Business Tips

Yes, $14,400 per hour to fix a WordPress site, you read that correctly. There’s both a story and a lesson to be found in there for every solopreneur, so read past the story for the nugget. Some of the comments are top-notch, too.

Several years ago, before I started this company, I had an urgent request from a customer of the company I was with at the time. Her site was down. Hard. It was either a full page of errors or a white PHP screen of death and she wanted my personal, out of support scope help.

I told her that I’d get her running for $120. The short of the story is that I either went into her .htaccess file or her wp-config.php file and fixed it. In 30 seconds. Done. Site up, customer clapping hands over the Internet 1s and 0s.

The guilt

Then the guilt hit me. I just “took” $120 from a lady for something that took me 30 seconds to fix. That would be $14,400 per hour for 30 seconds of my life. I’ll never forget it.

I immediately e-mailed her a moment after telling her it was online again, thinking she was going to be pissed that she just spent $120 so quickly. I asked her if she wanted most of it back, like $100 of it.

No, I spent over an hour trying to fix it myself. I’m happy to pay that much for having my site back online, regardless of how much time it took you. It was worth $120 to me and I wish I’d asked you sooner so I could have that hour of my life and my site uptime back.

The lesson

Your skills, whether it be physical or intellectual, are worth a certain amount regardless of how much time you spend using those skills.

Changing a lightbulb is a pretty simple task that anyone can do. Changing a lightbulb at the top of a 300′ tower on the edge of a 1000′ cliff will come with a hefty price tag. Get where I’m going with this? Skill — particularly the scarcity of it — directly influences the market price. It’s simple supply and demand. Certain skills take that to an extreme.

No one in their right mind is going to pay $14,400/hr for WordPress services, but they will pay $120 to get their site back online. So don’t settle for $1 for such a task.

Application as a solopreneur

I was encouraged by Brian Gardner of StudioPress to raise my hourly rates by 50% in 2011. He said it’d weed out the riff-raff and make my life easier. I was afraid I’d lose opportunities when people were pricing me out against others. It did. I lost opportunities. I’m glad, though, because it turns out those were probably clients I didn’t want to work with. I raised my rates again. Same thing happened: I got higher quality jobs and clients who didn’t complain or want more for nothing.

According to the 80/20 rule, 20% of your clients create 80% of your problems, extra work, and misery. It’s amazing how many things the 80/20 rule apply to. So, I took the 20% best clients and made them 80% of my work by raising my rates. I was many thousands of hours into using WordPress all day, every day and that made me more valuable than someone who uses a little of this and a little of that. They struggle where purists in one platform breeze through.

Stop there – kill your rates altogether

Now that you’ve raised your rates as you’ve learned more, kill them. Hourly rates hold you back. They make you an employee again, working time to get paid.

I attended my second WordCamp Orlando in 2012 and heard a great presentation from Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner, someone I met at the first WordCamp Orlando in 2009. He was a surprise presentation on getting paid what you’re worth and a lot of his (pep) talk revolved around not posting an hourly rate and not charging by the hour.

Instead, charge by the task or project for what it’s worth when it’s done by you.

One of his more awesome points was when you give a project price and include a bunch of features, and the client comes back wanting to pull out features to save money. First, you should be selling benefits, not features. Second, it doesn’t really save money because you’re already in the mindset that your delivery of said project is worth X. Adding or removing little items isn’t going to move the needle unless it’s a qualified scope change.

He’s right

I looked back over the last 3-6 months of 2012 and it’s been pretty rare the number of times I’ve billed someone by the hour or fraction of an hour. When I did, it was often an arbitrary price the task or project was worth on the market. That price was then converted into time because they’re old school and were expecting an hourly price.

The first week of December 2102 I killed my hourly rate. Have you killed yours? How is it going? Let’s talk below.

There is a distinct divide in the professional services industry, yet one term is used to clump everyone into one category: freelancer. I hate the term, even though it may seem like splitting the hairs of intended use of English. While most use the term out of a lack of a better word at the moment, others use it in a condescending tone, much like “the nanny” or “the help.”

Freelancer

Freelancers are frazzled shells of their dream selves when they quit their job to work from home and live a life of freedom. They are worn down, bowing to the illogical demands of many people who want to devalue their work and wring every bit of work out of them for the least amount of coin. All you have to do is spend 10 minutes at the hilarious site Clients from Hell to see how bad things can get if you’re not respected by your clients.

In most cases, a freelancer has just left the corporate world and is just starting out under their own name or they lack the skills or confidence to give themselves a promotion.

Expert

Experts, on the other hand, are respected, in-demand, and generally laid back because they run much more of the show than a freelancer. They are able to offer more to their clients than just delivery of a project to get their money — they improve their clients’ position in the marketplace.

There are several traditional definitions of what makes an expert, but they all agree that it takes time, dedication to their trade/skill, and even some amount of luck being in the right place at the right time with the right tools and support (Malcolm Gladwell – Outliers). Even using the basic “10,000 hour rule,” I surpassed that easily quite a while back, but that’s not all it takes… because some people do jobs poorly for many years without ever expanding their skill-set or improving customer satisfaction.

Can you look at past work and shudder that you used to do that crap months and years ago? If you can’t, then what have you been doing with your time – just running the rat race?

The Difference in the End

In the end, the difference comes down to a few things, while seemingly like nerdy English class exercises, they amount to a big deal.

First, you respect yourself more knowing that you are at the top of your game. Sure, there is almost always (always unless you’re actually the world’s greatest at something) someone better than you, but if you’re an expert and know how to take care of business, you’ll know you’re not at the bottom.

Second, your clients will respect you more than if you’re some $20/hr schlub. Charging those rates doesn’t command respect, timeliness, politeness, or anything a client might be tempted to do if you’re a “dime a dozen” person. You’ll know the difference the first time a client e-mails you for your opinion on something before spending money or backs out of something just because you advised them of dangers.

Third, your peers will respect you. Some industries are cutthroat. My industry can be, but (by and large) the WordPress developer community, especially the Genesis community are cooperative. We share info, tweet for help, discuss new ways to accomplish things, and even team up to complete projects using everyones’ best skill areas. If your peers respect you, then when they’re busy, they’ll send work your way. Be sure you do the same, by the way.

So, what do you want to be? An expert or a freelancer?