 Our second speaker today will be Brian Rothstein. His topic is grow your freelance business through better client selection, better relationships, and more profit. We may not have enough time for Q&A today, but don't worry, if you're on social media, just hashtag WordCampYVR. Please welcome Brian Rothstein. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming. Yeah, also, just one thing to add to what Tiffany said is I'll be around all day. So if I run out of time, there's no time for Q&A. You can definitely find me in the halls. I'm happy to speak to everyone. I actually, I came in from Montreal. I'm excited to be here, but I have a lot to say, so I'm going to jump right into it. So I've written a lot in my life. I've written a bunch of books. The most recent one is actually The Psychology of Pricing. And it actually says WordPress Edition. It's actually the only edition. I wrote this during COVID, during lockdowns, what have you. And I said, you know what? I love giving back to the WordPress community. I was like, I'm going to put out this book for the community. And so it's 400 pages of advice. And not that I'm giving you a sales pitch. I just want you to know that I love the WordPress community, and a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is actually what I came up with during the pandemic and put into this book. So there are many faces of fear. A lot of people fear the dark. A lot of people fear the walking dead, even though this sequel is kind of crappy, but whatever. And the big fear that most people in this room have at some point or had is fear of clients asking to get paid, asking to get what you're worth. So I really want to talk about the different types of clients that you don't want. But there are different steps you need to take before you can actually filter them out. Because the real question is, what are you really afraid of? You're afraid of rejection, that pricing conversation often leads to rejection. A lot of times, you feel stressed out talking about money issues, even in your personal lives. But when it comes to being a freelancer, running a small agency, dealing directly with clients, that money conversation sucks. And we've all been there. You're afraid of losing income. You want to make money. You don't want to get your hopes up too high. But you give out your proposals, and you always hope for the best. And of course, the fear of having to justify why somebody should go with you. Why should they hire you? And when somebody calls you or messages you, contacts you in some way to discuss their web needs, they're a relative stranger. Like generally speaking, you don't know who they are. And you need to justify to them why they need to hire you over somebody else. And people are really afraid of that. And it makes sense. It's fair. But it's something that hopefully by the end of the talk, you'll be a little bit closer to getting over. So let's change your state of mind. Change the way you shift your thinking. Change your mentality. And maybe even just a little bit of what I say today sinks in, then I'll feel that it was worthwhile. And hopefully, you'll benefit from it. Now, the first thing that you need to do is do your best to feel more confident. Now in the web world, we always have a confidence issue. There's always confidence issues. And I like to wake up excited for work. I like to wake up not dreading that I have to deal with clients, ask to get paid. And really, I want to love what I do. And we should all love what we do. And so it takes time. You build up your confidence. And over time, you get better and better at it. But in the beginning, especially, what I suggest is you either be confident or just pretend to be confident. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. Now, if you don't know how to be confident, then just pretend to be an actor. Say today, I'm going to pretend that I'm a confident person. I'm going to speak to this client. And if you do this all the time, eventually, you will be confident. But in general, if you want to gain confidence as a web professional, here are a few things you can do. So first of all, know what you can't do. Know what your limitations are. Know what your weaknesses are. Upgrade your skills. Constantly working at the upgrades, seeing what new plugins are available, what upgrades are available, especially in the web and tech community. Those are all really key. And so, yeah, upgrading your skills, very important. Attend the conferences. So I'm not a morning person. But I'm here, 10 a.m., Saturday morning. And so are you guys. How about a round of applause for each other? Like, this is great. You guys, you woke up. You made it here. And you could be doing anything else on a Saturday morning. But you chose to attend a conference. And coming here, you see what other people are doing. You see what's the latest trends, latest techniques. And that really helps boost your confidence. Now, I also suggest watching videos, listen to podcasts. Even something as simple as watching TikToks. Follow some people in the industry on TikTok. Even a little one, two, three-minute clips can give you really good advice and make you feel more confident that you know what's going on and find things to master. Same thing with reading articles, signing up for the newsletters that some of the bigger names in the industry are putting out. They'll make really good suggestions. And stay current. Follow market trends. And try to sell new services before or just as a new trend hits. So what do