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#2: Focus on Value Delivered not Price: The Value-Driven Entrepreneur
00:39:59
Focusing solely on price can lower the value you receive, cost you money, and harm your business. As a business owner pricing your services, you do not want to be on the low-end of the available prices. In this episode of the Build Your Business podcast, Matt and Chris Reynolds dive into why focusing solely on price can ultimately harm your business. They illustrate how prioritizing value over cost leads to better outcomes, using examples of hiring experts versus cheaper options and how paying for experience can save both time and money. As a business owner, it's essential to avoid competing on low prices, as it leads to a race to the bottom. Instead, they emphasize valuing your time, delivering exceptional value to customers, and working with companies that bring true expertise. Excellence, not cheap rates, drives long-term business success.
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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to the Build you'd business podcast, powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds.
- [00:12]
B
Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together. You're listening to the Build you'd business podcast. I am your host, Matt Reynolds. I'm here with my brother Chris Reynolds, where we help take you from fear to freedom. Hey. We've been business owners for a collective almost 40 years now, which is weird to say because I don't feel that old. But we've walked through all this stuff with lots of anxiety and lots of unknowns. And our goal is to help walk with you holding your hand through your earbuds to help you make those decisions so that you have confidence in the decisions you need to make for business to grow your business exponentially. And so today we're going to dive right in. We're going to talk about something that's this, I think, very valuable to both of us. And we're going to come from two different perspectives, which is that value is greater than cost or hourly rates. And so, Chris, you are a, you own a company and you have owned companies that really provide engineering and development work. Computer programmers, devs to people who often will get sticker shock at the hourly rate. The true concept of being a hundred percent vertically aligned is, I think, a myth. Like you could never really be vertically aligned. Right. So for example, I think both of us, we use AWS for Amazon for web hosting. Like, what would it cost for us to build out our own web hosting? Everything. Like, why wouldn't you not use them right now? Being vertically aligned on some level is I think, important. And the more you have to lean on third party software that does create some vulnerabilities. But ultimately we want to hire out the experts where we're not the expert. So for example, for us, we are a service company. We hire your company, certain and other excellent developers to help do a lot of the tech work that we do. Now, Andrew Jackson, again, incredible chief product officer for the company, he gets to oversee that. He's kind of the CEO of the techs stack and you work with him on a daily or weekly basis. But ultimately the work that's being done in the trenches is being done by experts who are not employees of Barbalogic of my company. Right. And so speak to that a little bit about the value there of value over hourly rates or value over total cost. What have you seen in the Market.
- [02:43]
A
Well, I think what, what happens in, in any company as you start needing sort of deep expertise in that space, whatever it is. Right. Is that there are people who already have that expertise, people who have been there, done that, got the battle scars to, to prove it. And you can either decide, hey, that rate is too expensive and I'm going to go do that myself, or we're going to build that in house, or you can go utilize those experts. And when you have that choice to make, everybody has that. Every business will have that many times, many times over. You have that. Whenever you run into taxes, you have that. When you run into, you know, any sort of security work that needs to be done or whatever, there's just like a whole spectrum of things. Attorneys, right.
- [03:31]
B
The thing that ends up being the line item on your financial spreadsheet is like professional services.
- [03:36]
A
Professional services.
- [03:36]
B
You're hiring people out that are better at their job than you could ever be at their job.
- [03:40]
A
Right. And so, you know, there's this whole concept of, you know, you've got to decide, are you going to go become the expert or you're going to build that expertise into the company or are you going to do that with an agency? The way that I have people think about this is when you think about an hourly rate, you want to think about this like, total value that gets delivered in that time as well, or else you can't really do an apples to apples comparison. So the example that I like to use in this particular case is one of our customers had a specific requirement to stand up some infrastructure in aws. And so this is just servers and basic setup stuff. And we had a guy who said, you know, I've never done this particular thing before, but I want to give it a shot. And we said, you know, okay, let's see what this looks like. And they spent, you know, I think their hourly rate was something like 75 bucks an hour.
- [04:34]
B
Right?
- [04:35]
A
And so at 75 bucks an hour, now there may be some people listening to this that go, 75 bucks an hour, like, that's a lot of money. That is not a lot of money in the engineering space. Space like that is a, that is a low rate in the engineering space.
