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Are you buying work? Or are you buying results?

The answer to the question above is pretty obvious when we ask it like that. But in practice, almost everyone is busy buying work! That work may or may not get you the results you’re are after. 

Here is an example to illustrate this issue.

Say John hires Maria to code a website for him. 

After the initial discussion, Maria estimates that she will need 100 hours priced at $100/hour for a total of $10,000. 

As she thinks deeper and some research, Maria finds a ready-made plugin that costs $1,000 and takes care of half the project scope. 

What should Maria do next? 

1. Buy the plugin for $1,000 and charge for the rest of 50 hours. So Maria is left with $4,000 in her pocket and a plugin she now owns. The client will love her.

2. Have the client buy the plugin and charge for the rest of the work. She now has $5,000 in her pocket, and the customer owns the plugin. The client will love her.

3. Buy the plugin for $1,000, work 50 hours, and wait for another 40 to charge 90 hours. Maria puts $8,000 in her pocket. The client will be happy; he paid less and got it faster. 

4. Maria ignores the plugin, starts coding, hopefully, be done in 100 hours, and charge at least $10,000. The client will be satisfied if finished on time and angry for any extra hours over the estimate.

We can all agree that (3) is dis-ingenious. But in truth, all four options suck. 

With option (1) and (2), Maria feels cheated. She had agreed to do much more work than she would get paid for. She has no incentive to choose less work for her. Still, if she chooses option (1) or (2) out of moral obligation, in the back of her mind, she will resent ever having done any research! 

With option (3), she will have to live with the lie.

And if she ignores the plugin and does the work agreed for the money agreed, she is also cheating. 

She is cheating herself out of the growth opportunity. Why work better or faster when that means less billable “working hours.” Best be slow and friendly as you plow along. 

And she’s also cheating the client because you are not free to do your best job. She will do the regular “fast enough” kind.

It amazes me, especially in the IT industry, where performance metrics are easier to measure, that people are still buying work instead of results. 

Whenever discussing a new project, I almost always hear this question: “How long will this take?” because the next question is, “What is your hourly rate?”

And the answers to those questions are: “I don’t know how long it will take. This project is a collaboration, with lots of variables out of my and your control. It will take at least three months, but it could take 6 months or one year… nobody really knows.” And “I don’t have an hourly rate.”

My favorite alternative is to focus on results and not care about how long it will take. 

With the initial example, Maria would ask John why does he want a website. How will that generate value for him to justify the expense of creating one? And John might say, it would help him sell his handmade products to a larger audience, and it would make it much easier for customers to place an order. Maria continues to ask what is a realistic revenue goal for one year from the website sales. John thinks for a bit and says that based on his audience and some estimates, it should be around $80,000. Maria says she is confident she can help John reach his goal of $8,000. 

Now, if John has spent $8,000 to make $80,000, do you think he would care if Maria used a plugin or not, or how many hours she worked on the website? Of course not! He did not buy Maria’s time; he purchased a result.

And what about Maria? She is free from the moral dilemma from before. She can now employ her full experience and work as fast as possible, using any tools she sees fit to help John accomplish his goals. 

It does not matter if she can do it in a day because she has done the same thing before or takes her two months to put everything together. John will pay a fixed price. He will not be taxed for a “poor estimate,” and Mary is free to work as fast as she can and be rewarded for getting better at her craft and working less. All interests are aligned. 

I challenge you to buy results and not work. You will pay more upfront, yes! But you will get much better returns in the long run. If you still choose to buy work, there is no guarantee that “the work” will get you any closer to your goals. And the conflict of interests will make it almost sure that you will run over the initial estimate by a large factor, even if everyone is super honest and fair. 

Building Trust

When I want to learn something, there are usually hundreds of resources available for that topic. Or if I want to buy a product, there is generally more than one option available. 

So how do I make my choice? 

For a while, I thought that I am considering benefits versus price versus quality. I imagined that I am making a rational decision. 

But that is not so. 

Someone was also looking to learn about a topic, and they ask me about it. I told this person that there are likely many people on YouTube, teaching this way better than I ever could. But they did not want to learn from YouTube; they wanted my perspective and guidance on it. 

I wondered why they would make this choice, when, at least in my mind, I was not the better option. 

And it comes down to trust :). Very simply put: they know me, they trust me, and they like me. And they would prefer I show them what they need to learn, rather than some stranger on YouTube that they have no connection to. 

Considering this, I realized that I do the same. I don’t act rationally at all. I much rather work with people I know, and I trust, even if they are not always the “best” at what I am looking for. When there is a connection, things are much easier. 

Trust, connection, and familiarity sound like very personal concepts, but they apply in business. Each action that you take as a business can build or erode trust. And in today’s world of “clickbait” and “shortcuts,” trust is ever more scarce. 

Building trust takes time. It requires empathy, the emotional labor of truly seeing the other, and serving your customer even if that means sending them to your competition. Yes, you may have lost a client, but you gained trust. 

It also means keeping your promises even when it is difficult to do so. Especially then. And it means being open when you do break a promise, owing to the situation and not trying to hide it. 

On a related note: online reviews are a tool that we sometimes use to determine if we can trust a vendor that we don’t have a relationship with yet. 

This tool gives power to you, the consumer. You can express your gratitude at no extra cost to you by writing a praising review for the vendor. But you can also be vengeful and write a bad review. And we all know that bad reviews weigh more heavily than the good ones. For some reason, we feel they are more “honest.” So wield this power wisely. 

Be generous with it, and don’t abuse it. Online reputation is hard to build and very easy to destroy. 

What does it mean to add value to your customers?

“How can I add value?”

