Fractional
Fractional
Heather Corallo: Value based pricing and structuring engagements as a fractional
Today we were joined by Heather Corallo, founder of The Canoe Project, and an executive coach and people leader.
She joined us to discuss product management, reasons why people fall into fractional work (and why the fail), selling expertise and value based pricing, consultant vs fractional, customer boundaries, and how to structure your engagements as a fractional.
If you've wondered about the business side of things you'll not want to miss this one!
- https://www.thecanoeproject.com/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathercorallo/
- https://indecollective.co
- https://www.amazon.com/Unicorn-Project-Developers-Disruption-Thriving-ebook/dp/B07QT9QR41
As always send questions to email@fractional.fm
Thanks to caleb@embrin.com for editing!
Hello and welcome to episode 51 of the Fractional Podcast. Excited to be back recording live with Joshua. We've been away for, he's been away for a month. This is our first time Back in our home studios at the same time. that anything was different. So awesome job. Kudos to you. Congratulations. Today, we've got a really cool episode teed up. And not to put any pressure on our guest who's waiting for her introduction, but the conversation around how in the world you price fractional, treating your fractional practice as a business. I'm excited. I'm excited about this. So our guest today is Heather Corallo. She's an entrepreneur. She fills multiple roles, does lots of things, but we're really excited to talk about her work as the founder of the Canoe Project, executive coaching, people leadership type advisory services there, and just bringing a ton of practical, experiential, insights for our audience. So Heather, thanks so much for joining us. We'd love to hear a little bit more about how you got to where you're at, what you're doing, and all the juicy details.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, well, I don't know. This is a PG podcast, so I don't know how juicy I'll get, but I'll do what I can to keep it lively. Thanks so much for having me, Josh and Lance. Yeah, so I started in HR and recruiting specifically all the way back in 2006. So it's been a while. I got my start here in Chicago where I'm currently based at a high frequency trading firm where I had zero HR or recruiting or tech or trading experience. I knew nothing, but they were an early stage startup. They were a technical organization that traded. They were not a trading firm that used technology. And they actually hired me as an executive assistant, but I was really bad at that. And they said, well, you like to talk to people and you seem interested in what we're doing. Why don't you go sit on the floor and learn what we do and then you can be our recruiter. And I did that and I actually fell and surprisingly fell deeply in love with the technology aspect of it, as well as the recruiting strategy. It was a very easy firm to recruit for. It was very exciting. It was a very successful business at that time in the industry. And so it was easy to recruit. And when you have something easy to sell, that's lots of fun. So I spent four years there. I actually grew my career from technical recruiting in Chicago. I moved to London. I grew out their London office, both their prop trading as well as their customer-facing business. And then I also grew out their Singapore recruiting as well. And so I had a chance to sort of touch both Europe and Asia during my time there. And when I came back, I did a super strong pivot to e-commerce and I went to Groupon and was helping in their technical recruiting team there. And very quickly after joining, became the leader of the tech recruiting team here in Chicago. So very exciting time. It was, you know, the fastest growing unicorn at that time in tech. It was so well known, but it was a deeply frustrating time to recruit at Groupon at the same time because Thank you so much for having me. I'm sort of a bull in a china shop. I was like, well, I can't recruit people if they're just going to keep leaving because you have these other problems inside the organization. And the CTO said, well, you're absolutely right. Here's a million dollars. Why don't you go solve that problem? And he began to fund a group inside the technical organization called Ethos, which really focused on the process of software development and agile coaching, but also the engineering education and the engineering experience. How does engineering product and design work together? And so my role shifted from pure HR and the recruiting vertical was sort of this hybrid where I was talent and recruiting and agile coach and sometimes coach manager coach and engineering and product manager coach, which was very cool. And As businesses tend to do, the leaders who I kind of rose up the ranks with eventually left Groupon and started their own organizations or were leading other organizations. And that's when I started my first consulting business in 2015 called CTO2. And that was all about organizational agile transformation and how to take agile outside of the technology vertical. And my sort of play on that was that, well, I'm an organizational polyglot. I can speak the language of every vertical. to help you transform your business and be more agile and innovative. Well, I had a really great product and a really great service, but I had no idea how to sell it. So it was a total disaster. And in 2017, at the end of the day, I sold to my co-founder and it was like not great. And I went back internal to a company called Aethlite, a global software consulting firm here in Chicago as a VP of strategy for them. really focused on their apprenticeship and engineering educational experience inside the organization because apprenticeship was foundational to that business and was there with them, had an incredible career with them for almost three and a half years. And like so many people, I burned out in COVID and we had all sorts of terrifying, terrible HR and people-related issues that I'm sure we can dig into. That led me to start my next business, which was the Canoe Project in January of 2021. But this time, I was much better prepared. I had three and a half years selling at an executive and a global firm, and I just had so much more experience under my belt running a business at an executive level. And I also went through an entrepreneurship program called Indie Collective, which is this fantastic 10-week program that really helps entrepreneurs Early stage entrepreneurs kind of get their feet under them for everything from marketing, branding, sales, you name it, they do it. And it's a hell of a lot cheaper than an MBA program. And I was so fortunate that that happened at the same time. And one thing led to another. And here we are four years, three and a half years later, and I'm still cooking and things are going well.
