Business Development

What is one of the most critical components of the freelancing/proposal process?

The proposal.

I don’t mean the “get down on one knee” kind of proposal. I mean the document you send out to a prospective client that is basically supposed to get them to buy from you.

A good proposal can win a deal. A bad proposal can lead to a “sure thing” turning into no deal.

The problem with proposals is that they are time consuming to create. What if there was an easier solution?

What about something like Proposify?

What Is Proposify?

It’s a SaaS solution for creating and submitting proposals. Instead of having to create proposals in Word, Google Docs or anything like that, you create your proposal online on Proposify and then submit directly to your prospective client.

Why Would I Want To Use Proposify?

Let’s face it, proposal writing is a pain in the ass. In fact, it’s something I’m actively looking to get away from with my consulting business, for the simple reason that you can spend time creating proposals, putting in tons of effort, only to have the prospect slip away to a cheaper alternative, stick with their existing provider, or pull out at the last minute.

When I first started consulting and freelancing I was just creating proposals

Things I Like About Proposify

• Massive time saver
• Overall very easy to use
• Electronic signatures
• Templating
• Content library insertion
• Flexibility in how you send out proposals
• Insights into views etc
• Clients love the proposals

Things I Don’t Like About Proposify

• Oddly-spaced pricing tiers
• Occasional bugs when creating/editing proposals
• Lack of flexibility in pricing tables, depending on requirements
• Some templating/layout niggles

Conclusion

If you run a business where you need to create proposals (such as a freelancing business, consulting agency or similar) then I would highly suggest checking out Proposify.

It’s not perfect. In fact, there are a number of things I actively dislike about it – primarily the bugs, awkward pricing tiers (there needs to be something between the basic and regular version for smaller-scale freelancers) and some irritating inflexibility in the way that pricing tables work.

That being said, the time saving and increased efficiency is worth it. What would have taken me 45 minutes to create can be made in 10-15 minutes, including proofing and sending.

Proposify could be especially useful if you sell “productized” services, with even less customization required in terms of service offering. I have a couple of productized services, and the proposal creation and send time can be as low as 5 minutes.

Hey. What’s up, everybody? Today I want to talk about a sort of spreadsheet meets project management data collaboration tool, sort of said to do a bit of everything. It’s called Smartsheet. So in this Smartsheet review, I’m going to cover what the product is, what it can do for you, and what I like about it, and what I dislike about it. And basically try and reach a conclusion whether or not it’s actually worth using.

So look, what is Smartsheet? As I mentioned before, it’s a platform software as a service that basically allows you to create these things called sheets, and they’re supposed to be smart … hence the name Smartsheet. And a sheet, the ones I’ve been using working with a client of mine … they use Smartsheet a lot to sort of manage just about all the data they deal with on a regular basis. They’re using sort of spreadsheet formats. I think there might be some other ones, too … I’ll double check … but what I’ve been using is, yeah, the spreadsheet thing. So imagine like an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheets spreadsheet, but it’s set up through a sort of secure login area.

The whole point behind Smartsheet is, as far as I can tell, is that you’re supposed to be able to quite easily set up a sheet, and then have different people have different permissions, and you can edit things, and look at things. It’s sort of like a collaboration tool. So you know, let’s say you had a spreadsheet that would normally reside on one employee’s desktop in Excel. Well, you could move it onto Smartsheet, and everyone could collaborate through Smartsheet instead, so that’s really the main purpose behind it. I’ve been working with Smartsheet now for quite some time actually. Yeah, so it’s pretty cool really, actually. I’m just looking at the home page of Smartsheet here, basically just trying to see if I can pick out a few things that I haven’t mentioned about the product before I get into the sort of nitty-gritty.

So basically Smartsheet pitches itself as “less talk, more action. Organizations need a way to get work done, not just talk about it. Smartsheet is the best way to plan, track, automate, and report on work, enabling you to move from idea to impact — fast.” Yeah, really I mean, as I said, it’s just a platform for allowing multiple people to work on and collaborate on documents, sort of through a secure, I guess, staging area. There’s lots of different software like this available, but because I use Smartsheet on a regular basis, I did want to talk about it.

So look, what I’m going to do is not dwell too much on, I guess, the features of the product. It’s pretty easy to see what you can do. I would suggest just checking out the website, smartsheet.com, if you are interested in what the product can do. There’s automation work available. Forms are available, and I’ll talk a little bit more about those. Loads of different integrations, as well. So it’s pretty powerful. And as far as pricing goes, it’s actually pretty reasonably priced, as well. If I look at the pricing here, so there’s an individual tier, which is $14 per user per month; team, $15 per user per month; business, $25 per user per month. There’s different sort of benefits to each thing. I mean, obviously, the more you spend … the business plan does basically everything, whereas the individual plan you’ve got some limitations. You can’t do automated actions. You can’t see an activity log. So yeah, I would suggest checking out smartsheet.com/pricing to see the different options available.

But anyway, look, I don’t want to make this review too long, so what I’m going to do is just talk about the things I like and the things I don’t like about Smartsheet. The first thing I like is that it’s easy to work with. I mean, it is really quite straightforward just to set up sheets and do what you want with them. We’ve been using it in-house, like I said, with a client I’m working very closely with, and the whole team’s using it, including people who aren’t the most tech savvy, and they do a really good job in it. It’s great for setting up, I guess, the sorts of sheets that in the past … documents that in the past you would have had to, every time there was an update or change, you’d have to mail it around to the team, or you’d have to update it on a server somewhere and make sure you’d updated a new version and everything. This just does it easily for you.

It’s just smooth to work with really, Smartsheet. It’s nice and effective. There’s good pricing available, as well. Like I said, the pricing’s very reasonable. I mean, for $14 per user per month, you can have team sheets, which is pretty good. You get email support. Any plan you can have unlimited sharing. So what that means is, someone who you share a Smartsheet to, they’re not a paid user, but they can view and edit a selected sheet that you’ve shared with them, but they can’t make new ones and, obviously, they’re restricted in what they can do. But if you’re only using it occasionally, you might be able to get away with having your own plan, the individual one if it’s just you because you have to have three users or more for team, business, or enterprise. For a very reasonable price you could have a great little secure system for basically using Smartsheet and disseminating information to your team and allowing them to edit and view things.

