Making More and Working Less with Jonathan Stark

The Soloist Life

How can you work less and make more than you are right now? There is a glide path if you’re willing to experiment insists Jonathan Stark, author of Hourly Billing Is Nuts. Yes, the dynamic Business of Authority duo is baaaaaaaaack for an episode:

Two experiments to try if you’re currently billing by the hour and want to explore alternatives.

How to start thinking about value vs. time, especially when you hit the maximum number of hours you are able—or want—to work.

What options to consider to ratchet up your revenue past the low 6 figures—and how to think about the audience or transformations you’ll need to deliver to get there.

Why being a “ruthless” minimalist can keep your business easy to run and avoid time sucks.

Exploring—and testing—ways to use AI right now in your expertise business.

LINKS

Jonathan Stark Website | LinkedIn

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Jonathan Stark is a former software developer who is on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. He is the author of Hourly Billing Is Nuts, the host of Ditching Hourly, and writes a daily newsletter on pricing for independent professionals.

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00 - 00:29

Jonathan Stark: As you're growing your audience and you've got just more people aware of what you're doing, you can deliver smaller bits of value at a lower price, but a way lower cost. If you've got enough of an audience, then that completely support you. The classic example is like if you have a bestselling book. So if somebody goes to Amazon, they buy the book, they read the book, you're not involved. The author doesn't even know about you. And if you sell enough of them, if the audience is big enough, you can live like a king off of that.

00:29 - 00:37

Jonathan Stark: It's a great example of the kind of thing where you're delivering a little bit of value for 20 bucks to 10 million people and it's like, oh, that's pretty cool

00:42 - 00:55

Rochelle Moulton: Hello hello Welcome to this soloist life podcast where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today we have a special surprise guest, my buddy Jonathan Stark.

00:56 - 00:58

Jonathan Stark: Hello. It's great to be back.

00:59 - 01:02

Rochelle Moulton: Awesome. And I'm in charge of the controls, which is like super fun.

01:02 - 01:02

Jonathan Stark: No

01:02 - 01:28

Rochelle Moulton: pressure. So, let me do an intro so people who don't know who you are will know. And Jonathan is a former software developer who's on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. He is the author of Hourly Billing is Nuts, the host of Ditching Hourly, and writes a daily newsletter on pricing for independent professionals. He is also a former co-host with moi of the Business of Authority. So, Jonathan, welcome.

01:28 - 01:31

Jonathan Stark: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

01:31 - 01:44

Rochelle Moulton: I just had somebody tell me yesterday and then somebody else this morning how much they missed TBOA and I had to bite my tongue not to tell them we were recording this episode today.

01:45 - 01:47

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, it's like smartless. You have to reveal

01:47 - 01:50

Rochelle Moulton: How fun to have the duo back in action, right?

01:50 - 01:53

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, yeah, it's great. It feels like riding a bike already. I know.

01:55 - 02:08

Rochelle Moulton: Well, listen, I wanted to have you on the show. You are actually the last guest of season 2 before we take a summer break. So we can talk about making more and working less, which is kind of your theme. And it seems kind of like a good summer topic.

02:09 - 02:13

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Working way less and you're taking a break, which is smart.

02:13 - 02:26

Rochelle Moulton: Exactly. Well, so first, Catch us up on what you've been doing since we wrapped TBOA in April. Like, are you simmering on another podcast, working on new products? Like, what are you doing with all that extra time you have back?

02:26 - 03:02

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, I've been experimenting with lots of different things, purposely trying to keep myself busy and spending maximum time in my sort of genius zone doing fun stuff because it's sort of a response to 2023 which was kind of boring work wise. I had things really automated and I was subconsciously optimizing to work as little as possible. I got down too far and ended up spending most of my time doing stuff that I think at, which doesn't make me feel that great. So this year I was consciously planning to experiment with more fun stuff, get a little

03:02 - 03:17

Jonathan Stark: bit busier, but in that time, purposely spend doing things, a lot of writing, but also launching things and creating new offerings and all different stuff. So I have a lot of irons in the fire right now and it's been exactly as hoped and extremely fun.

03:18 - 03:23

Rochelle Moulton: Well, I saw you on LinkedIn and my eyes like bugged out of my head because I know you hated going there.

