Your Offer Gets Easier When You Sell Outcomes

If your business “does a service” but customers still hesitate, it’s probably not your skill, it’s your offer. We sit down and map out what a real, sellable offer looks like when you stop describing tasks and start selling outcomes. From the milk-aisle pricing analogy to real client examples, we get practical about how to package your work so a buyer can instantly understand what they get, how it works, and why it’s worth it.

We walk through the building blocks we use with clients: define the dream outcome, break the work into specific deliverables, then add a couple of smart bonuses that help people get results faster without wrecking your schedule. Dwarne shares what changed everything for his website projects: solving the content bottleneck by including content writing and revisions, which sped up delivery and raised perceived value. We also talk about why “bonuses” are often better than stuffing everything into the core package, especially when a buyer might not want every add-on.

Then we go deeper into what keeps offers from turning into headaches: a confidence-building guarantee, a clear agreement that sets responsibilities on both sides, and honest scarcity based on your real capacity. We also connect offers to marketing fundamentals like systems, onboarding, awareness, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value, because more leads don’t help if you can’t deliver.

If you’re a small business owner, freelancer, or agency trying to tighten your service packages, pricing strategy, and sales process, this one gives you a clean framework to start today. Subscribe for next week’s conversation on valuing your offer, and if this helped, share it and leave a review so more business owners can find it.

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Transcript

Welcome And How To Follow Along

Dave 0:02

Welcome to Packet, working your future, real line, quite credit, and it's reinforced from the state effectively in your community. So whether you need help with applications, credibility, internality, and maybe just getting your mindset right. We are here and it's right to help conversation. So grab your favorite cup of Joe. Let's jump into the show. As that amazing sounding voice just said, grab your favorite cup of Joe. Let's jump into the show, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another Friday. I'm Dave Warden with Tribe Business Solutions, and I'm joined here as always. Well, not as always, as most always. Man, I love it. Love it. Well, welcome, everybody. So if you're yeah, if you're a business owner or maybe you're an aspiring business owner and you just want a good place to listen to two average-looking dudes, you know, talk about their business experience and what we've helped our clients with, both in the past but currently, you're in the right spot. So you know, make sure you do all that fun algorithm and stuff, like it, subscribe, and come back. Also, if you have questions, anything, there's no dumb question when it comes to your journey, our journey, anything, feel free to drop them down below. So you can put them down in the comments. We'll make sure either to answer them live or we'll answer them in the future if we see them after the show. But don't be afraid to ask any questions. We go live every Friday morning just for your reference, but every Friday morning around 8 15, 8 30. And we do that on YouTube, we do it on Facebook, we do it on LinkedIn. And if you're one somebody that wants the audio version, you're listening to the audio version right now. Well, we post that on all the fun, you know, podcast places, you know, Apple, Spotify, all those good, fun podcast places. So let's jump into it. So today we we were talking last week, and we decided that we are gonna at least start the conversation around offers this week and how important it is, how you can create your offer. Because I think it's a question that I get a lot from individuals, or as I'm having conversations with them and I learn about what they're doing, they don't even have offers created. What have you in your experience, you know, is that something that you personally maybe have you know struggled with, or maybe it's something also that you've had conversations with some of your clients on?

Duarne 2:44

Yeah, 100%, Dave. It's kind of interesting when you start looking at it as a one-man person handling all your own sales, you don't really think about it. It's like, yeah, yeah, I'll just make up some shit along the way and I'll just quote this job as it comes through and happy days. But as soon as you get people underneath you who are responsible to go out and sell the services, you have to empower them. And their way to empower them is to give them some bundled pricing or give them some offers that you can at least use as a starting point for the conversations. We took it one step further. We had a lot of white label partnerships. So, what we mean by that is we actually do partnerships with businesses who resell a lot of our services into their customer base under their own branding. So when we introduce that, the first thing they all say is, Oh, cool, can you send us the pricing? Yeah, great, great. Can you give us some collateral? So we have to have pricing, we have to have offers, and we have to have collateral that talks about our offers ready to go at the drop of a hat to send a cross for them. Because if we don't, it becomes too difficult and too hard. And can you imagine turning up at a mall and looking at the milk aisle and not having any pricing on it? You sit back and go, Yeah, so how much is that? Oh, you're gonna have to ask somebody. I don't want to ask somebody, I just want to know how much it is to start the conversation at least and help me with my decision making.

Start Now And Iterate Fast

Dave 4:14

Well, and I I guess when it there's so much about like you're you're you're saying a lot, right? You're saying collateral, you're saying offer, you're saying all that. And it can't get overwhelming. So and you may be thinking, maybe I don't even want to get in the business, right? There's a lot of things that you gotta do. But here's the here's the the key to anything, whether it's offers, pricing, business in general. You just have to get started.

Duarne 4:37

Oh, yeah. This wasn't all developed in day one, trust me. Exactly.

Dave 4:42

It it's so easy to get paralyzed by the idea of I can't launch this until I have everything ready, or people aren't going to one, be supportive of your product, two, stay around, you know, three, you know, you know, tell other people about it. And so, but those early adopters, they understand that you're going through the build and that they get to be a part of the process. That's why they're there. So involve them, you know. If it's a new service or a new product line, Darwin, you mentioned you know, white labeling. So if you have other people that you know potentially are reselling your service for you, like give them a good benefit for being part of that first group of people, you know. So if you if you typically want, you know, maybe 25% revenue share, give the first couple people a 50% revenue share for the first six months because they're there and they're and they're going through some of that stuff with you and they're giving your feedback. So you're paying a little bit of that extra up front for the knowledge, for their insights, for their feedback to you to help you generate your long-serving program and service. And so a little bit off topic on offers, but it's important to just really get started with that and it's a lot of different things.

