Tag Archives: clients

Are Your Clients Getting Too Little?

Posted on February 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

too little

Recently I was reading an article by marketing provocateur Seth Godin. In his usual challenging manner he hit the nail on the head.

” The hard part isn’t charging a lot. The hard part is delivering more (in the eye of the recipient) than he paid for…Too often, in the race to charge less, we deliver too little. And in the race to charge more, we forget what it is that people want. They want more. And better.”

This got me thinking.  A personal history book or video is a big ticket item for most clients. So what can we do to demonstrate that our clients will get get more than they expected?

Here are some ideas that come to mind:

Emphasize the lasting value of A life story.

When you have an initial conversation with a potential client, use  words such as investment rather than cost, legacy rather than personal history, gift instead of book or video.

I sometimes use a new car analogy. I point out that as soon as you drive a car off the lot, it begins to depreciate. On the other hand, a Life Story appreciates over time. You can’t say that about many things.

Use your professional qualifications.

It’s true that “Cousin George” can probably do the book for half the price. But does he have the experience and professional background to do a first-class job?

When people hire me, they know that not only are they getting an experienced professional personal historian but also a former award-winning documentary filmmaker. My work will be better than “Cousin George’s”.  At least I hope so. ;-)

Look for ways you can make your qualifications stand out.

Give your client more than just a book.

There are a number of ways to add  extras.

  • Include a set of audio CDs of your interviews.
  • Provide a poster size duplication of the book cover.
  • Give a subscription to a a family history magazine.
  • Reproduce a treasured archival photo from the book and have it framed.
  • Organize a launch party for friends and family after the book’s publication.

Find those little extras that add more value to your work.

Emphasize the superior quality of your books.

Have one of your beautiful personal history books to showcase your work. The quality will speak for itself. Point out the exceptional archival paper stock and inks that are used.  Acquaint clients with the  outstanding design elements.

You want to convey the message that these are “Legacy” books that will last for generations.

stress the  good feelings that come with a personal history book or video.

What clients may not appreciate are the positive feelings that arise with personal histories. It’s not just a book or video.

Parents and children talk about feeling closer to each other after engaging in a life story. Parents are touched by the thoughtfulness of their children undertaking such an endeavor. Still other recipients of a personal history find a new appreciation for their life accomplishments.

A personal history is  a connection to the soul.

What are some of the ways that you exceed your client’s expectations?

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Do You Have a Problem Knowing What to Charge Clients?

Posted on January 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

thinking

For many newcomers to the business of Personal Histories determining what to charge is a challenge. There are no set industry standards and fees range from next to nothing to $100+ an hour.

It doesn’t really matter what other personal historians charge for their work. We’re all different. One size does not fit all.  So here’s what to do.

Start with your own expenses

  • Make a detailed listing of all your expenses for a year. Include everything – personal as well as business. Include a “contingency” amount for such things as health emergencies, repairs, travel, etc.
  • Don’t forget taxes and start-up equipment such as printers, scanners, cameras, recorders, etc.
  • Divide your total expenses by 12 to arrive at a monthly estimate.

Let’s imagine your calculations point to monthly expenses of $4,000. If your only source of income is from your personal history work, you’ll need to generate at least $4,000 of income every month or about $1,000 a week just to meet your expenses.

Calculate your billable hours.

Use good time tracking software and determine how much of your time is spent on non-billable activities such as  research, marketing, bookkeeping, file management, and so on. A good rule of thumb is 20% of your billable hours. So if you work a 40 hour week, you’ll be spending about 8 hours a week on non-billable items.

This means you need to charge a little more than $3o an hour for the remaining 32 billable hours in order to bring in a $1000 a week. (40 hr. work week  minus 8 hr. non-billable items)

Determine your profit margin

Being self-employed means both flush and lean times. To ensure that you can bridge those downturns in your business, build in a profit margin. Consider anything from 10% to 30%.

Suppose you decide on 15%. That would mean adding an additional $4.50  (15% of $3o) to your hourly rate bringing it to $34.50.

Charging by the project

You may prefer to charge by the project. If so, estimate the number of hours to complete a project and multiply by your hourly rate.

And Don’t Forget

  • Double the amount of time you think a project will take. It always takes longer than you anticipate.
  • Avoid pricing yourself too low. Clients will assume you’re not good because you’re cheap.
  • Don’t base your rate on what others are charging.
  • You’re a professional and are worth every penny you charge.

Additional Resources

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on December 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

Monday's Link Roundup

For those of you celebrating Christmas tomorrow, have a very Merry Christmas!

If you’re a fan of director Michael Apted and his “Up” documentary series, you’ll enjoy his interview in The secret to success for director of Up docs? The power of ordinary people.  The folks at Copyblogger are offering a free Internet marketing course. Why not check out Grab Our 20-Part Internet Marketing Course (No Charge) and get a head start on your 2013 marketing?

