August 26, 2021

“How do I ditch hourly billing if I really want to work with government and higher ed?” and more…

In today’s group coaching live session, we had a bunch of good questions that touched on topics like:

Plus, we did a teardown on a home page for a .NET/microservices consultant, and a LinkedIn profile for a SaaS analytics expert.

Good stuff!

Here are some of the questions I answered today:

I’m contemplating writing a book. I’m currently weighing whether to write it in public (content marketing for my site and email list) and give it away for free online; with option to buy a dead-tree book. What would be any advantages or disadvantages to this approach? I’m also weighing going with a well known tech publisher. If I do that, what are the pros and cons to writing it solo vs having co-authors? (timestamp: 1m21s)

You say to “help people you like get what they want.” I fear I am doomed to like people who work in academic and government institutions with time-and-materials and milestone-payments-in-arrears procurement policies for custom project work. Should I bail on custom project work and focus on info products and productized services in order to ditch hourly billing? (timestamp: 22m36s)

I broke my own rule and took a somewhat challenging friend on as a client. She and the Chief of Staff at the company each have fixed fee proposals from me that they accepted verbally. They are somewhat disorganized and then asked for a monthly retainer model (which I had floated based on your advisory retainer option) but based on hourly rates. I refuse to do hourly with them and am now looking to transition the two proposals to a fixed fee monthly rate. Any thoughts? (timestamp: 28m47s)

Question about taking some margin for introducing other vendors to a client. In this case, I introduced a visual design company to my client. They have a skillset that my company doesn’t. I have collaborated with the founder in the past. For this project, I invested quite a bit of time to make and manage the connection so I do feel like some remuneration is reasonable. I get the sense that 10-15% is pretty standard. Any thoughts on this one? (timestamp: 50m27s)

How focused should my idea of my audience be before I re-start writing my newsletter? How much do you feel like you refined that through sending it? Before, I would have said I wrote “about” typography. Now, I’m trying to make it about helping typeface designers and graphic designers. But that’s still two different people I work with and could write to, and I’m having trouble deciding between them. (timestamp: 56m15s)

(If you’re curious, you can review the entire list of past questions here)

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Yours,

—J

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