From loose hours to one clear package
Sample video: in the live course this plays the full walkthrough.
Selling hours puts you and your client on opposite sides of the table. Every hour you spend making the work better is an hour that costs them more, so the moment you say “it depends how long it takes,” a careful person starts doing sums in their head about the worst case. They are not being difficult. They are being asked to sign up to an open-ended meter.
A package moves the conversation off the clock and onto the thing. It has a name, a shape, a beginning and an end, and it can be said out loud in a sentence. It does not stop you counting hours privately, and the next module will show you exactly how to. What it stops is the client having to.
The five parts of a package
A package is not a longer description. It is five short answers, in this order, to the five things a buyer is quietly working out.
Write these five, in this order
- The outcome. One line, in their language, naming the state they are in at the end. This is usually the sentence you wrote in Module 1, pointed at one job.
- What is included. A short list of concrete, countable things. Three to six items. A stranger should be able to tick them off.
- What is not included. Just as short, and just as concrete. This is the part people skip, and it is the part that prevents almost every awkward conversation later.
- How it runs. The shape of the process and roughly how long it takes: the steps, the number of review rounds, and what you need from them and when.
- What happens next. The single, obvious first action. A call, a form, a deposit. One action, not a choice of three.
Five parts is not a rule handed down from anywhere. It is simply the shortest list that answers everything a buyer needs before they can say yes, which is why anything you add past it tends to slow the decision down rather than speed it up.
A worked example
Before. “I can build you a website. Probably somewhere between forty and eighty hours depending on how many pages you want and how much back and forth there is. We can figure out the details as we go.”
Read that as the buyer. There is no end, no edge, and the only number in it is a range that doubles.
After.
- Outcome: a five-page site for your clinic that a patient can book from on their phone.
- Included: five pages written and built, the booking form connected to your existing calendar, a photo session at the practice, and a half-hour handover so your receptionist can edit the text herself.
- Not included: a logo, ongoing content, and anything to do with your patient records system.
- How it runs: a kick-off call, a first draft in two weeks, two rounds of changes, live in about six weeks. I need your service list and your opening hours in week one.
- Next: a thirty-minute call to check it is the right fit.
The second version is not more work. It is the same work, decided in advance instead of during. That is the whole difference, and it is mostly an hour with a notebook.
The line that does the heavy lifting is “two rounds of changes.” Almost every project that goes wrong goes wrong there: not through anyone behaving badly, but because “until you are happy” has no floor and neither side ever agreed where it was. Put a number on the rounds, say what happens after them, and write down what a round means. It is the least glamorous sentence in the whole package and it will save you more evenings than anything else in this course.
Where the edges come from
If you have done this work before, do not invent the edges. Take the last three projects of that kind and look at what actually happened: where the extra weeks went, which requests arrived late, what you ended up doing for free because it felt easier than raising it. That list, written plainly, is your “not included.” It is drawn from your own record rather than from a worry, which is also why you will be able to say it calmly.
Write one package this week, for the kind of work you would happily do more of. Keep it to a single page. Then, in the next lesson, we go underneath it and build the number the package has to clear before any of this is worth doing: your cost floor.