Duarne 6:01

It's relevant though, because if we look at this Dave from the other from the same point of view, is what you set up as an offer today is probably not going to be the price in six months. Your offer is going to evolve and it's going to change typically, right? So that offer you put out initially may need to be adjusted, changed. So even if you go out and a so even if you uh give a 50% discount, you may find yourself adding an extra 30% to the retail price in the future anyway. So it's at that point you can then readjust it. And the people getting the service from you are probably going to be just you want to make sure they're as invested in helping you launch it as you are, and it's going to be of a value proposition for them. This is not something you go and offer somebody who might sell one every six months or something. This is something who's probably got a customer base that's got you know a requirement. This is a value add to their existing customer services. We white label to a lot of MSP and marketing providers. So MSPs are many service providers, system integrators around the IT sector. So these guys are already dealing with the IT, the businesses. It's not hard for them to value add on some SEO, AdWords, pay-per-click, social media marketing, and website sales. So for them, it's a natural progression, natural conversation. And it's something they don't have to sell themselves. It's not something they have to stock up with staffing to be able to do. They don't have to have all the software and the knowledge in house to do it. So you might find that your offer is just simply providing a value add proposition product or service that works really well with what some these people are doing.

Define Outcomes And Deliverables

Dave 7:46

Yeah, let's take let's take a step back and and because this I think we're diving into step five, right? Before we even hold job, step ones, two and three and four. And so when you think of your service with your offer, the first thing that they tell a lot of people to do is think through the outcomes, right? What are what are those dream things that you're providing as part of your service? Those become the basic level detail when it comes to your offer. And so you may struggle with that because I've had conversations with a lot of people that struggle because they're you know, for example, bookkeepers are are one. They're like, Well, I just do bookkeeping. Like, what else am I supposed to put in there as my basic service? Okay, like how often are you allowed to communicate with you, right? Is it by chat, email? Can they call you anytime they want? That's one line, that's one line, right? And then you have your different packages, which kind of ups the quantity or the actual service level for that particular line. What is your you know your deliverable? Is it quarterly? You know, maybe quarterly is your basic package, you know, and then you have a monthly, you know, for the top two packages. So you think of what is the the speed at which you are actually or the frequency at which you are also you know providing the statements for them. Are you doing daily or you know even weekly reconciliations, or are you just doing monthly kind of categorizing and reconciling the bank accounts? Those are all things. So you take your what you think is just a simple service and you break it down into the deliverables and the outcomes you're providing that are going to help them, and now that becomes your basic labor. And when you're doing that, you got to make sure that you keep the client's dream outcome in mind as you're creating this offer. Because if you're like me and Dwarne, I know we've had this conversation, I'm in the numbers game, but I'm also a lot in like AI game. And so in the past, a lot of people's eyes would glaze over when you start talking numbers or you start talking financials because they know they need to do it, they don't get it, and they're trying to do it themselves. And so their dream outcome is I want to take the stress off my plate, I want to take these hours off my plate and still have like the information to make the best business decisions. But I can't do that right now because I'm stressed trying to figure it out. And and so the dream outcome there is like, well, you can you can outreach us anytime something comes up, right? Depending on your level, we're gonna give you, you know, we reconcile your bank account weekly so you're able to kind of go in at any time, run a interim report and see the you know up-to-date information by the end of the week. We help you understand your financials by doing a strategy session with you. We will sit down with you and actually you know do a quarterly kind of analysis of your cash flow. We'll help you plan your cash flow, your budget, you know, your goals, your KPIs, all those things that you need to make better business decisions that you mentioned was you know something that you're looking to, you know, have an outcome and take off your plane. These are the things that we're gonna do. And this is why I feel like you fall into this program. But that's just step one, right? Darren, so what have you done? And we'll just go step one and then we'll we'll go into like step two, three, four, and you know, beyond after the after this, but for yourself, you know, what have you done in that step one game? You know, because when people think web design, right, they're like, oh, you just didn't have my website. How have you kind of taken that to make it into a better offer?

Duarne 11:16

Look, for us, we've got a few different ways that we have done this over the time, but the successful method that's worked for us recently has in the last 12 to 18 months is we found what was the biggest problem of delivering a finished website, what was causing all the delays, what was causing the basically the bottleneck where everything just stopped. And most of the time that all came down to one thing content. And when I say content, I'm talking about the wording on a website. That typically is what kills most website momentum in our industry. People don't know how to write the content. They they sign up, they agree to do it, but then they get stuck, they don't know what to do. So we took on a value add proposition where we're able to increase our rates and include all the content writing. And we do it with unlimited revisions. Now, the key is we find out initially what they want during our initial onboarding. We then go and document that process and give them some samples, make sure we get the samples right, then we produce the rest of the content. By doing that, we probably have about 15% worth of variation throughout the uh term of the delivery. And we're able to finish websites in under three months, where some websites used to take 14 months waiting for clients to come along and do the content. The other thing was we used to we always offered content, but it was an additional charge. Now we bundle it, we don't give them the option, we tell them that it's coming with it. And we've had no one push back and say, hang on, I don't want you to write my content. Most of them say, Oh, look, if you could, yeah, if you could do the draft, and then I'll just review it. Cool, all right, that's part of it. And that's been a huge offer value add for us. And then obviously you've got all your upsells beyond that, but that's been our biggest draw. It's been successful for us.

Dave 13:52

And so there's one or two ways that you can frame it, and and you kind of hit what I call level two. And this is either the add-in when you start bundling and you start creating your like program, right? Or if you're just looking to sell the website and you want to ask maybe a little bit more for it, this now becomes a add-on, right? A bonus. And you know, where you have a value because you used to sell it and you could still sell it at that rate. That is what you call the bonuses. And this is where you start to throw in things on top of your basic level to say, well, if you you know kind of sign up right now, we're running this you know, kind of program where you get this bonus of X, Y, and Z. And it the idea with your bonuses is it's gonna help the client obtain that dream outcome quicker or easier. So in your case, right, they want the dream outcome of the website being done and rebranded or or reworked. What's gonna help them do it quicker? Well, hey, we're gonna throw this bonus in of we're actually gonna write your first copies of your copy, you're gonna review it, unlimited revisions, we're gonna throw it in. Typically, we charge a thousand dollars for that, but we're gonna throw it in. And so now that the client feels, well, shit, I just got a thousand dollars worth of value if I sign up with Duarn. And then when they go and review a website design with somebody else, well, they're gonna be like, Well, I have to do my copy here, and they're gonna go, well, yeah, if you wanted me to do that, I could charge you $1,500 extra dollars. And now they they realize that you're not comparing now apples to oranges or sorry, apples to apples, you're comparing apples to oranges, and so that's why it's so important to have these extra bonuses that are gonna help your client actually obtain the outcome, but it's not part of the main program because what's nice about that is your bonuses can change. So throughout the year, you want to have about four or five kind of specials that you're running, and how you do that is your main service will stay the same, but your bonuses are different throughout the year, and so that's how you make it feel fresh, even though it's pretty much the same program that you're offering. Yeah, and so you want to have maybe two bonuses, you know, per your offer or per year, you know, your program that you're running. So in your case, you kind of bundled it together, which is which is completely fine because that could be like your top level, right? Hey, this is like our all in, you know, you get all of this, but you're also getting X, Y, and Z additional bonuses than the standard program. And so that's level two is think about what are the bonuses that you could offer as a business owner to the individual. It's gonna help them make it you know that much more easier to get that dream outcome.

