Ed Gandia explains why profit-sharing deals rarely work for copywriters and business writers. He suggests pushing back on equity arrangements and offering consulting or roadmapping as alternatives that protect your income upfront.
Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.
Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. Just a reminder that you can find show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 204 so this episode is a little different and much shorter than usual rather than my typical 30 to 45 minute format. Today I'm sharing a quick tip with you and this is part of the regular audio insights that I publish for my private coaching clients and I just thought you'd find it helpful, so I wanted to share it with you. So here we go. I hope you enjoy it. So what do you do with prospects who approach you because they want to give you work, but they don't want to stick to your compensation terms and.
They instead want to pay you a.
Percentage of profits, or they want to give you the equity stake in their company, or they want to offer you to pay you very little now, but there's so much work down the road. You can work with them now, they can promise you all this work at.
Your full fee later. You know, what do you do in situations like that?
Are they worth pursuing?
Now I'm going to give you a blanket answer and then I'm going to.
Give you some options to consider.
The first is I have rarely seen these types of arrangements work out for the writer. Okay? And when I say rarely, it's like, you know, less than 10% of cases. And I'm being generous, they're probably 1 or 2% of cases. Very, very rare. The fact is that if someone can't pay you your fee, you need to either walk away, say no gracefully, or you need to look at other ways that you can engage with them. So let's look at the other ways you can engage with them. There's a couple things you could do. One is you could work with them on a consulting basis. Create a very defined scope where you can help them roadmap their path to success. So many cases, what I find is these are startups, not very well funded, but you know, really what they need is not a particular piece like a white paper, for example. What they really need is a little bit of strategy. And you could offer, instead of writing the white paper, to do a consulting engagement or roadmaping engagement where you can help them better define what the right solution is and in how to get there. So think of this in terms of in the realm of planning and strategy as opposed to the execution, which is the actual writing. And this you could do for a much lower cost. And if it's something that you end up productizing, so in other words, something you kind of templatize internally, you could do relatively profitably. However, here's the thing with roadmapping. Roadmapping works best when you know there's a decent probability that of turning that client from a road mapping engagement, which is relatively low dollar, into a full client where you actually can help them with, execute or implement the strategy. So in other words, you can help them write it where you can write the piece. So if you're in a situation where you can help them with the roadmaping, but you know there's probably not a future there, then I would think twice about even proposing that. But if you think it's really just an issue of, you know, they have good intentions, it sounds like, you know, they're well funded, but maybe they're just being very, very cautious and they don't.
Want to spend the whatever, five, $10,000.
For that piece, then road mapping could be a great way for them to dip their toe in the water. You offer great value upfront, demonstrate what you bring to the table, and then put yourself in a great position to then get hired for the execution of the work. But bottom line is, look these situations, creative arrangements with equity stake or promise of profits, percentage of sales, those things rarely work out. You're better off just pursuing prospects who are well funded and are willing to pay your full fee.
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