Now another feature I really like about Smartsheet is the forms function. Smartsheet forms basically allow you to create forms that then pull data into sort of headed rows. So we’ve been using it to create registration forms for events, and then we wound up with a nice sheet that everyone can see that’s got all the registrations that have been, and then we can order that by the date they registered. You can do loads of customization with the forms. You can have ticks, fields, or check boxes, or mandatory fields, or whatever. Smartsheet for forms side of things, very, very effective, really good.

Another thing is that it’s secure, as well. I mean, obviously, security only goes as far as your password and everything. If you’re using crappy passwords, it’s not going to be as secure. But as a solution for collaborating on, I guess, important information, particularly sensitive information, I would certainly rather use Smartsheet than say Google Docs shared with other people. If you’re the sort of team leader, you’ve got the ability to lock people out, secure the access and all those kinds of things, as well.

Yeah, overall there are a lot of positives to Smartsheet. Really, the way I look at it is, in your business, if there’s any function you do where you’d like to be able to share data securely with other people, especially if it’s data on some spreadsheet-type format, then Smartsheet could be an excellent option for you. It’s reasonably priced, so definitely worth checking out.

Of course, there are negatives, as well. I do find it to be quite buggy sometimes, like you think you’ve saved something, and then you haven’t. As far as I’m aware, it doesn’t even do auto-saving, or at least I haven’t got it set up correctly. Run into issues sometimes where I think I’ve saved, and then I go to quit, and it say, “Oh, would you like to save this?” That’s a bit annoying.

It’s not the most fully-featured, at least on the tier I’m using. It really does work based on a spreadsheet-type stuff, or form creation. I’m not sure how well it would handle like Big Tic documents or anything like that. It seems pretty focused around sheets. I suppose that’s in the name, Smartsheet. I mean, we’ve had some … just to go back that [inaudible 00:09:00] point on the bugs … we’ve had some issues, like in-house, where no one’s been editing … as far as we’re aware … but the data’s been moved around, or things have changed slightly, and it’s created some frustrations for people. It’s not a bug-free platform. It also feels a little bit dated. It’s easy to use, but it’s kind of old-school feeling. There are slicker interfaces out there than this one.

But look, to conclude this Smartsheet review, overall I do like using it. It’s a great simple platform for creating sheets or documents, spreadsheets, and then sharing them with other people and allowing collaboration in a secure fashion. There’s scope for automations, and forms, and things like that, as well. Basically, whatever you were doing in the past with … I don’t want to say whatever, because there’s probably some stuff that you could do in Excel that you’d never ever want to do in anything other than Excel with really complex formulas and all that kind of stuff. But if you’re running sheets … let’s say you had a sheet that tracks registrations for an event like I’ve been using it for … and in the past that sheet would have set on someone’s computer, and they save drive, and they email it around about once a week or something like that. Well, much better to do it with Smartsheet.

If you’re an individual freelancer or business owner, and you don’t really work with many other people, you sort of do it all yourself, you’re probably not going to need this. You’d probably be able to get enough use or enough mileage out of Google, Google Sheets, and Google Docs, and the sharing functionalities in there. But certainly, if you’ve got a team you work with … like if you had a team of outsourcers you work with, if you had clients that you want to regularly share information in a sheet format to, all those kinds of things … well then, yes, Smartsheet has some potential for you.

Yes, Smartsheet, if you’ve got a need for secure access, and providing that access to that data to other people, and you wanted a convenient platform that’s affordable and has decent support, then yeah, give it a look. I mean, I’ve been using it now for about 12 months, and I like it. I’m not an expert on the platform. There are people who can do a lot more with Smartsheet than I can, but I do like it. It’s not perfect. There are some bugs. It feels a bit dated. It’s not as good a spreadsheet tool as Excel or anything like that, but it has some powerful features. It is very good for getting your data securely shared to other people, having the ability to lock down access, all that kind of things. So yeah, go check out Smartsheet. See what you think. You can try it for free. If you’ve used it yourself and have any thoughts, please leave them in the “Comments” below.

Hi everybody, it’s Sam here again, back at Reviews Boss with another review. And, today I’m looking at a book. It’s actually a physical printed book. I think you might be able to get digital copy, but I got a printed copy from Amazon.com. It’s called “Advanced Google Adwords” by Brad Geddes.

Basically, I got this book because I’m into doing Google Adwords, both in house kind of work and for clients. I’ve worked on a platform for quite some time, but I wanted to learn really all the tips and tricks and have a good reference book that I could use whenever I needed to consult a nice printed book for advice or tips and tricks and what to do. So, I purchased “Advanced Google Adwords.” It arrived from Amazon.com really quickly. Within about a week, it’s come all the way to New Zealand, which is impressive.

And, basically what I’m going to do is give a short review of this book. Compared to my software or full training product reviews, this is a much shorter review, but hopefully it still gives you a good feel for the product.

So, what is “Advanced Google Adwords?” As I said, it’s a book designed to give you a really comprehensive grounding in Google Adwords. So, basically, it teaches you everything you need to know about the platform from basic campaign sittings right through to very advanced features. There’s hundreds of pages in this book. I can’t remember the exact page count off the top of my head because it’s not set in front of my, but yes. Hugely, hugely detailed. There’s illustrations, there’s screenshots, it’s very, very comprehensive. I think it’s probably the most comprehensive Adwords resource I can think of. So, that’s why I decided to get myself a copy.

I do still prefer reading a nice detailed book as opposed to say, you know, you could find similar information if you went through loads of different blog posts, but it’s nice to have it all in one place. And, in the spirit of keeping this review of “Advanced Google Adwords” nice and brief, what I’m going to do is quickly just cover off what I like about the book and what I don’t like, and then give a conclusion to this review.