Duarne 16:28

And so you can always peel it with that point too, right? You can always peel your top offer back if you need to. You can downsell it, you can take out and say, look, if you don't need the content writing, we can reduce the quote down to this for you to fit into the budget that you're talking about. But if you go in and you have to keep adding everything on all the time on that initial conversation, you can have an adverse reaction. So there's a pro and a con for between this.

Dave 16:56

Wait, right, but so when you when you include it as a bundle, like you said, and somebody looks at the price and they're like, Well, I don't want you to write my content, they expect you to reduce your price now, but when it's a bonus, right? If it's framed as a bonus, they're not paying for it, right? And and your main service is still your main service, so you can't really get you know a reduction of your price if you don't take the bonus content or the you've got to build that offer properly to not get caught up in that.

Duarne 17:25

Well, you're just adding an extra service, etc. Right. You've got to find it.

Break The Hourly Pricing Mindset

Dave 17:30

You don't want to do a lot of these things that maybe people feel like they don't want, those necessarily shouldn't be part of your main offer, the main program. What people feel are is like the elective, the selective options, those now are what you should do as your bonuses. Because if you pull it back and somebody doesn't want it, it's like, okay, well, you know, it's a bonus anyways, you don't have to take it. Or you could potentially offer them something in replacement of that bonus that's you know of lower cost to you, right? And so when you think of your bonuses, that's the first step, right? Think of what are those elective, those selective things that a lot of people either add on or don't add on, that becomes a bonus. The second part is you want to make sure that it's low cost, low time for you, right? So if you're adding all these bonuses that are adding hours upon hours every month into your workload, that's not a good bonus. You should be getting paid for that. So it should be part of your main service. Now, if you're adding something like Duarn, you have systems in place that probably help people generate that content based on the industry, based on everything that you've seen. That that system, it probably you know doesn't take you a lot of time. The revisions might, but the initial providing of that value does not. And so people are thinking, well, if it only takes Duarn 30 minutes, why should why is it a thousand dollar value? $1,000 value because Darren has years and years of experience building that expertise in order to create that system to give you that content in under 30 minutes. So what do you value more? The fact that it only took 30 minutes, or the fact that he's gonna give you actually high quality content that's gonna drive conversions on your page. That's why it's worth a thousand dollars, right?

Duarne 19:05

100%. It's the old adage where the ship's not working, and they bring and they've got the new mechanic in there trying to fix it, and he spends a week trying to fix it, can't fix it. They bring they ask the old mechanic who's retired to come in, he comes in, spends five minutes, gives them the bill and then walks out, and it's running. And they look at the bill and go, ten thousand dollars. Why is it so high? Well, just because it took me ten minutes to fix your problem, I knew where to look, I knew how to fix it, and I didn't have to waste all that time. You're paying for that experience, and this is where a lot of business owners devalue their offer a lot. They try and try their offer, it is typically based on how many hours or how long is it going to take them to do it, and they devalue it themselves before they let the client devalue it for you.

Dave 19:59

So if you know the value of conversation, and again, now we have next week's topic because we can go into forever, and I don't want to like derail, and this is why we call it business unscripted, of course. But I think this is such a deep dive conversation because I've had so many how do I want to how do I want to say this right without being mean, right? But I've had so many we'll call a mirror moments with clients where they're so stuck in that hourly mindset that they can't get away from it, they just can't see it. They can't, and it takes months to break through, but then what happens is they get a client that they're focused on hourly, and then they realize that it's a time suck because they're doing extra work that they didn't even think of, and and they devalued their hourly rate. And so now they're like, Man, I wish I could be getting paid for for this work. It's taken a well, yeah, because if you would have listened to me, you would have gotten three times as much by giving the outcome. And they're like, Yeah, I know. And then that's that moment sometimes people either learn because they want to grow, or they learn because you know they just went through the experience themselves, and and it's like, Oh, yeah, you were right, it just happens, right? It's just like I hope I've been on both sides, you know.

Duarne 21:12

100%.

Dave 21:13

So let's let's let's let's great cop topic for next week. So if you're watching and you want to find out what we're gonna be talking about next week, at least in general, it's gonna be that that that valuing of your offer, right? The pricing, the value, how do you got to get through your mindset and all of that? So that'll be next week's kind of show. So it's awesome. But to kind of get back to what the offer, so when you think of step two, one, it's it's kind of those optional selection things that people will either add on or not add on. But the second part to that is it does not take up a lot of your time or resources, so it should be something that's like evergreen, should be something that maybe you have a great system in place that you can run it and operate it without actually doing and like a great option there, like just as an example.

Duarne 21:57

Sorry to cut you there, Dave. If you're a mobile detailer, car detailer, a typical one that gets thrown in is doing the anti-beading on your windows where the water beads off, or tire wall, you know, doing a good, you know, tire black on the tire walls. These things are quick, these things are cheap, but they have instant value for the person who's looking at the vehicle it's been cleaned or used, etc., and lasting effects. Those are the sort of things we're talking about. We're not talking about if you're a bookkeeper and say, Hey, look, we can do your payroll, you can do your accounts receivables. No, those are different services that you add on later, and we'll talk about later. But these are just little value ads that you can put in. If you're a consultant, it could be an extra 15 minutes consult or a report that you can give them, which it takes you 15 to 30 minutes to generate for them, which has high value for them. There's always the thing too.