I mean by that? So obviously, technology is moving really fast. There's always updates. And here are a couple of examples. So years ago, we used to build a website just for it, the desktop version. And then eventually, we had a mobile version. And then we switched to responsive design. And so what happened was you had to level up. You had to keep going with the flow. And so at one point, my team and I started selling mobile sites and then responsive design sites and then doing responsive first and so on. So that's standard today. But 10, 15 years ago, it wasn't like that. And so we found a trend and we went with it. It gave my team a lot of confidence. We knew what we were doing. We knew that we were selling a quality product. And we could charge for it accordingly. Now, we did the same thing with QR codes. We started customizing QR codes. But then QR codes kind of went nowhere, right? So for a while, there was this big buzz about QR codes. And then they just disappeared. So you never know. You're never sure. You're not always going to succeed, but try. And that'll help you gain confidence. But I'm going to give you the number one confidence factor. Be prepared to walk away. Anybody who calls you and wants to hire you might offer you everything you possibly want. But if there are problems, suspected problems with what you have to offer or what they have to offer with respect to a business relationship in any way, which I'm going to get into much more detail shortly, be prepared to walk away. Before the contract starts, as the contract starting, even at the end, even near the end of the contract, be prepared to walk away. This is one of the best things you can do for confidence. Negotiate, speak to clients from a perspective where you're ready to walk away. Now, another method I use for confidence and what I recommend is the politician method or what I call prepared statements. So what are prepared statements? Think about politicians in the media. You ask them a question. They never answered what the question was. They already figured out what they want to tell you. They know what they want to tell you. So you ask them one thing. They give you another answer. They don't care what you're asking them. They have a message that's been prepared and they're giving it out. That's what I'm suggesting you guys do now. But don't do it in the slimy politician way. Do it in a clear cut way. I'll give you an example in a second. So first of all, just to drive the point home, let's look at these guys from Pawn Stars. For those of you who have seen the show. So basically, people come into their shop and they offer to buy things. So what do they do? So let's talk about Rick, the guy on the left. What does Rick do? Somebody comes in and says, OK, here's my item. And then Rick will say, OK, well, how much do you want for it? And the guy will say, well, how about $100? And then Rick will say, well, the best I could do is 80. And then you think, oh, 80. I really wanted 100. OK, how about 90? And what does he come back with? He'll say, well, I can give you 50. And it's obviously way lower. And then it kind of catches you off guard. And he says it with quick and with confidence. And he say, OK, OK, OK, well, I don't want 50. Fine, I'll take your 80. So what does he do? He has a prepared response, a prepared pattern of responding. And this is what I recommend for you guys as well. It's a really, really powerful tool. So in our world, we'd say somebody says, like, who hasn't heard? I'm not sure if I should spend this much money. Like, who in this room hasn't heard that, right? What are you going to say? You're going to say, look, don't look at it as an expense. Look at it as an investment. OK, this is what we're going to build your website. It's going to make you some money. I've used this line. Clients and potential clients, they hear that and they're like, OK, I didn't really think of it that way. Yes, it's not just another expense. This isn't the electricity bill. This is something that's going to make you money. Another example, the client insists that the price is too high for simple design. So then what do you tell them? You say, look, you're asking for a website. That is a lot more complex than you realize. And as such, I have no choice but to ask you for more money or stick to my price and work from there. And these are the kind of prepared statements I'm talking about where you can get the most out of your clients, but in a respectful way and in a way that you feel good about yourself because you're not giving a discount. And I'll talk a little bit more about that as well soon. Now, you just have to be more confident than you were the day before. That's it. The day before you spoke to that client, you wake up the next day and say, OK, I'm going to have confidence. I'm going to work with this client. So if it's today, just be more confident than you were yesterday and work from there. Now, when I'm filtering potential clients, I tend to look at it as an elimination round. Like this is like the hockey playoffs. And at each step, I'm asking, who's the client? What do they want? And then I get to the final client that I actually do want because you don't want every client. You want very particular clients. So you really have to set a high level, a high bar, have a strong filter. In fact, I would go this high. There are many reasons not to take on a client. And this is like the opposite of what every business person in the world will tell you. I have a lot of work colleagues, friends