in advance.
Because what I learned from this was I can’t add debt collector to my job titles, to my list of responsibilities. I’m running a business, I’m in charge of booking my team. I’m in charge of managing projects at a high level and everything else. I don’t have time to chase money around. And I think that, again, it’s exciting when you sell a contract, when you sell a new project and you see all these dollar signs and you get a big fat deposit check.
But what ends up happening often, not often but sometimes, is you run into a situation like the one I went into, maybe on a smaller scale, that can really stress you out, really cause you to reconsider whether you should be doing this in the first place, and a lot of other things. That was to me the big eye-opener, the big realization that I just can’t be perpetually optimistic about my clients and their ability to pay me.
Brian Clark: Did you end up writing that off?
Brennan Dunn: So, it’s funny, I called my lawyer and since you have a background in law, I’d love to hear your take on this. But he basically said honestly, “You have an agreement between a company and your company. There’s no personal backing of any sort. He basically said, “The best we could do would be to write a letter to their company bank and ask to get paid. But he said, “If they don’t have the money in their account, there’s nothing — you’re looking at a heavy legal battle. If the company’s bankrupt, they’re out of money, what are you going to get? I mean, they protected themselves by becoming a company, a corporation.
Brian Clark: Yeah, you had a good lawyer, he gave you good advice. Because I’ve seen other attorneys take advantage of people and tell them, “Yes, you can win. But they don’t talk about collecting, how hard it is. You can get a judgment, sure. But if they declared bankruptcy, you’re out of luck. If they have no assets, you’re out of luck.
My advice for small business litigation, even when you’re on the right side, is don’t do it. And that’s more as a business person who used to be an attorney and who’s never sued anyone and who’s never been sued. Knock on wood. Because it is the most disruptive thing and it will ruin your life. And if you end up not getting anything anyway, why did you go through that? So, it can be a bitter pill. It really can.
Brennan Dunn: And it’s not going to pay your bills in the meantime.
Brian Clark: No, you’re better off going out and doing something positive and growing your business with the right type of clients and instituting, like you said, more frequent invoicing cycle, stop working as soon as you don’t get paid. All of those kind of just very pragmatic approaches to minimizing the damage that a non-paying client can do to you.
Brennan Dunn: Right, and like I mentioned, that’s why I changed our business model in a way that allowed us to mitigate as much risk as we could. And that meant shortening the payment window. It meant getting paid up front and a lot of other things that made it so we never had that issue again.
How to Charge More
Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. We’re getting a bit doomy and gloomy. Let’s talk about something fun like charging more. Yeah! Let’s do that.
Now, the best problem to have, I guess, is more clients than you can handle. And at that point, you either raise your prices or you scale up like you did, and that’s a choice in itself. But do you have other tips as far as raising prices outside of that scenario?
Brennan Dunn: Yeah, this is kind of my bread and butter advice that I like to dish out. And this is something that it took me a while to really get a handle on. This kind of relates to what I mentioned earlier in the interview where I talked about how a lot of us when we start working for ourselves, we don’t shift the way we think about the work we’re doing in a way that we should.
What I mean by that is I think a lot of us are used to selling ourselves based off of what we’re good at like, “I’m a freelance web designer, or “I’m a freelance copywriter or something like that. But, at the end of the day, that’s not why people hire us. No one cares about buying words or buying sentences. No one really cares about buying designs. They care about what those designs or words or whatever can do for their business.
So, typically what ends up happening is when you sell a contract, when you sell a project and you write a proposal, your proposal is typically something like some boilerplate background info about you and your company. A list of things you’ll do, like “Five blog posts on your website, kind of like a line item tally. And then something about how long it will take, what you’ll charge and then a signature line or something.
And that’s typically how we go about selling. It’s, “Here’s what I’ll give you. Here’s what it will cost. But the problem with that approach is if you’re selling words or you’re selling designs or you’re selling code, you’re selling something that is by definition a commodity. Copywriting is a commodity.
The issue with commodities is that, well, I’m sure a lot of us have faced this. Let’s say we’re trying to charge $100 an hour and a potential client says to us, “Well, I saw somebody on this website called oDesk that will do copywriting for $10 an hour or $8 an hour or $4 an hour. What are you doing differently? Why should I pay you 10x that?
A lot of us, I think, don’t really have a response to that. We don’t really know what to say, I mean, outside of maybe a cultural or a location thing. If we’re selling a commodity, why should somebody pay so much more to you versus your competition? So, that’s where this race to the bottom with commoditized work ends up playing out.
Provide a Solution
Brennan Dunn: One of the things I learned when growing this agency — it allowed me to be between my team who was doing the work and my clients who had the needs. And my mentality started shifting where I started to realize that no one was paying us. They weren’t cutting us five figure checks, because they liked code. They were paying us, because they needed some specific solution or they needed some problem solved. And we just started to focus entirely on that problem and solution.
I mean, the code was kind of accidental. The code just was the bridge that linked where they are now to where they needed to be. And we started selling a better tomorrow. We started understanding, “What would it mean for this problem to be solved for their business, and what financial implications would that have and what would that enable them to do? Maybe they could open up a new location or they could grow their team or something if this problem was solved.
When we went to pitch them, it would all be focused on that. It would be focused on, “Here’s what we’re solving for you. Here’s what impact it will have. Ideally, we did a thing where we could kind of guesstimate to the best of our ability what the financial payoff might be. “So, here’s a clear path to helping you make a million plus in revenue additionally this year.
And when we went to go quote our prices, we would anchor our costs, which would always be lower than that, against that upside, that potential payoff. We started selling an investment. It wasn’t like an expense of commoditized coding or commoditized design or whatever else. We started selling an investment product. And when we started doing that, it was easier for us to close deals.