Guarantees And Agreements That Protect You

Dave 22:56

Like what also makes your day-to-day easier. So when I think of like things that I'm doing and constantly evolving, right? Because we all know like we're doing AI and things change with that constantly. But as part of our services, is we're creating more of a portal for instead of trying to individually create things and send it to our clients, we're creating a portal for the client that have a library of everything, but then also they're able to kind of manage their own, you know, kind of downloads and skills and things like that. So the idea there is that you know to get access to that. That's a bonus, right? It's just, hey, you get this program, you're gonna get access to this portal. And so it's that bonus that makes our life easier, but it also makes their life easier. And so that's a good bonus as well. And so that's how you kind of want to look at when you think of creating your offers, creating your programs. The next part to that is once you've decided on the one or two things that you want to offer as a bonus is your guarantee. Now, it doesn't have to be money-back guarantee, it doesn't have to be any sort of you know, lifetime guarantee, whatever you want, but some sort of guarantee that they can feel confident that you are confident in the work that you're gonna provide for them. And for a lot of this, this could be hey, we do a 12-month agreement. However, part of my guarantee to you is if you feel like you're not getting value or you're not getting the support that you need from our team after the first 90 days, we'll go ahead and we'll cancel right the rest of the and you won't owe the rest of the agreement. You can just go ahead and get out, and on top of that, I'll give you like an extra you know hour with me to kind of plan how to continue what we've the momentum we've started to kind of continue to add that value for you. But on your end, you know, and you want you got to make sure that they have responsibility in that as well. On your end, in order to qualify for that though, you have to be doing the work, you have to be showing up to our conversations, and you have to be making right the steps on your side, like implementing what we talk about, different things like that, in order to qualify for that. Sound like a fair deal? Great. So now you just created a guarantee, and it doesn't cost you money. People think of guarantees and they're like, Well, I'm gonna have to get money back. Like, well, I don't want to do that. One, you should be confident enough to, even if they did ask for a money-back guarantee, that you'd be able to do it, yeah, and be confident that you could provide the you know, outcome. And again, you per put requirements and responsibilities on them. It's not just all on you, but there's responsibility they have to give you the documents on time. Like, that's the biggest thing we talk bookkeepers, right? You do, especially for clients that don't want to give you access, they don't want to give you, you know, their you know, a bank feed or any sort of statement access, you're relying on them to provide you statements. And I actually had a conversation with a client, you know, because they're like, Well, you know, I why can't you just provide me statements if things aren't reconciled? It's like, why would you why would I want I'm not gonna sit down with you and with the information that's not complete? That doesn't make sense. I said, but I here I am, I'm reaching out to you three times a week to get the statements, and so they were, you know, once we kind of sat down and kind of hashed that out, I was like, you know, I already had, and that's the thing when you think of bookkeepers, right? You're giving people the state, you're giving people their but your bank statements. And so there are some hesitations right there. Well, why would I want to give them my bank access? Well, because it makes your job easier, you don't have to think about that. That's one other responsibility that's now off your plate. And so, in essence, if you're like, well, I'm worried that they're just gonna go in and start doing something. Well, technically they already have all your bank information that they need, anyways. If if they're if it's a bad Apple bookkeeper, you're already giving them your bank statement that has your the routing number for any bank is public and they already have your account number. So you're you're really only kind of at keeping responsibility to have that extra responsibility on yourself. So for you as the client, or sorry, not as the client, but as the professional delivering to the client, you do have to include dose cord of sort of like deliverable responsibilities. Like if it for me to meet this guarantee of a deadline, you have to provide me all of your documents by this date. And if you don't, our deadline right is gonna be adjusted and extended, which goes into an offshoot. This is why it's so important for you to have agreements. So many people I talk to don't have agreements, and now you're literally up shit creek because if you don't have an agreement that says what their responsibilities are, and you tell them that you have you're gonna give them something by let's say May 31st, and they don't give you the information until May 30th, you still told them May 31st, you didn't tell them when they had to send you the stuff, and they didn't sign anything to in agreement to that, and so now that they want their money back, technically, you know, it's their word against theirs, and if they wanted to go to court, they might win, which means you might have to give them the money back and still do the deliverable.

Duarne 27:56

And even a bank, you can go to a bank these days and request money back or Visa, MasterCard, Amex, all these guys, and then you have to fight it, you have to prove that it was and if you have no documents, no nothing, you're gonna lose that appeal every time, even if you already gave them the even if you already gave them the product, but you have no support, you're going to lose that case, yeah.

Dave 28:17

And so this is why agreements are so important as well. And people are like, Well, I don't want to do contracts. I didn't say contract, I said an agreement. Wording's a little bit different here, right? It's just two people who are agreeing to do work together. What are the responsibilities of each party? That's the goal of the agreement. I expect X, Y, and Z of you. I'm gonna give you X, Y, and Z from me. This is the agreed upon right workload and also the process, like the invoicing process, the payment process, the change process. All those things need to be documented so that way both parties are on the same page. Otherwise, you're gonna have a lot of disputes, you're gonna have a lot of missunderstandings, and it's really important for you to do that.

Duarne 29:06

And this is a rinse and repeat solution, right? I mean, these agreements are gonna be something that a cookie cutter for you to use over and over and over again. So create yourself a good one, get it good, get it checked if you need to by a lawyer if you're concerned, get it in there, template it. You know, we just did this with a client again recently where they're going out with outsource staffing and they want to offer it. We gave them our template and said, look, this is our template for free to start here. And because they were like, Well, we need an agreement. What do we do? It's like, well, look, we'll help you with that. But we're not gonna, it's a legal agreement. You need to get your own legal advice on it. This is what we've settled on, we're happy with this. The biggest dramas that we see is in industries like if you're a drop shipper, it's very easy to prove that you ship something. You've got carrier receipts and delivery receipts, etc. You can show those numbers, you can show proof of receipt. But if you don't give out an agreement for a services rendered, or this is another one that we've seen in the past where we don't start work until the agreement's signed and the first invoice is paid. Yep, that's our standard process. We have written in there that if they don't pay their invoice by X amount of days after issue, these are the consequences in relation to that. We will cease work. If they do not reply back within X number of days when we put a request in for information on the project, then there's a consequence for that. We'll deem that as, you know, that part of the process FOID, or that you know, we'll only do three follow-ups. We're not responsible to do more than that. All these little things need to be built into your agreements. And I think we've talked about agreements in the past and how important they are. But when you're offering services, huge, huge importance. And when we start looking into those agreements, make sure you're not seeing it at an agreement that's covering 16 different services that you're offering when you're only offering them two of the services that you actually do. Try and make it a little bit more tailored to the outcome, you'll get a lot less objection.