- [04:47]
B
It would be similar for people who haven't done this before. If you were hiring an attorney, an attorney was 75 an hour. You'd be like, better call, better call, stall.
- [04:56]
A
Exactly.
- [04:57]
B
What are we doing here?
- [04:58]
A
Right, well, and what you find is, I'll finish the story and then we'll reflect on it. So the idea Is this guy spent like 150 hours or something working on this thing and still didn't get it completed. And luckily, in about the same time frame, I had a good friend of mine who I've worked with for many, many years who is, I would consider probably the best expert in this space that I've ever seen. This guy charges $150 an hour, double that price. He came in and went from scratch because the thing that the other guy did didn't actually make sense, didn't actually work. Right. And so he started from scratch and had the entire thing done in about 30 hours. And so the net cost was far less to go with the expert to do this. Now the question is why? Like, what's at the heart of it? And at the heart of this is the idea that you can hire experts who have been there and done that, literally done the thing like know how to do it, know how to go from step one, step two all the way through, know what, what issues they're going to run into, know how to resolve those issues. Or you can pay someone considerably less and let them become an expert on your learning.
- [06:09]
B
Yeah, that's right, to learn it.
- [06:10]
A
That is what most people are missing. They think, oh, you know, this is an apples to apples comparison, 75 bucks an hour to 150 bucks an hour. Like, it's obvious you picked 75 bucks an hour all day, right?
- [06:19]
B
Wrong.
- [06:20]
A
Because the problem, especially in, in a space where you can't say this is an absolute number of hours, this thing is going to take sort of an unknown. There's a lot of, you know, work that needs to be done is that, is that the number of hours are going to vary. And so this is a big piece that you want to think about as you're thinking about professional services within your own organization and how you work with it.
- [06:41]
B
We have some developers that work for us. They're, they're very good. But your team specializes in the stuff that you do for us for Turnkey Coach and our software. And we made the decision, gosh, probably a year ago or more now, to hire your team to do the stuff that we knew we were, we would need to build into the expertise. You already had developers that were experts in that, or you would find the ones that were experts in that. So when we say that experts, we don't mean they've done it once or twice. We mean they've done it scores or hundreds or even thousands of times.
- [07:13]
A
10 to 15 years. They've been doing it like they've Seen literally everything. And they, they're the kind of people, you know, I think the one of the big differentiators here is you can provide somebody a list of steps to take, right? And they'll go through and go, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever. That is not an expert. That is, that is a task follower. Sure. An expert. You go, this is the thing we need to get done and this is how I think it should be done. And the expert comes back and says, you're thinking about all wrong. Yeah, this is how you want to do it. And here are the eight reasons that you can't see around the corner that you will hate yourself if you make this choice, but this other one will save you tons of time and money. And all those other things, they come at you with good judgment. And what you're paying for at the end of the day is judgment and creativity. You're paying for this idea that they understand inside and out how this thing works. And when you have unique things, well, our, our system is a little different. We got to do this thing this way. They are so well connected to that world that they can give you a good creative solution to the problem and work through it with you. And that's just a very different type of person than somebody who's a task, you know, task oriented, individual contributor.
