What To Do When Your Client Pressures You To Slash Your Rates

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Invite Friends Highlighted Stories! What To Do When Your Client Pressures You To Slash Your Rates Draft that long, frantic email, then hit "delete." Write these four sentences instead. Elliot's biggest client, Monstrous, was rapidly expanding into the U.K. and Europe. Elliot had noticed accounting issues with them lately. Nothing huge, just some sloppiness–they'd misplaced a couple of invoices, and once they'd paid a single invoice twice. So he was glad to hear they were hiring a chief financial officer. He'd enjoyed the work and company culture and wanted Monstrous to succeed. It was clear they needed a seasoned financial executive to do so. But one morning Elliot opened his email and realized that the new CFO wasn't necessarily going to make things easier for him. His day-to-day contact had written: Elliot, We love your creative insights and love working with you! I want you on my brand team forever. After researching local designers' fees, we've determined the market rate is $100 an hour. Would you be willing to drop your hourly rate to that? If this is okay with you, it will be in effect the first of the month. Sylvia "Yikes! That's one-third off my rate," Elliot thought. "I should've seen this coming. They need to hold onto as much cash as possible for their expansion. Now what?" Continued here � � Your Brand's Personality is the Secret for Success, But You're Probably Ignoring It Consider systematic changes in organizational behavior that promote and enhance client experience. A company's success can rise or fall depending upon the validity of the thing giving rise to its existence. This is an unquestionable reality in business, in which to succeed over time is dependent upon the product being appropriately vetted, proven, determined to be reliable and fulfilling a need within a given market. But then a question arises: Is the secret to a successful business the actual product, the perceived value of it, or a combination of the two? The mistake A great product or service is a vital business fundamental, so it is understandable why so many entrepreneurs and companies place a significant amount of focus on developing a strong product or service. If you have been in business long enough, you undoubtedly have heard companies say, "We are going to beat our competitors by having the best product." But it ultimately begs the question as to why many businesses fail or find themselves in the land of mediocrity. Turns out, this narrative is not a competitive advantage and puts a company's hope falsely in the wrong perspective. Continued here You Might Like � � � What Robots Can - and Can't - Do for the Old and Lonely For elderly Americans, social isolation is especially perilous. Will machine companions fill the void? It felt good to love again, in that big empty house. Virginia Kellner got the cat last November, around her ninety-second birthday, and now it's always nearby. It keeps her company as she moves, bent over her walker, from the couch to the bathroom and back again. The walker has a pair of orange scissors hanging from the handlebar, for opening mail. Virginia likes the pet's green eyes. She likes that it's there in the morning, when she wakes up. Sometimes, on days when she feels sad, she sits in her soft armchair and rests the cat on her soft stomach and just lets it do its thing. Nuzzle. Stretch. Vibrate. Virginia knows that the cat is programmed to move this way; there is a motor somewhere, controlling things. Still, she can almost forget. "It makes you feel like it's real," Virginia told me, the first time we spoke. "I mean, mentally, I know it's not. But—oh, it meowed again!" Continued here � Why working from home is so disruptive to your sleep schedule If you've been staying up later and hitting your snooze button more, you're not alone. Here's why. A night of fitful tossing. A bedtime and wake time that fluctuate daily. A workday that begins sluggishly and ends later than you intended. If this sounds familiar, your work-from-home routine (or lack thereof) may be the cause. "We might expect that working from home allows people to sleep better, but studies conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic suggest this is untrue," says Jennifer Martin, professor of medicine at UCLA and sleep-expert adviser at Precision Nutrition. "What I'm seeing is an increase in sleep disruption in getting to sleep and staying asleep related to the overall increased collective stress," says Allison Siebern, an adjunct clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences. Continued here You Might Like � � � Maintaining eye contact while talking overwhelms the brain To humans, eye contact is everything. From infancy onward, humans look to the gaze of others to try to gauge their emotions and thereby determine what those emotions say about their relationship. Yet, despite the social advantages we can gain by looking into someone eyes, we are pretty bad at doing it consistently: Research shows that adults make eye contact 30 to 60 percent of the time in a conversation, but experts say that people should actually be making eye contact 60 to 70 percent of the time if they are hoping to get anything out of it. Avoiding eye contact, it seems, is unavoidable. Researchers from Kyoto University decided to determine why some people find it hard to maintain eye contact when speaking with someone in person. In a paper published in the December edition of Cognition, they argue that people break away from another's gaze in order to not overload their brain. Continued here � Valentina Petrillo: 'Better to be a slow happy woman than a fast unhappy man' She clearly remembers the day when, aged nine, she put on her mother's skirt for the first time, "It was an incredible emotion. It was like touching heaven with your finger tip," she says. Valentina Petrillo could this year become the first openly transgender woman to compete at the Paralympics. For the visually impaired Italian, selection for the national squad would be a dream come true - but she says she understands why other athletes may have doubts and questions about racing against her. "I'm happy as a woman and running as a woman is all I want. I couldn't ask for more," says Valentina Petrillo. "I've got a fire inside me, that pushes me. An emotional strength. Obviously, my body's not what it was at 20 when I was at my peak, but my happiness pushes me to go further, to go beyond my limits." Passionate about running from an early age, Petrillo's aspirations were seemingly dashed at the age of 14, when she was diagnosed with Stargardt disease, a degenerative eye condition, for which there is no cure. After finishing school in her hometown of Naples, she moved to Bologna at the age of 20 to study computer science at the Institute for the Blind. Here she took up sport again, becoming a member of Italy's national five-a-side football team for people with sight loss.

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