Dave 31:11

Yeah, the first things that I always make sure when I'm creating an offer or any sort of program is the agreement piece has to be like the negotiate non-negotiable to go along with it. You know, and you can still have you could have like one agreement. Like, let's say you have a main service that's got three tiers, you can create one agreement that has the three tiers. You know, you just have a selection box at the bottom of that agreement, and they select which package they're picking, and then it details out well, based on this package, this is what you're getting. And so 100% agree with you. And we can go into agreement expectations of what needs to be included again in another episode, or maybe depending on where how long we get in this episode, we can jump into a little bit more. But I do agree with you, you know, you got to have some main things in there that cover your ass, but also, you know, you want to make sure that it's covering theirs too, like on your side, like just make it all over.

Duarne 32:42

It'll never end up in court.

Dave 32:43

You do have to never turn up, right? Just yeah, just do a bunch of red line versions. And like an agreement isn't to put one person over power of the other. An agreement is that you guys, exactly as it states in the name, you agree to these terms so they're favorable to both sides. It should never ever feel like one side won an agreement or not.

Duarne 33:07

It's just settling on the expectations from both parties to make sure you're both going to deliver what you're claiming to deliver. You're claiming to deliver services, they're claiming to pay you. Or they're going to work together to help you deliver the services. We've got written explicitly in our website design and development contracts that when we send a review of a website, whether it's a page, content, whatever, there's 10 business days. If we haven't got a response within 10 business days, we deem it as accepted, we move on. And that's written into the contract. It's written in there for them to sign and agree. And we did that is because we found ourselves getting into positions where clients wouldn't sign off on something and were stuck at that point, we couldn't move forward.

Dave 33:56

And then when the deadline comes up, the client's like, Well, how did you why did you miss the deadline? Well, we sent you this you know change order and you never signed off on it, you know what I mean? Yep, and so just like a proposal, an agreement is also good to review with your clients as well, like in depth. And it's also one of the things that with my advisory clients, I do go over in like our first session to say that by the way, like I just want you to make you aware of hey, this is what we're both kind of agreeing to. They say the expectations. That first session is always kind of going over those, those it's expectations, what's gonna happen, you know, both sides, everything. So don't just send them the agreement and then just forget about it once they sign it. No, again, your goal with a business relationship is to build that relationship. If you just leave it alone and then you you just let it, and then when something comes up, if well, you sign the agreement, that's probably not the best way to handle things, right? So that's why you can have conversations and build that.

Duarne 34:58

So absolutely, and and if you and you should never say it's in the agreement that you assigned, you should be able to go and respond and say, look, let's just refer to clause blah blah blah in the agreement. You might note that it's got this written here. Did you want to have a call and discuss that? Because this is a brief.

Dave 35:17

There are times where you do have to refer back to it, you know, so they're pushing back and they're saying, you know, well, that never happened. I didn't do that. And you can say, well, you know, on this page, right, in the in this paragraph, this is where this is kind of called out on. More than happy to kind of walk through it and then just have that conversation and walk through it.

Duarne 35:34

Um one thing that's really interesting, I want to add here too, is just because you have an agreement doesn't mean that it's locked in stone and you have to do that as the service provider. This is your baseline. If you have 10 days to get a response, give the client 10 days to get a response, and they get back to you and say, Look, it's gonna take me an extra few days. Is that okay? Then sure, you can there's some discretion there. You can say, sure, like I'll extend that out to 12 days.

Dave 36:00

Yeah, you can write it in there, you know, like you know, pending, you know, the mutual agreement, mutual agreement, mutual agreed upon, but you know, the baseline is 10 days or something like that, or mutually agreed upon, you know, response day or something.

Duarne 36:13

Because I know a lot of people out there are like, I don't want to do an agreement because I don't want to lock them in on that. We I was it's interesting, I was watching a podcast the other day, and it was about a managed service provider who's 20 plus years in the experience, and he's helped with huge amounts of mergers and takeovers and buyouts, etc., in that industry within Australia. One of the things that he noted was his current MSP business, they stopped putting people on 12-month, two-year contracts, which is really ballsy, in my opinion. So, what they did instead, they ended up putting in agreements which said, look, you need to give us 90 days notice to move away. So they could stay as long as they wanted or as little as they want, as long as they gave 90 days' notice. So three months notice, which meant his contract was effectively a three-month contract. And he found that almost nobody left. The attrition was very, very low because they didn't feel locked in on an agreement. So if you've got clients out there who are like, I don't want to sign an agreement because there's a term that comes with it, there's ways to think around that as well. So when you prepare your offer, you could say, look, I'm not gonna lock him in on six months or 12 months, not gonna lock him in for 24 months. This is just put in there that we need 60 days notice to end the contract or end the agreement.

Dave 37:38

Yeah, you the the term just becomes evergreen, you know, the term's monthly, but it over in order to you know terminate the agreement, it's just a 60-day notice.

Duarne 37:47

Yeah, and that is easier pill to swallow for a lot of people signing those contracts because it also helps with them not feeling locked in. Because we all know how phone companies have made us feel about being locked in. No one wants to be locked in on 24 months when there's new phones coming out every year, right? So we want to.

Dave 38:12

So to go back to the limited agreement for you.

Duarne 38:16

I can buy phones for a few hundred dollars, so I just replace them every year.