- [08:23]
B
This is just. Everyone knows this in their life, but they don't tend to apply it to professionals of kind of a buy once, cry once sort of thing, right? So remember when we were kids? Funny story, mom and dad moved us out to like five acres and dad bought the thousand dollar Kmart lawn tractor lawnmower and made us mow it every week. Five acres sucked. And I think about the day I moved out or got married. He went and bought a John Deere because he knew it was, because it was like, listen, this is five times the cost. But when he had to mow the lawn, it was like, look, I'm not doing it with this crap hole department store lawnmower. Like the same applies. Like we do this with cars. Like we buy, we buy cars that last, right? Like I'm a big Toyota fan. We buy Toyotas in the company and I don't buy, you know, whatever low end Chevys or whatever because they. I'm gonna buy a car that's gonna be a little more expensive or maybe even a lot more expensive, but it's gonna last. Or you know, if you buy a T shirt from my daughters love like H and M. I don't know if your kids are into H and yet if you go to H and M, just like the shirts are like 7 bucks, 5 bucks at H&M's and we're probably never going to sponsorship from H and M after this, by the way. We should be okay, but they just fall apart, right? Yeah, but if you buy a shirt from a Lululemon or, or whatever, a Buck and Mason or something, it's like this thing lasts for 10 years, 20 years, like it just weathers over time. And so yes, you're going to spend 5x the price on the shirt or the car or the professional, but the thing is going to last and it's going to stand up. So in the example you used, I think you talked about the guy that spent 150 hours at $75 an hour and essentially the whole thing had to be scrapped. And the guy that charged $150 an hour, twice the price, did it in 30 hours. The cost was far cheaper in the long run. And ultimately what is most important is that the value was far better in the long run than trying to hire somebody. Now here's the thing, cause I know we've both done this before. I also don't want to say there is never a time to hire somebody who is not the expert and let them learn. Because there are times when you are broke and you're young and you know, like my church to go on upwork or Fiverr and hire somebody to do your website from Eastern Europe or the Philippines or something like that for a cheap dollar per hour rate because you like my budget is $500 on a website like do that, that's fine. Just understand what you're paying for. You're going to get what you pay for as the business grows. The idea for us is buy once, cry once. In the same way that we're going to buy the John Deere, not the Kmart, the Lululemon, not the H and M, the Toyota, not the, not the Chevy or the General Motors or whatever like low end car is that the same applies to professional services that apply to the same sort of product that we often buy in our lives. That we did this thing years ago. You probably did the same thing. We were obviously we're both preacher's kids, Southern Baptist preachers, kids. I don't know if you said this on the podcast yet, but there were years that all of the furniture in our house was made from particle board. You bought it at Target or a secondhand store. And then there was a day where all of those things sort of fall apart and if water gets on, if you put a cup on it for 30 minutes, there's a giant ring and it swells and it'll never. And I was like, I'm never buying a piece of particle board furniture ever again. If I can't afford a real piece of wood that I can pass down to my children and grandchildren, I'm never doing that again. Now it's much more expensive, but Instead of lasting two years, it lasts 50 years or a hundred years. And it's the exact same thing with professional services.
- [11:57]
A
That's exactly right. I mean, like, there's another factor here that I think's important. And it. It's just when you think about. It's not that you never get mispriced labor, too. I just want to make this clear. There are times when absolute killers don't cost that much early in their career, or they're just trying to get launched or whatever. And there are times when people who have no business charging an extremely high rate charge an extremely high rate. But one of the things that's interesting about this and sort of tie it into the investing concept is that the market doesn't misprice things like that for very long.
- [12:35]
B
No.
- [12:35]
A
And so what you end up with is the really cheap talent doesn't stay cheap for very long if they're really good. And the really expensive talent that doesn't deserve to be expensive will fall quickly.
- [12:46]
B
Yeah. They'll go out of business or they'll have to drop their prices to stay in business.
- [12:50]
A
And what does that tell us about. About price? What that tells us about price is that if the market can sustain it, it's probably worth its value.
- [12:57]
B
That's right.
- [12:58]
A
Most of the time.
- [12:58]
B
Isn't it weird? Or you ever think about, like, I remember taking. Did you ever take that. That business economics business class with Professor Dickey at Missouri State?
- [13:07]
A
I did.
- [13:07]
B
That was one of the best classes I've ever taken. And it is so wild. What the invisible hand of the market does this, you know, stuff that Adam Smith conceived what is now almost 300 years ago. And it's like, that's still the thing at play, like. And because I think the world has gotten so small because everything is online and you can hire experts in the United States, you can hire them from overseas, you can hire them from China. The market itself dictates the price. And this is one of the things where, like, if I'm, for example, I use Airbnb a lot. So if I'm by myself, I go to hotels. But if I'm with my staff or my family, we go to Airbnb. If it has one review or zero reviews, I'm not going to get it. But if it has 30 reviews and they're positive, the market has told me that that place is worth the cost. Right, right. And so the difference, this comes back to, like, Warren Buffett's, like, the value equation of price is what you pay, the value is what you get.
- [14:00]
A
That's right.
- [14:00]
B
Right. That's huge for the customer, but also for the expert. The cost of the thing. Right. Versus the value you're able to provide is the trust and the profit that you're able to build as an expert. So it works on both ends of the spectrum, both as. As the expert or professional and as the client.