who are like, what do you mean you reject clients? Yeah, I reject clients. I reject nine out of 10 people who call me because most of them are not quality clients. They're not the clients I want. And so from a business perspective, you don't want to take on everybody. You want to filter out the ones that could cause problems for you. I've had a lot of sleepless nights. I love to keep people happy. I love to keep clients happy. And I want to be on their level. Like my clients, my contracts even say, I'm going to work with you, not for you. Because I've had weekends where all I could think about is, oh my god, I'm going to have a dreaded call on Monday morning with an upset client. That's like the last thing I want. And the thing is when you start with great clients, it's easier to work with them. It's easier to communicate with them. You have better relationships with them. And it's easier to charge them. So let me walk you through a whole bunch of scenarios that you might encounter when clients contact you. So first of all, I strongly recommend avoiding the get-rich-quick types. So who are these people? First of all, they're the people, so I'm looking at the dragons then. So people watch dragons then. They watch Shark Tank. And then the next day, they'll call me and say, oh my god, the dragon's invested in this website concept last night. I want one of those. Yeah, no, you don't. No, you don't. Because you and 2 million other Canadians just saw this. Or Shark Tank, where they have who knows how many millions of people watched the episode the night before. And they'll call and say, yeah, I want this. I want what they have. Like these people, they're just watching TV and thinking, oh, wait a minute. OK, well, I guess I want one of those. You don't want that. Or news items, like I had a client call or a potential client call who, a few years ago, one of the biggest trends was unboxing videos on YouTube. And they announced this on CNN. They're like, oh, unboxing videos are raking in money for people who are showing these videos. And somebody called and said, oh my god, I want to make unboxing videos. I want to make a website to promote the unboxing videos. And I want a whole marketing plan. I want to post it on YouTube and all over the place and all this stuff. And I said, OK, how did you come up with this? Oh, it was on CNN last night. And I'm like, oh, it was on CNN last night? And you think that you're the only person who saw this story? Like everybody saw this story. 500,000 people saw this story. Yeah, I don't think that this is really a worthwhile investment. So you don't want that person as a client. Partnerships, I get a lot of calls from people who will say, look, I've got a product. I've got it cheap. We're going to put it out there. All you have to do is build an e-commerce website, do the SEO, run the social media campaign, get those sales in, and I'll give you the products. No problem. Yeah, stay away from those people. You're going to do all the work, and they're just going to sit back and give you a hard time about why they're not making money. The multiple website type of people. OK, so these people, what they do is they'll call you and say, I need a discount because I want to launch 25 websites at the same time. Really, 25 websites. OK, how about this? You pay full price on the first website, and I'll discount the rest. They never call me back, ever, because it's just not happening. OK, then big site, lowest price. I've literally had people call and say, go to this website. K-I-J-I-J-I, yeah, K-G-G. You've heard of it? Yes, yes, I've heard of it. How much is it for one of those? Yeah, no, no, because they just discovered it. They think, oh, it's a simple website. How hard can it be? Yeah, you don't want those people. Then there are the meters. OK, now, I have not met most of my clients. And especially if you're like a digital nomad, you can really appreciate this. You're all over the world. You're traveling everywhere. And you're not wasting your time with this. But a lot of people want to meet. So the people here who must meet, like this guy here, he'll be like, well, I'm old school. I want to look you in the eye. I want to see that I can trust you. You're going to build me something of quality. I'm going to get my money's worth. And those people are going to give you the hardest time. I tell them, look, we can do it over Zoom. Zoom call, teleconferencing, or we could use the phone, which was invented in 1876. Why don't we use that? I don't have to come down and meet you. Because it's more than just meeting, right? It's the preparation, the travel time. And you're doing this all for free. It takes a lot out of your time. Then you have the types. I want you to feel my business. I want you to come down to my office. You're going to meet Jennifer at the front desk. I'm going to walk you through the factory. I'm going to show you everything. That way, you'll know what kind of website to design for me, what kind of logo to design for me. And they'll be talking to you and really heartfelt and be like, I am my business. And my business is me. I need you to come down. Please come down. And I'm like, no, no, I'm not coming down. This is the kind of guy who's like, as soon as you get started on the project, he's going to make you come to his office all the time. Trust me, I've gone through this. Please come down. You go down. OK, I just wanted to let you know that I'm really loving the website. OK, that's it. Yeah, forget it. Waste of time. And I'm not