  • The Paper Trail Through History. “Scholars  “have always looked through documents,” said Ben Kafka, a historian at N.Y.U. and the author of “The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork,” recently published by Zone Books. “More and more they are also looking at them.”If paperwork studies have an unofficial standard-bearer and theoretician, it’s Mr. Kafka. In “The Demon of Writing” he lays out a concise if eccentric intellectual history of people’s relationship with the paperwork that governs (and gums up) so many aspects of modern life.”
  • 10 Ways to Get Clients in 10 Minutes. “Does it seem like you can never find the time to market for more clients? It’s hard to find open hours in the middle of a busy week. But not every marketing task requires big chunks of time. Here are ten productive things you can do to get more clients when you have just ten minutes.”
  • How 6 New Tools Change the Equation for Writing and Self-Publishing Your Book. “…today’s tools marry writing and publishing, bringing artists ever closer to the end product with click-of-a-button e-book creation capabilities built into the writing tools. In 2012 the technology plot thickened, with the development or maturation of six representative tools that change the way we will write, produce and perhaps even change our very concept of a book in 2013.”
  • Grab Our 20-Part Internet Marketing Course (No Charge). “Want to discover the smartest ways to mix social media, content marketing, and SEO for lead generation and converting those leads to customers and clients? We’ve got you covered with Internet Marketing for Smart People. And there’s absolutely no charge.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on September 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

Happy Labor Day! I hope you’re resting from your labors today. If you’re looking for an enjoyable diversion, why not check out my Monday’s Link Roundup?  Every week I bring you an eclectic  mix of articles that I find fascinating and that relate in some way to life stories, memories, and self-employment.

  • In Andalusia, on the Trail of Inherited Memories. “There are scientific studies exploring whether the history of our ancestors is somehow a part of us, inherited in unexpected ways through a vast chemical network in our cells that controls genes, switching them on and off. At the heart of the field, known as epigenetics, is the notion that genes have memory and that the lives of our grandparents — what they breathed, saw and ate — can directly affect us decades later.”
  • The Next Big Idea From Twitter’s Founders? “Evan Williams and Biz Stone think their new site, Medium, could mark an “evolutionary step” in web publishing…their new venture, a platform for collecting and displaying stories, images, musings and more, isn’t just noteworthy for its web-visionary pedigree …In a sense, Medium’s intended to be a Pinterest for our own lives, an elegant repository for photos, projects, and stories we’ve actually lived, as opposed to a re-blogged clearing house for pictures of wedding dresses and eggs baked into avocados found elsewhere around the web.”
  • Apps for Journaling, Keeping track of your memories…“How do I keep my professional life separate from my personal life without driving myself crazy. I want to list a few apps that are possible solutions to this… I also want to list some differences between all of these that I have found.”
  • All About Me: How Memoirs Became the Literature of Choice. “Memoirs are the great equalizer of writing. In a genre utterly non-denominational, there is room for any story in any pattern of prose. The Christian Science Monitor reports that memoirs have seen sales increase from $170 million to $270 million since 1999. Most nonfiction MFA writing programs are geared substantially towards the genre; Hunter College even requires prospective students to submit a memoir proposal as part of their application. Many bookstores can count their autobiography sections among the most frequented and their popularity thrives.”
  • Anaïs Nin on Self-Publishing. “Besides artist and author, Nin was also a publishing entrepreneur. In January 1942, she sets up her own small press in a loft on Macdougal Street, and soon set out to print and self-publish a new edition of her third book, Winter of Artifice, teaching herself typesetting and doing most of the manual work herself.From The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 (public library) comes this beautiful passage on the joy of handcraft, written in January of 1942 — a particularly timely meditation in the age of today’s thriving letterpress generation and the Maker Movement.”
  • Peter Sellers: His Life in Home Movies. [Video]“Peter Sellers was a compulsive home movie maker…In 1995, fifteen years after Sellers’s death, producers from BBC Arena sorted through his extensive archive and assembled some of the best footage for a film called The Peter Sellers Story. In 2002 they shortened it into The Peter Sellers Story: As He Filmed It (above), which tells the story of the comedian’s life almost exclusively with footage from his own camera.”
  • Attracting High-End Clients. ” Everyone wants to attract more clients. But I think it’s even more important to set your sights on attracting more High-End clients.”

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Encore! Being Relaxed Makes People Spend More Freely.

Posted on July 25, 2012 | 2 Comments

The  recent issue of  the Journal of Marketing Research  examined the correlation between relaxation and consumer spending. It turns out that all things being equal consumers are more willing to pay higher prices if they feel relaxed…Read more.

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Encore! 3 Keys to Creating Trust with Potential Clients.

Posted on July 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

A key factor in whether potential clients will hire us as personal historians is trust. But how to build trust in an introductory meeting?…Read more.