So, the things I like about “Advanced Google Adwords,” it’s extremely detailed, exceptionally detailed. There’s so much information in here. It’s just incredible what you can learn. Even as someone who had worked on adwords for quite some time, I really did pick up a lot of useful additionally information and tactics and tricks and strategies, even basic campaign settings that I wasn’t so aware on. So, if you want to learn Google ad words, it’s the ultimate resource in that respect. There’s just an overwhelming wealth of information. It’s fantastic.

Second thing is it’s priced well. I can’t remember exactly what I paid for it because it was quite some time ago that I bought it, but I think it cost me only about 30 or 40 US dollars landed into New Zealand. Maybe a bit more. I’ll have to look that up, but when you consider that some adwords training courses, for example, I’ve seen a thousand dollars, 1500 dollars, and even the cheaper ones are 200 or 300 dollars. “Advance Google Adwords” represents exceptional value. It’s not a comprehensive strategy guide, it’s not telling you this is exactly how you have to run a campaign for this type of client if you’re doing a local service or e-commerce or whatever. It’s really making you aware of all the settings and features and pitfalls and tips and tricks, but it’s incredible value for money. It really is. It’s really well-written, easy to read. It’s not actually boring at all. You could probably sit there and read it for hours and not be bored.

I also love just having a really detailed, thick, rich feeling book in front of me. Sure, books have largely been superseded by Kindle versions or e-books or apps or whatever, but there’s just something, for this kind of book, there’s something really nice about having it in front of you as a proper reference manual. There’s another Google analytics book that I want to get my hands on that I’ll hopefully be reviewing soon and that looks similar. I can’t remember it’s name. I think “Google Analytics Demystified” or something like that. I look forward to getting another one of these detailed reference books. It looks the part, sitting in your home office or in your regular office or at your desk or whatever. It’s very, very good reading.

As far as things I don’t like, there is a risk of information overload if you’ve never tackled adwords before. You could probably start with something a lot more simple. I reviewed a really simple Kindle e-book the other day, “Essential Adwords: The Quick and Dirty Guide.” That was like a four or five dollar Kindle e-bbok and that would give you good grounding. Or just basic YouTube training as well. I’m actually going to be doing a series of basic videos on some key concepts from adwords and SCO and things like that in the near future, so keep an eye out for those. But that’s probably the biggest pitfall I can see of “Advanced Google Adwords” is that it does run the risk of overwhelming you with so much information, but at the same time, it’s absolutely spot-on in terms of the quality of that information. So, I don’t think this is a massive problem.

Other things, it would have been nice if there’s a color print version available. The screenshots and illustrations are in black and white in this book. They’re legible, you can make out what’s going on, but obviously it’d be better if there was a … even if you had to pay quite a bit more for a deluxe color-printed version with more detailed screenshots, that would be really good.

And then the other thing is there’s always a risk of buying a print version and it goes out of date. On my print version, I bought about a year ago, and there’s already been a number of adwords features that have changed since then. I think you get free updates for life through a digital version, something like that, I’ll have to double-check and I’ll update the review here, but that’s something to bear in mind as well is that, often if you buy an e-book, you get a lifetime access to updates. You buy it for 100 dollars and then every time something changes on a platform you’re learning about, you’ll get an update. So, that’s another thing as well. I think I have the third addition. There’s definitely some stuff that’s outdated, but by in large, most of the contents are still very good. I’m tempted to buy the next addition if there is one available.

But, in conclusion, “Advanced Google Adwords” by Brad Geddes. It is a fantastic book. If you’ve got any interest at all in learning adwords, go out and get the latest version you can. Just jump on Amazon, it’s available on there, won’t cost you too much money. Definitely, definitely worth buying. The things that are wrong with it are massively outweighed by the pros. It’s just such a detailed immersive guide to what is a very complicated platform, and it’s great just to sometimes be able to, if you’re setting up a campaign and you think, “What does this option do? What do I need to do in this situation?” Just flick to the reference index at the back of the book, find that option, jump to the correct chapter or page, read through, and all of a sudden, you know what you’re doing. It’s full of tip sections and check lists and detailed written explanations and all those kinds of things.

So, “Advanced Google Adwords” by Brad Geddes. If you’ve got any interest at all at getting good with Adwords, this must be in your bookshelf. 100 percent worth buying. Just go out and get it now. Click here to buy it on Amazon, you will not regret it.

Original Audio Version

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Review Transcript

How’s it going? It’s Sam here again from Reviews Boss back with another review. Today I’m gonna talk to you about a product that I’ve had my eye on it for a long time actually. It’s a training product. I’m moving away a little bit from my usual focus recently, which has been on software applications and things like that and going back to basics.

The product in question is called Double Your Freelancing Rate and it’s by a guy called Brennan Dunn. And I first came across this product actually because I think, if I recall correctly, I might have seen a Facebook ad or something like that from Brennan Dunn talking about increasing freelancer rates.

And as I’ve explained in a couple of other reviews on this blog, one thing I’m looking at doing in the near future is actually growing my consulting and freelancing business. So, at the moment I’m currently employed, I’ve got a job, and then I do a bit of freelancing consulting work on the side, and then I run this blog as well. And I have some other projects doing the affiliate space largely with social media, marketing Facebook groups, Facebook pages, that kind of thing. So, as you might expect, I’m a fairly busy guy.

But I mean what freelancing and contracting, so far, has shown me is that, you know, there’s a demand out there for the skillset I’ve got with regards to digital strategy. Almost like a sort of virtual marketing management for companies that are with various contractors that might be working with them. STO guy[inaudible 00:01:41] and a PPC agency and a social media marketing agency, and often times they’re not speaking together. There’s no one sort of a point that all of those agencies can communicate with and the business in question can sort of disseminate its ideas and its requirements to.

