Become a High Value Consultant

last week added talk with Chris doe founder and CEO of the future and blind and this was one of the most mind-blowing conversation ahead in a while and I want to share that conversation with you this video is longer than my usual videos but it is so jam-packed with value Chris is actually teaching me how to double my business by selling high value consultancy and it's just and he's busting through so many myths and thought thinks that I thought about how to run my business and so I think this this conversation is amazing if you've got the time please watch it all through the end I think you'll be mind blown as well hey Chris what's up thank you so much for for talking to me I've been like we we met - two months ago I think it was an epic Curren in Yosemite and it was first of all it was a pleasure to meet you but I was just like super inspired by your talk and he kind of really opened my mind when you discuss selling strategy and I was like you weren't asking people like who here makes $50 per hour $100 Brett friend I like pretty good with myself was like yeah I'm making 200 and then you were like who's making $50 $500 per hour it's like why aren't you selling strategy and getting paid for your thinking and so it kind of really made me think a lot and actually literally pushed my goals for this year which I don't think that I had really clear goals but after that I was like dude I gotta push myself to the next level right and that's kind of what I want to discuss with you and pick your brains about so let me real quick tell you my situation and why I'm trying to do kind of try and do so basically I'm I'm running two businesses so one of them is a product business which I run with partner developer partner which is online proposals for freelancers and we're bootstrapping that business we just got it off the ground last year and it's it's doing good but it's not enough to support us yet and so I'm doing freelance which I've been doing for like 15 years and that's been do been going great you know I've been doing 200k last year this year I'm looking at 300k so it's going really really good but phantasm yeah but it's also consuming like most of my time but I would say 85% of my time is consumed by that and since I'm working on multiple projects at the same time my my you know my ability to focus is really fragmented and I got a lot of context which because I got to take care of so many things at the same time and so what I really want to do I think is find a way to work with less clients bring them more value so I can charge higher prices and then allow myself more time to focus on my product business so this is really my goal but recently also talking with other people I've been actually thinking maybe I need to turn my freelance business into an agency and hire more people so that's been one thing because if I want to work with bigger clients maybe they want to work with an agency rather than a freelance so that's something that I've also considered but I'm very very much afraid of that going into hiring people and lowering my margins which are now obviously like as a freelancer working from home or like practically almost hundred-percent and so basically that's the position where I'm at right now so let me let me tell you like practically some things that I struggle with one okay I actually since since I saw you the last like two months ago I've actually taken action and sold a project it's a branding project and and charged over 5k for the strategy alone so that one great ingress still that client eventually came to me for the deliverables right they came for the design assets and stuff like that and I want to somehow get rid of doing the design deliverables and only selling the strategy okay that's not really why clients approach me right they come for the deliverables they see work in the portfolio and they want to get a website or they want to get a brand or they want to get an app or something like that and now like telling them I don't do those services anymore I only do strategy is not what they're looking for or again they might not even be the same clients right because I mainly work with startup companies and I now realized that I'm hitting their top budget and I might have to move to bigger type of companies who has larger budgets the second thing is I have one client at the moment which I am selling like thinking like consultancy but then I comfort for a day and so they want to pay me an hourly rate and I've asked them for my hourly rate and they were like okay that's super expensive we want to work with you on a regular how much is I how much is that by the way it's it's I I started with you know two hundred and fifty dollars per hour but there this is what I usually charge clients who are not based in Israel in Israel that's like super ultra high people people from the US can pay that but people in Israel it's the prices are lower so basically I'm charging something like a hundred and fifty now and but they were also like give us a discount because it's gonna be type of retainer but what I'm trying to say here is that a lot of times when I'm doing strategy people since they don't get deliverables they want to pay you by the hour which is totally against you know my religion of value pricing and so that's that's kind of a tough situation I think we're the struggling right now all right that was a lot to process if you see me looking down it's because I'm taking lots of notes that's awesome I'm moving into the consultative space right now so I'm gonna pretend like we're not recording or talking this is what I do when I do coaching right so I I do these one hour coaching things and you will have to figure out what you want to air for your audience okay I will air everybody thing you will like yeah okay well I'm gonna tell