SPEAKER_03:So I'm curious, having worked with so many different companies at different stages, in different roles, is there a black and white, oh, this company's going to make it, this one's not going to make it? Is there a way you approach it when you're helping someone? There's certain signals that you're either more worried or less worried because you've been in product management, you've been an executive, you've been in HR. So this isn't really where we're going with this interview, so to speak, but I'm just curious how you think about that when you're starting to work with a company.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it depends on how I'm going to engage with that company, but let's assume for this conversation that I'm considering an internal chief people officer role or something like that. I would want to know if it was an early stage startup, I would want to know what's your product strategy? How are you looking in the market? Do you have traction? What is your five-year growth plan? Have you even thought about that? And what's your runway? Because at the end of the day, they can have the best idea in the world. But if they don't know how to put it in their customers' hands, and they don't have enough money to get it in their hands, it's not going to last. I've been through a lot of startups that just had great ideas but didn't have the runway.
SPEAKER_03:I was working with one startup where about two months into the engagement, I asked about the runway. CEO didn't know. It had no sense. I And just had this vague, well, we have X dollars, and the burn rate is this, so probably this much, but hadn't actually done the exercise. And when I see stuff like that, to me, that says layoffs are impending. Just having been in that. 100%. I want to dig a little further. This is... Something that I have been thinking a lot about the last couple of years, when you see someone, oh, they have a sense of their runway, their burn rate, their go-to-market strategy, or finding their product market fit, they're starting to figure those things out. What then is the next thing for whether or not this company is going to succeed that you start to think about?
SPEAKER_00:Do they have the right people in the right seats at the leadership level? So let's assume... You're cooking with gas. And I'm going to be very tech specific because that's my predominant industry, but this might look a little different. Assuming a product team that
SPEAKER_03:probably has technical requirements. Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. If we're gold on the runway, or let's say we've hit a growth phase where either the product is ready to expand, they've received additional financing or they've had enough revenue to then invest that money back into the organization for growth, then I think the question is, what is the leadership strategy? How are you having people on your first team? Who reports to who? If your chief people officer or CHRO reports to the finance officer and not the CEO, that's a signal. That's a signal that the CEO is too busy to care about people stuff. So, okay, that's okay. But that's a strategy that like one can choose to opt into or out of, but like that's a signal of how your day is gonna go if you're the CHRO. That can be really difficult. Also, how is the tech and product organization organized? Does tech report to product? Does product report to tech? Does tech report to sales? Like, what does that all look like? Because a lot of organizations think they're a tech company when they start, but they're really a sales and marketing company. And then all of a sudden, the business strategy and the whole organizational strategy shifts at some very implicit moment, usually under financial duress, from business Hey, we're a tech and product company too. We need the money. We're going to build whatever our customer needs. And all of a sudden you become a sales company and not a tech company. And that creates so much tension inside the organization that if you're a people person who's responsible for culture, recruiting, retention, all of a sudden your job got a lot more difficult.
SPEAKER_03:We should have put a trigger warning at the start of this episode, because for those not in tech, you've just described the roller coaster that every person in tech has felt over the last four to five years, if you've moved around within the industry. And speaking for myself, I've been in full time, about six startups at this stage, but fractionally another dozen over the last decade. And so I've seen this over and over again. And you can have the absolute best individual contributors that are designers, that are engineers, that are building something. But if at the leadership level, what you described that first team term is so crucial, right? It's at the leadership level, are they the first team to each other? Or are they a bunch of silos who are fighting for their direct reports to be taken care of, but not caring about the rest of the company? So I, I must, there's a book I read years ago called the unicorn project.
