One day you will die, so stop trading your time for money.

I was a f**king idiot in college and a horrible negotiator.

During the summer I would deliver newspapers once a week to a handful of different locations all around the Westchester County area. 

It typically took me just a few hours to finish my deliveries.

I’d get paid $125 for all of the deliveries. 

At some point, I told my boss that it only took me 4 hours for the deliveries.

So we agreed to move it down to $100.

He was pumped because he was paying me less for the same amount of work, even though the only thing that had changed was that I became more efficient.

Again, stupid.

During the school year, I would work for a few hours a week at a local retirement community.

I’d input numbers into spreadsheets, write news articles for the paper that would circulate throughout the community, and 

I was pretty directionless and there wasn’t any work I was particularly passionate about or excited for.

I just took whatever direction they gave me (which was pretty rare) and mindlessly floated around the facilities. 

And yet, I was always painfully honest about the time that I put into my work, and how long it’d do to complete a project.

Because I had no sense of value. 

I felt that time often equated to value, and therefore if I put in more time I would create more value.

And so, my weekly time-sheets would often read out just a few hours a week, and I would get paid monthly commensurate to that.

If I worked 10 hours a week at $7.50 an hour, I’d get paid $300 a month (minus taxes). 

Never once questioning that payment structure. 

Often, I’d actually underreport my hours because I thought, well, I really just messed around for a few hours, so I probably don’t deserve anything for that. 

The only thing that’s really changed is that instead of focusing on hours worked, I try to spend as much time as humanly possible thinking about the value I’m creating. 

Working smarter, not harder.

The smartest entrepreneurs I know are the people who often work the least.

They leverage their time in the most efficient, productive manner in order to create the greatest amount of value to their clients.

Often, their work isn’t one-to-one. 

They create products or ways to effectively scale their time so that they’re not merely charging their hourly rate, for whatever amount of hours they’re working. 

This is a difficult position to put yourself in because in order to do so you need to first prove that you can create value for a company based on a fixed price. 

It’s easy to do so by selling them software or a product, but how do you do that when what you’re selling is just you. 

What I typically focus on understanding in my sales conversations is what is the real pain here? 

Often that answer takes a number of probing questions to get to. 

And you’ll know it’s a sore-spot when somebody says something along the lines of, I don’t really know. 

Or, to be honest, it’s a lot. 

A lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of frustration. 

And so, I try to spend as much of our conversation trying to understand that.

Why this? 

And, if this doesn’t work out, why would that suck? 

(And I often do a terrible job of this. This is probably the area where I need to improve the most in the next 3-6 months.) 

Once I’ve gotten to the bottom of that pain, only then can I fully understand the value that I might be creating for that business, and how much time and/or money that my solution might be able to save them.

For example, if they’re used to spending 2-3 hours in customer discovery answering simple questions that could just as easily be answered via a short FAQ video, that FAQ video could easily be worth 10s of thousands of dollars in saved time over the course of a year.

A typical videographer might look at a project like that, set aside a half-day for shooting, and another half-day for editing and call it a $1000 project (if their time is valued at $125/hr). 

Instead, I’ll look at the overall value that I’m creating and submit a number that’s more commensurate with the value that I’m creating. 

So, let’s say $5000, plus marketing services and guidance on how to most effectively use that tool that I’ve just created for them. 

And at some point in the near future, I’ll get to a point where I can hire somebody at a fraction of my overall rate to shoot the video, and I’ll simply provide editing and marketing oversight. 

(Then eventually hire a team to do that for me.) 

What is the value you're creating?

It’s easy to look at the rate that somebody pays you and say, that’s the market rate, so that’s what I deserve to be paid. 

As a marketer and a salesperson, I try to determine my value not based on market-rate, but rather the services that I’m providing and the value I’m creating. 

If you’re being hired to work for a company, they’re often paying you based on what the market-rate bears and nothing more. 

Rarely will you ever make more than that, and seeing a significant pay increase beyond that will either require years of upward mobility (and patience) or tough negotiation. 

But if you could come to that company tomorrow with a solution that might save them millions of dollars (and prove to them that you can deliver that), they’ll happily pay you 10's, if not 100's of thousands of dollars to provide that solution. 

So the next time you’re concocting a solution for a prospective client, think not about how you can create more hours for the project, but rather, what’s the problem that I’m providing a solution for? 

And how can I maximize the value for that client?