You’re in business to make money. These days, that sounds like a dirty little secret, but all businesses exist to make money. To reward the owners. The shareholders. To turn a profit. 
 
Therefore, you charge your clients for everything you do. 
 
Or do you? 
 
Or should you? 
 
In this article, we’ll dive into the reasons you should, or shouldn’t, provide some hard, payable work for free. It’s based on lots of experience, with lots of clients—and often, their clients. 
 
The cold-reality ROI argument
 
You’ve surely heard of a “loss leader.” Something that gets a prospect in the door for a super-attractive price. “Super-attractive,” as in “untenable.” Hence the “loss” you take on it. 
 
Ever played a scratch-off Monopoly game at McDonald’s and won a free order of French fries? C’mon. You think McDonald’s will lose money on that one? Remember: You can’t claim that prize on that visit. You have to come back.
 
So would you ever, honestly, make a trip to McDonald’s, and only order French fries? Even if they’re free? Of course you wouldn’t. Neither would anyone else. 
 
Hence the “cold, hard ROI” argument for freebies. Which goes something like this: 
 
Sure, you can give away something for free—just so long as you’re virtually assured that you’ll end up making way more than the value of what you gave away, from that same client or customer.
 
Ooof. How cold. How… Darwinian. 
 
It’s the little things
 
First off, know that we here at Copel Communications toss out freebies to our clients from time to time. Typically, they’re what we’d consider “too small to charge for.” We recently did a little quick-turn project for a client that, while admittedly urgent, simply wasn’t a huge amount of work for us. 
 
So what were we going to do at the end of the month? Line-item it for, say, 50 bucks? 
 
Naah. We refuse to nickel-and-dime like that. 
 
Still, we did list it on that month’s invoice. But the price? “N/C.” 
 
Surprise and delight
 
Sometimes, tossing out the freebie is just the right thing to do—especially if you’ve got a longstanding relationship with a client and the right project comes along and you can afford to do it. 
 
Ever give your dog a treat not because he chased a squirrel away from your bird feeder, but rather "just because”? This is like that. 
 
True story: We have a client that competes in an incredibly high-tech field. In fact, among our tech-savvy clients, this is one of the savviest, to the point where it’s always challenging to write for them—to assume that mantle of brilliance. It’s difficult and daunting. 
 
Yet we must be doing something right, because this client keeps turning to us with projects for years and years. 
 
One day, however, the owner of this business hit us with an unusual request. Turns out he was running for town council in the area where he lived, and wanted our help with some of his campaign materials. 
 
Man oh man. We knew this would be a freebie the instant we saw it. 
 
He sent us some fliers. And posters. And emails. And what-not. Asking us to clean them up, and bill him for whatever it required. 
 
Now we know this guy and you don’t. Trust us: He’s a great person. Any town council would be blessed to have him aboard. 
 
We were flattered, and honored, to work on this stuff. Sure, we had other paying gigs on the calendar, but were happy to carve out time for him. And when we turned to it, we hit it out of the park. 
 
Our client was delighted! He was so grateful—perhaps especially because this assignment fell outside of his usual high-tech comfort zone. “Send us your invoice,” he said. 
 
And so we sent it. With every single item line-itemed. We showed the “rack rate” for each thing—what it would cost in the real world—and even added up the total cost. 
 
And then, below that, we subtracted the entire total cost, with the note: “Courtesy discount." 
 
Amount due? Zero. 
 
If you think this client was delighted by the work we did, you can only imagine how surprised and happy he was to find out he was getting it for free. 
 
And we felt great. It still feels good, simply re-telling this story. 
 
Happy ending?
 
So, this client immediately came back and rewarded us with zillions of dollars’ worth of fresh, new work. Right? 
 
Wrong. In fact, it was months before he needed our services again. 
 
Are we bitter? Not at all! This is the antithesis of the “cold-reality ROI” argument. We’d call it the “spark of humanity” argument. A little Christmas, when it isn’t Christmas. 
 
Businesses exist to turn a profit. But they’re also run by people who live lives. Sometimes you simply need to connect at that very basic level. 
 
Have thoughts on this issue or a story to share? Contact us. We’d love to hear it. 

We’re fans of social networking. We’re fans of saving money. And if you’ve read any of these articles, you’ll know that we’re also fans of counterintuitive tricks to help get your business ahead. 
 
In this article, we’re going to check all three of those boxes.
 
Incidentally, although this article originates on our website, www.CopelCommunications.com, we’re cross-posting it on—you guessed it—on LinkedIn. 
 
Make that “attempting to cross-post it,” LOL! If it gets censored, we’ll take that as a compliment—and validation of our advice. 
 
Life on LinkedIn
 
LinkedIn is certainly a powerful and handy tool. We use it all the time. It’s great for making connections with, say, people you’ve just “met” via email—and for checking background credentials, mutual connections, and so on. 
 
It’s also a system that’s ripe for gaming, unfortunately. We recently interviewed a person for a job opening, and he boasted that he had thousands of important LinkedIn connections. One of the people on our interviewing team called him on this point: “Hey, I looked at your connections and I’m very impressed. I’m friends with that senator, too! How do you know him?” 
 
Crickets. 
 
Turned out that this person had essentially spammed this senator and thus got the LinkedIn connection. But it’s not what we’d call a “real” connection. 
 
