Category Archives: Pricing and Getting Paid

Video: Billing by the Hour Is Killing Your Business and Here’s Why

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Take a look at this quick, 3-minute video. It explains exactly why billing by the hour is keeping you broke.

Let me know what you think. Are you having any “aha!” moments? I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions so please do comment or email me privately. :)

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Are Virtual Assistants Employees or Independent Contractors?

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That’s the topic of a recent article on the USA Tax Aid blog here: Are Virtual Assistants Employees or Independent Contractors?

It reinforces something I’ve been telling folks all along about those team/multi VA businesses: ICs are not legally part of team/business and they shouldn’t be listed as such on your website.

What they don’t seem to be able to grasp is that there are legal implications in portraying someone as part of your team. Someone is not part of your team unless they are an actual employee and if you insist on calling them that, you are going to put yourself smack dab on the radar of the IRS.

Which is why the “team/multi VA” is so idiotic. If all they are doing is farming out their work and clients to other companies, there is already a (proper) term for that–it’s called subcontracting. And those people–in order to be considered independent contractors running their own businesses–are not part of their team.

Regardless of your position on subbing out your client work/relationships, the fact is that sub is not legally part of your team. You don’t get to tell them when/where/how and you certainly don’t get to dictate hours and pay. And if you do, then you are going to quickly find yourself owing money and facing a great deal of hassle that could bankrupt your business.

Subcontractors do not need to be and shouldn’t be on your website. It’s not about depriving them of “credit.” If they take on a subcontracting job, they don’t get credit. They are doing the work on behalf of your company. It’s your company whose name goes on the work. That’s just how subcontracting works.

You don’t have to like it. But if you want to argue about it, take it up with your tax authority. I think you’ll be set straight real quick. ;)

This is also another reason why VAs/Admin Consultants (or any business owner) should NOT submit resumes and references–because you then give the wrong appearance that you are an employee applying for a job/position. That’s NOT how business owners market.

Not talking about this and getting the story straight is as stupid, irresponsible and unethical as telling people they don’t have to pay their taxes.

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Dear Gritty VA: How Is the Economy Affecting this Business?

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Dear Gritty VA:

I am considering starting a Virtual Assistant business.  I have been self-employed for 10 years and know about the hard work and research which goes into embarking upon entrepreneurship.  I would like to know how the economy has impacted this business.  On one hand, I can see businesses downsizing employees and benefiting from hiring administration support without the extra costs of taxes and providing benefits, which is more cost effective to their bottom line.  On the other hand, I can also see how some businesses would think hiring a Virtual Assistant can be another added expense to their bottom line. Any feedback from you would be greatly appreciated –DA

Thanks for the question and I’ll do my best to help shed some light so you can look at this another way.  You see, I always struggle with questions like this (which is why it has taken me this long to answer) because… well, how do I say this… it’s not the right question to ask. Not that you are wrong for asking. I’m here to help. :)

So let me try to explain…

The first thing I want to help you get a clearer understanding about is the fact that Virtual Assistants are not replacement staff or contract workers (a contract worker is a legal term for someone who is an employee of a staffing company). In fact, if you read any of the back posts on this blog, you’ll see that I don’t like the term Virtual Assistant at all as it miseducates clients and industry newcomers alike and sets wrong expectations and perceptions right from the get-go (I prefer the term Administrative Consultant). On top of that, when you are running a business, you are not anyone’s assistant anymore than, say, an attorney is an assistant to their clients or a coach is an assistant to their clients and so on.

As someone in this profession, you are providing a skilled professional service, no different than an attorney, an accountant, a bookkeeper, a coach, a designer or what have you. All of these professions, ours included, requires a high degree of specific skill, experience and expertise. We aren’t replacement workers. As administrative experts, we are providing an expertise–the expertise of administrative support–to businesses that require our particular skills and knowledge.

Once you understand things from that perspective, the question isn’t about how the economy is affecting companies that are downsizing. Those aren’t your clients. Because anyone who is simply looking to replace employees at a cheaper cost is not looking to value the skills or the relationship and is only interested in saving money. If you make those folks your clients, you can bank on always being on a hamster wheel trying to fend off competitors willing to work even cheaper than you.

