Episode 105: Transcript

Free Gets No Respect

— Speaker 0 00:04 Make It Right. The manufacturing podcast. There’s a funny thing about free, it sounds great in theory to entice prospects and customers to consider doing business with you by providing something for free. But in reality, people tend not to place any value on something that’s free. Your free design sample analysis or report may be viewed as simply a sales tool negating the value it may have and putting no value on the time and expertise you invest this week on. Make it right. My guest is Joe Sullivan. He is the thinker and founder of guerrilla 76, a st Louis company that works with midsize manufacturing companies on their marketing initiatives. Joe recently wrote a great two-part article on why and how to stop giving your engineering and consulting away for free. Instead, he suggests starting with low commitment, high value consulting engagement, and he’s here to explain those ideas. So thanks for being on. Make it right Joe, good to talk to you. Yeah, great to talk to you too, Janet. So I know that you started this whole, uh, this whole journey from the standpoint of a marketing company. So what turned the light on for you about giving away your time and expertise for free? Speaker 1 01:23 Yep. So, you know, it’s kind of a thing in the marketing and advertising world where you know, there’s almost this expectation that you’re going to do a bunch of, you know, free spec work to just to win the job, you know, but whether that’s design or writing or some kind of strategy or research to prove that you know, you, you’ve got the brain power and the chops to um, you know, come up with the right solution for the prospective client and you’re probably up against a bunch of other companies doing the same. And so, you know, I, I wanted to, I wanted to kind of challenge that a few years ago and there were a few, few different sources that sort of inspired me to do it, but it just felt like, why are we doing all this work when, you know, in a lot of cases the company we’re doing this work for probably knows who they’re going to choose anyway. Speaker 0 02:17 So you suggested breaking off 5% of the prospect’s estimated budget for a project. And charging that for the initial problem solution analysis or as you call it, the diagnostics. And that’s step one down the engagement path. So explain how all of this works. Sure. Speaker 1 02:33 So let’s just say, I’m just going to use a round number. Let’s say that your typical engagement with a customer is a $100,000 engagement just for the sake of a round number. Um, and you, you know, you’re, you know that that your, your solution is probably going to be somewhere in that range. Maybe give or take 25% may premium. Maybe the same thing for, you know, the, the companies you’re competing against to win that work and you’re, you know, you’re trying to kind of come up with ideas to, um, you know, to demonstrate that you’re going to be the best fit. Well, my thought process here is instead of doing all of this work on your own time unpaid to figure out what that huge a hundred thousand dollars solution should be, what if instead you said, okay, Hey, Hey client, this is our process. Speaker 1 03:27 We charge $5,000 for this process. And here’s what we do. We have this discovery call with you that’s maybe a two hour conversation or whatever it might be. And we leave, we go do some research. Um, we put our best brains on it and we can afford to do that because we’re being paid to do it. And then we come back with a proposed solution for you where, you know, we haven’t cut corners, we’ve, you know, we’ve been able to put the time to it that it deserves and we’re going to bring an objective solution to the table for you and say, this is what we think you should do in order to get from point a to point B, you can hire us to implement it for you. You can shop it out to other companies like us. You can handle it internally, but this is what you need to do to achieve what you’re trying to accomplish. Speaker 1 04:13 So we’re looking at this from the standpoint of you as a marketer or are we looking at this as a standpoint, as a manufacturer or does it really matter because it’s all kind of the same process? Yeah, I think generally speaking, it’s all kind of the same and I think it applies to any company that, um, that sells a complex custom solution to, you know what I’m talking about, companies who aren’t selling widgets off the shelf, right — — ? Not, not, um, small, small, smaller ticket items or, uh, items that would be classified more as a commodity than a custom item. But you know, if you’re a type of organization that you lean on the deep expertise and experience of your team, um, to deliver very custom solutions that require a consultative sales process and often a longer buying process where there are different people involved, that’s where something like this makes a lot of sense. Speaker 1 05:12 And so that’s, that’s true. You know, across the board for a lot of companies in the marketing space where we’re trying to solve a complex business development challenge like regeneration or um, you know, establishing awareness in front of the right people from the right companies. And it also applies, you