- [14:17]
A
Yeah. And I think one thing, one thing that's useful, I think, just for our audience, our podcast listeners, is that for many of you starting your own businesses, or if you're an entrepreneur, or if you're a gym owner, coach, for many of you, the first place that you're going to start is in selling your services, selling your time. And actually, I think that's a great business. I actually think you can do really, really well in that business. Hormozi thinks that's a great business. He invests in those businesses quite a bit. And I think one of the things that's really important is when you first get into that business, you think a lot about, how do I price this? And I think one of the things that's really critical is that you never want to be on the low end of the services cost spectrum. And so if you are there, you're there to start. And just to get started, you're trying to get some social proof that your thing is awesome and that your services are awesome. And then your price needs to start moving its way up very quickly, otherwise.
- [15:15]
B
You get commoditized and to race to the bottom.
- [15:18]
A
That's exactly right.
- [15:19]
B
That's the point.
- [15:20]
A
There is so much evidence that this is the case. It is. It is absolutely the case that your business will sink eventually if you keep this up. There is no benefit to be at the bottom of the price matrix. There is an enormous amount of benefit to being at the top of the price matrix. Now, what I just said before, this is that overpriced assets don't stay overpriced very long, and underpriced assets don't stay underpriced very long. So the other piece of this is, you gotta be freaking awesome.
- [15:45]
B
Yeah. You've gotta be an Expert. You gotta legit be an expert.
- [15:48]
A
Yeah. You can't just raise your price and go like, hey, look how awesome I am. Like, you gotta be a killer. And so it's two parts to that same equation, which is that you want to make sure that your pricing reflects how awesome you are, and you also want to be awesome.
- [16:01]
B
Well, you always, regardless of what your price is, you want to provide at least a little bit more value than the price to the client.
- [16:09]
A
That's right.
- [16:09]
B
So the client always thinks, like, man, I'm paying whatever, $75 an hour, $150 an hour, $300 an hour, whatever the thing is. But I'm getting 10% more, 50% more whatever of value out of this. I'm paying $300 a month for this. But I would pay $500 a month for this.
- [16:26]
A
Yep.
- [16:26]
B
Or I would pay $400. Like, as long as that is in balance, then the churn stays low, and you don't lose the clients because you continue to provide more value than what the price is for the client. Now, as long as you can do that, the cost for you and the value you can provide builds that differential of profit for the business owner, which is also important.
- [16:46]
A
Yeah. Which is why, you know, once you sort of. Once you started out, you figured out the price spot. You know, you're a pro, you read on whatever the thing is all the time. You watch all the podcasts, you do all the things, and your price starts moving up. You get into a good price position. Your next step in that whole thing is to get as absolutely ridiculously efficient as possible.
- [17:07]
B
That's right.
- [17:07]
A
Start carving out the margin. And I think on that point, we. We've got more to say around what you do to make that happen.
- [17:14]
B
We hear this a lot. So we built out a software called Turnkey Coach for online coaching that we know is a more expensive online coaching platform than all the other online coaching platforms in the industry. It's not tremendously more expensive. And we're talking about. Most online coaching platforms might charge three or four dollars per client per month. And we charge somewhere in the ballpark of, let's say, five to $8 per client per month based on the services that you get. And so what often happens when we go to an online coach is they're like, oh, man, you're twice the price of XYZ programming software. Like, yeah, but here's the deal. We've entirely focused. We're built by coaches for coaches with an expert technical team, you know, supported by your staff. And what we've done, what we found because we were the largest online coaching platform using the largest programming software, a third party software in the world, what happened when we, you know, we spent, I don't know, a couple million dollars to build out our software, we improved our efficiency by a hundred percent. So we basically reduced the amount of time we had to spend by half. So what ends up happening is, is that you've got one software that charges $3 to $4 per client per month. If you have 50 clients, you know, maybe you work 30 hours per week on it. The total cost is for that software is 150 to $200 a month, like not that much, right? But if a far more efficient software like our software like Turnkey Coach charges even twice the price, say $8 per client per month, but those same 50 clients, let's say that you have only take you 15 hours per week instead of 30 hours per week. Now because it's improved your efficiency by, you know, it's reduced the amount of work by 50% or it's improved your efficiency by a hundred percent, you just saved yourself 60 hours per month at a cost of only $200 per month. Now I don't care what your hourly rate is like, it could be our 14 year old kids, that's worth it for them. And if you're a professional, why would you possibly go with the less efficient software with the less efficient professional with the less efficient. So yes, you can subscribe to Turnkey coast or our software or one of the third party softwares, ours is going to make you twice as fast, fast at twice the cost, but the cost is only a couple hundred dollars and for your time is going to save you tens of thousands per month.