We practice what we preach. Check out our LinkedIn page. Our connections number in the hundreds, not the thousands. But we know who those people are. And they know us, too. 
 
Turning spam to your advantage
 
Obviously, you’d like to have to have a rich book of LinkedIn connections. Just as important, you’d like prospects to check out your LinkedIn profile. That’s the first step toward their learning more about you, clicking their way to your website, learning even more about you and your business, and, ideally, reaching out to you. All of that would be great.
 
But it begs the question: How do you get these thousands of untold strangers to check out your profile? 
 
Here’s where we get to the “cheap” and “counterintuitive” part of this article. 
 
Not long ago, we got a LinkedIn InMail request from a total stranger: a woman who, ostensibly, wanted to sell us something. 
 
Now in case you’re not familiar with it, InMail is a "premium" service. You guessed right: You must pay to get it.
 
So connect the dots: This woman was shelling out money each month for the privilege of messaging us… a total stranger. 
 
What would you do if you got her message? 
 
If it’s clearly spam/a pitch to sell you something you don’t really need, you’d tend to ignore it, and delete the notification. But that might be costing you an opportunity. 
 
Make the system work in reverse
 
The best thing to do, in an instance like this, is to accept the invitation. Consider: 

• You needn’t buy anything this person is selling. Nothing is obligating you. In fact, this person just spent money to say “hello” to you. You can be polite and obliging and say “hello” right back, thanking them yet declining the offer.

 

• At the same time, connect to that person on LinkedIn. Why? We can guarantee you that this person has thousands of connections, kind of like the “Senator” person we’d described above. 

 

• Now consider that LinkedIn is a two-way street. Every one of those thousands of new second-level connections will suddenly get you on their radar. As a “close” connection, you’ll pop up under “People you may know” on their screens. 

 
This is a numbers game. The more connections this spammer—er, “person”—has, the more exposure you get for connecting with them. It’s like network broadcasting. Only it’s free. 
 
And it gets better: Depending upon how good a job that that person did in filtering to find you, your new “connections” may well be quite relevant to your business. It’s almost like getting LinkedIn Premium… without the premium. 
 
So keep an open eye, and an open mind. The business you end up boosting may be your own. 
 
Want more help? Contact us. We’d be delighted to discuss your needs. 

Have you tallied up your totals for your Schedule C? If not, you might want to consider some of the categories we’ll cover in this quick tax-time edition of our usual article series.
 
Of course we’d be remiss if we didn’t open this one with the obligatory disclaimer: We’re not accountants. We rely on the services of people who are. That said, we can pore through receipts and organizers as well as anyone, so here are some categories to consider before you hand off that big stack of paperwork to your CPA with the time-tested plea: “Find as much as you legally can!”

• Accounting. It’s always fun to use last year’s bill from your accountant to claim it as an expense this year. We’re not saying to rub their noses in it, but, well…

 

• Advertising. We see this one from many angles. As a resource for multiple ad agencies nationwide, we’re their expense and they’re our income. But of course, we need to do our own advertising, too (and so do you), so any outlays you have here are legit.

 

• Bank charges. You can take special delight in going through your year’s bank statements, since they’re arranged by category, and totaling up all the pesky fees they hit you with. Not only can you provide this total to your tax advisor, but you can also get a feel for what you’d paid all year. The bank generally won’t add this up for you.

 

• Books. Happily, this expense is still claim-able, even though hardcopy books are going away. All those downloads come with emailed receipts; take advantage.

 

• Dues and subscriptions. This is where it pays, quite literally, to keep informed. You may subscribe to trade pubs that cover your industry. If you consult, you may need to keep abreast of several industries. Ditto for trade groups, newspapers, and so on: It’s great to get multiple points of view. Added bonus: What you pay for this qualifies as an expense.

 

• Insurance. Uggh.

 

• Janitorial and cleaning. Oooh! A surprisingly good one. That is, if you’re a small shop and have been doing this yourself. Splurge. Get a receipt!

 

• Office supplies. We’re not sure about you, but we can say, firsthand, that our totals for this number have been steadily diminishing over the years. We’re not 100-percent paper-less, but pretty darned close. (Tax time is the one glaring exception.) Nowadays, we’re finding more expense-able items in a categories such as…

 

• Website hosting fees and online storage. These are categories that didn’t even exist back in the day. Today, they’re ubiquitous. And if you’re still riding that free trial version of Dropbox, for goodness’ sake, pay for the real deal.

 

• Printing. Here’s another one which, like postage, is going away fast. Now if you’re doing mailers and attending trade shows, you’ll still pay your fair share of both. But we’d wager they’re not, proportionally, what they used to be, in terms of your ad-spend.

 

• Telephone. This expense used to vary with the amount of “long distance calls” you placed. Today, it varies with the amount of roaming you do, or data you download on the road. Either way, this is a standard business expense.

 

• Other stuff. There are lots of additional categories you should consider, including things like computer supplies and updates, continuing education (classes, seminars), holiday and thank-you cards, and so on.

 
How can you come out ahead?
 
As we’d mentioned at the outset of this article, we’re not accountants. Once you gather up your info, do like we do, hand it off to the pros.
 
That said, there are ways we can help you save. If you’re investing too much time, money, or effort in your marketing, writing, or creative services, let us help. You’ll find that our work is first-rate, our service is cheerful, and our rates are hardly (*groan*) taxing. Contact us today.