Joel Miller - Nine Years After Ditching Hourly

In 2017, Joel Miller came on Ditching Hourly episode 33 to talk about his recent switch to value pricing. Nine years later, Joel and his identical twin brother Alan still run The Sky Floor as a two-person shop. They do all the client work themselves, their average client has been with them for eight years, and they haven't hit a famine cycle in a long time, so they're not hungry for leads. Best of all, Joel has gone from working 80-hour weeks and making “a hilariously tiny fraction” of what he makes now to working normal hours and turning off his notifications at night and on weekends.

00:00 - Meet Joel Miller00:46 - The Sky Floor Then and Now02:00 - The Why Conversation in Practice06:12 - Building Client Lifetime Value08:50 - The Client Who Came Back10:48 - Value-Based Monthly Retainers12:26 - Scaling Without Headcount16:03 - Indirect Word of Mouth18:08 - What Keeps Clients for a Decade25:25 - Spotting Hidden Opportunities29:01 - Think Like a Business Owner37:22 - Curiosity and the Entrepreneurial Spirit41:53 - People Over Profits44:51 - Never Stop Asking Why48:36 - Where to Find JoelJoel Miller is the co-owner of The Sky Floor, a digital problem-solving agency he runs with his identical twin brother Alan. They started the company about 18 years ago as a web design shop in the Chicago area and now handle everything from websites and LMS systems to Google Ads and CRM replacements. Joel and Alan do all the client work themselves and have built long-term relationships averaging eight years per client. Joel appeared on Ditching Hourly episode 33 in 2017 to discuss his early experiments with value pricing. Try his free Capacity Tax tool to see whether a client is blocking your next growth move.

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Before you go!

The next time someone asks you for your hourly rate, I want you to stop what you're doing and head on over to valuepricingbootcamp.com to sign up for my free value pricing email course.

Hope to see you there!