- [19:35]
A
And I would think that for online coaches, and I'm not an online coach, but I would think for online coaches that's maybe even higher value. Because so much of the world of an online coach or even like an in person coach that's trying to get that into an online space, right. Is the, how difficult it is to take time off. I mean, so the more time you buy back, that time is extra valuable.
- [19:58]
B
For an online coach, this always comes back to freedom. Ultimately it's like if you are more efficient, you can work more and make a whole bunch more money and that top line revenue goes up. We want to focus on the hourly rate as the expert, but the top line revenue can go up because you can then just, okay, well now I'm only working 12 hours a week and I can go to 30 hours a week and I can more than double my top line revenue as well. But your hourly income goes up tremendously. But ultimately what it does is it gives you the choice to have the freedom to. If you don't want to work more and you want to spend more time with family, faith, health, fitness, whatever those things are that are the most important things are often never urgent, it gives you the freedom to do that as well. So, yeah, so we've focused a little bit on if you're a business owner and you have to hire out a professional for something or a software, the goal is to focus on value and efficiency over cost. Value and efficiency over which is more important than like hourly wages. If you're buying it like the person that costs more per hour often gives you. They might cost 2x per hour, but give you 4x efficiency. Yep, that's the key. Right. If they're 2x per hour and 2x efficiency, you could just hire the $75 guy instead of the 150.
- [21:11]
A
Right.
- [21:11]
B
If the efficiency goes up faster, you hire that or you hire that or you, you know, buy the software at the better software. Now, on the other side of the spectrum is let's talk to the expert who's trying to figure out how to price their services or how to purchase those sort of things. Like. So as we transition from the purchaser to the expert itself, our job as experts is not, we've touched on this is not primarily to drive up total income first or top line revenue, but to drive up our hourly rate. And I want to call back really quick to last week's episode when we talked about how to 10x your productivity, when you dramatically improve your productivity, you dramatically increase your dollar per hour rate even and this is key, with no change in price or service. Same price, same service, but you got more efficient, you made more money per hour. More efficiency is the most important thing you can do as an expert, period. Unless your service sucks. Like, but if the service is good and the price is generally right, the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to figure out how to be more efficient, more productive, less distracted, all of those things. Right. And so we see this all the time as strength coaches again, try to talk through like turnkey coach and try to convince a strength coach why you should go with our software. And they, they often look at it like, and they go, well, how much total money will I make per month, per year, per week, whatever, as opposed to how much money am I making per hour? But here's the thing, if you can only charge $50 per hour and you can never make more value than $50 per hour, then the only way to make more money is to work more hours.
- [22:46]
A
That's right.
- [22:47]
B
That's a losing game, man. I've played this game at Strong Gym. So when I worked at Strong Gym and I was, and this is my first business, and I opened it in 2008, sold it into 2015, and in the time period, and you know, I was a professional strongman and, and was a fairly well known strength coach, so I could command a pretty good price. And this is quite a few years ago, and I'm in Springfield, Missouri, where cost of living is low, but I charge 50 per hour. And at my peak, I maybe had 12 personal training clients. They all trained, say on average three times a week. So I did 36 hours of work at $50 an hour, making my total income $1,800 a week or $7,000 a month. Not bad. Better than a teacher, for sure. Better than when I was a public school teacher. Right. The only problem that is that while I actually coached 36 hours per week, I was actually at the gym from 4am to 2pm every day, Monday through Friday and 8am to 1pm on Saturday. And so when you do that math, now I'm not working 36 hours a week. I'm working 55 hours a week. I own the gym. I'm often, maybe I'm cleaning the toilets, I'm doing stuff that maybe I shouldn't be doing. But now my hourly rate at $50 an hour drops down to $32 an hour. $32 an hour is still decent, but you're not gonna get rich off of it, that's for sure. Only it gets worse because once I calculated the time I spent getting ready to go to the gym and the commute to and from the gym, which for me was like an additional maybe 90 minutes a day, like 30 minutes getting ready, 30 minutes to the gym, 30 minutes home. Now, my total time devoted to my work was 64 hours per week for that same $1800, which now drops my hourly rate to $28 per hour to coach 12 people every week. So the other big piece for us from a core value perspective at Barbalogic is we want to dramatically improve as many people's lives as we can by helping them experience strength. Well, when you're a personal trainer, all you can do is kind of personal touch 12 people. Like, how much impact are you making on the world? And I know I made a big impact on those 12 people, but it wasn't that much. And by this time Now I'm at $28 an hour. Now you start to go, I'm not really making much more money