"HeySteve!" Show 4: Keith Asks I Log My Hours While Building Funnels

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Steve Larsen:

What's up everybody? My name is Steve Larsen. Thank you for listening to Sales Funnel radio. This is a special, "Hey
Steve!" segment.

Announcer:

Welcome to Sales Funnel radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now, here's your host, Steve Larsen.

Steve Larsen:

All right, all right, all right. Hey, I'm going to get right into the question again on this one. I really really like this question. This is, this goes a little bit beyond building funnels and is more about how to manage building funnels. If you're doing it for others, or kind of just in general. Anyways, I'm going to go ahead and play the question here from my man Keith.

Keith:

Hey Steve, it's Keith Mosely. Wanted to ask you, what do you use to log your hours that you spend on your funnels? How do you send out invoices and generate quotes for customers? Thanks man.

Steve Larsen:

Keith, okay. Great, I just love this. I smiled like crazy when you said this because obviously there's the skill behind building, but then, how do you build a business around that?

That's obviously what I've done...

Okay, so when I was 17 years old, no no, I was 18, just barely 18, just barely graduated high school. Had no idea what I wanted to do with my life still. I'm still figuring that out. I plan on being a kid forever.

I went to get a job at Discount Tire and I was a tire buster. I got over there and there's a bunch of rough guys. They, at least for the store that I was in, I mean, they would like, they'd push my buddy and I all over the place. There was this thing called tire tongues. It's like these big steel pieces of, well, they're big pieces of steel. That's basically what it is.

It helps you pry tires off of cars and stuff. I mean, they like, pushed my friend around and stuff. Anyway, they were some tough dudes. I was trying to be all cool, whatever. I'm trying to be really fast at my job so that they liked me.

I ended up being really really fast. I would go work and work and work. We'd work from, and it was during the winter season so there's hardly any heaters in there. We would get crazy sick. There's no breaks, there was no lunch breaks or anything like that just because we knew we were good and we knew we were fast.

We wanted to be that way...

I worked day after day after day. We'd work 12 hours a day, pretty much every day. Oh my gosh, it's so crazy. I ended up being really good at the job. After 12 hours, I think only got paid like $10 an hour, not much. I would come home with $120 right, for my time. I was like, this is cool. Up until that time, I had been working at different places.

It was probably the highest paying job I'd ever had that time...

Anyways, I was like, "Cool. I'm going to try and get really really good." I went and I started getting faster and I started getting faster, started getting faster. What was interesting is my pay got less and it sucked. I was better, but I was getting paid less for it, right?

I would be able to get all the cars done 10 minutes faster than everyone else, even faster even faster. I was like, "Man, this is dumb." I didn't think about it much.

Time went on, time went on. You know, 4 years went by. I was in college. I was doing lots of stuff and I started working at this pool repair company. We would build swimming pools. Residential swimming pools for celebrities and stuff. I got to go hang out and meet a lot of the Denver Broncos team. Colorado Rockies. A lot of really famous baseball players, golf players.

Actually, the singer from ... This is totally a... sorry guys ... Singer from, I think it was One Republic, I used to clean his pool. The guy's got a sick house man, it's awesome. His pool's underneath his house.

Anyway, what was frustrating for me though is I got fast. I got good. I got better than everyone else but I got paid less for it because I finished my route faster.

I was like, "This is retarded. I can't." Anyway, I remember there was one day. I had just really started getting into, kind of, side entrepreneurship. I wasn't full fledged into this, like I am now obviously. I remember there was, kind of the last day, I was going to go back to the school.

The summer was over, whatever. I picked up this little piece of broken tile on the ground. I remember looking at it. I had worked construction jobs like crazy. A lot of my teenage years, even into my very early twenties, in college and things like that.

I picked up this piece of tile, for whatever reason, it's very nostalgic for me. I was like, I'm never going to work a construction job again in my life. There's nothing against that, I was just trying to get out of the time and effort economy and trying to get more into the results based economy. There's an episode, podcast episode, that I kind of ranted about that a little bit.

It was very important to me...

Keith, to get back to your question, when you say, "How do I log my hours?" I don't. I don't. What I do is I log my projects. I log how good they're performing. I know I can build a totally kick butt funnel.

I have done over, just in the last 6 months alone, over 100 funnels...

They're good and they work. I have busted my butt to get very good at them. I don't charge by the hour, I charge by the project because you're not just paying for my time, you're paying for my expertise.

All the times I've sacrificed...

I would hid in our college campus, when I was in college, I would hide in the campus, really late into night, hiding from security so I could keep studying. No joke, funnels and building funnels.

I am so obsessed with this topic that I've given up a lot for it. There's no reason at all why I should get paid by the hour. I say that to all of you who are listening right now. Understand that you guys are too good at your specialties to get paid by the hour.

Pay by the project...

That means I can go build a funnel that's totally awesome, in about a week, sometimes two. It's going to be an amazing funnel. I charge 10 grand for the funnels that I build. They're awesome. I just finished one and it's amazing. They love it, the client loves it.

I'm off to another supplement funnel right now. They just, I know they're going to love it. They're not just paying for my time, they're paying for expertise.

I would dare say that if you take a crap load of time on something as specialized as a funnel or whatever it is you're specialized in, maybe people would like it if you're actually faster. They might actually like it if you don't charge by the hour, charge by the project right?

No matter how fast you get it done, you'll still get paid, which keeps you motivated and keeps them to their word. It's awesome. That's the first thing I do.

The second thing that I do is, you talked about invoices, how do I s...