you right now I can help you I can help you and I want to write I want to tell you what some of the things I heard okay right so here's here's what you told me about one is you have a product business we didn't talk too much about that but the bulk of your income comes from freelancing but that's consuming all of your time exactly you forgot to mention to me your third business which is your YouTube channel and building up your personal brand so the reason I don't see you don't know the reason that is just because I've gotten to a position where it's not consuming a lot of my time and attention and it's kind of a byproduct of what I do and so it's like I don't feel like we need to talk about this I mean it's but here's what I usually do but I try to found that it's true that it's it's helped it's like a triangle of things who it is that pushes each other right and that's right but I just look at as a function of time and mental space so we we can't invent more time during the week and there are so many hours and and you're married and you have a kid you have two kids or one kid tickets you have two kids right so you have two kids so everything is carving out a little piece of your time and and your your mental space so we kind of have to just acknowledge that because unless tomorrow you say I'm going to quit doing the YouTube channel which I do not encourage you to do at all obviously then you have to say okay look I want to have time to do everything that is important to me in my life to do it well not to just kind of do it as an ad hoc to other things so here's what I wrote down in terms of your once what you want to do is have more time that's the most important thing that you want to have free time is everything because you can focus on different businesses you can think about new things that you can create you can spend time with your family and I see that in your videos too and you want to basically move away from the guy on the box and be paid to be a consultant to be paid for thinking so you want to be paid for the high level stuff and there's some challenges there you want to also build a passive income business model through through this productized business thing that you're developing right right and right now you don't have enough time to do that this is a dream of all creatives is to do something once really well and to make money from it for the rest of your life and it's a wonderful dream and it's it's not a dream if you know how to do it and lastly we mentioned a little bit about the YouTube channel that at some point the YouTube channel depending on your your life ambitions can exceed all other things including the product business that you're building who knows or at least it can support and complement the other things that you're doing that's what I heard right yeah okay now if you had to and and play along with me here because I'm gonna treat you like a client right now to teach you in essence so there's gonna be this whole meta thing right alright to teach you how I do what I do so that we can go away from hourly rates now I'm gonna ask you to define what success looks like for free time how many hours do you want to be working on or in your business a week and and when that would look like yes I feel like I have more of my free time back so right now how I thought about this is mmm-hmm I've divided my week into like 10 chunks so every day there is like morning session and afternoon session so there's 10 chunks at the moment and right now my product business is getting about one chunk so like half a day per week and then there are there are other stuff but I want it to be at least like at least five chunks like half of my week at least okay yeah perfect that's a great so how many hours do those 10 chunks represent a week what kind of hours are you working um I'm working usually like I get started on I get started 8:30 I work until around maybe lunch so that can be like twelve then I usually take lunch break and then I do like probably two to six so it's about three three four oh three four sessions three four-hour sessions twice a day I would say okay let's do the math for me so in a week how many hours are you working on a normal work week in America is like forty hours so when somebody's telling me they're working 80 hours I know like six times five thirty hours thirty hours thirty hour okay yeah but I don't need like lunchtime which by the way I already do business meetings for meetings with with other people so it is productive but it's I'm not I'm not counting this as work right so you're working roughly about thirty hours a week you're making $200,000 a year which is fantastic you're doing really well three hundred this year right right we're gonna get there we're gonna get there it's actually not as hard as you is you might think you're gonna get there and you'll probably shoot past that actually now I'm looking at this thirty hours so what would you only want to work 15 hours a week then looking your ideal scenario you're only gonna work 15 hours a week you're gonna make $300,000 so you have all this free time because that'd be yes that's right so that's perfect let me see so that's like that's wonderful fifteen fifteen hours per week how many weeks are there not really like 52 so maybe like they're not really you have to take some time on holidays you're probably really working eleven months out of the year so that's doing like forty forty eight eleven times four is forty four right forty or forty eight forty forty fourteen yeah at 660 so 300 K divided by 660 I gotta be making yeah five hundred dollars per hour that's what I gotta be me okay yeah and you have to be able to do that fairly consistently that can't be alone that other way yeah the rate has to be even higher exactly now we have that all right let's see here in terms of like