than I did as a public school teacher before this, in the decade before this. And that's why I started the online coaching business. I was like, look, there's a better way and there's a different way. There has to be a paradigm shift for how you think about this. So when I sold the gym and I moved to online coaching, I focused on high touch service. But like super efficient coaching, no loss in service, right? And what I was able to do is from day one, I was able to charge about $200 per month per client, which is about a third of what they were paying for personal training. But my client pool went from Springfield, Missouri, the Ozarks, to the whole world, anybody that could potentially afford it, and so far cheaper for the client. I knew that I wanted to give a level of service that most or no other online coaching companies could give. And so I wanted to personalize program for everybody. No templates, no cookie cutter spreadsheets, nothing like that. But the most important thing is I wanted to actually coach technique for the clients. And so this is a level of service. It's like several strata above what anybody else was doing. And so the interesting thing was is I figured out a system. I sat down, you know this story as I was trying to build out the online coaching business for about two months before I launched it, and just worked like 12 to 16 hours a day at my desk, writing systems, standard operating procedures, trying to figure out the most efficient way to do the thing with no loss in service. And here's what happened when you personal train, those are usually hour long sessions. So I train one person, it takes them an hour, it takes me an hour. What happened is when I figured out how to do this online, it changed from one hour per client to five to six minutes per client per session. Because I focused on efficiency, not on top line revenue, not on how much money can I make total. Yet that's going to come, that's downstream, that is going to improve. But that allowed me to take on not 12 clients, but 75 clients at $200 a month at one third the cost for them with a total time invested of 20 to 25 hours per week at the time, or maybe 90 hours per month. So significantly less. So now I'm making not $1,800 a week or $7,000 a month. I'm making $15,000 a month. I remember calling you and saying, I think I'm going to do this. And you said, how's it going? I'm like, I make. And you're like, holy shit, you need to do this. This is like the efficiency is so much better than the in person model. So Now I'm making $15,000 a month on 90 hours of work per month. My dollar per hour went from a real dollar per hour of $28 per hour at the gym to $167 per hour with no commute, with no downtime in my house, in my living room, drinking coffee, sitting in sweatpants if I want to, right? Didn't have to put on the purple polo. And then the thing is, is that we were using, we were the biggest client of the biggest third party software, as I'd mentioned before, and we were pushing that software to the absolute limit. And so we recognized we had to build our own software to do the things that we wanted, which was primarily to bring efficiency. I wanted automated metrics and automated PRs. I wanted a super efficient programming and templates. I wanted an integrated screen recorder, a lot of stuff that your team has worked on over the last year or two. And applying those lean manufacturing techniques to an online coaching system made an astounding change, which is that we were able to cut that standard work time, remember, from one hour at Strong gym to five to six minutes with the third party software to two to three minutes with our software with no loss in service. And so at the same time, we were also at. Because we actually, I would say not only did we not have a loss in service, we actually improved service over time. We were actually able to raise our rates to about $235 per client per month. And so what happened was for those same 75 clients, now I'm not making 15 or 14 or $13,000 a month. I'm making over $17,000 a month, only working 45 hours per month, not 90, bringing my hourly rate to nearly $400 a month, which is a 14x increase in my hourly rate from what I did at the gym. And so this is the thing we're trying to explain to other coaches. And so your total income goes from 7,000 to 15,000 to 17. 5. But the real key here is that while I saw a massive A2 to 3X increase in my total income in this, what I would say is an antiquated version of personal training, when I switched to online, I focused on efficiency, which is the Focus of this podcast. I was able to increase that income 2 to 3x but decrease my working hours by 80% which is amazing. And while decreasing the cost to the client by 66%. So the client pays less, you make more per hour and the net effect is freedom. So now you have the freedom and then take on more clients if you want to. Maybe you don't want 75 clients, maybe you want 100, 150. We have coaches that do that on turnkey coach. Or maybe you just want to focus on the non work things that are more important in your life. Maybe you want to read more books, work out more, spend more time with your family, coach your kids baseball team. Like doesn't matter. The point is that it gives you freedom and you can do it from anywhere. That's the other piece of this is not just from your home, that online piece. And same thing for you, you run a business where all the developers, you've got developers all over the world. I've coaches all over the world. I've done this from Mexico and Scotland and England and Korea and any like, it's insane. I'm not stuck to a location and a schedule all the time. And the client isn't either.