against actually meeting with people, but they have to understand that there's a difference between a sales call and a consultation. This is really important. I give 20 minutes to everybody. Whoever calls me, my rule is you get 20 minutes. If I can figure out what you need in 20 minutes, you need to go back and rethink your business model. Because I know I'll figure out what you need. But if you don't know, that's a problem. And I have years of valuable experience that you don't have. So I'm trying to share that with you, so you get 20 minutes. Beyond that, you'll have to pay for it. I might just tell them, give me $100, almost like a token fee, just to meet with you. And honestly, if you don't think it's $100 is too much, ask them for $25. If they won't meet you, if they won't pay $25 to meet you and talk to you, even if it's over the phone, if they won't pay $25, they're saying, your service is not even worth $25. Your advice is not even worth $25 to me at this point. That's problematic. And it does happen. So you have something worthwhile. You have something that they don't know. You have information they don't know. You have experience that they don't have. It's worth paying for. All right, now there's a special place in hell for the time wasters. I hate when people waste my time. I really do. You have no idea how many people will gladly waste your time. So first of all, they're the lucky lose. So who are the lucky lose? These are the people who they're going to call you. They're going to waste your time. But they have no idea of really buying anything. They're just calling. I just want to get a few questions, a little information, OK. But here's the thing. You ask them, when do you need to launch by? I don't know. Do you have a logo? I don't know. Do you want me to design a logo and part of the project? I don't know. What are you going to do with the website? I don't know. How are you going to make money with this business? I don't know. What color is your underwear? I don't know. Like, these are the people who you want to filter them out. They're really, they're not in it for you. They're in it to waste their own time. And you get sucked into that. Then there's the tire kickers. The tire kickers are people who are never going to be satisfied with what you've told them. So they call you, you figure out what they need. You say, this is what you need to do this, this, this, this. And they say, no, no, no, that's not what I need. That's not what I need. I need this, this, and this. And then they're like, well, now you have to rewrite my proposal because I want this, this, and this in it. These people also, same problem, they're going to waste your time. And they'll waste everybody else's time too. They'll call your competitors and say, OK, I want everyone to give me a proposal. And again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. That's OK. But they're going to tell everybody that whatever they're proposing isn't good either. There's always going to be a problem. And that means throughout the project, there's always going to be a problem. You don't want them. Then there's the ignorance factor. This is people who make light of the fact that I don't know anything about those internets, but I heard you could make money. And then they start telling you that this is my industry. And I'm going to tell you all about my industry, what I need, even though they have no idea what they need. And they'll talk over you and they'll say, look, because I know more than you, you're going to give me what I want. These are people who say, yeah, I need a Twitter. And I'll be like, look, I've had people call me and say, I need a Twitter. Or maybe now they're going to call me and say, I need an X. But they'll say, what do you mean you need a Twitter? Yeah, yeah, everyone tells me I need a Twitter. I'm like, no, no, Twitter's like a process. It's ongoing. You don't just buy a Twitter. OK, OK, OK. I'll give you $100 for a Twitter. Let's just make it happen. I've had those calls. If the client thinks that he knows better, or you think that they will never understand what you're doing, if you say it's not just a website, it's SEO, it's social media marketing. There's so much more to it. There's multiple steps. Or they don't even understand the basics of hosting or domain name registration. They're not the clients you want. They're going to drive you crazy. They're going to take a real shot at your confidence. And you'll never be able to charge them what you want or what you think that you're worth. All right, those are the bad timing people. OK. We got Mr. Call from Car multitasker over here. All right, so it's the end of the day. He's exhausted. He's getting his little sugar rush from his donut. His boss is on his case. He's got his laptop open. He's going to pick up his kid from school. And now he decides, I need to get on this website thing and then call you. Yeah, this guy will never remember you when it comes down to it. He'll never remember you after the call. He'll never remember you when you send him the proposal. He'll never remember you when it comes to time to get paid. He'll never remember you. He's more concerned about getting his life going, working through everything. And he'll go to the bathroom, spend 10 minutes playing on TikTok, go back to his desk, and do that multiple times per day, but still not find time to call a web marketing person to discuss a website that will affect his business. That's that guy. You don't want that guy as a client. Now, there's