I say this sort of strategy and virtual marketing management is being where I’d like to go with my consulting business. And so obviously I was interested in what Brennan Dunn was talking about because I mean who doesn’t want to double their freelancing rate. I mean already my freelancing rate is significantly higher than my regular employment rate. I wouldn’t have to actually have to have that many hours worth of work a week at the rate I get to be able to replace our salaried income. And if you can double that rate, maybe even more, well then you’ll need even fewer hours or, you know, with the same amount of time you can be doing significantly better. So that’s sort of a picture of where I’m at and why I was interested in this product.

As I’ve started to take my consulting and freelancing more seriously, I decided look I’m gonna take the plunge. I’m, gonna buy this product, Double Your Freelancing Rate by Brennan Dunn. There is a bit of free content on his blog. It’s actually really good. I’ve read almost all of his articles. I read his newsletters, all those kind of things. In the end I should said “hey, look let’s try; buy the product.” Gives me an excuses to have something else to review here as well, which is good. So let’s get on with the review.

So what is Double Your Freelancing Rate? As I explained, it’s a training product. It’s like an online ebook. So when you buy the product you don’t just get a PDF to download. I presume pretty much because people would start sharing and you know uploading it black hat sites and things like that. So what happens is you actually gotta log in and when you pay you get the log in sent to you. And then you’re able to go access the product. And it’s a relatively short product, to be honest. It’s not actually that complex. There’s some bonuses and extra things that’ll talk about later.

But the core of the product itself is a short series of lessons or chapters that go on basically introducing key concepts around freelancing and consulting. Looking at the sort of problems that most freelancers and consultants face, specially with regards to rates and how they earn money. And then basically working you through step-by-step what can you do to actually increase the rates, you earn. And I mean really, you know for a short ebook or short e-course, I should say. There is quite a lot it in terms of the actual quality and depth of the lesson you’re going to get into. So what I’ll do now, is I think what I’ll do is I’ll talk through what I likes about the product and what I don’t. The core thing is it’s a simple product compared to a lot software I review here. A lot of the other training courses, it’s probably gonna take you maybe an hour to work through all the training.That’s if you’re a fast reader, maybe two if you’re a slow reader. I don’t know. That’s just the main training. It’s not the extra stuff comes with it and bonuses, I mention later.

But look, the things I like about the product about Double Your Freelancing Rate. First thing I like about it, the quality of the training is extremely good. I’m a firm believer of quality over quantity. I was, I must admit, a little bit disappointed when first I opened up the product and sort of flipped through the chapters online. And thought wow you know I’ve spent what? It’s about 300 US dollars on this, which, in my local currency, is about 500 dollars. It’s a lot of money. And wow there’s actually not a lot to it. A smallish number of chapters and they’re not particularly long. I sort of, on that first glance, thought “man I’ve me jupped here. This is a rip off.” But then I said “no, I’m gonna read” rather running for the exits and getting a refund, I’m gonna read through it. I’m gonna really sort of, I guess, judge the product not on the quantity of the content within it, but the quality of it.
And I am pleased to say it is really really good. It is content that if you read it and you put the principals and the lesson into action, I do believe you will have the ability to double your freelancing rate. I mean, but not everyone’s cut out to be successful in freelancing. I think if you’re on of those people who’s stuck in mindset of I’ve just gotta charge [inaudible 00:06:32] and do a lot of volume of work, this product isn’t for you. But certainly if you’re on that cusp of getting some good rates. And already maybe you earn a decent rate but you just wanna increase it, well products really gonna help.

A lot of what it does is give you really good strategies to implement to increase your revenue basically overnight by increasing your rates. I think in terms of the content and what it teaches it really is outstanding. You find this content, all these lesson and tidbits and strategies probably by browsing different free blogs, going on Revit freelancing forums and those kind of things, and you know you probably be able to get it all together in one place eventually, but I believe time is money and what Brennan Dunn has done actually done with this product is sort of combined together some of the best advise I’ve seen on increasing your freelancing rates. Being confident to ask for more money. Being able to demonstrate the value of what you’re offering. Moving away from that sort of “this is my alley rate and this is how many hours it will be” towards value based projects, where your potential for alley rate could be enormous.

If you can, I think the mindset he is trying to get you in is, if you can charge $5000 for what takes you an hour, but the client receives more than $5000 forth of value, why shouldn’t you be doing it? Everyone’s a winner.

That’s what this product is really about at the of the day is making your consulting and freelancing business sharper because you’re spending less time on low value clients. You’re spending more time on high value who can afford to pay your increased rates. And what that means is that you can offer them the better service. It really the same principal why when you fly on a business class or first class you get way better service than when you’re flying ion economy class. You know, there is the same number of staff, in those different sections of the cabin but they’re dealing with first class and business class flights attended are dealing with fewer people so they are able to leverage more attention on them and that makes them feel good. It’s kind of the same with this.

That’s what I think core lesson at the heart of this product is. So yeah I really rate the training, obviously I don’t want to give away the secrets. I think you can probably have a fair stab at working some of them out yourself. Just by reading the sales pitch and promotional material around the product but overall training quality is superb in this product. I really do give it a high score. I think the fact as well another benefit, even though it’s brief and it’s short, you can probably read though it on a short flight, or something like that. That’s a good thing. You know you shouldn’t be reading insanely long training eBooks that don’t really add value and have lots of fluff and everything like that. This is just hard hitting, to the point, good information, quality information that I feel you can trust. And the lesson you learn, if you apply them will work.

Which brings me on to my next thing that I like about the product and that is, I have already found that by putting the lessons I have learned reading Double Your Freelancing Rate into action that I have increased my freelancing rate. I wouldn’t say that I’ve double it yet but certainly it’s significant extra money an hour. And what it’s done is given me the confidence to go out there and say “this what my time is worth”, “this is what I think clients are getting in terms of value out of the time they spend on me.” It is a huge jump to make, anyone who’s done freelance or consulting or contracting will know the hardest part really, once you’ve sat in front of the client, is when that ask you to give a quote and you go “oh crap” if I quote too much, they’re gonna run for the hills and run to next provider, who will do a discount service. I think part of what makes Double Your Freelancing Rate really good is it gets you in the mindset of saying a client like that isn’t worth it in the first place.

