In this episode of OutBüro Voices featuring LGBTQ professionals, entrepreneurs, and community leaders from around the world, host Dennis Velco chats with Louis Waters is an LGBT entrepreneur.
His innovative approach is very different than most in that the bulk of his professional service fees are not the typical hourly or project-based. Rather he partners with his clients to share the risk and reward. On a client, by client basis, he structures a relationship where he earns a percentage of his client’s new growth. In this way, if his marketing is not successful his client owes nothing. If it is successful, he earns a percent of the new revenue. It is an innovative approach. Most marketing agencies pitch ideas and the client then pays for the implementation of those and hope it works. In this model, Louis’s firm is highly engaged and equally sharing the fisk and reward. His approach is not for all clients. He likes to have clients with little or very underperforming marketing and a fairly straight forward business model. He also keeps an eye on trends for emerging fields to work with businesses who are early adopters to ride a wave together. He has had to turn away prospective customers who were not a good fit. In some cases, he has offered business advice on how those prospects might adapt their business to be a better fit. Some direct cost fees get invoiced so that Louis is not financially losing any money.
Louis Walters’ profile on OutBüro > https://www.outburo.com/profile/louiswalters/
Conversation Time stamps
- 1:00 Louis Walters’ brief Introduction
- 2:00 Target Client Small to Medium Businesses
- 3:00 Partnering with Clients pay for success in a shared return on investment (ROI) manner – Skin in the game, share in the potential up-side, putting money where their mouth is – earn a percentage based on the success of marketing campaign, cut of increase in profit margin
- 7:30 Legal client example
- 8:00 Does not bill/charge client if traction/results are not realized, they revisit, improve and retool
- 8:30 Builds trust and mutual learning teamwork. Clients then still engage for work that is paid such as brochures.
- 9:30 Unique agreements per client with the ability to earn more with fewer clients.
- 11:00 Choosing clients wisely with the potential to grow and room for improvement
- 12:00 For prospective clients that aren’t a good fit Loius provides advice to improve to be a future fit
- 12:30 Louis seeks a business that has a market potential to take-off based on many factors
- 20:00 This could be a business game-changer if you have financial difficulty right now, this may not be the best model unless you cover your bare base and do a blended approach of partial billing and partial upturn profit-sharing
- 23:00 Small clients are ideal sue to dealing with the owner. Keep things simple, straight forward, and measurable with short spurts of 2-4 weeks to assess, measure, improve, repeat.
- 28:00 Not click tracking. Revenue tracking.
- 29:00 Train client staff – partner, educate, empower, and all thrive while building trust.
- 36:20 Don’t allow a client to abuse your time. Ensure the client understands your time has value and has a billing rate. Don’t waste it or bill.
Could Your Business Try Pay for Performance?
In today’s world crisis how you adapt can define new opportunities or potentially going out of business. If you offer professional services, would you consider a pay for performance? FOR Louis this approach has meant he has been able to cherry-pick clients to work with, have fewer clients while earning above average for his work. He is focused on quality that drives results.
To connect with Louis find him on OutBüro here. https://www.outburo.com/profile/louiswalters/
Join me and Louis on OutBüro, the LGBTQ professional and entrepreneur online community network for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, allies and our employers who support LGBTQ welcoming workplace equality focused benefits, policies, and business practices. https://www.OutBuro.com
Would you like to be featured like this? Contact the host Dennis Velco. https://outburo.com/profile/dennisvelco/
Get involved!
Comments