Course Navigation:
- Lesson 1: One Size Fits All?
- Lesson 2: Ditching Custom Proposals
- Lesson 3: Hiring & Delegation
- Lesson 4: 10x'ing Your Hourly Rate
How to Transition Your Business & 10x Your Hourly Rate
Hey again! Brian Casel here from Productize & Scale. I’ve got, perhaps my most important lesson I can share with you here today.
I’m going to show you can 10x your personal hourly rate this year.
That may seem like a bold statement, and it is. But it’s exactly this type of thinking that you’ll need to tap into when you’re working to change your business.
Stick with me until the end because I’m going to tell you about a special invitation to Productize, which is opening up again next week. Details in just a minute...
First—this is important—Let’s talk about your most valuable asset: Your time.
How are you spending your time today?
If you’re like I was (and most solo freelancers), I bet your day has you working on any mix of the following:
- Working on client projects
- Updating clients on progress
- Working on landing your next client project
- Administrivia and organizational tasks
- Project management and planning
- Refilling your coffee cup…
Now, let’s say your current billable hourly rate is $50/hour (yours might be higher or lower, but let’s go with this for the sake of easy math).
And let’s say you only have 24 hours in a day, just like every other human.
And let’s say you’re a normal human who only wants to work about 8 hours per weekday. 40-hour work week.
Now assuming every hour of every week is billable to clients, then you’re earning $2,000 per week. Not bad!
But let’s be realistic. Not all of those tasks are billable, right? There are plenty of tasks, like administration and sales that are necessary, but not actually earning you an income today. So let’s account for those and take off 20%. ($1600/week)
Then there’s the feast and famine cycle, which inevitably leads to weeks where you’re not fully booked with client work. Let’s be generous and assume you manage to stay booked 80% of the time, so we’ll knock off another 20%. ($1200/week)
Now what about sick days, holidays, and a week or two of time off? You’re not earning on those days, so we’ll take 10% off for those. ($1,000/week).
See what happened here? Your real hourly income was cut in half. It’s not any fault of your own! It’s just the nature of the billable hours model, especially when you (and you alone) responsible for all the work that you’re billing for!
Now, what if your business was able to double or triple the number of projects you could handle in one week?
No, I’m not suggesting you become Elon Musk and kiss any free time goodbye.
Obviously, you’d need to build systems and processes and perhaps grow a small team in order to handle this capacity.
And in order to grow your customer-base to this level, you’d need sales and marketing funnels in place to attract enough leads and streamlined sales and onboarding process.
And you’d need to Productize your offering so that it resonates with an ideal customer, which will enable you to actually do marketing and build those systems and processes.
That’s where your time becomes infinitely more valuable. When you spend your time working on your business—Productizing and building those systems and processes—What you’re really doing are 2 things:
- You’re methodically removing yourself from the day-to-day billable hour client work and freeing up more of your time.
- You’re building up your business’ ability to attract and serve more clients simultaneously, even on a recurring basis.
And that’s what enables you double, triple, even 10x the profitability, and most of all, your enjoyment and reward of owning a business that can scale and increase in value.
Now, the question is, how will you find the time?
How will start to make that transition away from billable hour work to business owner work?
And how can you break through that all-to-common cycle of indecisiveness, and fear of change, that I felt and that everyone feels when we’re intentionally changing the way we earn an living?
That’s why I built Productize, my flagship course and private community.
It’s currently closed to new members, but next week I’ll be opening it up for you to join us.
The Productize course and community will guide and support you through every stage of this journey, from productizing your idea to building your systems, to sales, marketing and growth.
If you’re interested in joining, look out for my email next week to let you know about the opening.
Not interested right now? Don’t worry, you’ll have another opportunity to join us later in the year or next year.
I’ve got plenty more free content coming up in the weeks ahead.
Thanks for joining me here in this crash course! I hope you found it helpful.
Talk soon,
-Brian
Course Navigation:
- Lesson 1: One Size Fits All?
- Lesson 2: Ditching Custom Proposals
- Lesson 3: Hiring & Delegation
- Lesson 4: 10x'ing Your Hourly Rate