Cheap clients are horrible to work with to be honest. They’re always the ones who have the most problems. They’re the ones who want limitless revisions, and they’re never happy. They bark at every single project. I can keep of my own base of clients I work with now. There’s a couple of them who I’ve worked in the past. I took on their work because I felt like I couldn’t say no or that I needed at the time and they’ve always wound up being more trouble than their worth. Whereas the one who you’ve got a good relationship with and who you’re charging a good rate that you feel good about often that’s the best relationship because they’re serious professional business, and they know the value of working with a good contractor, or a good consultant or good freelancer.

Double Your Freelancing Rate will also help you move away relying on and feeling like you need to rely on low value clients. There’s other people out there who are gonna look out for those low value clients. Don’t feel bad to move them on or reject working with them, as long as you do it politely. At the end of the day someone who thinks that they should be paying $250 a month for ECO eCommerce website, well guess what, their never gonna think that they should be paying ten times that potentially even fifty times that to have a good return on investment. They’re just stuck on that mentality that cheap is good, “I need cheap”. Don’t waste your time working with them.

And I think on top of the advise about increasing your freelancing rate or your consulting rate, Brennan Dunn has done a really good job of getting you in that mindset of saying no to low value clients because every low value client you take on. If your alley rate you want to give is $100 an hour and you’re taking on clients at $30 dollars an hour for example or $40 an hour. Well that’s wasted time in many respects, because if you could find another high value client who’s paying you $100 an hour, if that’s what high value is to you. You might take on the $30 an hour client for 10 hours a month and means you can’t then service the guy who’s willing to $100 an hour for say 5 hour a month, who would have been worth more to you and in less time. So really good quality training.

Other things I like is the included bonuses are pretty good. I into two minds about the templates that were included. I didn’t they were fantastic but what is worth it is the freelancer guild. It’s like a members only forum. It’s really clear [inaudible 00:13:36] sharing good advice and it well worth getting into that forum and taking a look around.

But look the main benefit of the product, is the way it prepares you for the process of increasing your freelancing rate. It explains why low rates are a bad thing. It explains what you need to do present good value propositions to your client and it also explains ways of increasing recurring revenue at a clients. Things like getting a retainer arrangement set up and stuff like that. Overall the benefits of the program are pretty strong.

That’s not to say it’s perfect though. There are a number of downsides, which I want to share with you now. The first one is the price. I think it is a little bit too expensive for what it is in terms of training. And what I mean by that is if you do put into action and you increase your rates. Well the value there, it makes it worth it. And I guess in many respects that Brennan Dunn actually showing the value of the training he’s giving by charging a higher amount, for what seems like a smaller amount of information, but the value’s really high. But if your price conscious purchaser of training products. You might find that $300 US dollars or thereabouts is out of your league. So obviously I’d like to see the prices less. Because it is a product that he’s probably making about a 95% product margin on.  But then again the value is there. So I’m not going to go on the war path and say it’s unfairly priced. I think the price for the value you get is reasonable if you put the lessons into action. But do be aware that the price is quite high, as well.

Another thing, it feels like a fairly hollow product in terms of amount of content you’re getting, but once the quality of it and the value you get out of what is there is very good. But if your the kind of person who you’d rather go to buffet than a high restaurant because you like a lot of stuff. You’re probably gonna feel let down by this product. But apart from that I don’t see too many other downsides.

I would like the ability to download a PDF version or something like that. I don’t like having to access the product through an online sort of gate only. That to me is a little bit annoying just because you gotta remember login details. It sort of feel a bit like you paid this money and he doesn’t trust you or the creator doesn’t trust you not to go sharing it around with everyone else. Which I guess fair enough concern with an info product as opposed to a software, but it still be nice to be able to have a version where its all in one sort continuous PDF or something like that. But that’s a minor gripe. The system that’s in place works really well.

But look moving on to the conclusion, overall, Double Your Freelancing Rate where do I stand on that? It is expensive. There’s not a huge amount in it, but what’s there is very good. I’ll go back to that restaurant analogy. It’s exactly like going out for dinner to really top end restaurant where the food is beautiful. You  sit there and the food comes out and you might look at the plate and go “I’m spending so much money on this and I’m not getting much for that money”, but then you take a bite and you realize how good it is. Versus going to a Pizza Hut all-you-can-eat and stuffing your face and then getting home and feeling like crap.

Value and price, all day long. What Brennan Dunn has done here is actually created a system in which you can see the value. Just like he is encouraging you to do with your clients, you’re prices are gonna go up if you read this book and you implement his strategies. And your prices are gonna go up significantly for the hourly rate you charge for the per project price or your retainer price or whatever price you’re charging. The price goes through the roof, but the value of the client is actually better, and that’s what really counts.

Even though it is an expensive product, the value is there. As long as you’re willing to apply the lessons. If you just buy it and read it and don’t do anything, well don’t waste your time because that’s a lot of money. You could spend that on something else. If you’re a serial info product buyer, I would probably say stay away from it. Because I can almost guarantee that what you’ll do is you’ll buy it, you’ll read it, and you’ll put on your virtual shelf and never put it into action. But if you are seriously interested running a freelancing or consulting business, then yeah I do think this product is worth it. I do recommend Double Your Freelancing Rate by Brennan Dunn. He’s done and excellent job at teaching you the strategies you need to know as well as the mindset you need to have to go out there with your freelance offering or your consulting offering and get more money out of existing clients and also get more money out of prospective clients.

If you look at the most successful consultants and freelancers there often ones who charge pretty high rates. Usually, the people who fell like they can only get by on price, are the one who struggle. They’re so dependent on sort of turning over a high volume of work. They burn themselves out. If you think your only differentiating factor is price in terms of the service you offer, your business probably isn’t gonna last very long. You want to be working with clients who recognize value who are willing to pay for that value. And I Double Your Freelancing Rate does an excellent of getting you in the state you need to be in mentally and in terms of real actionable strategies you need to get there.

