If you’re like most entrepreneurs you get hit up to work for free. Someone wants to pick your brain (yes, if the contents of your brain usually have a price tag higher than a cup of coffee, then coffee a good brain picking is working for free,) or they want you speak, consult, design, troubleshoot or otherwise provide your products or services for charity, for the exposure, for the good-will or just because they don’t want to pay for it.
As many reasons as there are for people to ask you to work for free, there are only two good reasons to do it. They are equally good reasons, but you should never use the first to justify the second.
Related: When You Should Work for Free (Yes, Seriously)
1. It’s marketing.
Every business should have a marketing budget. Benchmarks vary by industry, but let’s say you decide to budget a minimum of 5 percent of gross revenue. That may not be much money, but a lot of entrepreneurs don’t spend even five percent on their marketing efforts.
What do they do? They network, they use social media, they take their clients to lunch and ask for referrals. They avoid spending money by leveraging their two other resources, time and energy, to make up for what they aren’t investing in dollars.
That's great, so long as they follow the same principles for their time and energy investment as they would for a monetary investment. Which means having a clear strategy for their efforts and an eye on their return.
So if doing the work for free fits your marketing strategy, and you believe the investment represents a reasonable expectation of return, then it might be well worth saying yes. Your guidelines may differ, but here the questions I ask before investing time and energy instead of dollars:
If I were spending money, how much would I be willing to invest?
Let’s take a conference, for instance, at which I've been asked to present for free. If I had to pay for a sponsorship to get in front of that audience, I’d be weighing the potential return against the investment. I’d be asking questions like, “How closely does this audience align with my most profitable niche?” and “How much impact will this exposure allow me to have on the audience?”
Based on my conclusions during that line of inquiry, I’d decide if I was willing to invest marketing dollars to promote my business at that event, and if so, how many dollars I was willing to invest. Once I know that, I can do a pretty fair calculation of how much time and energy I should allow myself to put into presenting in exchange for exposure. That raises some questions.