doing high level thinking I think the the metric in terms of knowing that you've hit that and chief that is you're no longer the guy in the Box you go in you do the meetings you do strategy you discovery and as soon as that's done you might write up some things and somebody else is gonna take that from that point on to delivery right that sounds ideal but I am we're going for I do yeah yeah yeah but I yeah in the meanwhile I haven't find somebody who's gonna do the execution in anaphase I work really really fast and so sometimes it's just explaining somebody else the summary of everything I discovered and just doing the communication I would just can I can just do it myself and that's kind of no no problem yeah that's like it catch-22 that that's the curse of all otters it's cursed of all entrepreneurs is you can do faster than everybody else and the rationale was in the time it takes you explain it to somebody else and revise whatever you would have already finished at the right the first time so that's a trap like this week I had to talk with a friend and we were talking about hiring people and he told me he kind of did the math for me he said like if like hiring somebody is gonna take 20% to manage him 20 percent of my time to manage him he's got to be making it's like I have to hire two people to make three times the money to make it economically worthwhile otherwise hiring just one person I'm not gonna make enough money to justify you know hiring that person so right so you think so far what we're gonna bust through all these these beliefs and these so-called myths all right so we'll get to that all right now if you can really focus on your product business how much money do you think that that can generate for you annually if you were really building it the way it's supposed to my goal is to make like a multi-million dollar business out of it like and this is this is a really long-term play for me right I want to be loved the team around it I think we can create sure a brand a great product this is like a recurring revenue model so it's it can generate a lot of money I think I think so so let's put a timeline yeah yes so let's put a timeline on this say say in the next three years what kind of if you were doing what you're doing at the end of the three years how much money is this pullian I usually sorry yeah I just suck today about five years and I think that five years I was thinking about 300k monthly so that's gotta be like for me four million maybe yeah with a team of around maybe ten people okay yeah something like that okay and I'm gonna go down the list there I mean I'm not gonna ask you to kind of define the family time but basically from only working 15 hours a week really just working 15 hours when you're unplugging that's going to give you all the free time in the world yeah I don't have my family by the way right and amazed like work-life balance I'm doing good you know I'm weak I kids everyday you break this with them I a dinner with them I put them to bed so that's that that's not that's pretty figured out yeah I'm not like looking into working more or less by the way just just working more efficiently sure and then in terms of the YouTube channel which you don't put a lot of emphasis on in our dialogue here if you you were able to what would you want to where would you take the YouTube channel like what does success look like for you in terms of YouTube I think for me right now I do have a sponsor so it is making money for me but that wasn't the goal starting uh I wasn't like building this as a revenue model I think for me success would be if I have like a large audience and then perhaps I don't know I can travel and speak at events and stuff like that just that would be a great outcome from my perspective that's perfect yeah and and say that let's say put the same timeline in five years how big should your audience be by that point if it's also also by the way I do think it is a great marketing channel for my product business because it's exactly the market that is using my product and so and that's how we get a lot of traffic and rally manager so it works both ways for my youtube I want this year I want to reach 100k subscribers I don't know I never thought like three years ahead but let's just we're playing here so let's just think three three years from now maybe at 500 K and be at a million yeah perhaps yeah I used to think that I'm not I'm like too nice to be at a million because I'm not I'm never gonna be mainstream but you guys are actually proving to me that you can reach build numbers even though when you're in a niche that's amazing yeah the appetite is there we just have to build the audience amazing no I just thought that it's right cool million you got to be mainstream but I'm not mainstream I'm like professionally oriented nice but yeah well I mean you evolve and you grow and you response your audience and then you keep developing content and then you have hits and then you have misses and you focus more on the hits and then sooner than later your mainstream it just it kind of works like that I think right maybe I don't know yeah yeah okay or I don't know I used to never have ambitious for my youtube but this year I'm like hitting the gas on all like three of my businesses and so yeah I'm gonna hit that right well III think I'm in the same boat as you when we first started YouTube channel it's just kind of like a side thing and then I started to focus on and the more I focused on it the better it did and it started to sustain itself and a business model emerged and it's going to be where I spend most if not all my time that's amazing so that's bicycle and I'll share with you late later about how we did it what we're doing and the numbers were hitting - awesome okay so typically at this point now I want to talk to you about if I'm