So yeah Double Your Freelancing Rate – sure it’s pricey but the value is there. If you want to run a successful freelance or consulting business I do recommend buying it. It’s really good. You won’t regret it.

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Review Transcript

Hey guys. It’s Sam here from Reviews Boss back with another review and today it’s going to be a really short one. I just want to talk quickly about a product that I’ve used quite extensively now for a while for task management and project tracking. It’s called Trello.

So, what is Trello? As I briefly mentioned, it’s a task tracking project manaegement-y kinda platform. I’m trying to think what they actually call themselves. Let me just check quickly. I’m doing this review live so bear with. What do they say? Trello lets you work more collaboratively and get more done. Trello’s boards list and card enable you to organize and prioritize your projects in a fun, flexible and rewarding day. So, yeah, it’s like a sort of project management system, task management system. It’s built around these things called cards and basically, cards are pretty flexible. You can do whatever you want with them to try and create a flow that works for you for tracking projects and I got onto Trello at an old job of mine and basically, we were in a marketing tea. There was about seven or eight of us and to be honest, we were pretty bad at keeping track of all the work we did and so the boss actually got Trello going and we started using that to track projects and to be honest, it was really effective and it did help us get a lot of stuff done so I’ve always had it in the back of my mind to review Trello.

So, let’s talk through some additional details of the product. So, some other cool things you can do with Trello are that you can integrate it with other apps that you might be using. So, things like Slack or MailChimp or all sorts of stuff, Box, Confluence, draw.io, DropBox, it’s all in there. There’s tons of stuff. If you click this link to look at the Trello Power Ups, they’re called, you’ll be able to see what you can link your Trello cards in with. The pricing is pretty sharp as well so there’s a free forever plan that gives you unlimited boards, cards, members checklist and attachments and we used it for seven or eight staff and it was free and I use it for myself now and I’ve used it in smaller teams as well and it works for free. As you move up to Business Class, it’s called, for $9.99 per user per month when paid annually. You get everything from the free version plus you get Power Up integrations with other … For the Power Ups list I mentioned before, things like Jira, Bitbucket, MailChimp, Salesforce, Google Drive. So, it just lets you manage more stuff in one place for your projects, which is pretty cool. You can attach files up to 250mb. Free versions only up to 10mb.

You can control team member access much easier. You can create private boards, membership invitations and then as you go up to Enterprise level, well it just becomes more corporatey and it’s all about authentication etc. You get an account executive to help you on boarding assistance, priority support, all that kinda stuff. But, basically, where am I going with this? Trello’s got pricing and plans to suit everyone but you’re probably going to be fine with just the free version.

So, I don’t want to linger too much on how exactly it works. I’m probably not the best person to explain cause I’m not that good at explaining the card system apart from saying it works and you get into the flow of it yourself. What I’ve done, is added a couple of videos below of beds from YouTube that I’ve found that do a better job of explaining how Trello actually works. What I just want to talk about is what I like about it and what I don’t like about it and whether you should use it.

So, what do I like? Very affordable. The free platform’s great, really good. You can get most stuff done that you need and if you do have to pay, it’s very reasonably priced, especially if you’re just an independent person working by yourself or in a small team. The premium integrations, the Power Ups, they’re really good. They’re going to save you a lot of time and help you to recharge your projects as do the larger file attachments and things like that. That was one issue we used to encounter. In my job where we first started using Trello, was when we had the free platform, our graphic designer could not load his graphic designs properly for the different projects we had and that was a bit frustrating.

What else do I like about it? There’s lots of features. It’s fairly straightforward to use and once you get into a flow of things, you will find that Trello is just nice to work with and it really does help you get stuff done. I’ve got a card, for example, set up in Trello. I should say, what’s the correct term that you get this right? I’ve got a board, which … No, is it a board or a card? Let me have a look. Yeah, it’s a board. Okay. So, you’ve got a few things. You got a team, which is a group of boards and people so that could be your marketing department or your sales department or your HR department. Then you got boards. So, boards are things, they’re defined on Trello as, a board is made up of cards ordered on lists.

So, I’ve got a board for this website and under it, I have two cards, and one is the reviews that I want to do and that I am doing, that I’ve done, and the other is just general tasks like, make sure you back up the website every so often or make sure you pay for your hosting and things like that. And if I look at my card view for the reviews board, or the reviews project I guess I’d call it, I’ve got two cards there. I’ve got pending reviews and I’ve got reviews that need editing. So, pending reviews, I just chuck down a list of products I want to review and I can actually click into each card individually. I can open up one for, what is a review I’m going to be doing? I’m going to be reviewing SaleHoo and I can add comments, I can add a checklist so I can say these are things that have to be covered in the review. I can do all sort of stuff like that and then when I’ve actually started that review, I can just drag it, or if I’ve finished it, I guess the draft and published it, I can drag it across to my ‘reviews need editing’ column and that really helps organize the flow and I can add more lists as well with those cards.

The structure is … you’ll work it out as you go along but it’s pretty flexible and powerful to use Trello and what I want to do now is move onto the stuff I don’t like about it because I did want to keep this review short and as you probably saw or heard then, my explanation of the boards and the lists and the cards and all this stuff, it’s all a bit jumbled because while you can learn it and you can pick it up pretty quickly, it is actually kind of confusing in some respects, just the whole concept of cards and everything unless you really spend some time learning how they’re supposed to work. You just want to dive in and have an easy checklist system and if you want to do that, Trello potentially isn’t the best. You might be better looking at something like Todoist, which is another thing I want to review so I’ll add a card under my pending reviews list to review Todoist.