know, for companies who make things that are accustomed to. So, you know, our, our audience that we work with at gorilla is midsize manufacturers and a lot of the clients we have sell some kind of big ticket, uh, you know, custom product that, you know, comes with a lot of customizations. Um, you know, they, it can be very different from one situation to the next. So there’s often service that comes with it and, um, you know, it’s a very, very consultative custom process. So I think that that applies there too because there’s a problem to be solved up front before the exact solution can really be needed. Speaker 0 06:06 Determined. Okay. So I have to ask you, you thought of taking this new approach, charging for this, for this, this time that you invest. What did it feel like the first time you put that price on an initial project and told your client or prospect that you wanted to be paid for that? Speaker 1 06:26 Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it would have been very hard to retrofit that process to somebody we had done work for in the past and was used to getting all this free thinking and advice upfront. Uh, but when we sort of, you know, started with a clean slate for new future customers, you know, it was a, it was maybe a little bit scarier or nervous. I was a little nervous about it, but, um, it was exciting at the same time because I was just sort of curious to see what would happen. And you know, the risk was generally low if we were, and the worst thing that happens is we wouldn’t win the job. And you know, at that point I think our win rate on, on, you know, engagements where we would, we’d go down this long path of doing all this free research and putting together a custom proposal. You know, our rent win rate was something like one in three, which wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t amazing either. Um, so you know, there was a two out of three chance we were going to lose it anyway. So why not give this a try and see if we couldn’t, um, you know, secure the first part of the project and give ourselves a chance to earn trust and attention. So I think it was a combination of some excitement but also, you know, being nervous. Are we doing something that’s completely off the wall here? Speaker 0 07:41 So what was the reaction? Speaker 1 07:43 I, you know, honestly I can’t remember the exact first one we did cause we, we did a handfuls on that once I just said, okay, this is how we’re going to try to start doing this. And, and you know, it was probably over the course of the first month of doing this, there were probably, you know, got a few of these out the door as proposals for a more of a strategy project. Now. It was, it was a really good feeling actually because all of a sudden I had something that was more standard and scalable. You know, the first proposal that I sent out the door wasn’t some huge custom research proposal. It was a standard process that said this is the first thing we do. And so it didn’t take much time to put it together. And we got some bites on it very quickly. Speaker 1 08:24 And then the, the what was the most surprising thing to me that I hadn’t even considered was that, you know, we used to have trouble for a, for a free discovery meeting that we would usually run for 90 to 120 minutes. We would ask for the CEO or president, the VP of sales, the head of marketing to come to the table for these free discovery meetings where we would give away all this expertise and do a, you know, constant, uh, custom consultation with, with the client and you know, they’d say, yeah, okay, that group can attend. And then what would happen is, you know, the CEO would have something more pre — — ssing to do and he wouldn’t show up. And then the, you know, this person over here, um, you know, she would have to leave halfway through because she had to catch up on her email or had some other commitments. Speaker 1 09:12 And so I had, you know, half the attention of about half the people who I needed for this to really be successful and we were giving it away for free. So there were a lot of frustrations there when we started all of a sudden charging, all of a sudden, you know, the, the client had some skin in the game, the right people showed up. And not only that, they showed up on time, they had their full attention and all of a sudden, you know, there weren’t these layers to go through and in different people to loop in for future meetings. Everybody we needed to be present was there from day one. And that just made a huge difference across the board. Speaker 0 09:51 Yeah. So they’re actually paying for your time. They know that. So they actually, um, you know, show up because they’ve made that investment. Is it the same reaction that you know, your manufacturing clients are getting when they do? Uh, this type of approach to a proposal. Speaker 1 10:08 Yeah. We’re seeing, we’re seeing similar things happen. It’s a very, it’s very much in beta mode for a couple of our first few, um, clients that we’re, we’re sort of, you know, we’ve, we’ve helped them sort of brand and package and put together a, you know, an offering that is, is sort of their version of this. So it’s a little bit early to make that judgment for our own clients. But