Hi! I’m Jonathan Stark
I help independent professionals make more and work less without hiring.
Jonathan should have a warning label on his head. His advice will shake your world.
– David Trejo
You really are good at what you do
You’ve spent years learning your craft. You have attained a certain level of mastery.
You believe - deep in your bones - that what you do is valuable.
And yet...
Nobody seems to want to pay you enough for it.
What’s going on here?
You’re selling your labor, not your expertise
If you’re used to selling custom client projects, it’s easy to confuse your labor with your expertise.
In other words, it can be hard to separate your knowledge of the craft from your execution of the craft.
They’re NOT the same thing.
Your expertise has value independent of your execution.
As long as you bill yourself out by the hour, your clients will treat you as labor.
Like hired help.
A pair of hands to be ordered around.
If you’re actually good at what you do, billing for your time is a mistake.
Remote teams, offshore firms, automation, and now AI have made labor cheaper than ever.
So don’t charge for your labor! Charge for your expertise.
Your expertise is the most valuable thing you bring to the table. But it isn’t what you’ve taught your clients to buy.
Working with Jonathan Stark completely changed how I think about the value of my work.
The result? I successfully negotiated a project worth 10x what I had originally planned to charge, and my client never questioned the investment because the value was clear from the very beginning.
– Guy Shaffer
Sell your brains, not your hands
Your expertise, not your labor. Outcomes, not activities. Benefits, not deliverables.
This does not mean that you have to stop doing the work.
The shift is from “I do X” to “I know how to do X.”
You can still do the work. But the client is paying for your know-how, not the time it takes you to execute.
That means more influence over what gets built, how it gets built, and why it gets built in the first place.
It also means that getting faster makes you MORE profitable, not less.
Being on Jonathan’s daily emails is the next best thing to having him with you when you’re with the client. Answers just come to your lips, and suddenly you’re no longer a hands-on techie; you’re respected as a consultant.
– Anthony English
This is what I help with
Most people first hear about me when they want to stop billing by the hour.
And that’s a great place to start! But pricing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are three legs to this stool:
- Pricing without positioning leaves you trying to charge premium fees in a market where nobody can really tell the difference between you and AI or someone on Upwork.
- Positioning without publishing means nobody ever hears about you in the first place.
- And none of this matters if your sales conversations and proposals are focused on tasks instead of outcomes.
This is why I write and talk about pricing, positioning, publishing, proposals, products, and productivity.
Three ways I can help...
1. Read the daily emails
If you’re new here, start with my daily list.
Every day, I’ll send you one short email about pricing, positioning, proposals, selling expertise, or getting off the hourly treadmill.
2. Read Hourly Billing Is Nuts
If you’re billing by the hour, start here.
You’ll learn why hourly billing is holding you back and what to do instead.
3. Get private help
If you have a live pricing decision, proposal, negotiation, sticky client situation, or bigger business problem, work with me directly.
Stop reading this quote and hire Jonathan. If you’re still not sure, call me and I’ll read this quote to you again.
– Sean Boyce
Free Downloads
I've sent over 3,600 daily emails. Here are the greatest hits, compiled into free PDFs:
- Best Of: Pricing Professional Services — 10 of my most popular emails on how to stop trading time for money.
- Best Of: Positioning for Consultants — 10 of my most popular emails on how to stop competing on price.
- Best Of: The Why Conversation — 10 of my most popular emails on how to close better deals by asking better questions.
Too many kind messages to list them all here... read more »
Hi! I’m Jonathan Stark.
I was a software developer, consultant, and trainer for the better part of fifteen years. I’ve given sold-out talks on three continents. I am the author of five books, and in my consulting days, I worked with Staples, Time, T-Mobile, Cisco, Intel, and a bunch of other household-name brands.
In my first year as a solo consultant, I doubled my income by ditching hourly billing for value pricing. I have over a decade of real-world experience successfully applying value-based theories to my own consulting work and that of hundreds of business owners I have advised.
The unconscious acceptance of hourly billing as the only option for selling professional services is a collective hallucination that literally keeps me up at night. In fact, I consider it my mission in life to rid the world of hourly billing. Care to join me? I think you’ll be glad you did. 😊