a second special place in hell for the 459 p.m. Friday caller. These guys are going to hell, too. I guarantee it. This guy is sitting around. It's Friday. It's the end of day. Everybody's gone home. And he's sitting there thinking, I need a website. And so he'll go to Google. He'll type in web design, whatever, web design Vancouver. He'll find you. He'll call you. And you'll have a decent conversation while you're like, oh, man, I want to get out of here. At least it's like the end of the week. OK, fine. So you say, OK, I'm going to get you your proposal by Monday morning. OK, great, fantastic. Have a great weekend. Monday morning comes. You start working on the proposal. You realize you have to ask a couple more questions. You call them up. What does he say? You're who? Yeah, we spoke on Friday afternoon about your website. Website? Wait, you're who? What website? Who? What? Who? Yeah, this is Brian. You're who? I'm like, OK, all the who's who's is like Mr. Owl here. Maybe I should ask him how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop. But really, these guys exist. They will not remember you. By Monday morning, they forgot about you. Stay away from these guys. Now, let's say you filtered really well and you gave out a proposal, but you still found that there's still kind of a problem going on. So there are other people to avoid. Here's a few more. The bad communicators, they were great at the back and forth until you sent them the proposal and then they disappeared. They're not writing back to you. They're not calling you. They're not communicating with you in any way. Forget it. Drop it there. Don't chase after them. I mean, maybe chase a little bit, but generally speaking, their lost cause is the major red flags. The wait and seeers, same thing. Everything's great, wonderful, whatever. You send them the proposal. They say, yeah, yeah, get started. Yeah, but I have to get paid to get started. It's in the proposal. It's in our contract. Yeah, Karen over here thinks that you're just going to work for free. He's like, well, I'll pay you after you get started. No, no, no, no, no. You do not start until you have money in the bank. Don't waste your time. The proposal revisionists. So these are people who everything was great until they read the proposal. And now they're like, well, I kind of just, I didn't really want this. I kind of wanted that. And then they asked you to rewrite the proposal. After you've gone through everything, you got to that stage and spent all that time on the proposal and sent it and everything. I'm going to tell you that in 25 years of doing this, 80% of people who asked me to revise the proposal never go ahead with it. And they just not just go ahead and not go ahead with me. They never go ahead with anybody. Because they themselves are unclear on what they want or how much they want to spend or what they want to do or if they have time for it or anything. And so that's a major red flag if they ask you to rewrite the proposal. Then there are the scope creepers. So scope creep is when you've agreed to something for a price and then you want to just throw something else in. How about just do a little bit of this? Just do a little bit of that. Throw this. Can you just throw in a blog? No, I can't just throw in a blog. Can you just add an extra whole section of 15 pages? No, can you just throw in a photo gallery? I'll give you all these raw photos to edit. No, I'm not throwing anything in. These are the scope creepers that will waste your time. And just like the zombies here, I really love this photo because I imagine the zombies are the scope creepers here. And they will totally surround you and take all of your time and you will not get paid for it. So if you suspect that someone's going to be a scope creeper, stay away. Now once all these people are gone, the great thing is that you get better clients. If you can filter out all those people, which I do on a regular basis and with time and skill and effort, you can too, you get better clients. And with better clients, it's easier to work with them. So you've got more confidence in the beginning. You worked on your confidence. You filtered out your clients. Now you're working with clients who actually value what you're doing. They're like, OK, yeah. It's kind of almost like a one-on-one respect thing, not that they're looking down on you or they look at you as a commodity. And they'll pay for your services. This is Jerry Nirenberg. He was actually one of my clients before he passed away a few years ago. And he was a bit of like a mentor to me. He's the founder of the Negotiation Institute. He was the first person to write a book, a major book on negotiation, and really a phenomenal guy and a tremendous body of work behind this person. And what he taught me was, in a successful negotiation, everybody wins. And that really shifted my focus and the way I look at things. Because a lot of times when you're negotiating and trying to sell something, it's always like, ha, ha, I got one over him. I charged him an extra $500. I would have done it for $500 less. Or the client is thinking, ha, he's only doing it for $3,000. I was ready to pay $4,000. Like there's this kind of adversarial feeling to it. And what Jerry suggests is like, no, everybody can win. You charge what you want and feel satisfied with the amount that you've charged. And let the client feel satisfied as well. It's not adversarial. It's a win-win scenario. Now, let's see. How are we doing for time? Whoops, OK. So, OK. How