Scarcity, Capacity, And Timing Your Offer

Dave 38:20

If you if you literally so if you don't have an agreement, takeaway is at least get something, and even if you already have clients now and you don't have agreements with them, get something in place and send it out to them. Hey, by the way, we're just updating our records. We noticed we didn't have a signed agreement. Here, here's our agreement. If you want to chat to it, we can or talk through it. You know, if you're doing you know consulting work or anything like that, have the conversation with them. You know, hey, by the way, we're gonna be putting an agreement together. We're kind of you know formalizing our records, notice we didn't have one for us. Let's put one together. I'll send it over. You can review it. Yeah, going back to our offers, because again, agreements is great. But going back so far, right? The biggest thing is one, break down your main service, which you may think is as simple as just bookkeeping, or I'm gonna do your card detail, but break it down into the individual kind of outcomes, deliverables that you're gonna give, and then that becomes your main project. And so now when you break that down, you're giving the value of everything that comes with a bookkeeping package, right? You get the outreach, you get the questions, you get the the advisory session, the either the quarterly or the monthly, you know, kind of financial statements, you know, whether you're doing categorized categorization, you know, weekly or monthly. So all those things are value lines in the main service. Then you have to think through bonuses, right? What are bonuses that help achieve that main outcome of the main service, are low cost to you and don't add a lot of time, but high value to their client. Like Duarne's example, where he mentions that their bonus is they are now including you know the copywriting as part of website designs now. That's a good bonus because a lot of people don't necessarily do that, plus it helps him deliver the outcome because now he doesn't have to wait on the clients to create that. So that's a great option for a bonus. Also, it's generally the selective items that people either add on or don't become your bonuses because what you don't want to do is if somebody says, Well, I don't want that, oh great, it's just a bonus, anyways. If you include it in your offer, now if somebody says, Well, I don't want that, they expect you to reduce your price. So don't include it in your main bundle if it's a selective item. And then we talked about your guarantee, is the next thing. And then there's a couple other things to kind of focus on with your which we're gonna jump into next. But your guarantee doesn't have to always be money back, okay. Your guarantee can be something as simple as right. You know, if you feel like you, you know, at the end of the initial agreement before it renews, if you haven't gotten the results, we'll continue to work with you until you've gotten the results from the initial agreement. There you go. That that's a guarantee that people feel like, oh, okay, well, I'm going to get this, may not take the 12 months, but I may get it. Also, another good guarantee there is you know, offer them a get out of the contract free if there's no value, that they're feeling like they're getting the support. But how we got into the agreement discussion to kind of go back to that really quick is you have to also have expectations from your client. Because if you don't have the expectations of your client and you offer them a guarantee, the risk is that they don't have to do anything. If they're not going to do any of the work that you expect of them, and then they're like, Well, I'm not doing I'm not getting the value. Well, yeah, because you haven't come to the session, you keep canceling, you haven't done the input. Like I've done my side, you have to do yours. That's how you qualify for the guarantee. So you have to have some sort of qualifications, and in order to document that, needs to be in an agreement. So those are the main three that we've talked about so far when it comes to offers. Now, the next thing you want to think about is scarcity, right? Or urgency in how you present your offers to clients. So when you're having the conversation, the bonuses, right, the guarantee, those are all things that you only can do because if you're doing four or five specials throughout the year, those are your urgency. Well, I'm only this is you know, that this is uh you know Memorial Day because it's May, right? So this is our Memorial Day package, it comes with X, Y, and Z bonus and this guarantee. However, you have to book by May 31st. If you don't, then these bonuses are going away. We'll still be able to do the main service for you, but it's still gonna be full price, you're just gonna lose all your bonuses, and so that's the urgency factor. Your scarcity factor, and people are like, Well, I don't want to lie, you're not because if you're your if you're a one-man show or a one-woman show, and you won't you have limited capacity, so you know to say something like, Well, we can only bring two people on at this offer this month, how is that a lie if you only have capacity to on for two new people? That's not a lie, it's being truthful, and so you're framing it in a way that just says, Well, we uh we can only take two people this month for this offer, so you have to, it's got to be booked by May 31st, and I only have two slots. If you're not gonna book it, then you're gonna risk and you're probably gonna pay more next month, right?

Duarne 43:20

It's true. I had a client conversation actually in relation to that a couple of months ago that were talking about a marketing blitz, and I asked him a straight question. I said, How many new clients could you actually onboard each month for this service? And then and it's funny because the business owners in the meeting, and then there's the guy actually doing the deliverables, and he's like, If I was pushed, I could do two. Okay, I'm like, good. So that's 24 a year, but let's not let's draw let's make it 22 because you've got Christmas and new and the beginning and new year, which that's gonna take out the option of two for that time off. You're not gonna be able to do it, so that's 22 a year. So we need to be getting you in X number of leads every month to be able to qualify to get those two, if that's the case. So there's no point if we sign you up for five in a month and do a huge marketing blitz and get you five in a month because you're not gonna be able to deliver, they're going to be on a waiting list, and then the chances are they're gonna drop off and you're not gonna get the deals. So it's a very important thing to note when you're doing these offers, and this is something I've seen so many times where you've got a business that's like let's say detailing, you've got your existing customer base that are coming through, and then and 80% of your you know, your week is all booked in, and you're off you put an offer in to fill up that last 20%. And maybe you want to do a little bit more and just do some overtime to go with it, or maybe your offer is to allow you to get another employee to come in and help you do more. So you've got to work out what the offer, why you're doing the offer in the first place and how you're gonna deliver on that. So putting some scarcity around it is not a bad thing. Apple have just done it again. Apple have run out of Mac minis. And there's rumor that they're going to be releasing a M5 very soon. They've created scarcity on their product. You cannot order anywhere on the Apple websites across the world now brand new Mac Mini. It's just not available. It's a scarcity product. And what's happened is there's a lot of people scalping these now, $1,000 plus, on Craigslist, on Gumtree, on eBay and all that sort of thing, and even Facebook Marketplace. Because there's now a scarcity for the product. That's not the way we're telling you to approach this. What we're doing is we're telling you to approach this from a realistic point of view. And just look at what you can really deliver and then just be straight and honest about it. And don't be scared by sharing that information because you're not telling them I can only do two this month because that's my limitation. You're telling them you're only willing to take on two offers this month. You don't have to give them a reason as to why you do you can only take on two. And just because your offer is two this month, in 12 months' time, you might have done enough of these deals to get more people on, and that might be four that you can offer them. Well you've got capacity.

