How To Say No To Working For Free

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTPeople will often try to get you to work for free by saying that it will be a great case study for you. If they’re coming to you and they don’t want to pay you, you need to consider how willing they’re going to be to take your advice? If they don’t take your advice, it will make a difference to your case study.If someone gets in touch asking you to work for free, be polite and thank them for the opportunity.You may find that people will also ask you to work for free, as long as you can take a cut of the profits that you make them. Whilst this could work, you need to decide whether or not it is worth your time without a guaranteed income. If money isn’t an issue, you may decide that you want to give it a go.You need to remember that you have bills to pay and that should be your priority.If someone asks you to go for a coffee, be wary that they may be asking to meet up with you to pick your brain or get free consultancy. When I first started out, I would meet everyone that wanted to meet up with me because I needed to network and grow my business – and that’s okay.If you value your worth, others will start to value it too.When someone asks you if you want to go for a coffee, directing them to somewhere where they can find the advice you would give can help save you some time. Not only will the resources already be available for them, but it will show who really values your advice and who doesn’t.Sometimes there are times where it’s okay to work for free, whether it’s for a friend or an instance where you feel you will be gaining benefit that is not financial. In most cases, this will be exposure.If there is someone you want to work with, why not get in touch with them to offer them something for free? Make sure it’s value isn’t too great in terms of your time and resources.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…At the end of the day, if someone is paying you, they’re more likely to take your advice, ultimately resulting in more success.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSAn Introduction to Working for Free – 04:38Ways People Try to Get You to Work For Free #1 – 08:20Ways People Try to Get You to Work For Free #2 – 10:40Ways People Try to Get You to Work For Free #3 – 15:30When I Will Work For Free - 27:50LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODEEpisode 34 How I Started My Business5 Places to Use As Opportunities To Build Your ListHow to Produce A Webinar (Blueprint)Creating A Good Sales PageTranscript below Speaker 1: (00:33) Whew. I finally have got an intro piece of music. What do you think? It took me ages and I decided obviously to do it myself with the help of Phil who edits my podcast for me and we've put that together. So I'd love to know what you think. I've never started the podcast with a woo. Maybe I should, I always get a bit bored of doing the same old hello and welcome to the podcast. So maybe that's a new way to start it. Anyway, I apologise if I scare you they slightly, um, I'll wake you up if it's early in the morning. So yeah, let me know what you think of the intro. I'm just glad we've got one now because I was feeling a little bit lost, which is really odd actually because I don't hear the intro. Obviously when I'm recording, I record my little bit at the beginning and I just come straight into this, so actually should have made no difference to me, but I knew from your end it would have made a difference, which is why it feels like I needed to say something.Speaker 1: (01:30) But anyway, intro's in. You'll have to know, listen to the end because obviously I've got a new outro as well. In fact, I've recorded two different ones because one thing I discovered or one thing I thought about when I was doing the podcast is I'm not very good at asking people to go and subscribe or give me reviews and I know that when I listened to other podcasts, they have really long outros or really long intros where they're asking people to do these things. So I have done a couple of, well I've got two different outros. They're still very short and succinct. I think one just say, go and give me a review.. asking nicely obviously, and then one just says go and check out the website just to kind of finish off the podcast. But actually it would be ace if you were happy to go and give me a review. I'd love that. That'd be so cool. I've had some awesome reviews, such lovely ones and I'm going to start reading them out on the podcast and obviously we want to give you guys a shoutout. So if you are happy to then I would love it if you could possibly go and give me a lovely five star review. That would be amazing. Thank you.(02:35) Okay, today's episode's going to be an interesting one. The other day I was having a call with a possible coaching client and she was telling me about her business now because this just happened to be in social media and she basically was doing what I've been doing for the past five years and she was trying to build a business and she just started out and we were having conversation about clients and getting clients and getting paid work, good paid work.Speaker 1: (03:05) And we talked about a few issues and one of the things that came up for me, which comes up for me a lot is the fact that people try and get us to work for free. So today I want to do a bit of a different episode, but hopefully a really helpful one where I talk about basically the ways that people ask us to do work for free or try and get away with not paying us and why you shouldn't do those things and how you can perhaps respond to them. And because I know that was one of the first things actually that when people did ask me, I find it really difficult to say no in the early days because I just didn't know how to say no. And I think generally maybe human beings, women, people, anybody saying no is actually a fairly difficult thing to do for most people I would imagine.(03:53) So, especially when you're confronted with somebody very confident perhaps, and they've, they're trying to pitch a good argument and you've got to find a way to say no. So that's the first half of the podcast. And then the second bit of the podcast is going to be looking at actually ways that you could do some work for free and why I would on some occasions. So I'm just trying to help you think about how you're getting your clients and when some client does come to you and they want to work with you and they're trying to get something like paying and how you can deal with those situations. Because I felt like it happened to me a lot in the early days. So I'm just trying to give you a heads up so how you can avoid these. An Introduction to Working for Free So before I dive into telling you some of the very creative ways that people tried to get work for free, let's just start off by saying, if you have just started doing this as a job or just started this as a business, then you are going to be in a very different position as I was when I first started than I am now. The chances of me doing work for free now are pretty much slim to none. Don't get me wrong, I will do a sort of discovery calls with people and I give them lots of value on those calls and I will help people. I like helping people, but we're not going to do sort of consultancy or we're not going to do management and social media for free. That isn't going to happen now at this point because we don't need to. And because we've worked really hard to get to a level that actually if you don't value my service enough to want to pay for me, then obviously I don't feel that you value it at all. So that's honestly how I feel about myself today. However, when I first started it was different. So if you are just starting out or you're new to it, then you might want to view this in a slightly different way.Speaker 1: (05:38) One of the things that I did do when I first started is I did do training for