It’s not necessarily the easiest thing to use. There are some limitations with Trello. One of the ones I find is, it’s not fantastic for doing a weekly list. So, what do I need to achieve this week? You could do it. I’ve jerry rigged up a system that works but it really is more focused around projects and we had the same issue when we used it in my old work is that it worked fantastically well for larger business development or marketing projects but it didn’t work so well for weekly task planning. So, that’s something to bear in mind and the other things I don’t like about it is, there’s not a huge amount else apart from the fact that you really have to understand how the product wants you to work to get the most out of it. You can just run wild and free and just make lists and boards and come up with your own system and that’s cool but Trello does encourage you to work the way they want you to work to get the best result and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s just something to bear in mind and I suppose it is a negative for some people.

Other things, there’s some stuff that is a little bit strange to me. For example, if I look at my main list of all my teams, which represent the different businesses or different things I do in my life. I got one for personal tasks, just stuff I have to do, pay insurance or go get the car fixed, stuff like that. For some weird reason, I can’t drag the boards. Why I can’t drag the boards around, I have to star the ones I want to go to the top. That is just dumb. I should be able to just drag them around. I should be able to reorder everything the way I want to reorder it. That’s not very good, in my mind. So, that’s an example of something Trello does where it’s really trying to lock you into a particular system and probably not much development that they could create a lot more flexibility for you.

But, look, overall, I want to cap this review off and keep it short. Trello is very good as a project management task management system, for documenting what you need to do and then working to get it done, it really does work effectively. Just bear in mind that it’s really geared to make you work a way that obviously the product creators want you to work and people might debate that, “Oh, you can do anything you want with Trello.” And to an extent, you can, but you will find, “Okay, it’s trying to really encourage me to think about things in a certain way and use the system of boards and cards and lists to do things in that way.”

But, overall, there’s great training available. Heaps of people use it so there’s lots of independent training as well. The pricing’s fantastic. The supports good. It’s go a nice efficient interface. It’s not the most attractive app to use but it works pretty well. If you want to manage projects and keep yourself on track, it’s powerful, it’s effective, it’s affordable and I recommend you give it a try.

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Review Transcript

Hey guys, what’s up? It’s Sam here from Reviews Boss back with another review and it’s going to be another short one today. The product I’m talking about doesn’t need too much of an in-depth review but it is worth mentioning so that’s why I’m bringing it up. So the product I’m looking at is called Toggl. So that is toggl.com and you can click the link here to go straight to Toggl.

So what is Toggl? Toggl is a time tracker software. A time tracker for anyone who needs to sort of have a list of tasks or projects and then track the time they’ve spent working against those projects. So if you’re a consultant or a freelancer and you work by the hour, you might be a developer or something like that, or a graphic designer or a SEO business or anything where you track by the hour, well Toggl’s pretty much made for you. It’s designed to help make tracking hours, tracking time spent on projects and tasks easier.

And of course you know you can use it in internal teams as well. You might run a business that’s got ten staff and you want to see what they’re up to in the day, well you can tell them to track their time on Toggl so you can look for efficiencies and things like that. Of course that opens up another whole kettle of fish as to whether getting staff, internal staff to track their time if they’re not doing billable hours for clients is a good thing, I don’t think it is. I’ve found jobs where you have to do that are pretty miserable and often the staff are pretty unmotivated.

Generally, my take is that basically you should only be tracking time if there are actual billable hours involved. Obviously you can’t say to the client I spent ten hours on this project when you only spent five, that’s why you need good time tracking but you know if your team are just doing things that are in-house projects well focus on the output not the time.

But anyway let’s continue on with the review of Toggl. So like I said, it’s going to be a short one. I’ll focus on the things that I like about Toggl and the things I don’t. To start off with the things I like about Toggl, well the first one is the free version, the free sort of pricing level I guess you’d call it, is very very good. It really is different, decent sorry. It’s all I use … basically, yeah I mean I use the free version of Toggl every single day to track work I do for clients, for consulting I do.

It’s important to know the way I work I don’t actually charge by the hour anymore, I charge fixed price for projects or retainers or things like that rather than giving an hourly price, but what I want to do is have insights into how long on average a project is taking me and whether any clients or projects that are taking up more time than they really should be. So you know you might have to, if you’ve done any freelancing or consulting or anything like that, worked in an agency, you’ll know that some clients often the ones who are doing smaller jobs, the lower value jobs, they take up loads of your time and then it’s the higher value clients who are actually much more efficient to work with. So yeah, for just basic use for yourself, the free version of Toggl is very good.

However, if you have a team or you do a lot of hourly based billing and you’re not just tracking time to get a sense of how you’re using that time internally to sort of work out an average hourly rate you do make on paper, pay by the project work, or anything like that, well then look at the more premium plans because there are a lot of additional features. I won’t go into them all but there’s some really cool stuff as you move up through the feature list and obviously through the free to starter, to premium to enterprise plan. I mean the enterprise plan literally could do it all, probably if you’re doing lots of hourly billing for clients. Starter is where you want to be, free would be a little bit too limited. I’m going to upgrade to starter soon. Premium looks really good as well.

So anyway, first thing yeah that I like is just how many different options there are in terms of packages depending on your requirements from the very usable free one right up to enterprise, so that’s great to see. The second thing I like about Toggl is that it’s very easy to use, it’s just so straightforward to work out what you need to do and it’s straightforward but also not restrictive in terms of the way you’re able to work with it. So I basically have my account set up with different clients and then under those different clients, different projects. So you know one client it might be that the project is developing a digital strategy. So I would sit that as one project, I would track time against that. As I clock on and clock off on that project against that client, I can add commentary about what I’ve been doing so I can say okay, yesterday I spent an hour and a half researching competitors of their brand or something like that. Yeah, really easy to work with.

There’s great training provided as well, which is another big plus with Toggl. You have no worries at all about finding it difficult to use. It’s so efficient, if I think back on some time tracking software I’ve used in the past, things like Clocking It for example, were a lot less elegant and efficient to use. They just felt a bit clunky although this going back quite a few years. I remember using one in a company I worked for. I think it was called Copper or something like that or it might have been a slightly modified version of Copper or whatever the base software was called, we just called it Copper. But oh my goodness, that was horrible to work with. It was just absolutely terrible, you could only add time in increments of quarter of an hour, you had no easy sort of hour counter you just had to click start and then when you click stop you could see how long you’d worked. You couldn’t see the time adding up like you can with Toggl.