to get clients budget. So here's a little tip. Once you're working with really good clients, it's easier to actually get client budgets. So that's something to consider. But a lot of times, especially early on in my career, people used to tell me it's really rude to ask for a budget. I'm like, what? I shouldn't ask people how much they're willing to spend. I should go through all this, write a proposal, do all this communication, all this stuff, and then not ask them. And in the beginning, I didn't ask. I never asked for how much money people are willing to spend on the project. I'm like, yeah, that's terrible advice. Like, terrible advice. You want to know right from the beginning what their budget is. But sometimes it could be abrasive to say, what's your budget? So what I say is, I try to dilute it a little bit. I'll say, what's your budget range? So they don't just say, it's 4,000. I'll say, so what was your budget range for this project? And they'll say, well, it was like 3,000 to 5,000. And you say, OK, 3,000 to 5,000. I can work with that. Because then you can say, well, for service, I can give you these services for 3,000. And I give you a little more services for 5,000. But you don't offer the 5,000 services for 3,000. If you are going to lower the price, you have to lessen the services, provide fewer services. It's value for value. They're paying for a very particular level of value. And the price goes higher. You offer more. Price goes lower. You offer less. Oh, and also, right, so knowing their budget helps you decide if you can afford the project. If you can afford the project, not if the client can afford the project. Because if you take on a project that you can't afford because you're not earning enough money from it, then you can't afford the project. You need to think about that. Like I said a million times over, you're offering something of value. You need to get paid for it. Now, when it comes to discounts, maybe 5% to 15%, maybe. And under very specific, particular circumstances. But let me give you a really powerful piece of advice here. In fact, I think that this is the most empowering thing that you can do as a freelancer working with potential clients or working with clients. People catch you off guard all the time, especially for that horrible discussion about money. So you'll say, OK, client calls you. Oh, I want to add this to the website. And you say, OK, that's going to be like $1,000 more. What does the client say immediately? Could you do it for $800? And so what's your knee-jerk reaction to that? You're like, OK, well, yeah, sure, $800. Sure. Because you're like, $800 is better than nothing. It's more money. No, no, no, it's not. It's not. No, this is what you do. You say, I'm just going to put you in a quick hold. Is that OK with you? Who says no to hold? Everybody. Everybody. We're trained in society. Someone must have put you on hold. You say, yeah, sure, put me on hold, whatever. OK, you say, look, let me just put you in a quick hold. OK, put them on hold. Say, take a deep breath. OK, look around. Text your friends. Make plans for the night, whatever. OK, take them off hold. Yeah, look, I thought it over. You're getting a really good deal here at $1,000. I can't give you a discount. OK, no problem. Let's go for it. And that's it. You just made yourself $200 by putting somebody on hold. It is the most empowering thing you can do. I've been doing it for at least 10, 15 years when I realized how effective this is. Any time a client puts you in an uncomfortable position, especially talking about money, you put them on hold. And the thing is, when you put them on hold, it empowers you even more. Like, I'm controlling the conversation now. I'm putting you on hold. You're going to wait a second. OK, now I'm ready for you again. And I'm ready to tell you that I'm not giving you a discount. And they will go for it. Now, when it comes to charging, what do these businesses have in common? I'm asking you guys. Show of hands. Let me know. What do you think? What do these businesses have in common when it comes to charging clients? Yes. Yes. Yes. That's it. They've got fixed rates. And they never apologize for that fixed rate. OK, you know what? I want to give you this for getting that right. Just a copy of my book. What's your name? What's your name? Ankit? All right. Good stuff, Ankit. All right. These people never apologize for charging you. They don't care. You go to the dentist. What are you looking at and say, no, I'm not paying. I don't like the way you fixed my tooth. I'm not paying you. Like, it's not happening. Yeah, try not paying your phone company and see what happens. Good luck. No shame. They don't care. As Tom Hanks famously said, there's no crying in baseball. I say, there are no apologies in pricing. Don't apologize for charging people what you're worth and what you agree to. When it comes to payday, they need to pay you. When people are asking for payment, I say, no apologies. You say it with me? No apologies. Again, louder. No apologies. Thank you. There shouldn't be any apologies. Asking to get paid doesn't make you a bad person, a client-hater. I mean, you might be a client-hater, but not because you're asking to get paid. It doesn't make you a criminal. And the thing is, when you filtered all these bad clients out, most clients are going to be so much easier to work with when it comes to payment. It's like life-changing. My business grew tremendously as I filtered more and more people out, and I only got the clients