Which leads me to my next point. You will need to educate yourself about who you are seeking to work with and what their motivation is in hiring you. When you seek the right clients, the economy has no bearing on anything at all. You want to focus on a market that truly has a need for the expertise you offer, not the ones whose initial motivation is looking for cheap right from the get-go. So let me walk you through this thought process…

Who is going to truly need and value having an administrative partner? Is it going to be the big company who can afford their own employees or who is only looking to reduce their bottom line? Or is it the solo and boutique companies who run smaller scale operations, often from home offices of their own, that don’t warrant employees  or don’t have anywhere to put them even if they wanted them, but who still need the support and understand how it will help them run a more profitable business and make faster progress? Who do you think has the greater need for what we do and will therefore place a higher value on it because it has more meaning to their business success?

This is why the economy has no bearing once you understand who your market is. Those who need and value what you are in business will pay because people who want or need something, find a way to pay for it. Which again, makes the whole question about the economy irrelevant because you are going to seek only markets who need and value the expertise and are able and willing to afford it.

So your task as a new business owner in this profession is to find a target market who a) has the highest need for what you are in business to do, b) can be found easily enough in order to market to them and fill your practice, and c) earns enough money to pay for professional level fees.

Always remember, you can’t afford to work with anyone who can’t afford you (not my quote, but one I love a lot although I’m not sure of its origins).

Hope that helps!

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Is It Any Wonder Clients Balk at Your Fees?

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I hear from Administrative Consultants (Virtual Assistants) all the time complaining about seeming to only hear from clients who balk at their fees and only want to pay $10-15 an hour. Well, if this is you, I’m here to tell you that almost every bit of this difficulty stems from what YOU are talking about with them on your website and in your marketing message.

There will always be cheapskates in the world who want to devalue other people and get work for free. But that leaves the rest of the prospective client market and they are absolutely influenced by how you “sell” yourself. YOU control what they are focused on. And let me tell ya, what many of you are focusing them on right now is creating the very mindsets you are frustrated with and seek to discourage.

Go to just about any Virtual Assistant website and all you see people talking about in their content is how affordable they are, how they are cheaper than an employee, how much clients can save, discounts here and free hours there…

You think you’re enticing them, but this is all they are seeing and hearing:

Is it any wonder they are so focused on money when all you are doing is talking about money, and specifically about how little you cost and how much they will save?

If you want to attract well-paying clients–clients who expect to pay professional level fees and value the work–you have got to stop talking about money in your marketing message. Period.  You are training them to devalue you. You are telling them that the only thing that is important to them and you is how much you cost.

Let me say that another way… if you all you are talking about is money, all you will attract is money-conscious clients. Do you get that? If your marketing conversation is all about how how cheap, affordable and “competitively-priced” you are, how much they will save and giving discounts left and right, you are going to keep getting clients who are only looking for cheap. They won’t see or hear anything else.

Surely, you actually have something of value to offer… don’t you? So talk about THAT! How does your work improve their business? How does it help them move forward? What problems does it solve? How might their outlook and clarity and stress and mood be improved with your help?

Think of all the ways your work and skill and knowledge contributes to making your clients’ businesses better and focus on those things. The clients you attract with that message will be like night and day. Promise.

And if you want to learn how to stop selling hours and price and package your support based on value and expertise instead, don’t miss my teleclass coming up April 27 and 28. Early bird special pricing ends March 27. Get the details and register here…

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Pay What You Owe

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I’ve recently heard from several Virtual Assistants who have been having trouble getting paid from the VAs who engaged them. I hear from folks like this all throughout the year, but more so recently–seems to be an epidemic going on. They’re frustrated, not sure what to do and wonder what I think about it. So here are my thoughts on the whole topic…

It’s bad enough when Virtual Assistants get stiffed by clients. It’s adding insult to injury that they have to worry about this from their own colleagues.

I think it’s reprehensible and unethical to withhold payment from subcontractors because you are waiting for payment from YOUR client.

YOU engaged your subcontractors, not your client, so PAY THEM fair and square.

And if you don’t have the money, then maybe you shouldn’t be engaging them in the first place.

But subcontractors, you aren’t off the hook either…

Have Virtual Assistants who want to engage you sign YOUR contract, and YOU decide what rate you will accept–not the other way around. Just because you might subcontract doesn’t mean you have no say-so about how and when and what you get paid–but these things need to be established upfront.