from what we’ve seen so far, yeah, it’s, it’s a very similar thing because you know, what happens here is if you, if you can name your process for us, for example, it’s, we call it the industrial marketing roadmap and there’s a set price. These are the steps you go through. These are the people who need to attend. Here’s the information you need to provide us ahead of time. It creates this, um, you know, this from, from an outsider’s perspective, it’s a very buttoned up thing. It’s very clear you’ve done this before, uh, that you have, have a methodology for this. You’re not just kind of winging it. So that’s starting to translate as well for our clients who are doing the same thing. It just makes you look very buttoned up upfront, which our clients are. It’s just, you don’t necessarily see that if it’s not sort of branded and package and almost productized. Speaker 0 11:22 So earlier you were talking about this diagnostics that you would do as part of this first step in the process that your client pays for. What shape does a diagnostic like this take for a manufacturing company? Or can it be a variety of shapes? Speaker 1 11:38 Yeah, I think it can come in a variety of shapes. So let me give you a little bit of context to just talk about how ours works and then I’ll give you some ideas for how that could be applied in different ways for a manufacturer and their customers. So for us, our industrial marketing roadmap is essentially, there’s a few steps here. The first thing we do is we send out a discovery survey with information we need to collect from the client. That sort of gets the one-on-one stuff out of the way. And so we collect that at least a week before the discovery consultation happens. When the discovery consultation happens, that is a four hour meeting music. It’s typically just book it for the morning or the afternoon of the specific day. These people attend. We ahead of time, we’ve done a little bit of research based on the information we gathered so we can ask the right questions and our goal during that meeting is to get, you know, gather all the information we need that sort of missing colon, those holes so that we can then go perform some additional research after the fact and put together recommendations. Speaker 1 12:42 And then we come back two weeks later with a very buttoned up roadmap document that says, okay, based on everything we’ve learned, this is what you need to do to be successful. Whether you hire us or somebody else or do some of this yourself or do some of it yourself and hire somebody else, do the rest of it. This is what you need to do. Here are different, different, a few different ways you can implement these recommendations as well. So that’s our version. Now, maybe there’s a very similar way. I mean, you’ve actually could, uh, could implement the same sort of thing in their business. But yo — — u know, here are a few ideas. One, this one, this I’ve considered to be say a paid consulting engagement. You could do paid consulting or engineering where it’s a very specific process or some defined scope of work that’s meant for discovery to help figure out the solution. Speaker 1 13:30 You know, another idea would be a site audit. Could you come on site, walk into somebody’s facility and you know, these are the specific things you’re going to be looking for. Like if you’re a say in industrial automation company, you could come in and do a very specific audit where you look at um, different ways to create efficiencies along a production line. Um, and what equipment might replace older equipment that appears to be nearing end of life and whatever that stuff might be. You go in knowing what you’re looking for over a two hour period and then you come back a week later or not, maybe not come back, but you can just get on all and you deliver us. Similar to our roadmap, a buttoned up sort of a summary that says, okay, these are our recommendations at three different pricing tiers. You know, if you want us to implement it, here’s kind of how we would do it. Speaker 1 14:18 So that’s an idea site on it. Another thing would be say a second opinion service. Um, we’ve, we’ve sort of helped, uh, one of our, our long standing clients is in the construction industry and um, you know, there’s a lot of corner cutting that happens in that industry. And so our clients will, our client will come in and do like a second opinion service around, um, you know, before their customer would make a big investment one way or another. Um, another thing you could do as a research report is there, could you be, you know, if there’s research to be done, like market research or something, maybe you could do that to help a client make a decision. Um, and then another one I think would be, say a product sample or a prototype. You know, if there’s a big solution to be built out, could, could the prototype itself be, this is probably a more standard practice that maybe companies are already doing, but a lot of a lot of companies may not be thinking of it that way. Could you put together some sort of mini sample or prototype that would help build confidence that the bigger solution would work? So those are kind of a variety of ideas Speaker 0 15:23 it used to be, or it may still be the