Dave 46:20

This is why it's so important for you to actually understand your own capacity, right? Your systems. And this is what I get. Numbers, capacity, systems. Your system has to be built in order to onboard more. Maybe you can start growing your team. But so many their whole focus is I just need more clients. Oh, okay. What if I gave you 100 clients tomorrow? Can you do it? No. Great. Your problem isn't more clients, your problem is their system and your onboarding. Right? Because a lot of people, you know, could potentially, depending on you know their business line, you know, if you have the right system in place, even if you're a one-man show or one woman show, you if you had the right system in place to onboard people and to run the program and the offer that you're providing, you should be able to bring on 10, 15 people at one time and you have the onboarding process set up where all of them can get onboarded and serviced right from the get-go. But if you don't have that set up, you may be like, Well, I can only do like one at a time. Then again, as you said, why are you running marketing? And this is why it's so backwards for a lot of people is they think, well, I have to run marketing. Okay, marketing's gonna get you a bunch of leads and potentially new clients, but are you can you service them? Can you onboard them? Otherwise, you're just wasting money. Until you, and so that's why systems and and your program needs to be developed first before you think about marketing. So many people think I have to do marketing first, and it's it's backwards. You have to actually get your system in place, your program and your service in place first, then you can build the marketing once you've actually are confident that you can bring on a multitude of individuals uh at the same time. That's the ultimate when you think of that piece and capacity. So yeah, and then that's the scarcity, right, and the urgency factor. This is why you want to have this sort of refresh of your programming, is so that you can offer these four or five different specialized services and specials that feels like you're resurfacing, you know, or or you know, it that doesn't feel like you're just reusing the same program. You're turning it into a new program and a new offer four or five times during the year. The main service stays the same, but the add-ons, the bonuses, all of that, those are what you shift and you change around to make it a new, actual, fresh feel with your clients. And so that's the the last piece there. And then you kind of bundle it all together, and the ultimate goal, right, isn't you name it that you know, some fun name or however you want to do it. So if it's a you know, like we just said, Memorial Day special. This is our Memorial Day program for bookkeeping or for detailing or website design, whatever it ends up being, you know, if you're in the US. And so the naming is probably not as important as everything else. Like you can name it whatever you want, but those first four pieces are the most important. You have to get those right and you have to think through those. Otherwise, you're just gonna be the everyday person down the block that's just doing the same services as everybody else.

Duarne 49:21

And the other thing to keep in mind too is your offers, look into your industry, see what the other offers in your industry are, and don't copy them. Find something unique to stand out, and it doesn't have to be your flagship product. So many people think it's their flagship product they have to run as an offer, or their cheapest product they have to run as an offer.

Dave 50:21

Right.

Duarne 50:22

Do something in the middle, pick something different. You might have five products and you offer three of those products throughout the year, not the cheapest, not the hot most expensive, but the three in the middle and just alternate between those as offers. Right. And don't and work out in this is my biggest recommendation when doing offers, work out what can you deliver more of with least resources and least effort. And that should be your first offer that you go out to market with. Because if you haven't got the processes and in place, at least you can sell more of it and handle it without the you know breaking. And use that funding that you get and the revenue to figure out and invest that back into building those processes and making it so you can deliver bigger, better services and products at higher volumes in the future.

Awareness Marketing And Lifetime Value

Dave 51:14

And so hopefully we've covered offer for you in depth. Well, maybe not in depth, but we covered the main, you know, kind of things that you should be thinking about when you're in business and you're like, I don't know how to create an offer. Go back, re-listen to this episode. We're gonna give you some good insights as well as some you know ancillary things to think about as well when it comes to like agreements and value and stuff like that. But next episode, we're definitely gonna talk about value, right? How do you value yourself? How do you value your offer? Because so many people, especially if you're coming from the employee world, you're coming from the employee mindset. It could be hard for you to get out of that. I need to think of my hourly rate for each one of these programs that I'm doing. It's a good baseline, but it's not how you should be valuing your programs, your service yourself. You should be valuing yourself on outcome and what is the value that you're providing to the individual, as well as your experience to get you to where you are today. So, with that, we'll talk about all that on the next episode, and then we'll dive deeper in one of our future episodes as well on agreements. What are some things to consider? All of those things. So I think we we definitely came up with a couple alternative topics, but we just don't have enough time left in this episode to dive into those right now. But uh, so it's normal, no, not normal at all, right? We always you will kind of get to that point. So if you have questions at any time, like drop them down below in the comments or you know, afterwards, if you're listening to the replay or you're listening to the audio version, drop a comment or or a question down below. We know you have them. Don't be afraid. There's no necessarily bad question when it comes to any of this information around your business. Either we're gonna know and we can help you answer that, or we'll help you point you in the right direction. That's the ultimate goal. Me and Dwarne aren't the, you know, we don't know everything, and we don't uh we'll never claim to. We share experiences, support that we've gone through already or that we've helped others with, and we share those here with you, and to help you and guide you through your own journey so that you don't have to make necessarily all the same mistakes that we did in ours. So, Duarn, with that, what is what's your main takeaway from today's episode that you hope the viewer listening or watching takes away and starts implementing in their business this week?

Duarne 53:36

I think talk to your customers about what drew them into the offer when you do set these up and start looking at what you can deliver today with ease and at higher volume, and start formulating an offer around that initially, because that's a great starting point. It's not going to complicate things too much for you if you do get high volumes of sales. But the other thing is don't get too caught up on not getting hundreds of people signing up to your office. It's not about always getting the offers when you're putting these offers out. It's sometimes it's about just the awareness and getting the word out and getting on people's top of mind so when they are ready to make a decision, you're the one. So think car detailing, air conditioning, servicing and repairs, roofing, lawn maintenance, these guys, they're not gonna need services from you right then and there, potentially. But the moment they do, you're front of mind. These offers that you're putting out can, and if you're regular with these offers and they're all a little bit different every now and again, but they stand out, they're gonna really help you long term with your awareness campaign, and they're gonna get your word out there about you and your business and what you can do. So don't get too caught up that you're not getting hundreds of people signing up to your offers from day one. That's normal. It's not about that. And remember the volume you can actually bring on because you might not you get you might not get excited because you don't get enough people signing up. But then remember, well, I couldn't have taken on that many anyway. Getting one or two people to sign up to your deal is sometimes really good. Here's an example. I had a call with a client today who does screw piling, so it's a technique of foundations in loose soil, sand and stuff like that. And I asked him, I said, Well, how much do you want to put on your AdWords budget? And he shared the number, and I'm like, Okay. I said, Do you mind if we start it somewhere about half of that for the first month? He's like, Yeah, sure. I said, So what sort of return on investment are we looking for? You want like a three to five turn time investment return? And he goes, No, that's okay. If I can get a couple of jobs booked a month, I'm happy. I'm like, what's the revenue for each, what's the cost of one of these jobs? He goes, they average about 15 grand a job. Wow, what's your margin on something like that? About 30, 30 percent. I'm like, okay, so realistically, you do need at least two jobs a month coming through to cover the cost of your marketing on this. Yeah, but it's not about getting he said what you don't realize is a lot of these guys who are gonna use it are gonna be return customers. So that two can become 10 over a year, right?

