why working for free means you don't respect yourself

working for free means you don't respect yourself and there's a lot of guys in the online space who are telling you to work for free go get testimonials go get client case studies go deliver people some results and then you can use that to go get more clients later on now this is completely counterintuitive and you don't have to do this and if you do do this you need to stop doing it right now because if you're doing this like I said you don't respect yourself and your clients are certainly not going to respect you

either now David why is this the case well if you are going to work for someone for free that means it's probably not valuable if I gave away everything that I know for free or I gave away free consulting or free mentorship or anything like that then no one would think it's valuable these videos that I make are only 10 to 15% of what I actually know imagine that so when you're going into business and you think that oh I need all this experience I need all these testimonials I need all these case studies well

you don't because it's not true and I'm going to give you an example here so when I first started out out I was charging my first setup fee that I charged was with $1,000 and I did that first deal in 24 hours of me saying okay I'm going to start my agency when I got better at delivering the service I started charging more few thousand here few thousand here for we worked our way up to about $4,000 on the front end for setup so I just knew if I could figure out how to sell it

and figure out how to make the deals make sense for myself and for the client for the customer then figure it out on the back end in terms of the service delivery then I knew I was going to make money I knew I was going to get paid and when you work for free if you're working with people like if you're working for PE with people for free and you're saying that you have clients you don't have clients you don't even have a business because if you're not making money with the thing that you're doing

you literally don't have a business like you don't have a business so sales is always going to be the lifeblood of your business sales getting money in the door going out and acquiring customers and doing deals is always always going to be at the Forefront acquisition always has to be at the Forefront now you need to respect yourself enough to demand to be paid for your time and for your labor going out and getting people who are not successful or people who are struggling in their business and trying to do something in order to deliver

for them and try to make them money so that you can say hey we made this guy an extra $3,000 it's just not going to move the needle for you because these people don't even respect you enough to pay you for your time and it's a very bad way to start a business relationship and the only time I ever recommend you work for free is if you have some sort of mentorship or some sort of way to get paid on the back end now when I was 21 years old I was selling insurance for a

summer and I was selling Insurance Financial advisory services and asset management and I closed a $250,000 deal towards the end of that summer I was cold calling but what I found really valuable about it and I wasn't licensed so I didn't get paid anything on the deal and on Asset Management deals you really don't get paid much versus an insurance deal and I found it really valuable because I got to spend time with other guys who were relatively successful making a few hundred, a year in sales or 100 Grand a year in sales and they

taught me a lot about how to sell and I really learned the structure of sales process I got to watch these guys day in and day out and I knew if I would get licensed and I would sell these deals myself then okay I would be compensated for the money that I brought into the company I ended up leaving because it just wasn't the opportunity for me but I had that mentorship available which is why I did the job on a commission only basis for a summer for free essentially and it was very valuable to

me but when you work with clients and you just get an understanding like so many people focus on this Service delivery thing they focus on oh I have to learn how to write the email copy I have to learn how to mess around with Facebook you can mess around with Facebook and learn how to do this stuff yourself all you need is money in order to test St Stu so delivering for these people for free you guys got to structure something where you get paid I really don't like how the space perpetuates this idea of

working for free it means you don't value yourself it means you don't respect yourself and it's literally almost equivalent to slavery because you're just working working working spending tens or even hundreds of hours per month working for people who don't even have the respect to pay you really bad way to do business so we're now going to talk about how to structure deals if you do get people in the door who you want to deliver for and how to get this experience but also be compensated for it now the best way to do this is

pay on performance the best hands down way is pay on performance and I'll reiterate that because on performance deals and structuring Deals on a performance basis where you take a percentage of The Upside Revenue that you create for the customer is the best way to enally work for free but you have some way of guaranteeing payment now also you want to make sure that you have an agreement you have a contract when you're selling by the way always call in in an agreement never call it a contract contract is negative where agreement is positive so

make sure that you have things set up like you get a credit card on file for your customer right make sure that you're constantly tracking the attribution of the results and the things that you are delivering for the customer make sure that the customer and the client is going to be transparent with make sure you have access to the payment processor account make sure you have access to the attribution software if you're writing emails make clayo tracks it convertkit tracks it active campaign tracks it everything tracks it so Facebook ads manager tracks it so when