SPEAKER_00:It's one of the best with Gene Kim.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, it's related to product management and company management. Yes, I love this topic.
SPEAKER_00:We can hang out later.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_02:I think every guest so far would say, we've got to have you back for more on this. So we'll say it again. We need to have you back for more on this, Heather. When you and I first talked, we talked about... People transitioning into fractional roles, they get their first contract, they get their first gig, they get this first piece of work, and it feels like, okay, now I'm a fractional. Now I'm an independent. But there's so much more than snagging one gig to running an independent expertise-based business. And I kind of just want to crack that door open and let you kick it as hard as you want to. But there's just a lot here. And I think it's really important for our audience to recognize the differentiation between I snagged a gig and I'm running a business.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And I want to just take a moment and just have compassion for so many people that are entering into this space, particularly now, not because they had entrepreneurial dreams and they'd read the e-myth. They... had been laid off because of the market contraction or their roles have been eliminated or some other, they've been impacted, not because they wanted to do that fractional work, but because they've had to make that choice because of the flood of talent in the market and the limited amount of roles. And so I just want to start by saying, you know, hey, I get it. Like you got to put food on the table, go get a gig and you do hooker by crook, whatever you got to do to get it. And so there's no judgment in that dynamic. But I think there is a question for people who are considering it that's before, hey, I think I want to do this and I want to go get a fractional gig. It's, do I want to be a business owner or not, right? Like, what exactly am I trying to achieve with this? Is it a... This is going to fill me in. I'm going to do fractional consulting gigs until I find my next internal role. Or are you doing this with a different intention, which is I am hungry to start my own business, to be more independent, to have autonomy over my time, energy and financial independence. And therefore I'm going to try to hang my shingle. And those are different paths. And so, you know, I think when we started talking about, We were seeing so many people who it's a little muddy or it's ambiguous what choice, what road they're actually on. And so I think that's a place to start.
SPEAKER_03:All right. So here's a distinguishing question then, because that's been my exact position I've been in, wrestling with that in the past. Do you distinguish between that former person who, because of a job loss, is just trying to fill gaps and versus someone who wants to own a business but does not want to hire employees. Do you view those as the same or is there a distinction there?
SPEAKER_00:I think there is distinction there because if you only need five clients, the approach to how much money do you have in the bank for, you know, you gotta spend money to make money, right? So like, how are you marketing? How are you gonna consider thought leadership? Are you gonna have any content that you're gonna be creating? How are you going to tell anybody that you're looking for a job? Because that might work if you're just doing it between gigs. You can call your network. And if you're being a good ambassador for your own brand inside your community, going to meetups, participating in conferences, navigating professional development opportunities... and being, you know, and have a good reputation doing whatever it is that you do, you can probably score a gig or two here and there. And the pressure is a little bit different with that. But if you are thinking that this is what you're going to do and your income is going to be entirely based on a business that has your name on it, comma LLC or whatever, that's a different game. And if you start that game without intention, It will take you a lot longer to make the money that you're looking for. And it will be an incredibly frustrating experience if not done with intention or with some amount of like, okay, I am starting a business. This is what an LLC is. This is what a business bank account looks like. This is how I will do my taxes at the end of the year. All of those things look very different If you're just a 1099 contractor and you're filling in between internal gigs, that's a different game than I am going to try to do this independent thing full time.