Dave 56:21

I'm like, ah, and then and so that's where you know kind of customer lifetime value and customer acquisition costs comes into play. So don't always think like that first service, right? If you're if it's a monthly service, you know, you're not trying to get a three, four, five times return from that first buy from your marketing with that individual. The idea is that you're at least covering the cost of the marketing, or you know, the the cost of acquisition minimally, and then your three, four, 10x returns are going to come over the lifetime of that client working with you. And so you want to look at what's the average length of time that a client stays in your realm? What is the average number of times that they purchase from you, right? So if it's a monthly service, you know, per year it's 12. And then if they stay for you for two years, that's 24. And then what's the gross profit on every one of those purchases? So don't think top line, this is where the numbers can get skewed. Think what's the gross profit from each one of the purchases? And then that becomes you multiply that by the number of times that they purchase from you over that length. Now that becomes your your customer lifetime value on a gross profit margin. Um, and then you compare that to the cost of acquisition. It could be that you may you know pay two times as much to bring in a new client for if you only look at that first purchase that they buy from you, sometimes maybe three or four times on that first purchase. But the idea is what is that full value? That's where you're gonna get the long term. So you're right, you he has you know the perfect sort of mindset. But I think a lot of people are just if I spend a thousand dollars on marketing, I want to at least get right a thousand dollars of gross profit, and sometimes that's not gonna happen.

Duarne 58:12

No, and that's it, and this is where you need to engage, in my opinion, a numbers person like you, Dave, if you don't know how to approach these things, because there's different perspectives on this, it's not as linear as people think it is. And the offer, from a marketing point of view, it's as much about a brand awareness and getting your business awareness out there and what you can offer and do as it is about getting the sales. And for those out there, you're educating the public that you're there and you do that. And with any luck, you can track them in to look for more services and take you up on another offer, another product or service that you offer as well. And with any luck, you're not telling a, you know, you're not a one and done business. You're uh you've got services you can offer over long-term periods. And that's well, that's right.

Key Takeaways And Next Topic

Dave 59:05

There's also like, and this is way deeper of a conversation, but also a little bit outside of like our specific realm. But you have top of funnel, you have middle of funnel, you have bottom of funnel, you know, sort of ads and targeting that you should be doing on your marketing as well. Which, if you're not at that level in your business, you know, and you're only doing top of, you know, so all these cold ad outreaches and posts, you're only hitting one subset of the funnel that is, you know, maybe five, six layers deep. And this is why marketing and ad, like everybody's saying, Oh, I can just run Facebook ads, I just hit a button. You're right, you could, and that's a start, but it's only top of funnel, like it's only the cold lead gen. You're not seeing the people that might have clicked or stopped on your page and then retargeted. That's where all these extra layers come in, which again, outside of my realm, I know you know enough to be dangerous here. But the idea is that once they click, maybe they didn't submit the form or they didn't buy, but they're gonna get retargeted with future ads because you're retargeting them now, and you have to have a retarget campaign and you have different copy and messaging on the retarget campaign, you know, versus the main campaign. And so there's just so many different things that you want to be doing here to kind of maximize that. But until you've gotten past a system, a proved offer, approved program, none of that matters. And you don't have the system, like you have to do everything else first before you get in into marketing and really kind of building out your multi-layered, you know, kind of funnel. Otherwise, you're just kind of wasting money.

Duarne 1:00:46

100% and time. I mean, your time is of value, especially if you're a single operator. You know, you don't want to be doing 16 hours a day every single day. You know, that's just not what you're doing it for. You're not trading time, you know, your time for money. You want to get an outcome, you want to be able to bill for those outcomes, and you want to be able to do it in a way that gives you a little bit of free time, gives you the ability to get the time to drop the kids off at school if you need to, to go to a school play or watch a ball game, you know, those sort of events, spend some time with the family, take some time off for a birth of a child. Those sort of things are what you're working hard to achieve. And in order to get there, you need to take these steps, you need to introduce the processes, you need to put an offer out there, you need to take the risk. Don't be afraid. Your first offer may not work, your second offer may not work, your third offer may not work, but just be consistent. Like we talk about all the time. Consistency is the key here. The more consistent you can be, the better the chance of success is in the future.

Dave 1:01:49

I I would say, like, my takeaway for y'all from this episode would be just get started on it. You know, like we said we say that a lot, but just get started, create something. You know, if you have nothing in place, like just create something. And remember that you're looking for and you need to think through what are those pains, what is that dream outcome that my client wants to achieve, my service, my offer needs to provide that and speak to that dream outcome. Right, and it's gonna help them right understand the percentage of likelihood that they're going to achieve that dream outcome, which is where your guarantees kind of come in, the length of time, all of that that kind of plays into that, those are all deciding factors in your client's mind to decide to move forward. And so if you can handle all of those in your offer, now that's when you start to have this you know, Grand Slam, this home run, you know, this out-of-the-world kind of offer that people are going to feel dumb if they say no to, because you have bonuses, you have guarantees, it's a problem that they have. So you've identified that they have this problem, you're gonna help them solve it. It's almost a no-brainer for them to say no, right? And so with that, that's what I would just work through it, make sure you speak to those pieces, I think is the main. And then next week, as we talked about, we're gonna be talking about your value, how you can price yourself a little bit better, how once you've generated your offer, how do you determine what that value is? That's what we're gonna be talking about next week. As well, I'm sure just like this week, we've talked about a lot of other things as well. So, with that, please do all that fun algorithm and stuff. If this topic was impactful to you and you have maybe other business owners in your network, feel free to share this. We owe like as we say at the end of every episode, we're on a mission to impact and you know serve a thousand business owners by the end of 2028. Dwar's here along that mission as well. So we appreciate you being here. We appreciate you sticking around if you're watching us live and if you're uh watching us on a replay. We we appreciate you just as much. Share those questions down below. And until then, Dwarne, thank you for another amazing conversation. And we'll we'll see everybody in the next one. Hope you have a great week, guys. Thank you, everyone. See everyone.