- [30:58]
A
Yep, you have complete geographic freedom.
- [31:01]
B
That's right. So when we focus on efficiency, it doesn't just give freedom to the client, it gives freedom to the coach. It gives freedom to the professional, to the expert. And it often will cost the client less and make the expert more. That is the primary focus of I think this episode of the podcast.
- [31:20]
A
Two spin off ideas from that that I think are, are useful for the folks that are listening. I think the first one is, and I think this is really important in general. Don't price by the hour.
- [31:30]
B
Right.
- [31:31]
A
What we're saying is you're getting super efficient by the hour. So you're profiting by the hour, but you don't want to price by the hour as often as possible. Now sometimes at the beginning, there's no other way around it, you kind of have to develop, you know, you have to figure out what your pricing can be. So at the point, Matt, you're saying like, hey, you know, we got to the point that we understood what the monthly rate would be. Right now you've broken out of the hourly rate. So you get to benefit from the efficiency.
- [31:56]
B
That's right.
- [31:56]
A
You don't want to lose all the benefit of the efficiency. And so that's number one. Number two, once you do that, there is this model begins to scale. So you actually have A scale opportunity outside of yourself if you want to. So it's not just about whether or not as a coach, you want to coach more or you want to coach less. And you want to. You know, you're going to do the same amount of coaching, but you're going to have more free time in your life. The other thing is for the empire builders that are out there, you can build an empire around this. You can get additional coaches to coach under you under the same model, and you start building out this hierarchy structure that scales, right?
- [32:38]
B
And they make $200 an hour, but you get to make $50 hour off them or what, Whatever. The thing is, as the owner of the business that sends them the clients and lets them get the work done.
- [32:48]
A
That's right. So the idea here is this is opening up doors. You have more and more and more opportunity if you follow this sort of pricing path. It is definitely the way that you want to think about it. The last thought that I'll put in there, I know I said two and it was actually three, but the last thing that I wanted to mention as it relates to pricing is just that most of the time. And Matt, you're seeing this, right, from people that are like, hey, we're just doing a price comparison. Most people will compare your product or your service to some product or service they know. That's just like how. That's just how it works in your brain. You'll say like, oh, you're the Uber for X or whatever, whatever. The thing is, one thing to keep in mind is that you want to have sort of in that elevator pitch about what it is you do and how you provide your service and all that. Don't fight that, lean into it. Instead, say, yep, we are that, except.
- [33:41]
B
We'Re also this, this or we're here's what we do above and beyond.
- [33:45]
A
That's right. Because what you want to break when you're doing when you get into a situation of price comparison is that you want to break down this idea that they're getting an Apples to Apples comparison. Because an Apples to Apples comparison does become commoditized, even if it's a small commodity between two companies to do the same thing, right? So what you want to do is you want to get out of that as fast as you possibly can. And that means you want to basically be a market of one.
- [34:08]
B
That's right.
- [34:09]
A
Like no one else does this thing that we do. Our thing is completely different than that thing. Similar in this way. But look how more advanced it is. Look you know, so that, that is a big important piece to the way that you build your own products and your own services. As you look at scaling them and setting up price, make sure that you're thinking about that same, that same factor.
- [34:28]
B
I had a buddy that used to talk about like, he would say we don't sell double cheeseburgers here. We sell, we sell prime steak.
- [34:35]
A
Yeah.
- [34:35]
B
And it's like they're both beef guys. Like, yeah, if you're, you know, I'm child of the 90s. So I still think dollar double cheeseburger. I don't know what they are now. $2, $3 for double cheeseburger. But you know, I could get a cheeseburger for $2 or $3. Yeah, but we don't sell cheeseburgers. We sell choice steak. And then you're like, wait, we don't sell choice steak, we sell prime steak. Yep, but we don't sell prime steak. We sell a 5Y goose steak. And yes, a 5Y goose steak. And McDonald's double cheeseburgers are all beef, I think. I don't know, maybe let's pretend they're both beef but they're, they're no longer apples to apples. And so you can lean into that and say, absolutely. So for us it's like, yes, the software does do programming, just like we do programming, but it allows you to do more personalized programming and integrated screen recorder and video breakdowns. And oh, by the way, it does all the. Again, the name of the software is Turnkey Coach. It does all the backend administrative work, bouncing credit cards. We deal with that. Your point of sale stuff like so that you can do what you do best, which is just coach.