able to and I believe I can I believe I can get you there on all these fronts but let's just say let's go down one at a time that's the sign of value to each one of these if we can okay so if you're able to cut your work time from 30 to 15 how much value is that like what is how much is that worth to you like monetary value how much would I get if I can pay you now I don't know ten that I can guarantee the results if I can guarantee the result I mean basically I just want to first put a number on it yeah how valuable it is and then we can determine what's a fair price so my philosophy is I'm in the business of trying to create as much value for my clients as possible and then to be able to charge a fair percentage of that yeah that's reasonable now I'm getting mad about it but you're now doing - yeah you're doing to your client that's right I'm doing it to you right now I just bet I'll explain it a little bit yeah explain it a little bit it's good it's good okay so trying to quantify should an issue I think it's really hard it's really hard to quantify it like well good I can help you I'm not I'm not losing money because I'm making the same amount money I'm just making a lot more time and now but this time is an investment right because I'm not sure it's gonna pay itself back this year so but I think it's a long-term investment and so I don't know yeah tens of thousands of dollars for sure no I think it's worth more than that let me help you figure it out watch this yeah oh you're gonna hit you're gonna hit three hundred thousand dollars this year yeah so if you had to work half the time then you've already saved one hundred fifty thousand dollars so I'm gonna put $150,000 value on that right now I'm not saying I'm gonna charge you that way I mean how did you come up with this number watch this if it takes you 30 hours to earn $300,000 a year if for whatever reason I could like wave a magic wand or a genie comes out and you only have to work half the time you've done twice as much working half the time right yeah so that that means that I've saved you 150 that it's worth out a $50,000 you just take the half right okay good that makes sense all right amazing yeah $150,000 now here's the beautiful part that's just year one year two year three year four this is just something that keeps paying itself up but I just want to focus on the first year awesome all right now that you're getting your hands out of doing the making stuff if we can figure out how to build a team around you a process and and systematize all that stuff so you just go in you parachute in really just to do the critical thinking work how much would that be worth to you on an emotional level what kind of price tag would you put on that again I want to understand the question specifically so yes how much would it be worth if I like in my freelance business or in my product business in my freelance business to just come in your freelance business do they do the sale do they do all the high level thinking yeah oh man that would be amazing wouldn't it look if I could say I'm gonna build a team around you yeah and if I had to if I had to fly there and manage your team and coach them for three months or six months or whatever it took so I'm gonna say to them you guys don't bother Ron about any of this stuff he's gonna run it and we want to make sure he knows where he needs to be that he's prepped for his meetings and then as soon as he finishes doing what he - do we collect all that data and we handhold the client and deliver it just with just impeccable delivery smooth customer service if I could do that for you what would that be worth to you a lot yeah I think so yeah let's just put a number on it we're playing a game so let's just put a number on what you think that I think it's either the same amount or more because it's like yeah I'm making my business and autopilot and just keeping all the fun part you do all the best things that you want to do nothing none of the garbage exactly but by the way I wouldn't I want to put a caveat on that is that specifically to the type of projects that I'm doing right now mm-hmm a lot of it is is work together with them and so I'm not sure I'll be able to really hand it off to other people right but I'm telling you right and you can cuz that's what I do yeah okay I'm sure that's not an excuse it's until you learn another way you believe that's the only way Yeah right like kids who grow up poor don't know that they're poor cuz that's just their life until they step into a rich person's world or Wow yeah I didn't know what I didn't have it's so trite yeah so that's just your world and I'm just gonna be a little concerned I was just say 100 K all right okay if I can make all the garbage go when you just get to do the stuff that you love and from time to time if you want to get your hands on it that's fine too I'm just saying it's a choice now it's no longer a necessity yeah okay and we've helped you to grow your product business from whatever it is to four million dollars let's say to two million dollars so what's the Delta between where you're at now and getting it to two million dollars you're like 1 million and okay I'm gonna put like I'm gonna say a 1 million dollar valuation on that to help you to get to 4 ok yeah yeah ok I'm only family time alone the YouTube channel if we can help you to get there to 500,000 and you're you're going around traveling wherever you want to go because people love you they want to hear you speak and they're paying for everything they even paying you to right it goes so how much is that worth to you that's yeah yeah how much is that worth to me yeah obviously at least the amount they're paying before so right yeah so if you speak like three or four times a year yeah and they pay you ten K exactly to speak like every airfare and all that