People weren’t price shopping. Even though we were charging sometimes 10x, 20x, in some cases 50x more than our competition, we were the people selling a solution, whereas everyone else was usually just selling, “Here are some deliverables. And the client had to think, “Will these deliverables actually solve the problem that I have?
When we started addressing that problem directly, it was easier to close deals, we got more creative freedom. People treated us as consultants instead of just doers, which allowed our team to have more latitude in the work we did. And on top of that, we got paid more, which is always nice too. So, it just benefited everything.
Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s such an excellent advice. And I know better than anyone that a great writer is worth so much more than a mediocre writer. But most people don’t value writing at all. So, I advise freelance writers not to even position themselves as writers, which is always a bitter pill. But I’m like, “Look, they don’t want a writer. They don’t want words. They don’t want any of this. What do they really want? You know, figure it out. What’s the ultimate benefit?
It’s a solution. Like you said, position yourself as a solution provider, even though you’re going to go back to the office and write words.
Brennan Dunn: Everyone I’ve hired for my own business, to be honest, I’ve outsourced my writing. And the people that I’ve hired, I mean, most of them are my customers, so they kind of know how to sell me, I guess. But the people I hire end up, for instance, with Planscope, my software company, whenever I’ve needed anything done like a new marketing site, the person I ended up hiring, what she said was, “My only goal is to help you get more trials. That’s all I care about. So, whatever design, whatever writing needs to happen and make that happen, that’s my focus.
Whereas a lot of other designers might talk about just the aesthetics or something else. But here was somebody telling me, “Here’s how we can get you more trials. Here’s how my design will get more people to click that sign-up button and enter in their credit card info and kick off a trial.
Because I know if you can get 10 more trials a week, and say the average person is paying you $49 a month, even if just one of those closes, which is on the low end, but say just one of them were to close, that’s $50 a week in added monthly revenue, $200 a week in added MRR. That’s how she sold me. And she was selling me what I really wanted which was more customers instead of selling me design.
It’s funny, a good example of this is I recently did a video course earlier this year and I hired a videographer — again, one of my customers. And I was talking to somebody local who was going to film school and he was going to charge me something like $15 or $16 an hour to film and edit my video course. And it came out to be about six hours of material or six hours of final materials. So, it was a little like 10-ish hours of raw material.
I was perfectly willing to pay him $15, $16 an hour. And then I got a cold email from one of my customers who was a videographer and he sold me. I ended up hiring him instead of the local person. And he charged me upwards of $20,000 for six hours of video. So it was a lot more than the other person was asking for.
But what he did differently was, “Yes, I’m going to film and edit. Obviously, you need that done, but I’m going to direct it. When I’m filming, if you’re saying something that isn’t resonating with me, if you’re going down a rabbit hole that you need to get out of, I’m going to stop the recording and we’re going to start over, so that you can produce the perfect video course that will help people learn how to get better clients. Because that is why people are paying for it. And if we can do that, you’ll get more customers buying it. They’ll be happier. There’ll be more success stories coming out of it, which means it’ll be easier to sell in the future. And that’s how he sold me.
When I was looking at that, I was like, “Well, this is a no-brainer. He’s telling me exactly what I need instead of the other option, which was a lot cheaper but higher risk. “Just because I get filming and editing done, is it the right video being produced? Is it the right content being produced? So, that’s why I ended up going with David in this case.
Provide Value
Brian Clark: Well, just look at the value though there. You’re not trying to get the cheapest rate, you’re trying to get the highest outcome. And I think David focused on what was really important as opposed to price.
So often, I think people are skittish about pricing. They don’t feel worth it or whatever the case may be. But you can certainly become worth it simply by understanding what’s really happening here. What does this person really want?
Brennan Dunn: And there’s the degree of imposter syndrome that I think a lot of newer consultants and freelancers need to face. It’s easy to fall back and say, “Well, the market rate of it is this. Or if you were to hire an employee, basically their hourly rate would be this. And it’s easy to point to that and that’s why I think a lot of us charge based… We ask, “What is the going rate of a writer? Or “What is the going rate of a 500-word blog post? Instead of thinking, “What is the value that I can bring this business?
And the problem with that going rate mentality is it’s always this race to the bottom, this driving down of cost. And yeah, I mean, it’s something that when we started to focus on selling a solution, which sounds very enterprisey, sounds very dubious.
Brian Clark: No, it’s just human nature. Human beings want the benefit of something more than they want the thing. And that’s all you’re doing.
Brennan Dunn: And businesses pay for one of two things, typically. Either they want to make more money or they want to lose less money, so show them how you can help them do that. And then you start to become seen as an investment instead of an expense.
Brian Clark: Okay. Brennan has a lot of other great information on this topic. He has a free course called Charge What You’re Worth. Obviously, he has a lot of other paid courses as well you may be interested in. We’ll link all that up for you in the show notes.
Brennan, thank you so much for joining us today. Give a quick little blurb about your event. By the time this airs, you may have just finished it.
Brennan Dunn: It’s going to be on September 16th. So, I don’t know when this is coming out.
Brian Clark: So, how did your event go, Brennan?
Brennan Dunn: Well, future self says it went awesome. But it’s going to be good.
Brian Clark: Yeah, congratulations.
Thanks again for joining us, Everyone, and I hope you got a lot out of this. Lots of other great stuff from Brennan over at doubleyourfreelancing.com. Like I said, I’ll link that up for you or you could just type it in and head over there right now.
We will have more for you coming soon. Until then, keep going.