practice that a lot of this stuff gets given away for free and you know, the odds of somebody coming up with a really good solution and then them not winning the job where they take that report and run off to somebody else and say, Hey, can you put this in into play? I mean, I don’t know how often that happens, but at least you’ve been paid for your expertise and um, you know, people can, people can move on and you’re not out of pocket after 50 hours of unpaid work. I think it’s, I think it’s actually a great, great idea to do it this way. And I think like, you know, your average business owner is going to see the value on it. Um, I want to ask you about the spectrum of value creation. Now. You talk about this a lot in the second article that I read and can you break this down from the standpoint of how a manufacturer would go through this, this spectrum of value creation? Speaker 1 16:18 Yeah, absolutely. And this is, this is one an idea that’s just sort of been floating around in my head for a long time and I finally got it down in writing and made a little graphic to represent it. Uh, but you know, the idea is this, you, there are, when you’re an expert in what you do, um, and, and a lot of the things I’ve said are true earlier. You know, you have a complex custom solution. The sales process is consultative. It’s, you know, it’s not just your, you know, your customer is gonna buy this, this or this, and here’s the price tag. It’s more complex than that. Um, there are a lot of different ways that you can deliver value to your customer. And you know, for us at gorilla in the marketing world, it was years back, there was this free long drawn out research and discovery process where we would create a lot of value and it was completely free. Speaker 1 17:09 It was, yeah, we were just giving it away in hopes we’d win the job. And then there was the big, you know, which for us was typically a 60 to a hundred thousand dollar commitment for, you know, to launch a marketing program over the course of a year or so. And that wa — — s really it. Those were the ways we could create value. Um, and so, you know, what would I would look at is well, how, what are all the other ways that we could create value for somebody in, in way that would incrementally build trust. And so the spectrum of value creation, which is works for us but also works for really anybody who is, uh, you know, delivering custom expertise in their solution, um, could play out this, I, I, in my graphic, in my article, I have seven, seven different ways that you can create value list. Speaker 1 17:55 And these aren’t the only ways, but the first one would be, you know, on the far left is low commitment on the far right is high commitment. So on the far left you’ve got, you know, an article you could take, um, you know, a question or a problem, um, that you’re, you’re hearing all the time from your best customers. You know, this is something we’re always struggling with and um, and then that they’re always struggling with and you know, how to provide the solution. So, um, you know, this could just be an article explaining they’re answering a question or helping solve a problem. It’s a free article or blog post that lives on your website and it creates value for somebody. They don’t have to pay for it. It’s just there for the world to see. And so that’s sort of the lowest form of, um, of commitment or engagement between you and a prospective customer where you’re delivering value in exchange for 10 minutes of their time to engage with your content and read your article. Speaker 1 18:51 The next step along the spectrum of value creation would be a gated resource. So you know, you’ve probably been on websites before where you know, you’re reading an article or a page and then you’re prompted to download a white paper or a buyer’s guide or fill out this ROI calculator or you know, register for a webinar or subscribe to a newsletter. And all of these things usually require you to submit some contact information. And so now you’re asking for a little bit more commitment from your prospective customer here. They’re, they’re giving you permission to market to them by giving you their name, their email address, their phone number, their company name, you’re generating a new lead for yourself. Um, but they have to get in, they have to give something up for the greater value you’re giving them in the form of a, an asset. Speaker 1 19:41 The next step up would be a free consultation. So our version of a free consultation, as I’ve explained, used to be just go way too far. You know, we’d wind up 2040 hours into doing research and providing all this value for free. But I think that the free consultation that should happen is something like, you know, let, let’s talk about your situation for an hour over a phone call or a zoom meeting. That would be a perfect way to do it. Now you’re, you’re giving away an hour of your time or expertise and it’s very defined. You can say, you know, this is what we’re going to do in the consultation. We’re going to ask these questions. So come prepared to answer those. Um, and we’re going to help try to point you in the right direction, whether that means you’re going to hire us or you’re going to go in another