That said, you don’t have any business talking about money or accepting work directly from clients that belong to the Virtual Assistant you are engaged with. If you’re going to be ethical about this, then you need to inform any clients who approach you in this manner that they need to go through the proper channels and talk directly with the VA whose client they are–and that’s not you. Those clients are not your clients–they belong to the VA you are subbing for.

Yet another reason why that whole “team VA’ term is so ridiculously idiotic. Unless you are an actual employee, you are not part of anyone else’s “team.” So stupid.

Never include in your contracts, or sign any contract, with any clause that says you don’t get paid until the client pays the VA you are subbing for. If you do, then you’re stuck waiting or not getting paid if their client doesn’t pay on time or at all.

And if you do sign a contract like that, don’t complain when you don’t get paid–you’re the dummy who signed it. It’s not anyone else’s fault but yours.

From a business standpoint, this is yet another example of why YOU have to be smart in your OWN business.

I get that some folks think this is the experience they need to gain confidence to go out on their own, and sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to help keep some money flowing in. But never lose sight of the fact that when you are working for others (i.e., subcontracting), you’re building their business, not your own. You’re paid less, you lose a great degree of control over your circumstances, and you waste time and energy that could be spent growing your own client base and long-term success.

My advice (if you’re still nervous about engaging directly with clients):  Stop with the subcontracting and instead look for Virtual Assistants who want to engage you as their own support partner in the same way that any other client would retain your ongoing support. You would charge them your full monthly fee just like any other client and you’re going to learn a lot more about the business, managing it, and what it is to provide ongoing administrative support than you ever will doing piecemeal, nickel and dime subcontracting projects.

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How Working More Hours Can Mean Earning LESS Money

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Continuing the conversation in this week’s Dear Gritty VA post (“I’ve Lost All Boundaries–Is this Relationship Salvageable?”), I wanted to illustrate how a Virtual Assistant can be working 50 hours a week and still not be making “any” money. I use quotations marks because, sure, she’s getting paid something. But “something” doesn’t necessarily mean “enough.”

There are all kinds of VAs out there who fall into the “working poor” category. A lot of this is because a) they aren’t charging enough and b) they are looking at this as a virtual job instead of a business and so they keep working with clients as if they were still that employee, except that instead of working outside the boss’s door, they’re working virtually from home. That they might call themselves business owners means nothing, because for all intents and purposes, they’re not.

I see this thing all the time in our annual Virtual Assistant Industry Survey. While the report that goes out to VAs shows the collective totals of all responses as a single group, as an admin, I get to see the results in individual context. What I mean is that when someone fills out our survey, their submission gets recorded as an individual number. When you click on the number (the number representing that individual, anonymous respondent), it shows you that particular number’s individual responses to all questions in the survey. In this way, you can see what an individual business looks like.

It’s a common theme to see individual businesses who are working with, sometimes, 11 or more clients and still only making maybe $30,000 a year! Sometimes it’s because they aren’t charging enough. Often it’s because those clients aren’t retained clients, they are only project clients. The ones faring the worst are the ones who are working with that many retained clients and still only making that little per year.

And they aren’t an anomaly. Many of those are making less than $10,000 a year! There’s something definitely wrong with that picture and it’s what fuels my passion to help Virtual Assistants/Administrative Consultants start earning better.

But getting back to our example, to provide some illustration, I asked the person who originally submitted the question if she would mind sharing what she was making with this client so we could work with some actual figures.  She was really embarrassed (which I assured her she shouldn’t be; we’ve ALL done things in the initial stages of our businesses that we cringe at later). Still, she very graciously obliged my request (thank you!) knowing that I always keep these things confidential and never use anyone’s real name.

If you remember in the original post, the VA stated that she “took less to build the relationship.” Problem is that “less” amounted to less than the national minimum wage that an employee would make!

If you look carefully at the choice of words, “took” tellingly suggests that the client was calling the shots and dictating the terms and the VA merely accepted them.

And to use a crude analogy, how often do we hear of one night stands turning into real relationships? Not that this situation here is a one-night stand (sort of the opposite, LOL), but it’s the same concept of devaluing and dishonoring ourselves that leads to clients (and one-night lovers) not having any respect. A relationship that is flawed from the beginning just isn’t going to grow into something better.