kind of stuff it's nice so that's at least worth 40 K all right so I'm put 40 K on that that's our lowest ticket item there okay so what I would do with you now is I would do the math I would add up 150 plus 100 that'd be 250,000 plus the million so that's 1.2 million and I'll just throw in the other thing for free so we're talking about a total value of 1.2 million dollars just in year one dude okay what you did there that was really that was all right swipe your square what is ever that square thing is and just wire me the money so 1.2 million dollars of value has been created and you know large consultancies they charge somewhere about 20% of the value that they create in the first year and so if I look that that's 240 K and I can solve that for you and if I tell you right now I don't need to guarantee it if I guarantee it the numbers gonna be really close to 1.2 million I see you understand so what I'm doing is there's some some implied risk and the higher the price of the solution the less risky it is for example if you're like Chris just write me one piece of paper and I'll figure it out Oh Mike Oh K that sounds like a lot of risk to you so I'll charge less for that I'll charge you only I don't know 20 K I'll write you a plan for 20 K and you can do that so we'll figure out some pricing options right so you understand like I'm trying to let you understand the value of this is that 1.2 and let's say I charge you a consulting fee a percentage of the value that you're gonna reap and it's gonna be $240,000 now I know kind of like where we need to be so if I can come up with some solutions I need a few days to think about this I'll write a plan for you and I'll come knock with a couple of pricing options some that'll be much less than 240 but one will start somewhere around there are you okay with me doing that are we in the game plan or for sure we're still in it now we're still in the idea talking here it's amazing mm-hmm it's amazing I again I'm still not sure how to imply it to my current situation don't worry about that just be in the moment yeah and a little amazing yeah sure you'll figure it out because I know you're a smart guy right do that all right so I'm gonna do that so I'm gonna go away and now I'm gonna stop and tell you kind of what all has been happening to you right now yeah now what I'm trying to do the first thing is I'm trying to create and understand your desired future state right like what would life be like if all this stuff would work because as entrepreneurs we sit down we think about all these things if I can just get somebody to manage my staff I would grow my business if I could launch a franchise thing my business would quadruple if I can fix my branding and then somebody else will buy it then I have this intellectual property I can do so what you're doing is you're uncovering the desired future state right okay and then the next step is you're trying to figure out what the success metrics are so what I'm doing is I'm surfacing a combination of needs and once so there's some emotional things and the more emotional it is that's the biggest driver of price successful or I should say a value right so what are the success metrics because if we want to say we want to grow our business what's the how will we know when we get there and that's the problem with a lot of people fuzzy goals fuzzy results clear goals clear results so now we know okay if I'm able to do this this and that so we're taking abstract things we're making it more concrete each time the next step is to sign up value to all these things now notice I didn't go into the family time and either start to feel a little dirty to you like crayons come on my family like what are we doing here so I skip over some things but I'm also putting in your head the value of all this stuff because you're starting to see a really big number yeah so then when I assign a price to the value it seems reasonable I know that what I want I do value pricing with my clients as well and so I usually do this yes but yeah but usually it's you know in order to sell a deliverable right you want a website yeah sure what's that websites gonna do for you that's right all right okay so let's keep going here right so what I want to do is I want to say the price before I show you the price I don't want to go away be mysterious about this because ultimately if you're uncomfortable with this price I I want to address it now because the problems want to get worse as we go along yeah so you got Chris come on that's that's highway robbery or that's that's ridiculous or if I see that you're really excited Matt and some entrepreneurs are like this and and this is what our creative community is afraid of is they're like oh my god if you can do this I'll pay you 30% of this yeah of course and you know if if you made a deal with anybody in the street if you give me a dollar I'll give you a dollar thirty back how many times would you do that deal yeah forever and that's what what banks do all the time so we're talking about you even just up to 70% you're gonna do up to 80% sometimes to 90% this is what people do this is just business okay and I don't want to get greedy so I say consultancies you charge 20% so I do the math with you that's $240,000 so now whatever proposal I come back with it's gonna sound very reasonable because I've I've dropped an anchor yeah exactly and now you're gonna be primed in preconditioned to just think about the 240 so anything around there that's a little bit below it's gonna seem like it's a fair thing imagine if I began this whole conversation say okay what do you want me to make okay my rates $500 an hour like what that's ridiculous I'm not paying you 500 dollars an hour not in Israel this is not gonna work right of course because then that's the first anchor you've dropped the first anchor