Time vs. Money Trade - With a little twist.

[circleme]

I know what I'm about to say isn't new to most people here, but I still want to share it because it felt really good even though it was still a time vs. money trade.

Short intro: I'm now approaching my first six months as a Fastlaner (from freelancer on an hourly fee basis to SaaS entrepreneur). I initially didn't plan on taking up freelancing at all, but I still teach from time to time at our local educational institution. Whatever. I get paid per lesson there. The main reason I did this at the time was because I wanted to acquire customers. A lot of marketing managers attend these educational institutions and after 1-2 years after starting my freelancing work back in the days it has turned out to be a great lead magnet. Although I only received $40 per hour, I was subsequently able to acquire clients (as a freelancer) that earned me many times more. Recently I clearly heard that my participants wanted to know a lot more about a certain topic where I already had a lot of experience, but this was not mentioned in the curriculum. For a moment I thought I'd just write to the educational institution to see if we could perhaps also go through this content - for a fee, of course. I quickly saw myself informing the facility's management about this until I thought to myself the following...

Wait a minute... I get paid $40 an hour here. No matter how many participants I teach, $40 remains. 2 participants? $40! 20 participants? $40! 20,000 participants? $40. So after a little back and forth, I decided to set up a workshop about my company. But before I started creating the presentations, I first wanted to have a certain number of fixed participants so that my effort would pay off. Of the 20 participants, 15 decided to participate for a fee. This time with a small difference:

This workshop lasts 2 evenings, 4 hours each. In the educational institution I would get 2 x 4 = 8 x $40 = $320.

However, for my workshop I charged $290 per participant (these are all employees of companies, so $290 isn't really much for further training for their employees).

New invoice: $290 x 15 = $4,350

Comparison:

Hourly rate base: $320 ($40 per hour)
Own workshop with small leverage: $4,350 (that's roughly ~$543 per hour)

However, in both cases I would have taught the same thing. It's really crazy what options you have, even if it's still time vs. money. Oh, and one more thing... This also resulted in a potential follow-up order - which I politely declined.

If I could do this every month, I would earn around $52,200 annually and would have a total effort of around 100 hours per year. For many, this is a full-time income. Very insane and actually (unfortunately) my first experience with scaling on such a scale, even if it is still time vs money and 100% dependent on me and myself.

 

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[Etti]

owever, for my workshop I charged $290 per participant (these are all employees of companies, so $290 isn't really much for further training for their employees).

I know what I'm about to say isn't new to most people here, but I still want to share it because it felt really good even though it was still a time vs. money trade.

Short intro: I'm now approaching my first six months as a Fastlaner (from freelancer on an hourly fee basis to SaaS entrepreneur). I initially didn't plan on taking up freelancing at all, but I still teach from time to time at our local educational institution. Whatever. I get paid per lesson there. The main reason I did this at the time was because I wanted to acquire customers. A lot of marketing managers attend these educational institutions and after 1-2 years after starting my freelancing work back in the days it has turned out to be a great lead magnet. Although I only received $40 per hour, I was subsequently able to acquire clients (as a freelancer) that earned me many times more. Recently I clearly heard that my participants wanted to know a lot more about a certain topic where I already had a lot of experience, but this was not mentioned in the curriculum. For a moment I thought I'd just write to the educational institution to see if we could perhaps also go through this content - for a fee, of course. I quickly saw myself informing the facility's management about this until I thought to myself the following...

Wait a minute... I get paid $40 an hour here. No matter how many participants I teach, $40 remains. 2 participants? $40! 20 participants? $40! 20,000 participants? $40. So after a little back and forth, I decided to set up a workshop about my company. But before I started creating the presentations, I first wanted to have a certain number of fixed participants so that my effort would pay off. Of the 20 participants, 15 decided to participate for a fee. This time with a small difference:

This workshop lasts 2 evenings, 4 hours each. In the educational institution I would get 2 x 4 = 8 x $40 = $320.

However, for my workshop I charged $290 per participant (these are all employees of companies, so $290 isn't really much for further training for their employees).

New invoice: $290 x 15 = $4,350

Comparison:

Hourly rate base: $320 ($40 per hour)
Own workshop with small leverage: $4,350 (that's roughly ~$543 per hour)

However, in both cases I would have taught the same thing. It's really crazy what options you have, even if it's still time vs. money. Oh, and one more thing... This also resulted in a potential follow-up order - which I politely declined.

If I could do this every month, I would earn around $52,200 annually and would have a total effort of around 100 hours per year. For many, this is a full-time income. Very insane and actually (unfortunately) my first experience with scaling on such a scale, even if it is still time vs money and 100% dependent on me and myself.

Awe man I love hearing stories like this, especially with the passion and joy your story is expressed, almost makes me feel as is I myself was teaching and came up to this conclusion myself! this is awesome man, I can only imagine that eureka moment you got when you first arrived to that conclusion about you being able to make more money alone than working for "the man" it probably is the me most rewarding feeling in the world, almost like a matrix unlock! man I wish you nothing but well in your endeavors and that you keep coming up with even more of those eureka moments in life and make tons of money doing it! keep it up man!

 

[circleme]

this is awesome man, I can only imagine that eureka moment you got when you first arrived to that conclusion about you being able to make more money alone than working for "the man"

Thank you for your kind words in your response. That means a lot to me! =)

It felt really good, yeah. It's still time vs. money, but for the first time with a leverage that catapults me in other dimensions in terms of hourly rate. Even though it's still time vs. money, I do count those things as small wins lately. A lot of times I measure my success only with hard-facts like "how much my SaaS makes, as it's the only real specialized unit", but recently I learned that those kind of successes are also successes - even if they are not purely fastlane. I'm still at the very beginning on my journey and I'm not in the position (yet) to call me a full-time entrepreneur, as I still do trade my time vs. money to pay the bills (even though my plan looked different half a year ago ), but leveraging my time like described in my story enables me to work more on my fastlane business. Nowadays, it's like 20% freelancing work/teaching and 80% fastlane. I do pay the bills and cover basic necessities this way with minimum effort.