January 28, 2019

All week, every week

Sent by Jonathan Stark on January 28th, 2019

Imagine that Alice hires Bob by the hour to paint the interior of some apartments she wants to rent. She’s already got all paint, she just needs Bob to do the painting. Bob takes a look at the properties, estimates that it’ll take him about 100 hours, and Alice approves the work.

Which schedule do you think Alice would prefer for Bob?

A. One hour per week for 100 weeks

B. Fifty hours per week for 2 weeks

I’m reasonably certain that Alice would have a strong preference for option B

But why? Either way, Alice will end up paying Bob the same amount of money, right?

Sure BUT...

The sooner Bob is done, the sooner Alice can start bringing in rent money from her apartments. She doesn’t want to have to wait two years.

Here’s the thing...

When you’re billing a client by the hour for a project, they’re virtually always going to want you to work as many hours per week as humanly possible so they can get their desired results sooner.

What this leads to is pressure from the client for you to spend your entire week, every week working on their project only.

If you aren’t disciplined about pushing back against this pressure, you’ll end up with no time or energy left over to work on attracting more potential clients.

i.e., you’ll spend all your time working IN your business instead of ON your business, which is how people end up on the feast/famine hamster wheel.

Please don’t do that ;-)

Yours,

—J