This is the question I write at the bottom of my daily planner almost every day. Why? Because I want to train my brain to think in those terms. Why? Because I hear this is the key to success.

I never managed to answer this question adequately. And I had the insight that I need to answer a different question first! And that is:

“What does it mean to add value to your customers?”

Looking at this question, I realized that my efforts have been selfish. I was concerned with “my success.” The reason I wanted to add value is that I become successful by doing so. 

This question forces me to face the fact that I don’t know what “value” means for my customers. Yes, I can make guesses, but I don’t truly know. 

So many times, I have been tempted and followed through with this idea: what I do is valuable to me, so it must be valuable customers too. And if they didn’t see the value, that was their loss! This approach has resulted in projects that are too complex or in features that I thought were cool, but the customers did not care about them. 

And this has happened because I never paused to ask: “what is valuable to my customer?”.

Value is very subjective, I have discovered. I don’t handle loss very well, so I have a reliable backup policy. But others are much more willing to start over again, so backup is not essential. 

I value aesthetics and elegant design. But most of my customers value ease of use and the ability to manage the website themselves. 

I also have discovered that I am biased. And my bias is not the same as my customer’s bias. 

The first step in discovering what it means to add value to my customer is to be humble enough to admit that I don’t know and that I need to have a discussion. In this discussion, I need to ask the customer what is valuable to them, and if required, to help them discover their values in that process. I also need to set my bias aside and truly understand where the other person is coming from. 

The second step is for me to determine if we are a good fit. Based on what I now know about my customer’s values, can I truly serve them in their best interest? And sometimes the answer is no. And in this case, I have to send them away. 

But there is a way to refuse to work with someone that is not selfish. You can still add value by making a recommendation and send them to a specific someone else (your competition), instead of simply turning them down. This way, interacting with you has still got them one step closer to solving their problem, and you have been generous and trustworthy enough to recommend another person for them to work with. You may have lost a client, but you have earned trust, and in today’s world, trust is precious. 

So how can I add value to my customers? It first starts with showing empathy and meeting them where they are at. And in some cases, it means saying “no” and pointing them in a different direction.

Credits: my viewpoint on marketing and adding value is shaped in great part by people like Chris Do, Seth Godin, and Blair Enns.

How do you find customers?

I know this is a burning question in the minds of many entrepreneurs and freelancers. 

I don’t have a “how-to” guide that will guarantee your success, but I would like to share my perspective because it is not just about getting more business, but also about creating a better world for everyone :). I also admit that what I about to share does not apply to everyone or every business model.

My first customer was my first employer. They were buying what I had to offer, my unpolished, raw programming skills fresh out of school. I did not like that customer, but they taught me a lesson: 

your customers should find you, rather than you finding them. 

It took me almost a decade to understand it, though. 

My second customer was my second employer. But this time there was a big difference. They called me, and I had to decide if I wanted to work for them, not the other way around. They had already decided they wanted me there.

This may seem like luck, and that is what I also thought for a while. But it happened again with the third employer. And after that, I stopped being an employee and became a freelancer. And the people I work with today found me. 

It wasn’t until I read about inbound marketing that I understood what was going on. And that, in fact, luck was just a part of it, and maybe not the most significant part. 

What I was not doing was not sitting around, waiting for clients to call. I was continuously working. Either to improve my skill or to generously solve other people’s problems. 

When I began my freelance work, I’ve spent the first two years doing volunteer work. And they have been the best years. In those times, I would only do work that was profoundly satisfying to me. And I discovered how nourishing it is for the soul to be able to choose the people you are working with or working for. 

To paraphrase Seth Godin, the way to get clients is to do work that matters for people who care and to do so generously.

Contact forms done right!

What is worse than nobody contacting you for business? It is having to deal with a lot of Spam. Spam takes away from your attention, and it can potentially drown a valid contact request or a genuine request for support. 

I will be talking here about WordPress and specific plugins, but the general principles apply to other technologies as well. 

The contact form is an essential part of your business. You can get both feedback about how you are doing, but also it is a way for customers to quickly reach out to you, or for leads to ask presale questions. 

The easiest way to get a contact form in WordPress is to use Contact Form 7. 

But just installing and activating the plugin is not enough. There are two extra steps that I suggest you do:

First: get rid of SPAM. 

Yes, I know, in the first few weeks or months there will be no problems, but as soon as a script bot discovers you it will send a ton of Spam, and that will also affect your server reputation and your ability to send out email. Don’t wait for that to happen. 

To get rid of Spam activate and configure the CAPTCHA test. The one from Google works best, and I choose it most of the times. (If privacy is a big concern from you, I don’t know if Google can be trusted, so shop around!)

Second: Safeguard against email failure.

The way a simple contact form usually works is to accept the submitted message and then email you (the website owner) with the contact message. 

This way used to work well, but with the ever-increasing Spam problem, there is a chance that the contact email will never reach you. When and if this happens, you will never know. Unless…

Unless you also save the messages on the server where you can review them later. For this, I use the companion plugin Flamingo. Aside from making sure you don’t lose your messages, this collection of data can become a treasure when it comes to customer research: most common questions asked, or problems in interacting with your products and so on.

Bonus: Integrate with an auto-responder.

When you begin to get more messages than you can quickly respond to, a nice touch is to use an auto-responder to provide some quick tips or to reassure your visitors that you will get back to them as soon as you can.

When you do use Flamingo or an auto-responder, make sure you update your privacy policy to inform your users about that and be GDPR compliant.

A look into the (not so distant) future.  

Soon contact forms will be replaced with virtual agents/assistants. This is already happening, and it will be a game-changer — more about AI in a different article.