Instigator Blog

You’ve cut your price down to almost nothing. You’ve agreed to an impossible timeline. You’ve even decided to cut corners with your product or service.

But what about your soul?

Are you willing to sacrifice that?

Enough with the melodrama, Ben! Ok, fair enough, here are some questions to ask yourself:

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We’ve talked about sacrificing your price and time to close a deal…but what about sacrificing what you offer? What about diminishing the value of your service or product to a close a deal?

Typically this would be done in response to another sacrifice. You’ve given the customer a crazy price or you’ve agreed to an impossible timeline…now what? Or, perhaps you’re already stretched too thin but you don’t want to turn down business…

Do you cut corners with your service or product?

No.

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There’s so much going on at The Great Big Small Business Show it’s amazing!

First, we have a bonus podcast episode titled Choosing a Book Publishing Method which tackles the differences between self-publishing, print-on-demand and traditional publishing. Ted Demopoulos tackles this question with a great podcast.

Second, we have our first ever video blog entry, which our Executive Producer, Becky McCray did — providing tips on great business card design. The video is short and to the point, easy to enjoy and grab a nugget of valuable information from. I hope you’ll check it out.

You can expect to see more videos, podcasts and blog entries showing up at The Great Big Small Business Show as we ramp it up and expand into other areas of interest.

I hope you enjoy the content, tell your friends and link to http://www.gbsbs.com to spread the word!

Time is cheap right?

Sure there’s only 24 hours per day, but what’s the harm in doing a bit more work for someone without charging more?

Let me ask some more questions:

• Do you track the hours you work on different projects?
• Do you charge more when you go over a certain number of hours on a project?
• Do you know what you really make per hour?

This won’t apply to everyone. There are some jobs - take being a lawyer - where they charge by the hour, or even in 15-minute increments. They’re not sacrificing their time at all. But in other service businesses or in the product business where you might be building newer versions of your product, customizing it, training, implementing it or providing support, the value of time is something worth looking at.

People are often very willing to sacrifice time. Most people don’t value their time enough.

I sacrifice time quite a bit. It’s a dangerous risk, because it’s not infinite. If I under-estimate how long a project will take, then I usually eat it. That means I do more work than expected without charging more. My hourly rate drops, and drops and drops. So, estimating how long things take is critical to ensuring that you value time properly.

The more time you sacrfice, the less time you have to do other things: sales, marketing, other projects, etc. Let’s say you get so busy sacrificing time that you need to hire other people to help you — now you’ve got a double whammy: you’re swamped and your costs are going up. That’s very troublesome territory.

Often, time is sacrificed because we’ve already sacrificed something else - like a timeline or price .

You ask the client, “When do you need this done by?”

What’s the most common answer to that?

Client responds, “Yesterday.”

You agree, and suddenly you’re sacrificing time.

Time is perhaps one of the easiest things to sacrifice - you can always work 24 hours a day if need be - but the risks are still there. And sacrificing time has to be something you do less and less of as your business grows, or it won’t grow successfully.

So, is TIME worth sacrificing? Have you done it? What were the results?

(Monday we’ll ask, “Will You Sacrifice Your Service/Product to Close a Deal?” - the 3rd part in an ongoing series: What Will You Sacrifice to Close the Deal)

Photo by Beholder.

Blog About 5 Things Week was a huge success. Including my own posts, there were 32 submissions. Not too shabby at all!

I’ve put up a page listing all the submissions, so people can go back and read them all with ease.

I hope you’ll take a look at the Blog About 5 Things Week Resource Page.

We did get one last submission — it was a bit late, but I wasn’t going to reject it!

Emmanuel Oluwatosin submitted Five ways to stay afloat while following your passion. Sounds great to me! Emmanuel is a young entrepreneur from Nigeria, working in technology. Amazing how the world shrinks with a bit of technology…