I've dropped is this emotional need that you want right but in in our conversation yeah I didn't come for you for a specific solution right I was just hey can you help me here's my board eduation right well let's rewind the tape if we're beginning before he even reached out to me before having this conversation yeah there's something you want from me you're not quite sure what you want from me just yet but I think you have an idea maybe Chris is gonna coach me for an hour and that's the way it's going to be or he'll he'll write a proposal or you'll teach me one technique or two and so doesn't really matter as long as the conversation has began and you've reached out I have you on the line and now I'm going to chart start to create value for you instantly and I'm not trying to sell you anything this is the big difference that our audience our community does not get don't try and sell I want to create value for you immediately now if you had to if we have to look at this list and I just helped you with one of those things it could change your life for sure but I'm telling you I think I have a plan on how to solve most if not all the things that you want and that would just blow your mind this is by far has been the most mind-blowing conversation I've had in a while maybe since I last heard you speak all right so that's how we begin and then I I have a plan now I'm gonna teach you some of these things right now so this is the first part so when you're dealing with your client I want you to try to surface the desired future state yeah don't go too far out because then it gets too dreamy right yeah and then they're gonna that's up high in the sky so somewhere between two to five years seems to work yeah but there is a juice box there's one like it might be technical right I I really get the selling of the consultancy now but I guess I still think that I'm I can't sell it to my current client base they just don't have the money for it you can't sell or so you say about the money or so you think really no yes I'll tell you something okay mmm scuse me I should get more okay if I throw it goes I go get some hot water right here we go so a client called me up and they said hey we want you to look at this project but here's the RFP and we looked at the RFP and there was just massive amounts of deliverables and they said we have a hundred thousand dollar budget they asked us to pitch ideas this is the budget and they us to come and meet with them so I had to do a couple of things one is I got I told them I don't pitch and the reason why we don't pitch is because we don't feel like we can solve a problem that we don't yet understand and part of our process is to help you understand your customers and their behaviors better so we provide a better solution and that takes deep work with your entire team and that's how we have to do this like okay okay fine just come in and give us a presentation of your capabilities and your process no problem so we show up we do the meeting and I'm basically teaching them how we work and they're bought in and I've not seen this happen that many times but I'm sitting in the room and there's a variety of people different ages and different levels within their company and it's a multi-billion dollar company I see them leaning in like literally leaning in almost on the edge of their seats I know I have something here now even though we have zero or very little experience working in their vertical and we have a very very limited portfolio of doing what it is they're asking us to do not only did we beat out the six competitors but that $100,000 job got smaller in scope but bigger in price so that $100,000 grew to 250 and within a week of starting the discovery with them that $100,000 turned into $750,000 of new work for us yeah I understand so you that you just don't you just don't know you never know they're right they're a company who had 750 K in in the bank account to pay I'm working with with startups they might have just you know raised the money though and so yeah right that could be the problem and and the startups may have some problems but I've also worked with startups who have given me a lot of money - yeah it's when you are able to help solve a big problem they will find money yeah that's the key right because the marketing person says we can't afford this the CEO the big decision maker will say we will find money to afford this yeah and this that's a big difference okay so for example right now if you're helping them to develop the UI the UX or whatever it is that you you wind up making for them what if you have the conversation to say like the biggest problem right now is where going to run out of runway in three months our burn rates too high we need to raise an additional round like Series C or whatever and we need to raise twenty million dollars well if I told you I can help you raise the twenty million dollars what would that be worth to you exactly yeah so we're talking about using that big creative brain of yours to solve very different kinds of problems than you are solving today now I want to address the thing that you were talking about with me and clients do come to us wanting deliverables we make a lot of shiny things and so they call us up we need you to make a video for us or mm-hm we need you to help us rebrand that's just the beginning of the conversation that's not the end and I usually say thank you love it so happy that you're calling us but let me ask you a few questions before we kind of go down that path and that is in the diagnostic phase that I'm able to create value for them surface problems and and value to me and it's backed up by a lot of other people right about this is to tell them something they didn't know yeah that's so you only reinforce yeah right so if you only reinforce what they believe so for example