SPEAKER_03:And there's even a different way that you interact with every single client because there's a clear... separation from, oh, I'm not just a resource of yours. I have this business that operates and functions and helps companies in this industry accomplish these goals with this business strategy. And then you are more of an expert, right? And that, frankly, I've been very much in the former where, yeah, I do have an LLC. I have all that set up, but I generally drop in as a, I'll do whatever you need. And that can be really great for filling gaps, but it does not lead to a at least so far for me, a long-term successful business.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and I think there's something there, right? And the message is intention. So yes, at the beginning of starting a business, you don't want to be so laser focused with your service offering that you alienate yourself from anything else that you could possibly do to make money and revenue at the beginning because you need revenue. You need to build your brand. You need to try things. You need to productize whatever offering it is that you have. And in the people landscape, we can all do so many different things because we've all had to do that. That's what happens internally in an HR organization. Somebody's looking at resumes and filling out talent development performance management reviews at the same time. So I think... We have to be open as entrepreneurs to not narrow our business offerings too quickly. But I do think it's much harder to think about marketing and branding and what are you going to be known for if it's, well, I can do anything. And that also makes it very difficult to price because you're like, well, I'm a generalist and it lowers your value as a subject matter expert and my values in quotations.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Okay, we're getting a couple of really good things here. Let's go to that value part, diluting the value, not having to focus. Like, what are some of the ways that you have observed the value of a fractional expert entrepreneur who wants to do this? How does the value of that compete with someone who, and I can relate to what you're saying, like, wearing the shoes of I've been laid off and I really need to find something. And I need that revenue. I need that early revenue. Like there's a tension there between those two offerings, right? Two people who can say, I could probably do the same thing, but they have different goals at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's tricky. And I can't judge anybody who's going to be like, I am going to take that$125 an hour offer. talent acquisition gig for the next six months even though I just ran the entire team at 250 but I need the gig like I get that there's no judgment I think there's another there's so much more in the middle though of and this is where I think HR has to kind of shake some cultural residue off when you start your own thing even if you have to start your own thing there's a a narrative inside so many businesses that people operations and HR is a cost center. But you read any Jim Collins book, and he's going to tell you that the first thing that you got to care about if you're starting a business is the people who are on your team. Well, who's in charge of the people that are on the team? The people organization. That's a very important part of business. But there's been this narrative inside organizations for so long that that is a suboptimal area of focus to product or engineering or sales or marketing. But we know, and like, I don't have to quote the Unicorn Project or, you know, Google to say like, we know the value of people when it, as it ties to innovation and people's strategy as it ties to innovation and higher, you know, revenue, bottom line and top line. And so I think we as HR professionals have to recognize the value that we can bring to any organization and they're not hiring you if they don't need that support, right? So many of us go in and we're the only talent person or we're the only talent development person or that we're thinking through compensation strategy. Compensation is the biggest line item on SG&A for any organization is how much are you paying your people? And what is your people strategy? That's a pretty important thing. So if I was doing compensation strategy, which disclaimer, I don't do that at all. I appreciate all of you who do. I'd be charging a hell of a lot of money for that. I would not go in low on that because it's an incredibly important thing to deliver to an organization. It impacts employer brand. It impacts retention. It impacts all sorts of things. Just employee engagement. when we consider compensation as a form of intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. So that all being said, maybe I'm like rattling, I'm looking at the both of you just kind of like staring at me. But I think that We really all need to recognize our value from a business standpoint, not only from an HR standpoint, when we're selling ourselves as either fractional momentarily or entrepreneur for a long-term business.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, I have opinions on compensation, but I want to go back to something that you were starting to touch on right before that. How do you think about when you're setting up your own shingle, you're a business, you're trying to operate and you have a personal burn rate, right? You're like, I will be out of savings in X period of time. I I've noticed personally that part, this is actually a friend of the show, Doug Wheeler. He's listened to all the episodes and we were talking the other day and he made a comment that part of being in business is that people, it's going to take years for someone to even know that you have a business and then for them to have an opportunity to connect with you. So part of it's like, how can you survive for three, four or five years with some relative offering that matches what people thought? For instance, I had a customer that was a colleague from four years ago, me to reach out last summer. So we worked together. And just yesterday, he reached out again, hey, I might have a project to do together. Part of that is you just got to keep being around. So all that to say, there's actually a question here. How do you approach? I've got roughly six weeks till I need a day job. And I'm going to try this. Would you just tell someone to not even bother? Like, how do you think about that with someone who's maybe in that position?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I would say don't bother. I would say go get a job as soon as possible.
SPEAKER_03:Like that's not worth the stress.
SPEAKER_00:If you have six weeks, it is frigging impossible, right? Like if you have six weeks before you're out of money, you should be banging on every door and most people would be, right? They would be banging on every door for fractional opportunities and you should be applying for full-time positions because the chances that you are going to get enough revenue in six weeks is to cover you for an extended amount of time before then you're like, let's imagine you got that gig. So you got it with five weeks left of cash. Okay, now you're burning, right? Burn rate is a real thing. When you are out of money, you are out of money. So you gotta be paying attention to that. And that's what I talk so much to people about who are coming into entrepreneurship in any capacity, whether it's startup founder or fractional HR person. How much money do you have? How much risk can you afford? And you have to have good answers for that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. We should have talked a year ago. Lance and I have talked about this in depth. So I lost a day job and I had six weeks of runway, which is why I brought up the hypothetical. And the amazing thing is I got another day job within the six-week timeline, but I also got so much fractional that it was covering all my costs. So I resigned from the day job after three days. And the fractional carried me through for eight months until it dried up, which is exactly what you described. And so then I got another day job. So here I am, I'm at a day job, but everything's fine. But like you've described my scenario exactly.
