Jonathan Stark

So you're automatically not going to have all the information that you need before you get started. So what do you do to address that? And those are the sort of frameworks that I've created around that. But also this thing called the why conversation to help in the sales meeting and then a major mind shift that I call scope last.

So if you're in a sales meeting, you do not try and do not even try to scope the project in the sales meeting. You're going to scope it later after you know what the value is. You set some prices based on the value. Then you decide what scope you're going to do based on what the desired outcome is and which price they choose.

So I would say the why conversation and scope last are like two terms or phrases that I use a lot when I'm teaching this to people. And both are pretty mind blowing and take a while for people to fully integrate into their processes or their business.

I think like any good product company, it was demand. It wasn't my plan at all. I was pretty well known when I was at that firm when we were still billing hourly because I wrote for the Trade Journal, which was a physical magazine at the time. They had a monthly column there. I was a tech editor. I spoke at the annual conference a few times, maybe four times.

And so when I left, everyone was like, are you crazy? What are you doing? And I told them about this sort of ditching hourly thing. And they were like, oh, yeah. And I think in their minds, they're like, he's going to come crawling back in a year. But my first year went great.

One of my colleagues wanted to put together a panel to talk about this sort of unofficial at the conference, but an unofficial thing in like a side room. And it was standing room only packed. And then I was getting invited to talk to user groups of people from the FileMaker space who had seen me, been following me from the sidelines, following what was going on.

And there was one time up in Boston, I presented to a room, maybe 40 people. And at the end, we had to leave the room because someone else was coming in after us. But I was still getting questions. So I told everyone to just email your questions to me and I'll blog about it every Monday.

And so I did that for weeks and weeks, maybe months, where people would just send in questions and then I would answer them on the blog so they can then share it with everyone. And then finally, someone just offered to pay me to coach them directly. And I was still doing my normal business, my normal software consulting business during the day.

But since I wasn't trading time for money and I was giving fixed prices, I wasn't really very busy and I was doing really well. So I had plenty of time and money to help these people out pro bono. And then people were offering to pay me to do it. It was just real natural progression.

Then eventually I collected everything I had written about the subject and published a self-published book called Hourly Billing is Nuts. That was the year when I was like, okay, I'm officially going to switch my business. I'm going to pivot from doing software consulting into doing more like business coaching or price consulting for service businesses.

I'm a soloist. I am a lone wolf personality-wise. I don't like meetings. I especially don't like recurring meetings. So no, I intend to never have employees. I'm not against other people having teams. It's just not the, it doesn't, for the kind of business I have now, it doesn't make sense to scale that way. And for even the software people I coach, that's just one approach to scaling.

It's really the only approach to scaling if you are trading time for money is to hire a bunch of bodies. But you really need to get up to 50 before you start to get the benefit. And then you've got just a completely different lifestyle. You're a manager, you're a boss, you're a leader. I never talk about leadership concepts on my daily mailing list.

And it's just about pricing and ways to scale without hiring. Pretty much all business books assume you're going to hire. So no one needs another book about how to hire and how to lead a team and how to have your engineers in harmony with each other and all of that. My approach to scaling for myself and the people I work with is to increase the altitude of involvement with your clients.

If people out there are listening, have running a SaaS or something, you probably pay a team or you have an outsource, some sort of outsource, a dev shop or something where they are writing code. They are implementing new features. They are squashing bugs. And it's the coal mining of the software business. It's the typing semicolons.

And if that's what if you're a dev shop and that's what you do, especially as a soloist, but even as a dev shop, if that's what you do and you like it and it's profitable, then great. Keep doing that. That's fine.

But your path to scaling without hiring or without growing the team would be to increase your altitude of involvement so that you are doing more high level strategic types of engagements with your clients and not so much the implementation or the execution of the plan.

And I think of it, especially in software, it's really easy to map to kind of building metaphor, physical house type of thing, where you've got these three altitudes of involvement with a client. One that most people operate at is the middle tier, but there's a bottom tier. So the bottom tier are called maintenance. So that's like a support maintenance contract, that sort of thing.

where somebody's got a software application and they just need someone to keep it from breaking down or when an OS upgrade creates a bug or something, they just need to keep working the way it's working. They're not looking for necessarily for new features. That's the bottom level.

It's the least profitable, perhaps the most predictable, but it's a very specific kind of business, the volume business. The middle tier where I would call implementation or building or execution is where you're making the new status quo so that if the maintenance level, the bottom level is maintaining the current status quo, the middle level is making a new status quo real.

It's adding a new feature. It's adding a new module. It's building another SaaS, a companion app. It's some new feature development or new product development where you're creating a new status quo, which eventually will fall into the maintenance level, but someone else can do that. And then the top level is helping the client decide what the new status quo should be.