a lot of designers do this a lot of designers come in the clients are talking to them we need a new we need to rebrand because it looks ugly and and then they are like okay we'll do an audit and then come back you're right through the questionnaires and customer surveys your your brand and your logo it's really ugly you've not created any value for them because they came to you knowing that so now you're gonna compete on price because you haven't add anything to the conversation however if they came to you and said we need to rebrand and through your process you come back and say so here's the thing that we observed we're not getting a lot of customer traffic between two and five if we helped you to figure out a business model to bring people in to your place of business from two to five I think we can generate according to what you've told us before four million dollars of new business a year is that a problem worth solving they're like hell yeah let's focus on that then then you've told them something they didn't know yeah and that's the critical part that was really like yeah that was like mind-blowing I'm learning a lot I'm learning you're telling me stuff that I didn't know and so you're adding okay right it's getting super meta right now you guys this is like Inception like we're in three layers into the dream and we have to remember our totem just remember you're in the dream okay now there's a couple other things here I'm gonna just power through here because I wrote some notes here right so from you to go to two to three hundred you're already working really efficiently the the problem right now is to talk about how you can scale and multiply your time this is a classic and and I used to suffer from this too and my business coach has helped me through this and have helped others through others through this as well the first thing is I think you need to formalize your process a little bit the the super efficient brain of yours make certain decisions along the way yeah that you need to be able to codify into like five major steps all right no more than five okay now I remember when I was working with a faculty advisor at Art Center he said when you're critiquing the work of these designers and we're doing storyboarding right he had asked me he says the whole purpose of what you're doing is to try to get them to think the way you think to look at the work the way you see it because they put up the work and they're confuse and then they get a critique and to them it's a very mysterious thing like why did you say what you said so he says what we want to do is to have a shared conceptual framework of what it is that you're looking for so he said just tell me right now what are the five things that your brain is looking for as you're looking at the work and I had never even thought of it like that before so on a piece of paper we sat there in the next three minutes I said well the first thing I'm looking for in a frame a storyboard frame is is it clear or is it confusing so he's like great let's write that down and then if it's clear it's boring that's no good so it needs to be clear and interesting okay so now it's clear it's interesting but when we look at the sequence it doesn't make sense so that's considered a non sequitur so we then have to say do the sequence add in a meaningful way and we'll go through each and every one of these things and so now I would print it out at the beginning of each crit I would tape it up to the wall and I would say when we're looking at this work I'm no longer going to critique it you are so the person who made the work looks at it like is it clear right they're frame three he's not clear so I would tell them and we would have like red dots and we would say all the students you can feel free to put a red dot and any frame that's not clear to you and you have a blue dot put a blue dot any frame that's clear but it's clearly boring and so now the pages start lighting up and you can see now I've taken something that's very abstract and mysterious to lots of people and I've made it so that they can understand this happens to be one of my strengths is to take these things and just organize I'm just a good organizer right yeah so now they're able to do so I think what you have to do is like how the heck can I make so much work in such little time what are the decisions that I'm making when I look at this thing let's just break it down by the way some of those things I actually try to break down on my YouTube where I show my process so I'm already kind of trying to formalize the process in my mind and communicated to other people but yeah I guess that's the first step before you even hire somebody I got to do this right before you hire yes Jan you kind of need to know your process a little bit because here's what's going to happen yeah you have to somehow download your knowledge into somebody whether they're working on-site or off-site so that you don't have to do all the heavy lifting yeah and I'll tell you this if you get to your goal and and you're going to get there to get to five hundred dollars an hour so you can work half the time almost anybody you can hire is going to make you money because most freelancers not gonna even approach anywhere near that rate yeah okay so even if you were charging hourly let's say whatever clients that you they'd agree all the US or European clients I agree to pay you whatever rate you want to charge if you hire somebody even at the highest level 100 bucks an hour it's a lot of money for somebody yes eight hundred dollars a day even if they took one and a half times even two times as long as you did you're still out way ahead and if you can just come right and give him a little bit of art direction an hour's worth of your time to do with high-level thinking stuffs like let's change this here remember