you're looking at getting into the agency business or looking at getting into business in general and you're going to be doing a service based business smma whatever and you're working with clients just make sure that you can get paid make sure that eventually there is some way if if you deliver if you do what you say you're going to do you get paid on the back end never ever ever ever ever work for free if you're watching my videos I do not want you to be broke I want you to be successful working for free

is a very easy way to get burned out stay broke not make any money and then burn out on the business and quit the business and then go back to doing whatever you're doing before because you just simply can't hack it so you guys got to figure out how to sell stuff first always you have to be able to respect yourself enough to say look we'll do the work for free but we need it we need some sort of compensation I would love to I would love to get you guys results I would love to

work with you but we need some sort of compensation whether it's a pay on performance or it's a setup or something like that or just one a onetime fee for the month so we can see how everything goes just because we need to be paid for our time and effort and labor okay so like I said if I gave everything away for free no one would think it's valuable so and I do have some notes here for the video so I I just need you guys to understand like there's a those memes where kids are

in college and they're saying oh I'm trying to apply for a job but the job's requiring three years of experience and all this stuff and they can't get experience without a job right so you need ways to get experience but you need to be paid for your time effort and labor whatever business model that you're going to partake in or part participate in whether it's ads for roofers or ads for Home Services or HVAC or landscaping or email marketing for e-commerce or email copyrighting direct response for info products or something like that make sure that

you have some way of attributing all of the money that is made with the person that you're working with look and see if your stuff converts or it doesn't convert you can sit there and practice the service delivery on your own until the cows come home until the sun just explodes into destroys the Earth and you're never going to make any money unless you sell it so the entire way that you structure these deals so you're going to want something called an a agreement which means an automatic Clearing House transfer uh this essentially is a

part A stipulation in your contract or in your agreement that says basically hey we just want to get a card on file just so that we can guarantee that we get compensated for our services if someone doesn't want to agree to that on a performance basis then please do not work with them working with people who are unsuccessful working with struggling business owners is a really really really hard thing to do the value of a dollar to someone who is making 5K a month or 2K a month is a lot more than someone who's making

200k a month the people who are making 200k a month are a lot more willing to spend money just simply because they have money they try stuff all the time right I have an old consultant client who spends tons of money I was having dinner with him this weekend here in La he makes loads of money and he buys stuff all the time just to try it out he buys people's time he buys people's mentorship buys people's Services just to try it out see how it works and if it doesn't go well then okay he

takes the $2,000 hit and then learns from it and then says okay well where can we improve to make this better so the best way to get clients if you're starting out and you are really unsure of yourself about demanding money for your service is simply just structuring a performance deal right stipulate hey we just want a 20% or a 5% or even a three % or 10% upside revenue or 10% of The Upside Revenue that's created in the business from what we we do so if you have a business and I'll give a mathematical

example here if you're working with a business that's doing $100,000 a month and you come in and you make them $110,000 a month and you charge 10% of the 10 you charge them 10% of the $10,000 that you made them you get paid a grand okay this is a very easy way to structure deals because the business owner and the person that you're working with the client is now going to see okay well they came in we were doing 100K now we're doing 110k we attributed the 10K to what they did okay we owe him

a grand that's more than fair after what their profit margins are maybe they're doing 30% profit margins okay they make 3K they pay you 1K 2K profit net left over so the deal makes Financial sense for them every single deal that you guys do if you're running an agency you're running a social media marketing agency smma service based business it has to to make Financial sense because you are selling money at a discount every single agency deal is you give me 3K today and I will make you 30k over the next 3 months or 50k

or 100K or whatever it may be every advertising deal is saying hey look you pay us $4,000 a month to run the ads or $2,000 or $1,000 a month to run the ads or $1,000 setup fee plus 2,000 all different types of deal structures and we'll run the ads you're going to be responsible for the ad spend but we're going to hopefully make you x amount more in the next 1 to three to 6 months so people who tell you to work for free are dumb you should never work for free if you are not

compensated in some way experience is a very good teacher and you have to understand that if you're going to just sit there and get beat over the head and work with people for free just to learn the service you are in a very bad business model and you're in a very bad way and bad shape in order for the to do to do business in the future you guys got to respect yourselves you want your clients to respect you you want your clients to pay you loads of money because you're making them loads of money