So look, it’s such an easy platform to work with. Really I don’t need to go into too much more detail about the benefits of it I think. Basically it’s very affordable, you know free is obviously extremely affordable and then the actual paid plans are very reasonably priced with what you get as well. You know the starter package is only nine dollars per user per month. Well if you’re an independent contractor, it’s nine a dollar a month for a really powerful platform, only 18 dollars a month per user for premium. It does jump up to 49 dollars per month for enterprise but to be honest, unless you’re running a large team, especially a team that’s doing billable hours, and you need to be able to do things like lock their time entries so you know they’re being honest about the time they’ve spent on their billable hour tasks or you’re probably going to stick to free, starter or premium and you would do very nicely with those indeed for a good price. So look from the positive side of things, Toggl is great value for money, it’s very easy to use. It’s just so nice to use as well, it just feels right. It doesn’t feel like a sort of program that’s trying to interrogate you and shake you down every second of the day, it’s just trying to help you get your work done in a more efficient manner and that’s great.

So moving on to the negatives, things I don’t like about Toggl. Well to be honest, there aren’t that many really. When I first started using it I must admit, I didn’t really read the instructions properly and I used it incorrectly and this sort of resulted in time reports that were fairly meaningless. But if you do take the time to actually look at the training you’ll see how easy it is to use. I mean nothing’s perfect but with this particular software I am finding it really hard to put my finger specific things I don’t like. I think the interface is very clean. I have noticed some times that it will be a bit laggy with like picking different client projects, or clients and picking different projects. I wish that there was a faster way, or maybe there is and I haven’t discovered it yet, of copying projects from one client to another. So if you provide a SEO service to ten different clients and you just create the different client names and you copy the same projects that would sit under it like link building or Google Analytics research or outreach, and you can copy them all under the same client.

On the free plan there are a few things missing that you’ll probably notice fairly quickly if you do really need to be doing time tracking in your business. Just things like downloadable reports make it a bit harder to work with on the free platform.

As I said I just use it for internal reference purposes basically saying okay how many hours did I spend on this project versus what I billed. What was my average internal hourly rate? I’ve got a rate I try to work to even though I don’t quote on that directly. But look, overall I think Toggl is absolutely fantastic. I mean you might find some gripes with it but in terms of what I do and how I like to work I really do find it very good. I mean I’ve never been a huge fan of time tracking. I think it’s only really useful to do it very, I guess, fastidiously if you’re doing genuine billable hours in which case yeah you really do need to be on the ball because firstly, you don’t want to wind up ripping your client off. That’s you know not the right thing to do to say oh yeah I did ten hours work when you only did eight.

Secondly, you also need to be aware and if you’ve got a team working for you they also need to be aware that, it eats into your profitability if you’re not tracking your time effectively when you’re supposed to be doing billable hours and you think that client A is paying you for 20 hours a month but actually there’s 25, 30, 40 hours worth of work going into that client. Well you’ve just taken a 50% pay cut overnight or whatever the percentage may be. [inaudible 00:10:58] worked in quite a few agencies and doing my own work as a consultant now, and I’m all too aware of the fact that it’s very easy for time to blow out when working on clients. You’ve either then got to go to them and have that awkward conversation of oh I’ve just blown out on a task and I’m going to have to send you a bigger invoice than you expected, or you’ve got to wear those costs and that’s not good for your business either.

So yeah look Toggl is a very good platform for time tracking. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s easy to use, it’s well priced, the features are there, the support seems very good. I’ve even received, they’re obviously automated emails but they’re pretty nicely personalized, promoting training for the product and can we help you get more out of it. But when I compare it to some of the other time trackers I’ve used, it really is very good. I just can’t see any reason not to recommend it to be honest. It’s one of those apps that comes along every so often that you think okay this really works, it’s very effective. Speaking of apps, you can get it for Android, iPhone, you can get it for your desktop, you can get it for Chrome browser or you can just access through a web interface.

So yeah Toggl, if you need to track time it’s well worth checking out. I really like it. I think it’s well priced, I think it’s easy to use, I think it’s effective and I can’t really say too much bad about it. Really anything bad is probably going to be more around the interface or if you have very specific requirements about how you need to track time. But overall yeah go give toggl.com a look, see what you think, give it a try and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

This post is a bit of a departure from my usual review-based posts. I want to share with you an exciting project I’m involved with. It’s called Numerik, and it’s a software designed for sales reps and sales managers who fit the following profile:

• You sell (or manage a team that sells) multiple products to multiple customers with short deal cycles. A good example would be a sales rep for a tyre wholesale business that sells to a bunch of different of tyre retail shops within your territory. Basically, if your success is built off closing a high number of lower value deals, then Numerik could be a good match.
  • If you’re selling high value products to a few customers/accounts with long sales cycles, then Numerik probably isn’t right for you.
• You need to have sales targets/quotas that must be met. Attaining quota/target has to be at the heart of everything you do.
  • Numerik is a quota-focused product.  If your organization doesn’t use sales quotas (or they aren’t all that important) then Numerik probably isn’t right for you.
• The software is currently in early access and is still under development. This means there will be kinks and issues that need to be sorted out along the way.
• You need to be committed to diligently using Numerik to get the best possible results. This is a software that requires frequent (preferably daily) use in order to maximize the value it can deliver. At the moment you also need to be comfortable with manually uploading data from your ERP or CRM on a regular basis – preferably daily as well. We provide instructions and a template file for doing this.

In exchange for your feedback and input, we are offering free, early access to Numerik. If you’re a sales rep or manager who fits the criteria listed above, then we would love to hear from you.

Go over to numerik.ly and fill out the contact form for more information!