Here’s a tip to earn more in 2025
Feb 09, 2025
Find Your Superpower newsletter 090
Read time: 5 minutes
Topics covered: Pricing strategy, business models, small business, freelancer
Hey there! Your rocketship captain is reporting for duty.
It is Sunday morning, the kids are still asleep, I’ve made myself a cup of coffee, and I am writing this newsletter for my readers. For a brief moment in time, my life is perfect.
PS: if this is not joy, then I really don’t know what joy is.
I’ve been running my flagship 12-month Brand Builder Mastermind for slightly over a month, and I am having a lot of fun getting to know my nearly 200 cadets. I am learning daily, and my learning curve has never been steeper.
Today, I want to share more about how I intend to deliver on the promise of the fourth goal in my Mastermind:
- build a brand
- learn to speak
- learn to write
- monetize our brand
If you are a small business owner, solopreneur or freelancer, I want to share with you a simple tip on how to make more money in 2025.
This is a really bad habit
If you come from an agency background like I do, you’re probably familiar with the concept we fondly call the "billable hour."
Let me explain: if you worked four hours today on a retainer client’s project, you would bill them for four hours of your time, based on a hourly base rate of say $200. That means you would have earned $800 today.
To earn more money, someone familiar with the agency model would want to:
- find more clients
- increase the number of billable hours per day (e.g. go from 4h to 8h)
- increase the rate of each billable hour (e.g. go from $200 to $400 per hour)
All three strategies pose a different problem
When our goal is to find more clients, we start off with amazing clients who are strong evangelists of our brand (AKA hot leads), but after time, we end up with clients from outside our community who have never heard of our brand before (AKA cold leads).
In an end-game scenario, we run out of organic leads and start advertising heavily, or we get sloppy with our ideal customer persona and start accepting clients who do not fit our criteria, resulting in a massive mismatch and poor fit. Needless to say, we experience incredible unhappiness and burnout and may even quit in a couple of years.
Increasing the number of billable hours per day is all good and fine until we run out of waking hours and start working past midnight or cutting back on our exercise, entertainment and rest. It is not uncommon to hear successful people say their business is "booming" but observe that they are completely exhausted every day. How is that good for our physical and mental health?
Last but not least, increase our hourly rate: while this is something I would certainly recommend, at some point we will hit a ceiling where it is no longer competitive for us to raise our rates any further. Would you pay US$1,000 per hour for a consultant? All of us would love to earn that, but it is probably not feasible for most people reading this.
LEVEL ONE: Let’s try this instead
Instead of the three obvious strategies of trying to find more clients, billing for more hours, or increasing our hourly rate, why not consider a new strategy: charging our clients for results.
Charging our clients for results is based on a pricing strategy known as value-based pricing instead of cost-based pricing.
Cost-based pricing is often pegged to what the market rate is, what it costs to keep ourselves alive, multiplied by the number of hours we work for a client. So if it takes us 10 hours to complete a project, we bill the client for 10 hours.
Value-based pricing is based on what we think the return on investment (ROI) is to our client, pegged to what our client will pay for that ROI. So if it takes us 1 hour or 10 hours to achieve that ROI, we bill the client the same amount of money. The flipside is that if it takes us 100 hours to achieve that ROI, we don’t get paid more.
In value-based pricing, we don’t charge by the hour, we charge for results.
LEVEL TWO: Peeling the onion here
If you are charging for results, then you can no longer price your service in one-off sessions.
For example, if I promise to help you with a complete re-branding exercise during your career transition, I probably can’t achieve all of that in one hour, can I?
So this is where package-based pricing comes in.
To achieve the results I promise, I start selling a five-session package or a ten-session package. Or if I can package it into a retainer or subscription service, even better.
What this means is that we stop acquiring clients for one-off gigs, but for a sustained period of time to deliver the results we promised them.
A myth that I hope to bust today is that our clients prefer to spend less money to solve their problems.
The truth is that good clients would be delighted to spend more money on a competent consultant who can resolve their problems and help them achieve their goals.
And if we can deliver on what we promised them, they’re not only going to open their wallet to us, they’ll also refer all of their mates and relatives to us.
LEVEL THREE: Unlocking Yoda-level Jedi powers
Until now, we are still transacting in terms of time... just a little more efficiently than before.
Yes, we have graduated from earning $ per hour for our work, to $$$ for the ROI our clients desire (level one).
Yes, we have graduated from earning $$$ for the ROI our clients desire once, to $$$$$ for a long-term, sustained ROI over and over and over (level two).
But we still have not managed to separate our time from our earning power.
This means that if we are traveling, if we are on maternity leave, or if we are on sick leave, we don’t earn anything.
It also means that if we have a full roster of clients and completely maxed out, our earning power is ultimately capped as we simply cannot take on any more clients.
To unlock Yoda-level Jedi powers, we would need to learn how to completely separate our time from our earning power.
If we wanted to go down the agency route, we would start hiring a virtual assistant (VA), a project manager, or a junior consultant. That’s one way to scale.
But another option is to create a product for recurring revenue. By productizing our services, we earn even when we are sick or traveling. It can also act as a lead magnet to attract clients to be curious about the higher-level services that we offer, or act as a waiting list while we free up our time to accept new clients.
A mindset shift has to happen first
Most of us were brought up in an era where our time (40 hours a week) equals $$$ amount of money.
As a result, we simply cannot imagine a world where time, space and income are untethered to each other.
We cannot imagine that we can be on vacation and making money ---> because in the past we needed to be seated in a physical office to make money.
We cannot imagine that we can be resting and selling at the same time ---> because in the past we had to grind and sweat to make money.
We cannot imagine that we can charge someone to speak or write about our ideas ----> because in the past we were a commodity. Why would anyone pick me when they have 99 identical options to choose from?
Go from a commodity to a high-value brand
Imagine a simple subscription that gives you access to world-class experts and business mentors who will guide you on how to build a brand, speak & write better, and make money from it.
Imagine a subscription that unlocks an exciting lineup of workshops, clinics, book clubs, members’ forums and fireside chats with expert coaches and speakers, accessible virtually from anywhere in the world.
That’s exactly what you will find inside the Brand Builder Mastermind.
PS: If you are interested in joining my 12-month virtual Mastermind, our next intake opens on Valentine’s Day (14 February).
This month, I am officially launching a "Superhero track" where I offer 1:1 quarterly coaching to a small number of VIP clients at a launch-only rate.
Wishing you more joy, more growth and, of course, more money in 2025! 🚀