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Steve Larsen:
What's up everybody? My name is Steve Larsen. Thank you for listening to Sales Funnel radio. This is a special, "Hey
Steve!" segment.
Announcer:
Welcome to Sales Funnel radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now, here's your host, Steve Larsen.
Steve Larsen:
All right, all right, all right. Hey, I'm going to get right into the question again on this one. I really really like this question. This is, this goes a little bit beyond building funnels and is more about how to manage building funnels. If you're doing it for others, or kind of just in general. Anyways, I'm going to go ahead and play the question here from my man Keith.
Keith:
Hey Steve, it's Keith Mosely. Wanted to ask you, what do you use to log your hours that you spend on your funnels? How do you send out invoices and generate quotes for customers? Thanks man.
Steve Larsen:
Keith, okay. Great, I just love this. I smiled like crazy when you said this because obviously there's the skill behind building, but then, how do you build a business around that?
That's obviously what I've done...
Okay, so when I was 17 years old, no no, I was 18, just barely 18, just barely graduated high school. Had no idea what I wanted to do with my life still. I'm still figuring that out. I plan on being a kid forever.
I went to get a job at Discount Tire and I was a tire buster. I got over there and there's a bunch of rough guys. They, at least for the store that I was in, I mean, they would like, they'd push my buddy and I all over the place. There was this thing called tire tongues. It's like these big steel pieces of, well, they're big pieces of steel. That's basically what it is.
It helps you pry tires off of cars and stuff. I mean, they like, pushed my friend around and stuff. Anyway, they were some tough dudes. I was trying to be all cool, whatever. I'm trying to be really fast at my job so that they liked me.
I ended up being really really fast. I would go work and work and work. We'd work from, and it was during the winter season so there's hardly any heaters in there. We would get crazy sick. There's no breaks, there was no lunch breaks or anything like that just because we knew we were good and we knew we were fast.
We wanted to be that way...
I worked day after day after day. We'd work 12 hours a day, pretty much every day. Oh my gosh, it's so crazy. I ended up being really good at the job. After 12 hours, I think only got paid like $10 an hour, not much. I would come home with $120 right, for my time. I was like, this is cool. Up until that time, I had been working at different places.
It was probably the highest paying job I'd ever had that time...
Anyways, I was like, "Cool. I'm going to try and get really really good." I went and I started getting faster and I started getting faster, started getting faster. What was interesting is my pay got less and it sucked. I was better, but I was getting paid less for it, right?
I would be able to get all the cars done 10 minutes faster than everyone else, even faster even faster. I was like, "Man, this is dumb." I didn't think about it much.
Time went on, time went on. You know, 4 years went by. I was in college. I was doing lots of stuff and I started working at this pool repair company. We would build swimming pools. Residential swimming pools for celebrities and stuff. I got to go hang out and meet a lot of the Denver Broncos team. Colorado Rockies. A lot of really famous baseball players, golf players.
Actually, the singer from ... This is totally a... sorry guys ... Singer from, I think it was One Republic, I used to clean his pool. The guy's got a sick house man, it's awesome. His pool's underneath his house.
Anyway, what was frustrating for me though is I got fast. I got good. I got better than everyone else but I got paid less for it because I finished my route faster.
I was like, "This is retarded. I can't." Anyway, I remember there was one day. I had just really started getting into, kind of, side entrepreneurship. I wasn't full fledged into this, like I am now obviously. I remember there was, kind of the last day, I was going to go back to the school.
The summer was over, whatever. I picked up this little piece of broken tile on the ground. I remember looking at it. I had worked construction jobs like crazy. A lot of my teenage years, even into my very early twenties, in college and things like that.
I picked up this piece of tile, for whatever reason, it's very nostalgic for me. I was like, I'm never going to work a construction job again in my life. There's nothing against that, I was just trying to get out of the time and effort economy and trying to get more into the results based economy. There's an episode, podcast episode, that I kind of ranted about that a little bit.
It was very important to me...
Keith, to get back to your question, when you say, "How do I log my hours?" I don't. I don't. What I do is I log my projects. I log how good they're performing. I know I can build a totally kick butt funnel.
I have done over, just in the last 6 months alone, over 100 funnels...
They're good and they work. I have busted my butt to get very good at them. I don't charge by the hour, I charge by the project because you're not just paying for my time, you're paying for my expertise.
All the times I've sacrificed...
I would hid in our college campus, when I was in college, I would hide in the campus, really late into night, hiding from security so I could keep studying. No joke, funnels and building funnels.
I am so obsessed with this topic that I've given up a lot for it. There's no reason at all why I should get paid by the hour. I say that to all of you who are listening right now. Understand that you guys are too good at your specialties to get paid by the hour.
Pay by the project...
That means I can go build a funnel that's totally awesome, in about a week, sometimes two. It's going to be an amazing funnel. I charge 10 grand for the funnels that I build. They're awesome. I just finished one and it's amazing. They love it, the client loves it.
I'm off to another supplement funnel right now. They just, I know they're going to love it. They're not just paying for my time, they're paying for expertise.
I would dare say that if you take a crap load of time on something as specialized as a funnel or whatever it is you're specialized in, maybe people would like it if you're actually faster. They might actually like it if you don't charge by the hour, charge by the project right?