direction. Speaker 1 20:21 Um, so that’s the free consultation. And then from there I think you can move into paid engagements. So one example would be we’re, you know, right now we just launched a membership site. This could make sense for somebody in factories in the form of training or some sort of premium content where, um, in order to access that content, somebody’s got to pay. You know, we’re, we’re playing with a membership site where we have a few different tiers. Somebody could pay, you know, $50 a month to attend live weekly Q and A’s where I’m there. But you know what, maybe every other week, one of my experts, a copywriter or a marketing strategist or um, you know, a designer is there with me to just answer questions. But um, there’s some premium access to you that’s being given, but it could be scalable. So that would be, say, paid content. Speaker 1 21:11 Now somebody is actually committing some hard cash to access your expertise in a more one-on-one way. After that. That’s when I think you’d move into the paid discovery action plan, the, our version of a roadmap or what we’ve spent the first part of this call talking about. And then the last two steps would be, you know, maybe there’s a preliminary imp — — lementation but also a flagship implementation. So like for us, the preliminary implementation is what we call a phase one marketing plan. If you know the roadmap that we created, if the client decides yet we want to hire you gorilla to do this while there, as opposed to committing to a longterm retainer with us or something like that, we’re going to ask them to commit to a six month phase one plan where we knock out the most important priority projects that’ll help jumpstart their initiative but not require them to commit for the longterm. Speaker 1 22:01 And then our flagship implementation would be more of a, an ongoing marketing retainer, which we have a few clients who’ve been with us for six plus years. One that’s been with us for 10 years. And you know, for them it’s, it’s recurring revenue for us and we’ve learned their business really well. But you know, we’re not asked is essentially what you’re doing here is you’re not asking somebody to go from a first date to getting married. You’re, you’re creating steps before the first date and between the first date and getting married to, um, allow trust to be built, to be able to demonstrate that you can produce results along the way. And it’s just a much more natural progression. Speaker 0 22:38 Joe and I think, um, the key thing here, and like we were looking at it from a marketing perspective, we’re looking at it from a manufacturing perspective, but there are manufacturers there with tons of knowledge. They could easily write that article and just get their name and their, their um, sort of develop their thought leadership out there in the greater world. And then as you say, it just pushes people to, you know, they see somebody, they go, Oh, that’s Joe from gorilla 76, he’s great. I’ll go to that gated resource and see what else they’ve got. And then it just sort of, as you say, it’s, it’s a bit of a courtship and you’re walking down the path and naturally you may never get to any of those payment things. But for a manufacturer, it certainly opens the door up and gets you out there to a larger audience, I would think, um, than you would probably ever get just by sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring where somebody wants you to do a, you know, a discovery call or a consultation. Right. Speaker 1 23:40 Absolutely. I think you absolutely nailed it there, Janet. It’s this idea that you know, you’re an expert in something. Let’s, let’s give away a little bit of that expertise to help you get discovered by people who are out there looking for a solution or an answer to a question that you’re able to answer or um, you know, trying to solve a problem and you can help sort of guide them along the way. Um, and by doing so, you know, you’re doing exactly what you said. You’re establishing yourself as a thought leader while all your competitors are out there. You know, their websites are filled with brochure content that just talks about how great they are and all the things that they, you should buy, um, from them. Uh, you know, you’re out there actually helping solve problems and you know, who do you think is going to be top of mind when they reached the point in their buying process where they actually need to make a buying decision? Who are they going to call first on that’s been talking about themselves or the one that’s been helping them along the way with, with content? Speaker 0 24:41 I think and now is a particularly a key time to be thinking differently as a manufacturer, right? Because I mean, there’s a lot of people that are very stalled in their, in their manufacturing at this point in time. And now’s a great time to be sort of building up that thought leadership and figuring out ways to be helpful so that you can get to those customers who need your help and are willing to pay for your help. I’m curious to know how you’ve seen the buyer’s mindset change as this approach is taken now. I know you talked about it a little bit earlier, but you know, as, as this progresses and you grow along with it and