Move on from the hourly rate

Many of us sell our skills and experience for an hourly rate for a living.  If we have skills in gardening, we charge people for designing their garden, or cutting their hedge, if our skills are in hairdressing, we charge for a cut and blow dry.  I’ve called this the prostitute business model before, as many of us hire out our skills by the hour.

There are limits on the prostitute or hourly rate model.  You can only sell as many hours as you have in a day, or you have to take on more staff to do the cut and blow dries.  And I’m always looking out for new ways to improve on this, to put more money in the pockets of my clients.

How to move on from the hourly rate

So I was very impressed by Susi Doherty and the team at Vervate who have launched a series of workshops to teach people some of their skills.  There’s a lot we can all learn from Susi’s approach.

Vervate are a team of photographers who specialise in taking photos for using in online marketing.  They did a lot of the photos of me for my site, so you can see that they take great photos.  And now, you can learn from the skills and experience of Susi and the team by going on one of  their workshops, where you’ll find out how to source images for your website, take great photos on your mobile for using on social media, and how to make those photos look great and not cut off someone’s head in the twitter image.

Why this is a good idea

I’m a big fan of getting better at what you do and learning new skills, so these workshops are definitely recommended for anyone who wants to get better at using images for their marketing.  But I’m also a big fan of people who move on from the hourly rate/prostitute model, and find an additional income stream by running workshops (or writing books, setting up membership sites, selling online courses)

How to book the Vervate course

You can book a place at the workshop here.  I went to the pilot workshop, where Susi tested her training on a bunch of Brighton business people, and I learnt tons about using images for online marketing, so I can heartily recommend the new workshops.

Photo credit – I took this!  My model was fellow course participant, Lindsey Pickles (probably the best name in the world)