SPEAKER_00:But so here, and I was like nodding so excitedly. Yeah. You're sharing that story. Like, yes. Okay. So like if you want to be an entrepreneur and you want to run your own shop, but you only have six weeks of runway, you take that day that you take the day job. And you take the fractional work.
SPEAKER_03:Which in hindsight, that's what I should have done. Like that would have helped so much with the stress over the previous over the year.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And if you can't do that because of, you know, family risk constraints or other things like that, then the question is, OK, take the job that's going to make the most money and figure out how much you can save during that period of time. to continue your runway so that when you are ready to try again or when more fractional work appears, you have a larger runway to work with. And that's where like the question of, do I wanna be an entrepreneur or do I wanna be a fractional person, right? That's in between gigs, right? You can play it both ways. You can go back and forth. I know a lot of people who like to work internally for a year or two, and then they like to take a year or two off and do fractional work. And there's no playbook that's like, you're either one or you're the other, but the bank book counts. And so that's how you have to be strategic of like, which one do I do? And it's more like, can you do a yes and? Could you have outsourced that fractional work to some of your friends who I'm sure also got laid off and paid them$100 an hour and gotten$50 of margin on that and put that in the bank? And now all of a sudden, you're a consulting firm. And you
SPEAKER_03:didn't even try. I'll let you be flexible. If I have evenings and weekends, I'll do freelance. And I've learned how I can do some fractional to try to build up that bank balance while having a day job. And so that's, I think this is a scenario a lot of people probably fall under. So yeah, I appreciate your thoughts. It's been a journey.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. If you don't have runway and there's a must sell now situation, the stress of that is crushing. So if there's any way, right? Like it's kind of this like attractive idea of, hey, I just got laid off, but I'm going to go and go it on my own. Right. But the, the amount of, of pressure that you're inviting on yourself is immense. And if you don't have runway for that, like do whatever you can to mitigate that stress. Even if your long-term goal is to be a fractional, because I am speaking from experience, it is too heavy. It's way too heavy. It's way too heavy.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It's so, it can be so much pressure. And I, I was just in a sales training call. I still go to all of the, I go to those all the time and I, I, met this incredible woman like wow firecracker of a human being and she left a job with a major uh publication after seven years in this like huge strategic position or rather she had been her position had been eliminated and she was like all right i'm gonna go out on my own and she went out on her own and she got eight clients right away because she had a great network and she worked for eight months and then it dried up and she had no idea what to do next Because, well, I've already had 45 lunches with every person that I personally know in my location on my LinkedIn board. Like she didn't know like what to do next once you exhaust your network. And so I think that there's so many flavors of the journey. Like you just have to be kind to yourself at all points and say yes to everything that comes and be creative on, well, You know, maybe I can't do this, but I know somebody who can. And maybe I can take a commission on that or I can find a way to start pulling revenue that will if you really do want to be an entrepreneur and you really do want to get out from under the internal full time gig, you can set yourself up for success while you're doing that.
SPEAKER_03:You know. The person you just described is basically me because I had six clients at once. I had from two to six clients for that eight months. And it was fantastic. The most money I'd ever generated in my life until it dried up to zero. Absolutely nothing left. And that's where I went and got a day job. And so I'm glad to hear other people have experienced this. And then... I do think the biggest thing I learned from that is, oh, I can do it on my own. I do just need a different approach. There's some learning I need to continue doing, but it can happen. And I think it's okay to stumble into that and fail, knowing that even though it was stressful, I felt so much autonomy of being able to push back on CEOs and say, hey, this is not a smart idea for your product, knowing that they only represented 20% of my revenue, right? And And I found that leaders appreciated the candor and actually wanted to keep working with me as a result. And that may lead into the next topic that I saw Lance wrote out here, which is it. So I'd love your thoughts on this, where if you're not employed by someone, my view is you actually can be far more helpful to a leader at a company.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I think as an internal HR professional, I never had as much power in communication as I did as a consultant. Because The CEO or the stakeholder that I was working with in a consulting capacity is looking for confidence, perspective, and an excuse if it fails. Nobody gets fired for hiring McKinsey. That's a well-known slogan for consultants. Nobody gets hired. We provide a safety net. So if we recommend something that the organization does and then for whatever reason it fails, the CEO didn't fail. The stakeholder didn't fail. The consultant failed. That's part of what they're buying is a way out. But they're also buying perspective and confidence in making difficult decisions, which are always in the people space. And that's worth a lot of money. It's certainly worth more than so many people, I think, give themselves credit for.
