Yeah.

So I don't like the feeling as a client, but I still...

The habit is so hard to break.

When you go into that meeting and you're like, "Okay, well how many business objects are in the entity relationship diagram, and, like, how many relationships between each one?" And you're doing all this total scopey solution first thinking.

Which makes sense.

I mean, if you're trying to give somebody a good estimate, you need to uncover all of the scope.

But the thing that you never ask, and it took me a long time to get better at asking, and digging, and digging, and digging, is what's the goal? What's the point of this? Yes, you came in and for 15 minutes you told me all of these features and things that you want, and, like, w- how big the logo should be, and all of these things, and that's great.

... [laughs] get to listen to you, and what has that journey looked like?

You can't figure out what it's going to cost before you do some legal work.

Oh, you don't know? Yeah.

Yeah.

the tank is unbounded you can't even guess you know yeah one of the one of the stories I tell it's like an exercise for someone where I'm trying to like wean them off of hourly and start to start to feel what it feels like to actually benefit from being fast and good is to the next time they get a potential client, client wants some sort of a proposal, then do your normal thing.

Say, I think it's going to take 100 hours.

I think, you know, my rate is $100 an hour.

So it'll be, you know, what's that $10,000 there? Or You know, and I'll work as fast as I can.

I

How do you help someone figure out what their work is actually worth to a client, especially when maybe the person themselves doesn't know what they're worth? [chuckles]

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

This is the hard part.

This is the hard part.

If you're gonna w- if you're gonna do projects using value-based pricing, which is only one of the ways that I teach in terms of pricing, but it's a big one, and it's like, it's, it...

But, but, but the, the thing I wanna, I don't wanna leave behind here is that we, there's a elephant in the room that we haven't mentioned which is how do you document all of this so that there's an agreement to what the work product is so that, you know, scope creep is something that can even be defined?

Well-

If you just...

It's terri- it's so bad.

It's so painful.

Probably a- anybody listening that's been in business longer than a few years has probably experienced this.

It's brutal.

And you don't want, like, it's...

... to the customer, to the buyer?

Okay.

So web shop.

So, you know, you want to build this, you need this customer portal.

You've got big clients like Home Depot and you're afraid that they're going to start going to your competitors because they have a better online experience for self-serving their projects and invoices and all this stuff.

Okay.

We can definitely do that for you.

It's And for a company that size, you can start and probably they've already started to give you some numbers.

What was that transition like? What were you thinking about with even the time tracking component of this?