We are often asked how much our clients hire us to do, and I have to admit that many of them are just not that savvy. They have the opportunity to hire someone with the experience they themselves lack. They may not know how to start a negotiation with their employer, they may not know how to manage a negotiation, or they may have no idea how to negotiate with their own employer.
As a firm, we use our experience to build a relationship with our clients. It’s a way of showing them the value we can bring to their business and our way of thinking. We often ask for referrals, or even for some “free” work. We have a number of people who have used our services to hire other people for different purposes, and our results are very good so we are very happy to continue this practice.
The first thing we do when we hire is ask our clients a few questions to get to know them. We ask questions like “What do you do?” and “What’s your biggest challenge?” and then our clients give us a list of things they are good at, areas of their businesses they are passionate about, and so on. We then use this information to build a model of the kind of person we want to work with.
A lot of people who have a passion for something have a particular skill set that they are very good at. The more we can model that and help people identify that skill first, the better our clients will be able to identify when to hire us.
I have a lot of clients. The bigger the business, the more complicated the issues. I’ve been in the real estate industry for 22 years, and I have had to work with both developers and brokers, but on a day-to-day basis, it’s really the other person’s job to make the decisions.
One of the most frequent questions I get is “How much should I charge?” The answer is, it depends. I have a lot of clients in the mid- to upper-thirties, but they are all different. I do what I can to make sure they know what they are getting into and what they can expect. If you can’t answer such a question, I can generally refer you to my previous client reviews.
I generally work with developers on a weekly or monthly basis. You can expect to get paid based on three things: total hours on the project, your hourly rate, and your time spent on the project. On a per hour basis, I pay hourly rates from $25 to $60/hr. On the project, I charge hourly rates from $45 to $80/hr and time on the project from $12 to $30/hr.
I can usually get my clients to spend about 10% more time on the project than I do, so I make sure to always ask about the hours spent. I generally work with one client at a time, but we’re also interested in working with multiple clients at the same time.
If you’ve ever worked as a consultant, you know how much it means to be an expert in a particular field and how much more you need to know. The consultant is an expert in a particular field who works for a company to advise the company and help them get to a certain position in the company, or maybe just to help the company get to a certain position in the field.