March 2022 - InsureYourCompany

Everyone aspires to earn more money for their skills and expertise. As your career progresses, you may be paid more for the solutions you can provide. But the value of those solutions, and your potential income, is limited to the value of the problem and the ability of your clients to pay. If you work on cars, you can’t charge more than the car is worth or more than local car-owners can pay. The same principle is true for the value of every professional and the solutions they provide.

Value and Compensation

So you want to earn more. Not just a little more each year, but to seriously increase the compensatory value of your time. The answer is to solve bigger problems. We all start as entry-level teens and young adults doing delivery jobs, waiting tables, and sorting mail. These jobs are often low-paying because the problems the jobs solve are not high-value. We need deliveries, but the consequences of a missed food delivery are not high and easily recoverable.

Those of us who seek bigger clients and bigger paychecks need to seek out problems that need big solutions.

How Do I Get Bigger Clients?

Most contractors, providers, and service teams strive for bigger accounts, bigger clients, and bigger payouts. It’s a natural part of business growth. But how do you grow your business to bigger clients instead of increasing your capacity for small clients? It’s all about your problem-solution offering. Solving a $40,000 dollar problem probably won’t yield a $250,000 dollar fee for the solution. Likewise, small businesses by necessity must keep their costs modest so they can be covered by a small-scale revenue.

If you’re good at solving small problems fast for a good price, you can win as many small business clients as your services can reach. However, if you want larger-scale clients you will need to solve larger-scale solutions.

Just What Is a Big Problem, or a Big Solution?

A big problem is one that can generate or cost the company a large amount of money. This means the company has more to lose, to start with, and the problem will likely require a more large-scale solution. Sometimes, this is because a larger company has bigger systems that need maintenance, upgrades, and integrations. Other times, it’s because your clients have bigger clients themselves, and each of their projects is higher stakes when put in jeopardy.

Let’s look at these concepts as two examples:

Big Systems, Big Problems, Big Solutions

A local company provides backup generators for lease during emergency outages. They usually provide small generators to a few dozen small businesses in each outage. However, seeking larger clients, they expand to large permanent generator installations and emergency power backup systems. Larger clients not only need larger emergency generators and backup systems, they also have more to lose with hours of delay between the outage and activating their generator. By taking on bigger systems, solving bigger problems, the electrician business wins bigger clients.

Higher Stakes, Bigger Payout

A new hack is using a vulnerability in software used to process health insurance claims. The information at risk private patients’ data, from their social security numbers to their medical records. Every company hacked not only puts patients at risk but is faced with hundreds of thousands of dollars in HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR fines for the exposure.

The cost of a breach means that even small practices are willing to invest a big amount to both protect patients and offset the fines.

Strategies to Scale Up Your Value and Compensation

What if you’ve been solving small problems and are ready to scale up? There are several approaches to your ability to solve bigger problems for bigger clients with deeper pockets.

Scale Up Your Service Capacity

The first is to scale up your business capacity, like our electric generator example. By investing in larger generators and a team to provide concierge on-demand power recovery services, a business service can solve the same problem on a larger scale for larger companies. This mainly requires an investment in your business resources and your team’s capacity to perform skills you already have.

Scale Up Your Skills

Another is to up your game in the types of problems you can solve. The cybersecurity example might involve a technician who ups their game from securing one server to a multi-server network to an international business cloud. This mainly involves building new skills and increasing your personal capacity for big problem-solutions.

Innovate Solutions to Existing Large-Scale Problems

The last option relies on your intuition to innovate solutions to existing large-scale problems. In marketing, this is called seeking a pain point. In other words, look for areas in the market where there are bottlenecks, chokepoints, or hassle where there needn’t be. An example might be writing an API that bridges two essential pieces of software used by large companies in an industry you are familiar with. Another example might be introducing a service that smoothly provides regulation compliance in a challenging industry.

Companies that are struggling with the pain point you solve will pay for your solution. Many will pay whatever they can afford.

If you want bigger clients and higher-dollar projects, you’ve got to solve bigger problems. Your skills and understanding of your clients will determine which problems you solve, and just how big-value those solutions can be. Know your worth, increase the value of your service, and don’t be shy about seeking bigger clients than you’ve ever dealt with before.

When scaling or changing operations, it is important to keep your insurance broker in the loop. A small general liability policy may have been sufficient when you first started out. However, as companies grow their insurance needs change.

Hiring employees, changes in revenue and operations, work locations, and equipment needed can all impact your insurance considerations.

For more information on how changing operations can affect your insurance, contact us today.

Tech consulting is a great field. However, there are often a few hundred listings to sort through and only a few real jobs that meet your goals. As a tech consultant, it can be tough to find the right contract or employment opportunity just by sorting through the job boards. Half the listings are decoys recruiting for other positions and the other half might be a good fit – if they had enough information for you to tell.

The problem is that many companies don’t know how to hire the tech recruiter they need and those that do sometimes don’t take down their job listing when the role is filled. This leaves you with a lot of noise and not a lot of substance. One of the best ways to weed out the chaff and find the jobs that meet your goals is to work with tech recruiters who truly understand the industry – and have clients on both sides of the line.

Here’s how to work with recruiters to find the tech consulting jobs that matter – and weed out the ones that don’t.