SPEAKER_03:So this is something that Lance and I love to dig into that. I believe there's a bit of a Venn diagram between an employee a consultant, and a fractional. And having done all three, how do you define the difference, or do you, between a consultant and a fractional versus what they're offering?
SPEAKER_00:It's a really good question.
SPEAKER_03:I can tell you my definition and feel free to tell me differences in your experience.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, please.
SPEAKER_03:All right. And then Lance, feel free to add on, because this is actually Lance's definition I'm stealing. A fractional... gives expertise advice and actually goes and does a lot of it. A consultant often gives the advice and then is there for feedback as the team implements most of it. That's the biggest difference that I've recognized so far.
SPEAKER_00:So I have a little bit of a nuance to that. I think the reason why people don't like consultants is because they write a lot of decks and don't do any of the shit work. And I'm not that kind of consultant. But that doesn't mean... So I feel like for me... Being a consultant, like I don't leave my client at the waterline. When I make a recommendation or a strategy that they're going to have to deploy, I always try to make the execution of that work part of the agreement. It may be paid out in a different capacity. It might look different from a timing and an engagement perspective. It might be, you know, I break, often I will break my engagements into segments. So phase one might be, right, the assessment and the audit and phase two is the recommendations and sort of the buy-in and the change management strategy. And then phase three is the execution and like, how does the team actually roll whatever it is out? I try to stick all the way through because I'm the one who has the most context to why I said or suggested the strategy that we're doing. And so if I leave and they're executing it four months later and some engineering manager is like, I don't wanna do that, why should I do that? Well, if I'm gone, who's there to answer that? And that's why a lot of consulting strategy I think fails because there is no context during execution from the people who thought of the strategy to begin with yeah
SPEAKER_02:so it's a hundred thousand dollar deck that sits in a file that nobody else can use
SPEAKER_00:that's right that's right and that's why so many people internally don't like consultants you told me how to do a bunch of work and then you don't help me with the execution
SPEAKER_03:so i was part of a team where we initially would do consulting And then I would transition into being the product manager who would do the work. And that was a lot of fun. I loved it. We'd charge a lot for the initial, and then we would charge a different amount for the actual work. But then the company started to grow, and we started to have people selling it who were not doing it, and all kinds of problems arose because the people selling it were getting a commission based on the price, but there was no tie-in to whether or not the project went well after that. So what you just described is the challenge with if you're purely consulting but not doing the follow-up, that gives it a bad name. It often does.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and it also limits your upside on revenue.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Stick with one. Like if we're talking about how do we build a business when we have limited network and limited entrepreneurial skills like sales and marketing and all of that, because we're HR professionals, we're not sales and marketing professionals. I'm going to sell my time for as long as I can to stick with the client because a deal is a deal is a deal. And the longer I'm with a client, the stickier I become and the more service offerings I can provide.
