Steal This: Parachute Sessions

I was speaking to a friend of mine at my co-officing space The Coven yesterday, and we were both commiserating on the way that both large projects and small projects always seem to take the same amount of care in the sales process before clients make a decision about working with you.

Sometimes folks may not know what they need, or how to ask themselves those questions. They may also have preconceptions about what solution might be best for them, or confusion about what type of professional they need to work with. Their pain is real — but so too is the fact that as a solo entrepreneur you only have so much time in a day, and when you don’t get paid a salary, time, for us, is truly money!

So here’s a solution that I mentioned to my friend that’s really helped both me and potential clients. If it looks like a client may need more than a one-hour intake conversation, I often suggest what we do is a “Parachute Session”. In this two or three hour session, I strap on my go kit of sharpies and 2 by 2 grids, and meet up with the client to help them unpack what their challenge is and what solutions for them could look like. For these sessions, I charge my hourly rate, and also charge for the one to two hours it takes to produce a report that documents our conclusions.

I make it clear that one of the things we may figure out is that I’m not personally the right person for whatever their job is. In that way I can approach the conversation more agnostically, and truly give them a genuine assessment of how they can go about getting their needs met, even if that means working with someone else.

This process is really helpful for me, because it means I can serve folks without the difficulty and resentment of spending many hours on pro bono discovery work that I don’t currently account for in my hourly project rate (which is another way of making sure you get paid for this time.)

This has been really helpful, and the folks who I work with are often really happy to have an option to get some clear and honest direction before the embark on a potentially costly investment in this work. If this idea is useful to you, please steal it!