03:23 - 04:04

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, I've been anti-social media for probably 8 years. I've been basically off of social media. The only thing I did was syndicate my daily email posts on a dozen platforms, but I didn't engage. I didn't really do anything there, and I have the results to show for it, which I would get just no engagement whatsoever on any of those automated posts. I'd be like if I got 80 impressions on a LinkedIn post that was just like a title and a link to my blog, the blog version of my email list. So that wasn't doing anything. But

04:04 - 04:32

Jonathan Stark: so 1 of the things I did, it was after we decided to shutter TVA away. I was like, my mailing list has been hovering around 10,000 for a long time. Partially because I'm an aggressive pruner. I like to have my open rate around 50%, so I prune people that haven't been opening a lot. But it was more than that. I just felt like I was talking to the same group of people, which is great, but I wanted to get the message to rid the world of hourly billing. I want that mission to grow, So I wanted

04:32 - 05:04

Jonathan Stark: to get more people on the list. I had experimented with a bunch of different things like YouTube and other podcasts and guesting on other podcasts. I was like, I'm seeing people getting really good results on LinkedIn. It's the least offensive platform to me. And so I took it, I don't know how long it's been, maybe 2 months ago, I started to take it really seriously. I researched 2 or 3 different people that were having, you can see they have tons of followers, you can see they get tons of engagement. I'm like, well, if I believe that

05:04 - 05:37

Jonathan Stark: that translates into more people on the mailing list and more people joining me on the mission, if I believe that, then okay, let's just posit that that's true, that those are good leading indicators for my ultimate goal. How do I take this seriously and really do it right or at least effectively? And holy mackerel, it really works. When you actually engage with people, imagine social media be social. LinkedIn wants their users to behave a certain way and that's no surprise it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what they want. They want you engaging in

05:37 - 05:55

Jonathan Stark: sharing good content and attracting more people to their platform. They don't want you linking off of the platform. They want you engaging in other people's comments. So, you know, basically I spend maybe half an hour to 45 minutes, Monday through Friday, chatting with people who care about whatever I posted, which turns out to be pretty fun.

05:58 - 06:04

Rochelle Moulton: Have you seen it translate into email subscribers or is it too soon to tell? What do you think?

06:04 - 06:31

Jonathan Stark: It definitely has. So I didn't have any tracking on my website on the signup form prior to doing this experiment. So I don't have like web traffic numbers, but the idea is to transition people from who are meeting me for the first time on LinkedIn, transition them to the website where they can sign up for the mailing list. And my traffic from LinkedIn, I installed some tracking software. It actually, Paul Jarvis's application Fathom,

06:31 - 06:31

Rochelle Moulton: we had him

06:31 - 07:06

Jonathan Stark: on TVA years ago. And I can clearly see that my traffic from LinkedIn is increasing, not like dramatically, but it's definitely increasing. So we'll see, and my subscribers have started to climb again on my mailing list. So we'll see if it's worth the squeeze, so to speak. But it is pretty fun and it doesn't take that much time. So I'm writing the daily anyway, so it's it feels it's a little bit different writing for LinkedIn than for my list because it's for strangers and not preaching to the converted. Yeah, it's been fun as long as as

07:06 - 07:08

Jonathan Stark: long as it continues to stay fun. I'll keep doing it.

07:08 - 07:10

Rochelle Moulton: Look at you being social. I'm so proud.

07:13 - 07:19

Jonathan Stark: I've been meeting a lot of really good. I mean, we met on social media. I've been meeting a lot of really cool people. It's really cool.

07:19 - 07:30

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, and I think LinkedIn has a lot of really cool people. It doesn't have as much of the sort of detrius that you see on some of the other ones for people in the expertise space.

07:30 - 07:32

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, we can leave those unnamed.

07:34 - 08:07

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, we'll leave that 1 there. So let's talk about this whole idea of working less and making more. There's a lot of advice out there about this from myself included. So maybe we can start with how experts tend to evolve. So an expert of some sort like a software developer or a consultant goes out on their own and they start doing project work. They probably start by billing hourly. So if someone is in the spot right now early in their business evolution, what can they experiment with to increase their revenue without working more?

08:07 - 08:14

Jonathan Stark: I mean, the main thing is, assuming you're not going to hire, which is something that I've never going to do, I've sworn that off.

08:14 - 08:16

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, let's assume they're solos. Yeah, exactly.

08:17 - 08:51

Jonathan Stark: Right. This is the show for that. So then you've only got so much inventory to sell. You've got however many hours a week you want to work and your hourly rate for your industry probably has a reasonable maximum that anybody would ever be willing to consider. And it's very easy for people who say, oh, you're a PHP developer and you're $300 an hour. Well, I can easily find a PHP developer that's $150 an hour or $50 an hour or $15 an hour. So it's a terrible way to position yourself in the marketplace because it makes it

08:51 - 09:21

Jonathan Stark: really easy for price buyers to put downward pressure on your fees. And at some point you run out of hours to sell and if you're not gonna hire, that's that. So what do you do instead? And the answer is you got to break the dependence on trading time for money and To experiment with that. I would probably start to offer usually it starts with a product I service because that's the easiest thing to get your head around if you're used to billing by the hour. And the easiest kind is just a paid consultation, some kind of