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on July 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

In this Monday’s Link Roundup don’t miss Why Killing Time Isn’t a Sin. It’s by Leo Babauta at Zen Habits, a favorite of mine. His wise words are worth reflecting on. And if you get high on grammar and enjoy a good chuckle, then you’ll want to check out The 9 Best Funny and Helpful Blogs About Grammar.

  • 7 Things You’re Doing Wrong on LinkedIn. “Today, LinkedIn is the No. 1 social media platform for professionals. Estimates of professional participation in LinkedIn are as high as 83%…social media expert Alexandra Gibson…told me that she sees too many professionals making a lot of mistakes. Here are the seven she sees most often.”
  • What multitasking does to our brains. “We all know this and have heard it hundreds of times. To work efficiently we have to single task. No multitasking.And yet, we let it slip…Why the heck is it so hard to focus on just one thing then? To understand what actually goes on in our brains and see if it all makes sense, I went ahead and found some stunning research and answers to these questions.”
  • Why Stories Sell: Transportation Leads to Persuasion. “Research suggests that trying to persuade people by telling them stories does indeed work (Green & Brock, 2000). The question is why? Because if we know why, we can make the stories we tell more persuasive.”
  • Epilogue: Book-Lovers on the Future of Print. “Epilogue is a lyrical student documentary about the future of books by Hannah Ryu Chung, featuring a number of interviews with independent bookstore owners, magazine art directors, printers, bookbinders, letterpress artists, and other champions of bibliophilia.”
  • Why Killing Time Isn’t a Sin. “I have no objections to reading books, learning languages, or writing to friends. It’s the idea that downtime must be put to efficient use that I disagree with. While I used to agree with it completely, these days I take a completely different approach.Life is for living, not productivity.”
  • eBooks 101: Standard Vs. Fixed Layout. “One of the most frequent questions we get asked here at BookBaby is, “What’s the difference between a fixed layout eBook and a regular eBook?”
  • The 9 Best Funny and Helpful Blogs About Grammar. “There are numerous blogs about grammar available if you poke around. They can be instructive, amusing, helpful, or hysterically funny. I prefer the latter, since I find a little laughter makes learning a whole lot easier.Here then are blogs for your entertainment, education, and enjoyment, all on the subject of grammar.”

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Encore! Would You Hire Yourself?

Posted on June 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

Every time we meet potential clients, we have to prove ourselves.  They’re sizing us up and assessing whether we’re the right fit for them.  Here’s a cheeky question. Would you hire yourself?…Read more.

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on June 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

This Monday’s Link Roundup has its usual eclectic mix. For the “shock of the old” take a look at Vintage Ad Sexism.  If you’re a Dorothy Parker fan, you’ll love  Dorothy Parker and the 5 Senses. Her clever use of the senses is a perfect jumping off point for memory prompts. And Seth Godin reminds us of the hard reality of marketing in The unforgiving arithmetic of the funnel.

  • Dorothy Parker and the 5 Senses. “I found three great Parker quotes that show her intriguing use of the five senses. The first two below are ones that I feature in my SheWrites post today…The third one, I selected to share with you here. Below it is a special writing prompt that it inspired.”
  • Why can smells unlock forgotten memories? “The toy cupboard at my grandmother’s house had a particular smell. I cannot tell you what it was, but sometimes now, as an adult, I will catch a whiff of it. The smell brings with it memories I thought were lost, memories of visits to my grandparents’ house, of my grandmother, and of playing with the toys from the toy cupboard. But why do smells have this power to unlock forgotten memories?”
  • 5 Steps to Turn Audiences into Clients. “Public speaking can be one of the most powerful methods for an independent professional to land new clients. But it doesn’t always work out that way. Before you book your next speaking engagement, ask yourself these five questions to make sure you’re on the right track to turn your audience into clients.”
  • The unforgiving arithmetic of the funnel. “One percent.That’s how many you get if you’re lucky. One percent of the subscribers to the Times read an article and take action. One percent of the visitors to a website click a button to find out more. sparked by an idea and go do something about it. And then!”
  • The myth of English as a global language. “English spelling is notoriously inconsistent, and some have gone further, calling it “the world’s most awesome mess” or “an insult to human intelligence” (both these from linguists, one American, one Austrian)…How did this unsystematic system come about? And is it really that bad? Some say that there are only a few hundred deeply irregular words, but the trouble is that most of them are common. Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle even went so far as to claim that we have “close to an optimal system”, though that takes a deal of argument to convince.”

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Encore! Are Your Clients Extremely Satisfied With Your Service?

Posted on March 28, 2012 | Leave a comment

I was in my neighborhood bank today and as I was coming out, I noticed a sign that read We hope your experience with us today was extremely satisfying. I thought it a bit odd. Most of my banking is pretty perfunctory. As long as the ATM doesn’t screw up, I’m pretty delighted. But the sign got me thinking. What would make your personal history service extremely satisfying for clients? Here’s what I think… Read more.

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