Number One hundred-two Lose your hourly rate
G'day. I'm Troy Dean, from Video User Manuals and Agency Mavericks. This is ‘The 101 Ways to Elevate Yourself and Demand Higher Fees: A Practical Guide for WordPress Consultants to Start Attracting Better-Quality Clients, Work on Better, More Interesting Projects, and Get Paid Better Fees'. Let's go elevate.
The bonus way to elevate yourself and demand higher fees is to lose your hourly rate. I could probably develop another 101 ways to lose your hourly rate, but I absolutely know whole-heartedly from personal experience and the difference that this made in my own business.
An hourly rate is an arbitrary figure that 2 parties agree on when they can't agree on the value being transferred in a transaction. You're job as a professional WordPress consultant is to lose your hourly rate and start illuminating the value that you bring to a project and to your client's business. Hopefully in the past 101 ways that I've just given you, you'll find something. If you could take 5 ideas out of the 101 and apply them to your business, you would be elevating yourself above the pack. You could stop having a conversation about the hourly rate, and you could start having conversations about value you're adding to the project and what it's worth for a client to have you solve the problem in the way that you propose to solve it.
No one is going to tap you on the shoulder and tell you, you now have permission to lose your hourly rate. No one is going to tap you on the shoulder and say, “Shawn, you can give up your hourly rate now. It's okay. We understand that you add enough value, you can just charge us for the value. You don't have to charge us for an hourly rate.” No one is going to do that. You have to actually step off the cliff, you have to make that leap and know that as soon as you do make that leap, the net will appear; you won't fall flat. Lose your hourly rate, start illuminating values, start having those conversations with your clients about how you're going to solve their business problems in all of your marketing, in all of your . . .
If you have a blog, if you don't, you should, and if you do have a blog, start talking about how you solve problems for business clients. Stop talking about what plugins you use, stop talking about how you contribute to WordPress, because if you keep talking about technology, you'll always be a code monkey; you'll always be a developer and you'll always get paid an hourly rate. If you want to be a Word Press consultant and you want to charge for value, then start communicating about the problems that you solve and how you solve those problems with your creative trouble-shooting thinking.
The absolute bonus way here is to lose your hourly rate and start illuminating the value. Of course, there is one final bonus slide. In the next video, you'll learn how you can accelerate all of this learning and how you can really accelerate implementing this stuff in your business. Until then, go elevate.
Make sure you subscribe to the ‘101 Ways' podcast, in the iTunes Store. Just search for ‘101 Ways to Elevate', or visit us at WP101Ways.com and download the free ‘101Ways' e-book.