you’re using these, um, the paid content and things like that, what changes are you seeing? Speaker 1 25:31 Yeah, so that’s a good question. And there are a handful of things here that, that come to mind. So when you can start, um, w if you were to implement a, something like this, what I would have, you know, decided to call the spectrum of value creation and you start operating this way. Um, you know, the first thin — — g that happens is the sale starts before you ever even talked to your prospect. Speaker 0 25:57 That’s, and that’s so important, right? Speaker 1 26:00 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, think about the difference. I see it all the time because we’ve been producing content for so long that that is just educational in nature. And there are times where I will get on a first call with somebody and you know, we use, we use software like we use HubSpot as our marketing automation and software and CRM. And so I can see, you know, somebody filled out a form on, on our side. I can see you all the pages they’ve viewed on our site. Um, you know, how many times they’ve come back to our site and all of that stuff helps set up my first call with them. Because if I look, you know, if I jump on a first, you know, free consultation, that sort of one hour call. In fact, I have one right after this, this interview coming up. Speaker 1 26:38 And what I can do is I can look at at this person’s profile, their contact record in and see, okay this, this person has viewed our, you know, they landed on our homepage and then they filled out the consultation request form. All right, well they clearly haven’t done a whole lot of vetting of, of my company. I’ll look at other people and they maybe landed on our site through, you know, an article that was about lead generation for manufacturers, which means that, you know, out of organic search means it meaning they probably Google search that. So they were trying to look for a solution in the first place. And then I could see they might have viewed 15 other articles on our site, looked at. So a few case studies looked at our, our team page and clicked on a few of our people’s profiles and then they looked at our who we help and how page and another case study. Speaker 1 27:25 And all of a sudden now I’m now this person is showing some level of buying intent. And I also, I can see that they’ve started, you know, they know a lot about us at this point. They’ve, they’ve looked at how we’ve solved problems for others. They’ve read our thought leadership content and it results in a completely different first sales conversation. The sale already started, the sales started in all this maybe two hours they’ve already spent with us because we have all this information out there that’s meant to help them. So that’s when I say the sales starts before you ever talk, you know, that’s kinda what I’m referring to is that, that’s kind of the first mindset change thing that I see. And the next one we touched on already is this idea that the, your prospect has skin in the game. Um, there, your prospect is now at least a preliminary customer. Speaker 1 28:10 They’ve got some skin in the game. The decision makers are going to be more willing to come to the table and give attention because they’ve, they’ve, you know, there’s been an outlay of cash on their, um, you know, the, the other thing here is that sort of affects you, I guess more than anything, is you can now give it your all. Like they, your, your buyer, your prospect can now feel confident and you can say with confidence, you know, we’re, we’re putting our smartest brains on solving this problem because you can afford to do so you’re being paid for, for the work as opposed to saying, Oh, we gotta we got to crank out this proposal. It’s going to take 20 hours. Who’s got time? Um, you know, this guy over here does, so we’ll just throw him on it. Well, now you can budget for this and staff accordingly, knowing that you’re selling these paid engagements and that you want your experts on it. Speaker 1 28:57 Um, you know, the, and then the last two things, your customer, I guess, first of all, your customer doesn’t want to backtrack. If they’re this far in, they’ve got some skin in the game and you’ve been doing your job, demonstrating your expertise and creating value. Well by the time you bring your proposed solution to the table, why would they want to start over with someone else? As long as you’ve done your job, you’ve had an opportunity now to earn their trust and if it isn’t a fit at this point, well then it wasn’t meant to be anyway and you probably shouldn’t be in this relationship that’s not going to work out really well for you or them. So you know, I think there’s the fear. The one thing I, I, I suspect some listeners might be thinking as well, you know what, if they take my solution and go elsewhere, I thi — — nk it’s very unlikely to happen. Speaker 1 29:42 In fact, we’ve never seen it happen in doing this in two years and probably having done 20 of these sorts of engagements. I, I can’t think of a single situation. We’ve got some that haven’t worked out, like we haven’t even hired us, but they’ve said, okay, we just don’t have the budget to do the full implementation. But when, if, and