Edmonton Business Coach | Customers Dont Value Your Time

The entrepreneurship has nothing to do with showing up and getting paid entrepreneurship. It has to do with, you know, can you deliver value so the customer perceives value and they pay you based on that value or you know, work guard lists of, you know, how long or how much time you spent on it. You know, when you go into the store and you buy a hammer, nobody cares how long it took to make the hammer. They only care how sturdy to hammer is. And can it do the job that I wanted it to do.

Yeah, I can see why I can be, because it’s not.

Hi, thanks for tuning in again for another episode of ask [inaudible] CPA today, every the Edmonton Business Coach we’re talking about customers don’t value your time. Again, Edmonton business coach, just talking about customers, don’t value your time. I have may here with me again, me. So how are you making it with the CPA program so far?

Um, so a lot of work, especially when you’re working and you’re studying all at the same time. Um, but it really does help develop your skills in your work as you, you know, study what little portions of, um, financials or whatever that there may be and you actually apply it, which is a very beneficial part.

Excellent. So the quote that we have here today, you don’t talking about customers don’t value your time as a Gary Vaynerchuk quote. And he says, you’re going to go through a time where you’re not gonna make any money. It’s not going to be a week. It’s not going to be a month. It’s not going to be one year. It’s going to be years. And during that time, if you don’t love what you do, it’s going to be very hard to stick it out. That is something that people don’t understand when they hear follow your passion. They hear rainbows, Unicorns, bullshit. But the truth of it is, it’s important because if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’re not going, you’re not going to be that much more likely to quit when shit’s hard. As he says, a Gary Vaynerchuk has a way with words, I guess. So, uh, you know, the, the statistic that we have here is entrepreneurs on average work 63% more than employees sole. And the story that we have here at Edmonton Business Coach owners, they get overly frustrated as soon as we encounter a situation where our time invested is not immediately rewarded. So when you don’t mean what are the questions these business owners should be asking? So the prepared for the lifestyle that, that, uh, uh, of an entrepreneur.

So the first question is, do we grow up in a world where the cultural norm is to exchange time for money?

Yeah. So that, that is, you know, how we’ve grown up, we think we get a job, we agree on hourly rates. Maybe it’s a salary and I show up and they get paid and there’s a, you know, there’s labor laws and government regulations of why we get paid and it’s guaranteed. So that’s the norm that we grow up with. And it’s ingrained into our mind that if who I show up, I should get paid.

And is entrepreneurship about generating money not dependent on time?

Yeah. Entrepreneurship has nothing to do with showing up and getting paid entrepreneurship. It has to do with, you know, can you deliver value so the customer perceived value and they pay you based on that value or your work regardless of how long or how much time you spent on it. You know, when you go into the store and you buy a hammer, nobody cares how long it took to make the hammer. They only care how it’s 30 to hammer is and do the job that I wanted it to do. Um, you know, so entrepreneurship is the complete opposite of everything that we were, that was ingrained in us when we grew up or we show up and we’d get paid. Um, you know, it’s about delivering value, uh, in customers paying for that value with time completely irrelevant to the equation.

Well, that normally require doing activities for free with hopes of a future payoff,

100%. So that’s normally what the game is, that building a Edmonton Business Coach is there’s going to be some things that you’re going to have to do a, you know, initially in your Edmonton Business Coach that you’re not really going to get paid to do. You know, whether it’s the development of that product or whether it’s writing the processes for your system so your team can help you replicate that system or you can deliver that system at a higher value. There’s going to be, you know, even maybe doing work for, for a certain customers, uh, for lower than market rate to build the reputation of the company that you’re working for. Um, you know, so a lot of times it’s about doing things at a reduced rate with hopes that it’s going to pay off in the future. Not necessarily today.

Well, we naturally feel frustrated when working for free because of the cultural norms.

It should, it should feel as if you’re doing it right. It should feel weird. Um, you know it, the minute you start doing one thing and it, you know, it doesn’t provide an immediate pay off. You have to remember that we’ve been taught for years and years to value that immediate payoff and then immediate pay off. That’s the golden handcuffs. You know, we get that immediate pay off, but that immediate pay off can only get us paid so much. Um, so we should naturally have that, hey, is this right? It should feel a little bit weird. It’s like skydiving. Um, the know the parachute will catch you, but when you jump out of the plane, it’s not going to feel normal.

Do most people buy products or services to solve a problem? Okay.

That’s probably the, you know, the single most reason why people buy anything we go back to the hammer example is because they wanted to put a nail through a piece of wood. Um, you know, they’re doing it to solve a problem than even, you know, luxury goods. People buy luxury goods to solve a problem. And believe it or not, people buy a Rolex watch because they feel that they’re not cool enough or they don’t look good enough. So, um, they’re buying that watch to solve the problem. So no matter what you’re doing, whether it’s a practical or whether it’s extravagant, chances are the purchasing decision is made to solve a problem.