I point this out only because it’s so important to examine the underlying thinking and default modes that drive our actions because they are what allow us to accept things that aren’t always in our best interests. In this case, she had relinquished ownership of her business, took a subservient role in the relationship and let her personal needs and standards take a backseat to the client’s. In recognizing this, she knows that this will be an area of personal growth she will need to focus on and be conscious of as she continues to move forward with her business and interact with clients.

And what was this VA making? $350 a week.

So let’s pick this apart… At 50 hours a week, that amounts to $7 an hour–if I’m not mistaken, that’s less than the national minimum wage that an employee would make. And even an employee would really be making more than that if you figure in the Social Security, Medicare, vacation pay, sick leave and all the other myriad benefits that they don’t necessarily take home, but are there nonetheless.

At $350 a week and 52 weeks in a year, this VA is only making $18,200 annually. And actually, she’s making even less than that after you subtract taxes, business expenses and operating costs. I don’t know about you, but I certainly couldn’t live on that little money all by myself, much less with any kind of family to take care.

So yeah, she’s making something. But that something is relatively “nothing.” It’s only enough to barely survive and exist on.

And in this particular case, the VA actually is a single mom with a high-school age child nearing the college years. She is barely making enough to keep them fed with a roof over their heads; forget about any kind of money for college.

Plus, at 50 hours a week, she doesn’t have any time left to do much of anything else, let alone work with other clients to increase her income.

There are other things we all have to do in life besides working in our business–things like nurturing and taking care of kids, grocery shopping, helping with homework, spending time with our husbands or boyfriends, exercising… SLEEPING.

Again, I don’t know about you, but I am a mere mortal. I’m just not going to have a lot of time and energy left to do much of anything else in my business after a 50 hour work week. Even if technically there are more hours left in the day, I’ve still got a life to live, responsibilities to take care and simply a finite amount of energy with which to do it all.

As you can see, this isn’t a healthy situation in any way, shape or form. It’s certainly not a business situation as this VA recognizes.

I can hear some folks out there saying, “Well, she isn’t charging enough! If she would just raise her rates, all her problems would be solved!”

Not really. Because a) she’d still have all her eggs in one basket; b) she’d still be working in what amounts to basically a job; and c) there’s no room for any kind of growth.

Success is not success unless you are both making money (and by money, I mean MONEY!) and are profiting in terms of also having the extra time and freedom to enjoy it.

And maybe you’ve got the inside track, but I charge what amounts to roughly $75 an hour and even I would be hard-pressed to find a client willing to pay $15,000 for 200 hours of administrative support a month.

And not that I would ever advocate this as an adequate, sustainable professional fee, but even if she was only charging as little as $20/hr, that’s still $4000 a month. While there are clients in the world who can afford that, how many of those kind of clients is this VA–or any VA–realistically going to find?

And that still doesn’t resolve the problem of working that many hours, having time for a life and doing anything else in or with her business.

When you are operating a business, it shouldn’t be in what amounts to the role of an employee to your clients. And dammit, you have a right to want more, to want better, for yourself and for your kids and your family! You have a right to not settle for merely a meager, subsistence income that you have to work your ass off just to get! That’s never what business is about!

This is why, like I say, it’s infinitely easier to work with–and find–a handful of 20-hour a month clients. The work is more broken up. It’s easier to give superior attention to each relationship. AND you’ll have room to grow or take on other kinds of work and projects in your business if you so choose, not to mention a healthier amount of time left for the rest of your life and to simply BREATHE.

To put some numbers to this, let’s go with a nice middle of the road fee of $50/an hour. If you had 5 clients each on a 20-hour retainer of $1000/mo, that’s $5,000 a month.

Obviously, that’s before taxes, expenses and operating costs, but you get the idea. It’s still a very nice, healthy income, much more than what most of us ever made as employees. And that’s working what would amount to 25 hours a week (if my math is correct, LOL).

This is why you have to understand your role differently and redefine that role. You will never create the kind of circumstances I’m talking about here by working like an assistant to your clients.

AND, if you get away from selling hours entirely, your potential skyrockets for reaching a six-figure business that doesn’t have you working slave hours to earn it.