- [35:37]
A
That's right.
- [35:38]
B
I remember doing this years ago when I was really, really poor and I was trying to figure out like how to do a website for Strong Gym or Reynolds Strong or whatever. It was. Like I don't. And I thought maybe I'll just get on WordPress and see if I can figure it out myself. A terrible idea.
- [35:50]
A
Yeah.
- [35:50]
B
You know, now at that time upwork and Fiverr didn't exist. Like I could have just hired somebody for a few hundred bucks to build a basic website. I would have. That's the thing though. Like do what you do best as the expert and hire out and don't worry about the, the dollar per hour wage. Like think about the total value it's going to bring. Like obviously we can't all afford thousand dollar an hour developers or, or attorneys or whatever, but spend the money on what you can afford for the value that it brings as a customer. And then think about what the market, the invisible hand of the market is going to price your stock service at and set that price. That's fine. And then you work on being more efficient to improve your dollar per hour. And as you do that over time and you're able to separate yourself from everybody else, eventually you can actually align the price to the dollar per hour. You can't do that in the first six months, the first year. Like it takes some running room to figure out what your churn is. And so over time, like once you develop the reputation, these are the best strength coaches in the world, these are the best developers in the world. People will pay more for that sort of thing. And I, I always want to provide the premium service for the thing. I also want to pay for the premium service for the thing because I found that the value is better. It's the buy once, cry once, both from the buyer side and from the expert side. And as you continue to separate yourself and you show yourself to be wagyu steak and not dollar double cheeseburgers, you can continue to increase your price over time. Both of which bring more value to both the client and the expert long term.
- [37:20]
A
Yep, spot on.
- [37:21]
B
Awesome. That's it. That's another episode of the Build your business podcast. Thanks for listening to us. Hope this brought you value. If it did, we would love a five star review. Say something nice. Give us a five star review. Say something nice about me and Chris. Reach out and you can reach out to us on email. You can find us very easily. Chris, how do they find you on social media? You're primarily on X and LinkedIn.
- [37:38]
A
Yep. On X I'm Chris by Boston. Chris by Boston. And on LinkedIn I'm just Chris Reynolds. I think I'm one of the only ones that are out there and your.
- [37:48]
B
Company is certain S u r T o n. That's correct.
- [37:51]
A
You can catch us@certain.com and if you're interested we have a signup link there to get on the wait list. We're wait listed out a couple months but feel free to reach out if you're interested.
- [38:02]
B
Awesome. And I am at Reynolds Strong on social media. You can go to Ryan mattreynolds.com to check out my book that's coming out with Forbes that got the hard copies in yesterday. Dude, I got to actually put my hands on the actually look through it. So I'll send you one here in a couple days and and super excited for that book. That's coming out. A lot of it is about the very stuff that we're talking about here. Undoing urgency, focusing on the thing that matters, pulling the urgent stuff so you can be more efficient and more productive, make more money, have more freedom, and focus on the stuff that really matters most to you. Of course, we'd always love for. If you're looking for online coaching, go to Barbelogic.com or if you're a professional strength coach and you're looking to dramatically improve your efficiency and make, I don't know, $400 per hour instead of $28 per hour, you can go to Turnkey Coach, which would be a great step to, you know, 10x at least 5 extra dollar per hour. You can do that as well. So go to Turnkey coach. We try to give out as much content as we can. I know we're going to do. I think next week's episode is going to be about how to get more clients. And we talk about putting out, you know, this, this content we pay for, we put out for free because it helps establish us as experts in the field. We're not content companies, we're service companies. And so for us, we do the same thing. I know you do as well in your business, that we put out a ton of content for free to help people see the value and what we can provide before they have to buy. We don't put everything behind a paywall and make people pay to see the content. No, the content's for free. Learn what we have to offer and then it builds that trust. Allow them to pull the trigger on the purchase.
- [39:28]
A
Absolutely.
- [39:28]
B
There you go. Thank you guys for listening and we'll see you next Friday.