the easiest way to do that structure and performance deals of the upside Revenue in the business not the entire business no business owner in the right mind is going to say yeah I'll Fork over 35% of the company to some random guy on the internet who just hit me up and had a 30- minute sales goal it's just not happening not going to get into Equity deal structures here but if you are not demanding payment for your time labor services I don't care how bad you are if you're really unsure yourself just charge a few

hundred say 500 bucks right but you guys got to make sure you're getting money in the door and you have a chance at the back end to be compensated for what it is that you are doing for the client this is probably one of the more important topics that I wanted to cover here on this channel just simply because I just see too many people going wrong I get like 50 messages is a day across Instagram across Twitter and I get YouTube comments now which is interesting of like hey I'll do this for free how

do I work can I work for you for free like no because I have a network of hundreds of people who can do what it is that you're trying to offer and they're a lot better than you at doing it because if you're working for free that means it's not valuable I'm more than happy to do performance deals with competent people who have a lot of results because those make sense for me but that's just where I'm at I don't usually pay retainers because I can structure performance deals because I want people to be compensated

greatly if they bring Revenue into the business the worst thing that you could possibly do as a business owner is pay some sort of fee and just get absolutely burnt and this is why agencies get such a bad repap people will go and they'll charge you know five grand on a retainer basis to a company that's doing 30k a month in Revenue like this company just can't simply can't afford it they literally can't if they're doing 30k on Top Line they can't afford 5K but what they can afford is a 10% performance basis fee on

top of what they're doing if you come in and you bring Revenue to the company so make sure that when you guys are doing these deals and you guys are pitching these clients and you guys are pitching these prospects that you are doing the best you can to make the deal make Financial sense for the business owner for the person that you're trying to pitch a lot of you guys are selling and you're just trying to get your Pitch Out you guys are just oh uh we'll do this 20% 20% here 15% there like there's

only 100% of a business and if you account for expenses and profit margin and taxes and all the other expenses that are required to run a successful business wherever you are you have to understand that these people don't have as much money as you think the business that I remember working with a company that did was doing $250,000 a month and they had like 20 grand left over I couldn't sell them a $5,000 a month thing because that's before the owner even paid themselves so the deals have to make Financial sense performance basis is the

easiest way to get customers if you want to go that route of doing the work up front and then getting something on the back end if you're a Savage then you just go in and say hey we charge this fee and then we charge a performance fee there's a bunch of different levels you have performance only you have retainer only or you have setup only on the front end and then you have Performance Plus retainer which is a more complex deal structure in order to sell because you have to be really good at what you're

doing there's a lot of guys who can do that but there's even more people who can't do that and then you have something called Equity deal structures where you are now a partner in the business on a consultant basis or a actual agency basis where you essentially work as their in-house team now that's a more complicated deal structure I'm not going to get fully into it here structure your deals to make Financial sense I don't want you guys watching my videos and pitching people and saying I will work for free in for experience and a

testimonial because I'll tell you the truth clients and Prospects don't care about testimonials as much as you think they're not going to sit there and watch your 50 client testimonials because they're running a business they don't have time to sit there and watch all of your client testimonials and look at all your client results you can send that information over to them if they ask for it but most of the time they're not going to care they're going to say can this guy do the job can this guy actually come into my business and help

me make more money why is that and all you need to do from the sales side is just simply tell them people want to be told they don't want to be sold you go and you simply tell them hey look here's how this makes sense for you here's how it makes Financial sense for you you can use the ROI breakdown video that I did here on YouTube to get more information on exactly how to make deals make Financial sense for business owners but this is the easiest way to do it you come in you work

on a performance basis and instead of working for free you're just compensated for the money that you bring into the business and if you suck well then you get all this feedback and now you have all this feedback and you realize okay well now I know how to make my service better if you were able to sell the deal and get the customer to say yes then you're doing something right if you're not able to deliver results then you know that you have a delivery bottleneck so I encourage you and I implore you to please

respect yourself respect your time respect your business and get your clients to respect you so that you can make more money thank you for watching guys my name is David much love and like I said the reason I'm making these videos I don't want you to be broke I don't want you to listen to anyone else if you're watching this stuff and the information that I give in these videos like I said it's only 10 to 15% of what I know everything else is behind a paywall if you are interested in getting some free stuff

go ahead and click the link in the bio or not the bio the link in the description go ahead get access to that it's going to help you in your sales process it's going to help you make more sales it's completely free on top of that thank you for watching and I will see you in the next video take care