when we do, you’re the ones who are going to come back to talk to. Um, so they don’t want to backtrack. And then the last thing, which is probably the most important thing, is you’re not seen as a vendor anymore. All of a sudden you are being perceived as, um, you’re, you’re not, you’re not interchangeable with the next company around the corner. You have demonstrated your expertise, you’re selling something that is more than just another service that, you know, 50 other companies could, could act on your, you know, you’ve got something unique to offer. And I kind of took that idea from, there’s a marketing agency consultant named David Baker who we hired to do some work for us and he sort of really hammered that home for us. And our positioning is, you need, you can’t be an interchangeable vendor. You have to figure out how to differentiate yourself through expertise. And that completely applies in the manufacturing sector as well. Speaker 0 30:52 I think it’s interesting too to think about, okay, so in the past, if you had done those free consultations and you’re looking at it and going, Oh my goodness, it’s going to be X number of hours, who has the time to do this when we may or may not win the job. Okay, just here, you just do it. And whether or not that person who did the proposal had the right insights and expertise and whatever it was, maybe the person who’d asked for that proposal really did want to hire you, but the proposal didn’t get or didn’t provide the didn’t, uh, what is the word I’m looking for? Didn’t justify what your business could do for them because you weren’t able to put the time in because you weren’t getting paid. Right. So it’s kind of like this is dog that’s chasing the tail. You can see the reason why you would want somebody to pay for that consultation and why you would want to pay for that consultation because you do want the best minds on it because you’ve wasted your time trying to find somebody to solve your problem. Speaker 1 31:54 Yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s a great point. There’s a very good chance that for those of you listening who, who do fall into this trap, it’s a very good chance that your, your prospective customers actually want to buy this thinking from you, but you’re just not offering it because you’re kind of operating under the assumption that, well, the expectation is we’ll do this engineering work for free or this, you know, investigative discovery process for free. That’s just how people do it. Uh, but if, if you can deliver a much better product or service or, or, um, you know, solution by putting some senior people on it or some, you know, most most qualified people on it, um, you know, there’s a good chance that a lot of your, your prospects would prefer that anyway and prefer, you know, outlaying some, some cash to get the solution in front of them that they’re most confident is going to work. Speaker 0 32:49 Okay. I know I’ve taken up a lot of your time, Joe. So how about, uh, just a couple of tips for people to get started down this path and start thinking about how they might want to, uh, approach the spectrum of value creation as a manufacturer and, and how, you know, to get some of these tools in place so they can maybe start pursuing this. Sure. Speaker 1 33:09 Well, um, you know, I think the first thing to do is identify like, you know, is, is this a trap you’re falling into? And if it is, um, you know, to just start by thinking about what, what are some of the ways we could, uh, we could do this a little bit differently and what would be that first 5% or even one or 3% of an engagement that we could break off and sell as a standalone step one. Um, so start with a brainstorm there. I think that’s the best first step. And there, you know, there’s these articles that that you’ve mentioned that we just published, um, that you can find in our, if you go to gorilla 70 six.com/learn there are um, the part one and part two articles called how to stop giving away your engineering and consulting for free. Take a look through those and I think it — — ‘ll, it’ll give you a context for how to start thinking about that. But I would, I would just start there, you know, do we have this problem and what are some different ways we could, we can address it. Speaker 0 34:05 Joe, this has really been a very valuable conversation. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Speaker 1 34:12 Yeah, you bet. It’s my pleasure to be a guest. Speaker 0 34:14 Joe Sullivan is a branding expert. He is a thinker and founder at gorilla 76. They’re based in st Louis and you can read more articles as he mentioned at their website, gorillas 70 six.com learn. That’s our show this week. Please check out our Twitter and LinkedIn feeds that are on our podcast page. You can subscribe and share the podcast with your friends. And colleagues through iTunes, Google, play, Stitcher, Spotify on YouTube. And don’t forget that. Make it right is brought to you by Kevin Snoop. He’s a leadership advisor and author of the bestselling book. Make it right. Five steps to align your manufacturing business from the frontline to the bottom line. I’m Janet Eastman. I hope you have a great week and thanks very much for listening to make it right.