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Dear Gritty VA: I’ve Lost All Boundaries–Is this Relationship Salvageable?

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Dear Gritty VA:

I have a client who signed a three month retainer which will end next month. The client is a publicist in Los Angeles. Working with this individual has become a job. I work 50 hours a week. The reason being that I have become an assistant vs. admin support. I like this person and it is clear that she needs help. My challenge is how to steer this so that she’s working within my business model and not the other way around. I’m not making nearly what I should be. I took less to build the relationship. Is there a way to bring this around or should I just thank her for the wonderful experience (while frustrating at times, I’ve learned a lot) and move on? –TK

This is SUCH a great question. It’s a common pitfall for so many Virtual Assistants. I’m sorry you are going through this, but on the positive side of things, as you recognize, it’s a really valuable learning experience.

There are so many business concepts this touches on so I’m just going to enumerate things to consider. You may have figured some of this out having gone through this now so a lot of it may  just be a validation that you’re getting on the right track from this point forward.

1. Never bargain with your fees. You never want to make bargains with the very thing that earns your living. All you do then is teach clients to devalue the work and the relationship, and give them the idea that everything is up for negotiation.

And really, it amounts to bribery. It’s saying, “I am not worth what I’m charging so I need to bribe you with discounts and freebies in order to get you to work with me.”

That’s a horrible, powerless way to start a relationship and attracts all the worst kinds of clients. I know we see people doing this a lot, but just because we see it doesn’t mean it’s working. ;)   There’s a whole lotta people out there who are NOT making any money and whose businesses are going nowhere due to this thinking.

If what you have to offer is valuable and worthwhile, it’s worth charging fully for right from the get-go. There will be more mutual respect, and your business and relationships will grow more successfully and healthily from there. There are other–better–ways to start new client relationships and make it easier for them to say yes that don’t entail discounting or otherwise bargaining with your fees.

2. Never take on anchor clients. An anchor client is one who ends up monopolizing all your time and energy. They are called “anchor” clients because they weigh your business down and keep it from going (and growing) anywhere.

It doesn’t help that we’ve got Virtual Assistant training programs telling folks that these kinds of clients who hire them for 40, 60 or more hours a month are the bee’s knees. If you are someone who is only doing this work as a side income and more of a hobby, then that’s fine and dandy. But it absolutely does not work at all for those who are trying to build a real business that earns a real, full-time income (and more!) that they could actually live on.

That’s because working with those kind of clients doesn’t leave you the room or energy to work with others and grow your business. I can’t tell you how many VAs I personally know who are struggling because they are working like full-time assistants to their clients. They aren’t making enough money to live on and they barely have any time to think or do anything else.  And they’re definitely not living the freedom and choice-filled life of the self-employed they dreamed of when they first started. If you have read my blog for long, you’ll frequently see me referring to this as “operating and working with clients in ways that don’t give your business room to grow.”

A good rule of thumb is that no one client should make up more than 20% of your business. If you are working with one client for 40-50 hours a week, you’ve got yourself an anchor client who is probably making up 75% or more of your entire business.

You aren’t making the kind of money you want and need, yet you haven’t given yourself room to work with anyone else.

And what happens if that client says bye-bye? There goes almost (if not all) of your entire income. On top of things, you’ve been so busy working with this one client, you haven’t had any time to market your business to keep those prospective client pipelines open. Not that you had any room to take on new clients anyway.

Quite the dilemma and not a good place to be, right? So this is what you do…

3. Recognize when what a client really needs is an employee. As you’ve stated, this has become a job and it’s time to let this client know that what she really needs is an employee, one who can be solely dedicated to that level of workload.

You want to always remember (and tell this to clients, too) that a Virtual Assistant/Administrative Consultant is an alternative, not a replacement for employees. There is naturally going to be a significant difference in the way and when you work together as well as what work you take on. There are going to be many clients and many workloads this simply isn’t a fit for–and isn’t supposed to be.

There are a lot of people out there who just aren’t going to understand this (sometimes folks have to be a little further along in their business for certain things to make sense), but I gotta say it anyway–when a client starts needing you for more than 20-30 hours a month, what they really need is an employee.

