The Client Letter
July 29, 2013
Arizona
Sunny 72 Degrees
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In this month’s Rainmaker Letter interview, there’s an interesting exchange where my guest starts talking about one of the biggest challenges in the service business:
Trading Time For Dollars
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen into the trap about I’m to describe. I don’t remember who planted the seed in my mind the first time, it might have been Robert Kiyosaki.
The idea was that trading time for dollars is dumb.
Now I could have been extremely naive back then (most likely) but the idea of never trading time for dollars seemed very exciting for me.
To think back how I used to do tech consulting for $40 per hour and then imagine a world where thousands rolled in without me charging for time… well that was an awesome image.
There’s just one detail that seems to get glossed over when someone goes on the “stop trading time for dollars” rant.
The detail is that EVERYONE is trading time for dollars, without exception, all the time.
The question really is how much time and how many dollars.
Without that detail, I tried to divorce myself from “trading time for dollars” (an impossibility) instead of focusing on doing the real work – which is to maximize dollars per time unit.
This doesn’t mean you charge for your services by the hour. This DOES mean that you have to figure out how to make sure you’re achieving an acceptable level of profitability for your goals. Generally, this means more money for less time.
The feedback is already coming in from this month’s Rainmaker Letter interview. I thought it was awesome and apparently, I’m not alone.
You can get it right now and hear how this one service provider deals with the time for dollars challenge:
http://www.artofclients.com/rainmaker-subscribe
That one part is worth your entire year’s subscription.