☕️ Patrick McKenzie talks about meeting up with a business friend for coffee…
A couple of minutes into the coffee date, he locked me in a conference room with him and one of the cofounders of the company and said, “We just want ask you some questions about the stuff that you do, in terms of search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, that sort of thing.”
Patrick had experience and liked to be helpful. So he went ahead and dropped knowledge bombs for the next 3 hours 🔥
At the end of it all, his friend said…
I just want you to know that if today had not been a coffee date, you could have charged for this conversation and I would be pulling out my checkbook right now and write you a check for it.
Patrick was a young engineer when this happened, and figured his time was worth about $100 an hour 💵
He said as much, and got back an astonishing reply…
“No, I think I’ve got $15,000 worth of value out of this. I would write you a check for $15,000 right now.”
He asked his cofounder, “Do you think $15,000 is about right?” His cofounder said, “Well, I don’t know about $15,000.”
I’m like, “Oh, thank God. Sanity.”
His cofounder said, “For $15,000, I would need to see a printed report about it too. But $5000, yeah. We could pay that out of the petty cash.”
It blew my mind.
So…
- Patrick wasn’t even thinking to charge for those 3 hours
- If he did charge, he figured his contribution was worth $300 max
- One “client” figured Patrick’s contribution was worth $15,000
- Another figured it was worth at least $5,000
Patrick’s takeaway 👇
If you are genuinely creating value for businesses, you are no longer in the “trade defined small units of time for defined small units of money” business model. This is what most employees do. This is how you have spent most of your life working. You have left that life behind.
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