Find Knowledgeable Tech Recruiters

First, find a team of experienced and knowledgeable tech recruiters. It takes a tech expert to hire a great tech consultant. This means that your recruiters know your value when they see it – and fully understand the tech needs of the companies they will connect you with. Experienced tech recruiters know how to match your consultant skills with companies who need what you have to offer – allowing you to sort out every job offer that doesn’t fit your profile.

You’ll know the right recruiters because you will understand each other. They won’t just be spinning buzzwords. They’ll tell you in plain language what their clients are looking for and when you explain your expertise they’ll ask all the right questions to really determine your specialties and workflow preferences.

Detail Your Skills, Expertise, and Interests

Once you find the right recruiters, help them understand what you have to offer by detailing your skills, specialties, and interests. Talk about the experience you bring to the table, the technologies you are most familiar with, and the consulting value you have to offer.

Of course, this isn’t just about selling yourself, it’s also about finding a good match for future clients. You’ll also want to describe what you’re most interested in working with, the sectors you prefer, and where you see your skills expanding in the future. This will help your recruiters get an idea of which of their clients will make good contract clients for you, with a good fit on both sides.

Outline Your Ideal Workflow

Workflow is a big deal in today’s recruiting industry. Are you planning on working remotely or do you perform on-site tech consultations for hardware and business systems? Do you prefer Zoom calls, phone calls, or text-based communication? Do you like a 9-5 schedule with the commuting crowd or would you rather have a company culture of night owls?

Give your recruiters an outline of your ideal workflow and the types of teams you like to work with. Then define some margins including what you can comfortably work with outside your dream-job ideal. This will help your recruiters find a good company culture match in an ever-diversifying landscape of workflows in the business world.

Work with Recruiters to Find the Right Clients

Once your recruiters have a strong idea of where you will best fit, they’ll start connecting you with clients. You can skip 100% of the chaff on job boards because recruiters work directly with their clients – they know who is hiring for a real position, which listings are “duds”, and who is just trolling for tech talent.

A team of recruiters on your side can protect you from freelance recruiting tactics like dummy listings and hidden details. They also have insight into each of their clients’ real company cultures and details about the job that might not be included in typical online listings.

Take Interviews with Companies that Meet Your Criteria

Finally, start taking interviews when your recruiter team finds a good match. By working through recruiters, you can avoid wasting your time by only connecting with employers who really want a tech consultant who does what you do – the way you do it. These interviews will be arranged and curated by your recruiters, which also helps to avoid no-shows and ghosting because recruiters know their clients directly. It’s not just a job board connection.

When you find the right match with a client during the interview process, you can build your new consulting contract and your recruiters get a commission from the company for helping them sort through the job board noise from the other direction.

Tech consultants are often required to carry specific insurance. Your contract may list several types of coverages you’re required to have. There are also several insurance products that, while not required by contract, can help protect you and your business. If you are a tech consultant, contact us today for help with your insurance needs.

More and more people are looking at ways to save the environment. They want to do their part to make it better. One such way is to buy an electric vehicle instead of a conventional one. These vehicles can be more costly, but many hope that the amount of money that they save on gas will outweigh these higher costs.

Either way, you will still need to get car insurance for your new vehicle. If you choose an electric vehicle, you may be unsure if you need to know anything special about purchasing insurance. In some ways, it is similar, but there are also differences.

Here are some ways that insurance is the same for conventional and electric vehicles.

You are still purchasing the same type of insurance. You will look at different plans that include liability, bodily injury, collision, and even comprehensive coverage. Due to the increased cost of fixing your car, you may want to purchase a better plan with collision and comprehensive insurance. You don’t want to get stuck without a vehicle if it gets totaled.
Most automotive insurance companies offer insurance for electric vehicles. You can still go through your same insurance company when it comes to electric cars. Most of your bigger insurance companies have started to offer insurance for these types of vehicles.

Here are some ways that insurance is different.

You should expect to pay more for insurance for electric vehicles. Unfortunately, it is more costly to fix or replace electric vehicles, so you should expect to pay more in your monthly or yearly insurance bills.
You may not be able to get discounts on your insurance with electric vehicles. Though most insurance companies offer discounts for many reasons (multiple cars, bundling your home and auto, and much more), you may not get these discounts for your electric vehicles.

So, what tips should you know before buying insurance for your electric vehicle?

It is always a good idea to shop around. You should never buy the first policy that you see. Instead, shop around. Talk to several insurance companies and compare their plans. However, you need to remember that not all plans are the same. You need to look at the fine print to really decide which plan offers you more for less.
You shouldn’t always go for the cheapest plan. No matter how much you want to save money, you should avoid going with the cheapest plan. Even if it is enough to satisfy your state minimum, it might cost you in the long run. Could you really afford to replace your car if it got totaled? If not, you may want to look at a comprehensive plan.
Look for companies that will reward you. Some companies are giving discounts for those who only drive electric cars. They may be able to give you a better deal than some of the other companies.
Don’t be afraid to ask for discounts. Though you may not be eligible for discounts, it never hurts to ask. You may be surprised by the answer, especially if you go in thinking that you won’t get any discounts.

Buying insurance for your electric vehicle isn’t much different than regular vehicles. You are still going to want to shop around at multiple companies. You also need to decide if you just want the liability or if you want collision or comprehensive coverage. That being said, you are probably going to have to pay a little more for your insurance, due to the expense of an electric vehicle. You may also not be eligible for discounts, though it doesn’t hurt to ask!

Whether you have an electric or conventional vehicle, don’t hesitate to contact us today to see what we have to offer you.