09:21 - 09:49

Jonathan Stark: paid call where someone can kind of pick your brain about your area of expertise. And you know, maybe it's got a, The trick with these is that it kind of seems like an hourly rate because in order to schedule it you have to put something in the calendar that's some duration. But it's really not tied to that. It's tied to the clarity that you can give them on the call. So maybe you schedule it for 45 minutes. The way I do it is I think right now they're 45 minutes, but I tell people to block out

09:49 - 10:16

Jonathan Stark: extra time after that because we could go long. So I kind of skew toward the short end of the appointment, but then I tell them to make sure you don't have something after it because we might really be jamming and want to keep going. So I make it clear that it's not really about the time. It's more about the outcome that they want, which is almost always clarity about what to do next in some situation that they're stuck in. So for a software developer, it could be something like, I don't know, somebody's got some outrageous Amazon

10:16 - 10:50

Jonathan Stark: Web Services bill, and you're really good at DevOps or doing something on cost control on AWS, or even just reading the dashboard. And you could have something like, for 500 bucks, you can share your screen, log into your account, and I'll go through your dashboard with you, explain how it works, explain what to look for, any potential opportunities for serious cost cutting. And if I can't give you some tips that will lower your bill by at least $500 a month, I'll give you your money back. So that's really not tied to the hour. That's more tied

10:50 - 11:11

Jonathan Stark: to the outcome and the clarity around how they could get that desirable outcome. So I'll probably start there. Productized service, just say, if you want to, I could go down maybe a few more examples of productized services that I'm aware of, but that's the basic concept where it's, you're packaging up your expertise and you're selling an outcome. It's not about the 45 minutes or however long it takes. It has nothing to do

11:11 - 11:26

Rochelle Moulton: with that. You just talk about 1 more. So pick 1 that's a little bit higher up the food chain, but not too high. Maybe, you know, like an assessment thing or some kind of a front end for something that you normally do a full Monte on.

11:26 - 12:02

Jonathan Stark: Good place to step up the next level from a kind of ad hoc consultation call would be some kind of a roadmap. And for software developers, that probably looks like a non-technical person who's got an idea for a SaaS or some kind of app, an iOS app. Could be anything, could be a website, got an idea for this thing, but they're non-technical and they don't even know if it's feasible. Like is this technology even, is there technology that exists that would even make this idea possible? And if so, how much would it cost? Like what would

12:02 - 12:38

Jonathan Stark: be involved? What would be the ongoing expenses? What would be the upfront expenses? And if you're attracting people who are like this, like I had 1 person who was focused on senior level salespeople from enterprise SaaS businesses who are constantly meeting with clients that are buying enterprise B2B software and identified, it wasn't uncommon for these types of people to identify gaps in the market that they kind of were like, well, maybe I'll just fill this gap but I don't know anything about software So they would call my guy and he would start them off with a

12:38 - 13:06

Jonathan Stark: blueprint and the promise was I'll get the idea out of your head down onto paper in a way that to determine the feasibility What the upfront costs would probably be what the ongoing costs would probably be a list of technologies that would probably be involved, how risky each 1 is or isn't. Then at the end of that, they would have something that they could bring to perhaps a lower cost developer or they could take it to investors to perhaps get angel round of funding to get it done, depending on if they needed the money or wanted

13:06 - 13:25

Jonathan Stark: to bootstrap. And then my guy would, you know, if they wanted to, then my guy would say, well, if you want me to build the MVP, I'm happy to do it, but I'll probably be the most expensive option. You should shop around if you want. And of course there was like, no, I'll go with you. That sounds great. Let me just get the money. So a roadmap is a natural next rung up in the product ladder for someone like that.

13:26 - 13:53

Rochelle Moulton: Oh, good. I think that gives people who are still in the early stages some ideas of what to do next. But then we have this sort of next category, and you and I, we've talked about this together so many times, but we know what happens when experts that are mostly billing directly for their time, and that can include retainers too, hit roughly 150,000 or so somewhere in that vicinity. Talk us through what happens and how they can peel themselves off when they hit that wall.

13:54 - 13:54

Jonathan Stark: Peel themselves off

13:54 - 13:56

Rochelle Moulton: the wall. I mean, that's what it

13:56 - 14:23

Jonathan Stark: feels like. You end up like 5, 10 years in, maybe you've got a couple of little kids now, and you realize you're working more than ever and you haven't increased your income in years, like 234 years and you're like, huh. You start to see like, you know, the wall starts to look like, wow, how am I ever going to work less? You know, all of a sudden you've got these other things you want to spend your time on during the day, and you're getting better and better at what you do. You're finishing it faster and faster

14:23 - 14:40

Jonathan Stark: at a higher level quality. Maybe you raise your rates, but it doesn't compensate, and you're just treading water. When you get to that point, that's when I get a lot of people who come to me and they're just desperate. They're like, I don't know what to do. There's no...