Because once you start getting into those kind of hours for one client, the work starts to require more constant, daily monitoring and it overwhelms everything else. And that is a condition that will not only lead to burn-out and keep you chained to your desk every day, more importantly it will limit your ability to work with others and deprive you of the “space” you need to move around easily in the work. Daily on-demand work causes crowding which also leads to poor performance and inconsistent delivery.

The more profitable, sustainable model that also allows you to keep the higher value, one-on-one, true partnering relationship is to work with several retained clients whose individual workloads don’t exceed 20-30 hours a month. It’s a much easier business to manage, it gives you space and leaves room to grow and offer additional services and project work. In that model (and as long as you are also charging properly), it only takes a handful of clients to really do well financially, and because you have “space,” you can supplement that line of business in many different ways.

4. YOU need to set the parameters and the definitions. This is where I’m always saying that being an administrative expert and being an assistant are not one and the same thing. And if you’re a business owner, you aren’t anyone’s assistant.

What I want those two statements to do is help people get conscious and intentionally define their role. You can be an administrative expert without having to be anyone’s assistant. Problem is most of the information you get in the VA industry today is telling people that they have to be assistants. And that’s not a new paradigm whatsoever. It’s just a different name for the same thing–employee.

When you get clear about that, you understand that your value isn’t in being and doing everything for that client. You CAN focus on just the administrative support in your clients’ businesses without being an assistant and instead being an Administrative Expert. If you want to also be an assistant, that’s up to you, but like I say, they aren’t one and the same thing. You get to choose, but understand this–your value isn’t dependent upon also being an assistant. It’s all in how YOU define the work and your role in your business.

Likewise,  you need to define what administrative support is. And the reason this is important is because so many VAs are giving everything away under the administrative support umbrella. So you want to define what kind of work is administrative support and what work logically falls into other categories of business. This will not only help you define parameters, making things more manageable and leaving you room to grow with that client as well as others, but you also create additional revenue sources by charging separately for those things that don’t fall under the administrative support umbrella.

Obviously, I can’t say one way or the other if this is a salvageable relationship. I can tell you, though, that once you’ve spoiled a client and allowed them to have expectations that you can’t sustain and that keep your business from growing, it’s often really difficult to wean them off those things. As you grow and your standards change and improve, always expect that you may lose some clients. It’s just natural that you will outgrow some.

If it’s a relationship you’d like to try to keep, all you can do is be open, honest and direct about the changes that must take place in your business in order for it to grow, and let the client know that you hope she will come with you. Don’t be invested in the outcome beyond that. If she chooses to come with you and accept the adjustments you need to make, great! You can now move forward on more mutually beneficial footing. If not, it just leaves you room for more ideal clients to come into your business.

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You See What’s Happened Here, Right?

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Askimet is a fantastic little service that helps block and prevent spam on blog comments. It’s been around for years with millions of happy users.

Up until now, it was offered for free. But as with most businesses, especially one that provides such a great, convenient, easy to use service, Askimet recently decided to start charging.

And people are up in arms.

Gee, go figure. Why on earth would a… um…. business charge for its services?

This attitude completely baffles me. In one comment I read, the person thought it was “outrageous.”

Come on, people. Why on earth do you expect a business to keep giving away their stuff for free? Do you honestly think the world revolves around you and that they were put on this earth to subsidize your life and your business without compensation of any kind? Oh brother.

It’s so hypocritical… you expect people to pay you for your services and products, but as soon as someone else does the same thing, what they want to charge is “outrageous?”

That kind of hypocrisy keeps you out of alignment with integrity. It’s also a form of poverty mentality. People who are successful (or want to be) don’t whine about nickels and dimes, and they certainly don’t expect others to work for free.

At $5 a month for a single site license, there’s nothing outrageous about it at all. It’s quite reasonable, in fact. If you have 10 sites,  it goes up to $80 a month. Still very reasonable if you ask me considering the problems it prevents from spam and all the lost hours it saves us in dealing with those issues.

They have additional multi-site licenses in increments of 25, 50 and 100 on up. Sure, if you have that many sites, it can get spendy. But just because you have a million sites doesn’t mean they should be giving their service away for free.

More important, though, is the business lesson here. You see what’s happened, don’t you?

Askimet has trained its customers to devalue the service and expect it for free. For years they have spoiled people by providing a valuable service for absolutely nothing. And like spoiled little babies, these people are outraged now that Askimet has the audacity to actually expect to be paid.