these four points that we talked about if you can do that this is going to be really tight and then they would do it here's the thing it's an investment of time upfront and you get a lot of reward on the back end yeah this is like you tilling the soil preparing it fertilizer leveling it out and then planting that seed it's a lot of work upfront but once the seed is matured into a tree that bears fruit it's gonna continue to bear fruit for you now you're gonna go through quite a few people to find a superstar that superstar would be a right-hand woman or man and that person will train the next people and then that's how you build your team up you have to remember they don't need to work as fast as you nor as efficient and there's here's another kicker for you to think about the level in which you're able to produce is very high and you want everybody to be able to hit that mark but in reality I know you you don't believe this to be true today your clients can cannot actually discern the difference between time high and super high I agree okay yeah I believe right so you you might be killing yourself or your team to get them to super high but the general public cannot even tell the difference between high and super highs so as long as they meet the minimum threshold of quality they're good and you need to learn to let go because you need to focus on the bigger things onboarding new clients networking speaking to gain influence writing killer content for your YouTube channel and teaching the world the things that you know and that's a much higher goal in life than whether or not that's the exact shade of red or if that pixel is exactly where it needs to be all right so you think I need to hit $500 per hour before I do my first hire or I should know I don't I think this is part of the plan okay so theirs is a complex thing and I'm trying to disseminate a ton of information for you really really fast so I just want to go over high-level concepts then we can drill down at some other point in time all right I honestly think you should be moving towards like a project base thing so that we're not measuring time anymore yeah we're not selling time as a freelancer okay we're gonna sell what Blair calls okay the first type is called inputs which is to selling time how much time that I input into this project is how much it's going to cost the second way of bidding and estimating projects is selling outputs yeah so we don't care how many hours how many people get get involved in the thing and we only care that the product at the end is what we've asked for in the time that we've asked for it and then you can learn to run your company the way you want and now what we want to do is we want to start to assign a higher dollar value to the output yeah that also means that I'll have to change a little bit kind of the types of projects that I'm taking because some of them are to kind of help team on a process on an ongoing product development and so theirs isn't like a fixed outcome there's it's an ongoing process but yeah maybe maybe I have to change some clients maybe yeah yes process so you're are you selling like sprint cycles so each sprint is completed and then there's a dollar amount and they're not really they're not really perhaps it's a good thing to do I'm considering it might be yeah there's a lot of different models here right yeah so you can sell like a two or three weeks sprint yeah that we define what done looks like the MVP and then you just use your team to run the project yeah and here's the here's the most amazing thing we're not even talking about the feeling that a person gets by helping to teach another human being and giving them something that's going to help them for the rest of their life yeah so you might find some young able-bodied woman or man who comes in it's like Ron I believe everything you're doing and I want to like buy all into this and I just want to learn from you and so then as you see them grow and blossom you're like a proud father now to this other person and you know if you get hit by a truck tomorrow that person's life is improved forever and they're gonna be able to find a way to sustain themselves and to take care of their loved ones and a family that may or may not come in the future and that's a pretty amazing feeling and it's right I don't want to get all the economics and accounting on this but there's a value to that too yeah because that feels you up on the inside and yeah I've actually I've actually experienced that because did hire for one of the clients that I work with I hired for them and I mentored their designer for over the past years and I have seen them grow and and study and yeah I totally get what you're saying okay all right man take care bye all right wasn't that a great conversation I know that the end was a little bit abrupt the reason was that just my battery on my camera died so we had to cut the conversation short but at the end of the conversation Chris told me about a new problem that they have which called business boot camp and it's a six-week program helping creative business owners to run their business more successfully and so I'm signing up for this program and hopefully I'll learn a lot during the next six weeks I'll share my insights with you here on this channel and yeah enjoy the ride and come with me as I try to double my business have a great day and I'll pitch tomorrow [Music]

Channel: Flux

Views: 81,729

Keywords: design, freelance, tel aviv, ran segall, ran segal, רן סגל, work, life, vlog, startups, Become a High Value Consultant, how to do consulting, how to become a consultant, double your freelance, how to charge more, money, goals, chris do, tips, business, business of design, hiring

Id: GtrVGkIVbhc

Length: 47min 33sec (2853 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 30 2018