No matter how fast you get it done, you'll still get paid, which keeps you motivated and keeps them to their word. It's awesome. That's the first thing I do.
The second thing that I do is, you talked about invoices, how do I send invoices? I actually don't either. I'm maybe kind of a different kind of business guy than you would think. I take half of my money up front. Then I take the other half when it's over. I give a discount though if you pay or it all up front.
For example, one of the last guys I just billed for, I said, "Hey" ... He needed a lot of extra custom stuff and it was going to take me some extra time. His actually took 2 weeks. I think I had to go out of town, or something like that. Anyway, I was like, "Hey look, I'll do ... I need to charge like 12 grand for this because this is intense. I can pull it off, I know I can do it, it'll just take me a little extra time."
Right?
I was like, "So, I'll charge you 12 grand, so it'll be the first payment is 6, and obviously the second one's going to be 6 as well. Or, you can pay the full 10 up front and I'll take off the extra 2."
That's a good way to structure it as well. Some people like that as well. The only reason why I spend so much time teaching you about this stuff is that I have been burned so many freaking times by people who want to take advantage of the things that I've worked hard to be good at.
For example, when I was doing ... I think I've told you guys this story, at least on a podcast before, that I was a traffic generator for Paul Mitchell for a little while.
The Paul Mitchell, the hair school. It was awesome. It was super cool. I was in the middle of college and we were driving traffic for these guys, we're helping them get more clients, more people coming in.
One person coming in is worth like 20 grand, so they had a lot of lee way to spend money and still be profitable. We were driving traffic, it was awesome. We start building these sites for some of their rising celebrities. I'm totally saying the name Paul Mitchell right now because I'm still pissed off about this. They came to us and said, "Hey look, we got to build the site in 36 hours. This guy's going to get on TV in 36 hours and we need him to be able to say, 'Hey, go to such and such URL.' and say on TV what website to go to."
We said, "Holy crap! 36 hours? Do you guys know what you're asking us? You're pretty much asking us to stop everything else we're doing." My buddy and I, we sat in his living room for the next 36 hours.
We didn't sleep. We barely slept, we barely ate. Just bloodshot, bleeding eyes. We got it done though, in just an hour or two to spare before he got on TV. It was a screaming success, it was totally awesome.
They never paid us...
They still owe us a ton of money. Anyway, it was very very frustrating for all of us. That's the reason why. Unless you are dead sure that it is a successful company, do not take on people who are start ups and do not take your money solely in the back.
Do half up front...
When you guys are these specialized people in whatever industries you're in, I would say to do that every time for everything.
Anyway, I guess that's the second question. The third one, you're talking about, "How do I give quotes?" It's built in. It's kind of a secondary part to the invoice question. The way I do it, like I said, I charge a base of 10. The a lot of times I'll even charge, you know, even 15 or 20. The reason is it depends on what kind of funnel. It depends on how serious of a funnel do they need.
Do they need custom code? Do I need to build a whole membership site? Am I writing all of your copy?
Which is huge...
If someone needs that, that adds a tone of time and a ton of brainpower. I go into hibernation mode for a week. My family does not see me. It's not like I just toss these things up, just so you know. It's stressful for me too. I go into hibernation mode. I don't see my family for like a week or two when I'm doing these custom ones for people. Especially when you add something like copy in.
Do I need to write the scripts for your videos? Do you need to shoot the videos? Do I need to edit them?
I do basically the whole Adobe suite. Photoshop, video, audio, I mix my own podcast and that's the reason why. Anyway, that's why though. I go and it very much depends on also, are they a brand new start up?
Which I'm very hesitant to take startups on because people think that the funnel is their business, and that's not true. Their product or their service is the business.
If something goes wrong with the funnel or they don't like something, sometimes they think that it's the funnel's fault, when in reality, 90% of the time, it's actually the fact that their business model is not proven.
Anyways, I have probably given way too much on this, but man, like, serve your customers like crazy, but have another backbone for when you need to put your phone down and say, "Look, I've worked my tail off to get good at this. It's my unique ability. You got to pay me. I want to get paid half up front."
That's what I do Keith.
That's a bit of a rant. I don't log hours. I don't really do invoices. I just do it.
There's a quote, I went through the certification program with ClickFunnels. I did it in two weeks. It's a 3 month course. I actually got in trouble for it which is kind of funny.
Anyway, I did the certification in 2 weeks and then they help you with some different, really cool formats for contracts you sign with people for getting funnels and stuff like that.
That was really nice to use...
It's kind of a starter place. Anyway, hey, that's, I'm kind of ranting now. I just want you to know, that's what I do. Thank you so much for the question Keith. You and I will chat and I'll send you over your T-shirt. Anyone else, if you want your free, "Hey Steve!" T-shirt, please go to salesfunnelradio.com and scroll down just a little bit. There'll be a button, a green button on the right that says, "Ask the question" or "Start recording". It will be highlighted.
You can ask a question straight off the browser. It forwards right to my inbox. Then if it makes it on the show here, I send you over a T-shirt. Anyway, hey guys, thank you so much. You guys are awesome. I really appreciate you.
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