SPEAKER_02:Mm hmm. I like that. And I think this might loop us back into the last point I really want to make sure that we get to is then, how do you structure your pricing when you do have a client like that, or that you can continue to work with, or that you can engage with? In a perfect world, right, where all fractionals could do this, right, would you want to see... less of the here's 10 hours per month from me and more of something else? How do you do it? And is there a way that you'd be like, if everyone could do this, it would be really great for the fractional community?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I don't know if we have enough time for me to answer that, but I will try to be succinct. Value-based pricing is so much easier, better, profitable for someone than hourly rate. If you have to justify hourly rates and the hours you worked per week, month, whatever, it makes it very difficult for you to add additional value and to be seen as a high-value consultant versus they can just cut your hours. Well, you know what? We asked you to do this thing, but we were going to pay you for 10 hours, but now we're only going to pay you for five. But we still want you to do that thing. And now you're stuck in this very uncomfortable environment account management conversation that needs to be had because now you can't meet, I mean, it's the product management nightmare, right? Like it's time, money, and scope. And so one of those things has to give. But I think if you're doing very operational and tactical work, it may make sense for that to be hourly. But as you move into more strategic or organizational defining contracts, It's important for you to understand what the market will bear. What are your competitors offering? What, and like, not like, what is the person sitting right next to you offering in the Slack channel? Like, what is Brene Brown offering? What is like somebody, like, why are, you know, I have sat around so many tables of brilliant, very interesting people making very little money because they didn't value their own time. And I have sat around many tables with very foolish people stupid, stupid people who are making lots and lots of money and not feeling bad about it at all. So I think that, you know, we have to value ourselves and our own time. And only you can decide how much money your time is worth and how much what you are going to deliver to an organization is going to provide them from a value perspective. So that's where I think it's important for HR to understand or anyone in people who infractional people work to understand what is the actual bottom line value to whatever it is that you're going to be delivering. If you deliver a talent acquisition strategy that brings in five blockchain smart contract developers and that company goes on to make a billion dollars in Ethereum because it's bleeding edge, you know, technology, boy, you better be like Charging a good amount of money for understanding what that network of talent looks like and how you're able to fulfill that. Because that's a lot of money. We have someone in our fractional people Slack, and I won't call him out by name, but he's a brilliant recruiter and he's been in tech forever and he should be charging a lot of money. That guy knows everybody in, you know, bleeding edge technology. Like you should be making a lot of money recruiting for that kind of business in the same way that you should be making a lot of money if you execute a compensation strategy or a people management strategy that's going to impact a significant amount of people. So, you know, maybe there's a Then it comes down to a different conversation that I'm sure we'll have to have later, which is like, how can you price things where you might get equity? Or if you're working with a startup, do you take cashless equity? Because you believe in the long-term value of what you're going to do, and maybe they won't see the value of the strategy that you're going to implement for 12 to 18 months. Stay sticky. Build in contracts that allow you to keep going back and having a relationship with that client where... If it continues to be profitable or more, you know, this X percentage of retained people stay because of that strategy, well, maybe you get an upside for that. You got to get creative with the sales and the contracts. And I think that that's an opportunity for a conversation at another time probably.
SPEAKER_02:I love it. We need level two, level 201 fractional pricing strategy with Heather Corral. So we look for that in the future. Heather, how can people that are listening who want to know more about your work, who want to engage with you, how can they find you? Where's the best place to look? Where are you most accessible?
SPEAKER_00:Thank you.
SPEAKER_03:And what are you doing these days? Like, what are you excited about right now?
SPEAKER_00:Oh my gosh. Thanks so much for asking. Okay. So first you can find me at the canoe project.com. You can find me at Heather Corallo on LinkedIn. Please, everyone LinkedIn me. Tell me that you listened to this amazing podcast and that you'd like to talk more because I am all about the networking. What am I working on now? I am... actually going to get my coaching certification. I've been coaching since 2015, predominantly tech startup founders and early stage CEOs and executive teams. And after sort of a life-changing experience last year, I decided that I wanted to grow my customer persona. So rather than I am always thinking in business terms, even in like the middle of the night. So I'm like, what's my customer persona if I wanted to like not coach tech people anymore? And I'm really interested in wanting to actually coach female founders. So anyone who identifies, gender identifies as female and perhaps not in tech. So are you, you know... making cookies online? Are you doing, you know, a flower shop? Are you a nonprofit leader? I haven't really had a chance to serve those communities. And I feel like a lot of what I have to offer at this stage of my career in life, because I'm not just me, like professionally, I'm a mom and I have four children and two dogs and a cat and a husband and a So are you saying that you're
SPEAKER_03:not exclusively just wanting to babysit white emotionally stunted dudes?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah. Well, I can only hope that that's what I can give to them and how I spend my time. And I'm also really excited to help people who are on this journey with us, and not to make money, but because I think that having this community, a rising tide lifts all ships. And I've been doing this for a really long time, and it's really hard. It's so hard. So hard to run your own business, especially when you don't know how or you've never done it before or you're by yourself or you don't want to be, but you have no choice. And like, how do you navigate that? And so I'm hopeful that my journey can help other people as they navigate it
SPEAKER_02:too. I love that. Yeah, love all that. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening today. Definitely reach out to Heather, get connected. If you have feedback on the show or have questions, follow-ups, you can always reach us at email at fractional.fm. And we'll see you back here next time for episode 52.