This is a common tactic of technology companies. Give the product away for free in beta to build a large user base. Let the users identify the kinks so you can work them out. Then, once you have a really fantastic product with a huge customer base of people who can’t live without it, start charging for it. But as you can see from the uproar, there is a huge drawback to that strategy.

I think they should have been charging right from the start. Then they wouldn’t have to deal with this ugly “free” expectation they themselves have created. You can do yourself a favor by learning from their lesson.

I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free.” This is exactly what’s going on here and you want to avoid that in your business. If what you have to offer is worthwhile and of value, then it’s valuable and worthwhile enough to charge for right from the get go.

Don’t give away freebies and discounts in the hopes that it will get you more work. All that does it attract freebie seekers and train clients to disrespect you and devalue what you have to offer. If you train them to expect it for free or cheap, you’ll have one helluva time getting them out of that mindset once you realize you can’t make a living on “free” and “cheap.”

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Only Two Days Left to Save

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Virtual Assistants and Administrative Support Consultants:

Just a quick reminder–only 2 days left to save $50 on my brand new Value-Based Pricing & Packaging Toolkit!

Until midnight Saturday, September 25, I’ve reduced the price of the Value-Based Pricing & Packaging Toolkit to $97 (a savings of $50). What’s also cool is that I’ve added a ton of new information to the product so you’re getting the benefit of all the added resources I’ve realized people need in implementing this new methodology in their business.

You’ll get:

  • 2 videos where I walk you through the entire presentation.
  • Written guides to teach you how to implement value-based pricing in your practice.
  • Success and profitability tips.
  • Visual illustrations and graphics to make the concepts crystal clear.
  • A diagram of my own successful business model.
  • Samples and templates to use in your own practice.

I’m probably leaving something out. The product page will give you the full low-down. There’s just so much I’ve included that you will get with this product. And be sure to read the reviews from folks who attended my original clinic and purchased the product. I’m telling you, this is REALLY good stuff and I hope this price break will help give you access to it.

Virtual Assistants and Administrative Support Consultants: get ready to toss those timesheets out the window once and for all!

If you have any questions at all, please do email me. I’m always happy to help. :)

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Get Ready to Toss Those Timesheets Out the Window for Good!

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I know buying business products can be tough. The really good stuff does cost money. There’s just no way around it. But it’s an investment in your growth and success. And those of us with the really good stuff to offer can’t devalue ourselves and the knowledge we share. That’s a really poor business example, and none of us should help others at the expense of our own interests. Right?

I also know that cost can sometimes make great tools and training inaccessible for a lot of people
. Which is why I price my products at a range I feel honors the value and expertise I offer while still being accessible to a large number of people. Internet marketers charge literally thousands of dollars for the kind of learning, knowledge and guidance I offer in my products.

That’s why occasionally I offer a sale to make it a little easier for those who are still struggling financially
. I really want to help this profession grow and succeed to the next level. I have heard from many of you who would really love to get my new Value-Based Pricing & Packaging Toolkit, but the regular $147 price tag was still a bit out of reach. Sooooo, I’m going to open a window here to give you a really great savings…

From now until September 25, I’ve reduced the price of the Value-Based Pricing & Packaging Toolkit to $97 (a savings of $50). What’s also cool is that I’ve added a ton of new information to the product so you’re getting the benefit of all the added resources I’ve realized people need in implementing this new methodology in their business.

You’ll get:

  • 2 videos where I walk you through the entire presentation.
  • Written guides to teach you how to implement value-based pricing in your practice.
  • Success and profitability tips.
  • Visual illustrations and graphics to make the concepts crystal clear.
  • A diagram of my own successful business model.
  • Samples and templates to use in your own practice.

I’m probably leaving something out. The product page will give you the full low-down.  There’s just so much I’ve included that you will get with this product. And be sure to read the reviews on the product page from folks who attended my original clinic and purchased the product. I’m telling you, this is REALLY good stuff and I hope this price break will help give you access to it.

Virtual Assistants and Administrative Support Consultants: get ready to toss those timesheets out the window once and for all!

If you have any questions at all, please do email me. I’m always happy to help. :)

Virtual Assistant Business Contracts Templates Forms Guides
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