that I wanted, the ones that actually understood what I brought to the table for them. Now, OK, I want to talk a little bit about human nature because nobody talks about this. This is something that really nobody talks about. The thing is, you're, how do I say this? OK, you could be the problem. When you're talking to clients and you have all these people that I'm pointing out that are troublesome, sometimes you have friction with clients because you're the problem, not the client. And it's something that nobody, everyone's afraid to tell people this. But I'm like, no, no, no, I'm telling you, I'm letting you know. You're trying to persuade someone to buy something from you. You need to consider their personality. You have to consider your personality. And you need to consider the interaction between the two personalities. And there's a lot going on. The bottom line is you need to be self-aware. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about psychology. So I have a psychology background. I used to teach psychology at McGill University and at Boston College. And I actually used to administer IQ tests in whatever it was like a lifetime ago. And there's another way to look at intelligence instead of just having an IQ score. And one is the theory of multiple intelligences. And the idea is that instead of having this general level of kind of like excellence, different people are able to excel in different areas. So for example, if you're musically talented, you can be a musician. If you're body smart, you'll be into sports. If you're logical mathematical, certainly at this conference, a lot of you are programmers and excel in that part of intelligence. Now, when you're negotiating with clients, you need to be people smart. You need to have interpersonal intelligence, interpersonal skills. And not everybody does. If you're introverted and you're dealing with clients, you need to be aware that you're introverted. And you need to take action to work with clients from an introverted person's perspective. It's something that you have to consider in your interactions. Now, one thing I strongly recommend is go into 16personalities.com and do a little quiz. It takes like 10 minutes. And it'll give you one of 16 personality types. Now, it's not perfect, but it's a tool that's been using psychology for decades. And it basically breaks you down to one of these areas where on the website in particular, once they tell you what kind of personality you have, you'll be able to actually see what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, who would be ideal, well-suited, like romantic partners, jobs, and so on. But my favorite part is actually the strengths and weaknesses, because it really gives you this eye-opening information. You'll be reading this and be like, oh my god, that's me. That's me. That's me. And then you're like, oh yeah, I don't do that. I don't do that. But maybe some of the I don't do that's like the negative parts, the parts that are not part of your general personality, could be parts to be worked on to improve your interpersonal skills, improve your communication with clients. And the better communication you have, the better the client feels comfortable with you, the more you can charge, the happier you are. You don't have these dreaded weekends where it's like, oh my god, you get what I call Monday morning dread, where you're like, I really am afraid for Monday morning, because I either hate my job, or I hate this client, or whatever, you won't have any of that when you work through that. You work through your personality styles. Let me just see quickly for time. OK. All right, so again, a few more minutes. Perfect. OK, now, the last part, the last few slides I have, we're going to move away from this. And just to review, so we've got the confidence factor. You've got better clients. You're charging more. Now, what is a way you can structure your business to charge even more while working with these great clients that you got because you filtered out the bad ones, you got the good ones, and you gain confidence? So here are some pricing models, some of which I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with, especially in this room. Most people charge an hourly rate or have a project fee. That's generally what people do. And that's kind of like the easy way out. I mean, everyone at some point has an hourly rate. No matter how big the project, there's generally something, there's like a number put in there. Now, two big problems with hourly rates. One, if it takes you three hours to do something and the client pays you for three hours, great. But the faster you get, or the more experience you get, the faster you get, and the faster you get, the faster the project gets done. So after a few months, it goes from three hours to do to one hour. Well, now you're only charging for one hour, so that's a problem because you're making less money. And the other big issue is AI. With AI, what took you three hours might take you five minutes. And so a client's going to say, well, it took you five minutes, how can I pay you for three hours? So that's not good, that doesn't work anymore. Then with project fees, it's kind of the same thing. They'll be like, why am I paying so much? It didn't take you that long. And then there's other models, productized services, retainer fee, value-based pricing. A lot of people ask me about that. With value-based pricing, basically the idea is you say, well, this project I'm gonna do is gonna make you $100,000. I want 20% of that, so give me $20,000 and let's get going. This only works if you have a long-term client. You can't just do this with anybody who calls you. This is that you have to have an established report with the client, so that doesn't really work. So what I wanna talk about is relative value pricing. Now, relative value pricing is something is that I formalized, and that's what I put in my book. It's something that we were doing in-house anyways, and I realized that it's something that could really benefit the WordPress community and everyone, if you're in the web freelance community. So what is relative value pricing? How it works. Step one, you can start from an hourly perspective or from a fixed rate perspective, that's not a problem. But instead of just saying, yes, this is what I'm charging, you actually look at the unique scenario. So what's a unique scenario? There we go. Okay, so I actually identify 20 different unique scenarios. Rush jobs, very common. Leveling up, do you charge differently if you wanna gain new skills? If someone came to you because you have a stellar reputation, do you charge the same price you would charge everybody? Do you charge more? Do you charge less? Stop gap work. Is it just, you know, you're taking on some small project in between two big projects, something to consider. And so on and so forth. So I've written extensively about all these different scenarios, and I look at this and say, okay, so you've got your price, you were originally wanted, and we're ready to charge the client. You say, let's look at the unique scenario. What's the situation? And then you look at the opportunity associated with that. So what are the opportunities? And then you consider all these other factors, like, what is the client opportunity? Is there potential for more work? Is this person well connected? Do they know a lot of people? Do they have friends that are gonna hire me after the fact? And you figure that out. Are you gonna get a lot of referrals? Look at the growth opportunity. Are you gonna gain more skills from this project? It's like, okay, maybe I'll lower my price a little bit just to make sure that I get the project because I'm gonna be doing new things that will make me a more effective WordPress programmer, more effective business person, and then grow from there. Then you look at the scenario. Is there a location issue? Excuse me. Is this client on the other side of the world? Do I wanna wake up in the middle of the night to deal with them? Are there issues related to you within the scenario? Like, am I ready to take on this project? Or did they say something in passing that kind of threw me off? Like, everything sounded great in the conversation, but he kind of said this and that, and you kind of reevaluate. Like, maybe I really don't want this person, so I'll raise the price a little bit and go from there. You know, like, I'll see. You know, like, maybe I can overcome this issue by raising the price a little bit. So, all right, you've looked at the scenario, you've looked at the opportunity, and then you either increase or decrease the price accordingly. So, I'll give you a couple quick examples. The unique scenario of a rush job. Rush jobs are a headache, okay? Like, obviously, you know, people call you and they're like, I need this now. So, what do you do? You say, okay, well, that's gonna cost you 300. That's what you normally say. Okay, whatever you need to fix, this thing is $300. But then again, you need it now. So, I need to drop everything I was doing that day. Whether it was, you know, other clients waiting for things or that day I was going to the beach or I was going skiing or doing something else, I'm stopping that to help you out. You're gonna pay a premium for it. And so, the unique scenario is, okay, rush job, you're paying a 50% premium. It's no longer $300, it's $450, I'll have it done by tomorrow morning. So, see the relative value there, it has changed. You would have normally charged 300 for this, but given the unique scenario, the price has changed and you make a little bit more. Whoops, and then, all right, it's my last slide. Family and friends discount, very common. So, you get a call from a laundromat and the laundromat's like, okay, we need a website. You say, okay, fine, it's $3,000. Here's the problem. But I'm your cousin, you can't charge me $3,000. Oh, okay, well, you know, then you think, well, do I give it to them for free, give it to them at discount? First of all, you should never give it for free, unless it's something really close, maybe you're like your parents or siblings or whatever, a little bit further removed, you don't want to give it for free. It still takes you time to do it. And just because that person didn't account for their marketing expenses when they opened a laundromat, that's not your problem, that's their problem. They should have thought of that. But there's something else to consider in this unique scenario, is that your mom is gonna be really pissed at you because you didn't give cousin John a discount. This is a problem, and so in the unique scenario, friends and family discount, you need to consider that. And so there's so many factors in all these different scenarios you need to consider. So here it's like, okay, give him 10% off so he feels better about it. You know, okay, I got a discount from a cousin, whatever. And what's in it for you is you get another portfolio piece and then move on from there. And that's what I have for you today. So, thank you.