Do they care how much time it takes us to solve that problem?

They don’t. They don’t care how much time the customer does not care how much time the Edmonton Business Coach invested to solve that problem. Um, you know, it, that’s not what’s relevant to them. It’s, I think it’s a, Seth Goden said, you know, uh, it’s, it’s not very difficult to talk with drowning out into grabbing the life jacket. If they need the life jacket, they’re gonna grab the life check cause that’s going to solve their problem. They don’t care how much time it took to build that life jacket. Um, so most people are buying something to solve a problem and they don’t care how long it took to come up with that solution.

Did you contract Julie tried to prevent people from taking advantage of your time

that that can be one. Uh, because customers, the, you know, they really don’t care. But some of your cost structures, you know, if you don’t want to run out of cash, you know, sometimes you, you do have to contractually protect yourself because customer little occasion they will do things because they don’t care about your time. I’m no want you to work for, you know, $5 an hour in perpetuity for hundreds of hours. And you know, as an entrepreneur would be nice if we could, do you ever think that every customer wants, but ultimately we only have so much cash and we have to deploy it in a responsible manner. So sometimes that means you putting provisions in your contract, uh, with your customers that will prevent them from taking advantage of your time.

Should you be upfront with those contractual provisions to avoid bad customers?

I think so. I think so. So if you have your reasonable provisions in your contract, so you’re not going to spend crazy amounts of time on a project that’s new or not economical at all. And if you present that to a customer and the customer box at that provision in the contract, I think you’ve identified what their intentions were right then and there. So I think it’s good not just to put it in the fine print, but actually to explain the fine print or explain it. You’ll rate up front before the customer does Edmonton Business Coach with you because you know if that customer you know, wants you to be in a position where you’re going to have to spend a crazy amount of time based on the match you’re getting paid, that’s not the right customer that you should be doing Edmonton Business Coach with.

does having one very large client create the risk that they can demand unfair time?

Yeah. This is a very significant risk, especially for new businesses or even some established businesses here. They don’t go far enough away from one customer. So they have, you know, one customer that if that customer leaves that it’s going to provide a real significant hole in the revenue for the Edmonton Business Coach. Now, no matter what, even if you have a good contract in place at that point, at that point in time, the customer holds all the cards. So when they want you to do more than is fair, sometimes a business owner ends up doing it because they don’t have any other options. You know, and this can be even a small, this can be a big business where it has a 10, 20, 30 people on the payroll or it can be, you know, the smallest Edmonton Business Coach. If you are a, uh, a general contractor and it’s very difficult for you to get jobs and you have the one job and, and you need to get paid from that one job, um, you know, that can be a problem when the customer demands something unreasonable. You don’t have a lot of choices sometimes. Sometimes you’re going to have to invest that unfair amount of time. So one of the ways to protect yourself, um, from spending an unfair amount of time on a project is not just to protect yourself contractually and be upfront about those contractual provisions is to make sure that there’s no one customer that can hurt you too much if you do everything right.

Unavoidable. Yeah. So we talk about, you know, the things that you can do with, you know, changing your mindset and changing your expectations. And you know, we have, you know, make sure your, your, uh, your contracts are, are congruent for you. Not Getting into that situation too often. Make sure you’re not susceptible to any one customer, that they can start making unreasonable demands. But even if you do all of those things, you’re going to get into some unfair situations as an entrepreneur where you’re investing way more time, then you know, anybody at a, um, an objective level would think is, is necessary or fair. And we have to just learn how to push through that. You know, it, we have to realize that that is an unavoidable consequence of being an entrepreneur. We can do things to minimize that consequence. But we just, we can’t eliminate it altogether and we need to avoid doing the, the natural thing of reverting back to that employee mindset.

And we start thinking of, you know, how much benefit does this activity have? Not just tomorrow, but if I do this activity now, where can I be in a year from now or two years from now and five years from now? And you just have to take a much longer time horizon that the payback is not just in that moment. It might not even be just with that, that contract, you know, might be developing a good relationship or might be, you know, creating systems and processes that are going to make the whole company better, uh, over the long haul. Um, so it, it’s completely unavoidable that you’re going to run into some situations where you’re going to end up spending more time. Uh, there is a fair, uh, but you just have to think, you know, if I do invest this time where kind of potentially be two, five, 10 years from now, and that’ll probably help ground you a little bit and what you should do in this situation. So I think that’s what we have here today. Thanks again for joining us. As always, you’ll please leave us some comments so we can respond back to you and a, use your, your feedback for content for future videos. As always, please hit the like and subscribe buttons so we can continue to deliver your tips on how to beat the odds of Edmonton Business Coach. Thanks very much.