Actually, I think there is, and I am not sure this phrase attributed to the American economist Milton Friedman is right any more. In my local town is a supermarket with a car park. It used to be free and you could park there, go to the town and then if you wanted, visit the supermarket. Then they changed it all so unless you went to the supermarket you could not park there. By contrast in a smaller town 10 minutes away is a Waitrose with a big car park and, as long as you stay no more than one and a half hours, no restrictions. I often park there, go somewhere else and then invariably buy something in the supermarket. I have never been back to the more local store.
The same applies to an extent in the context of professional services. If you are prepared to provide some advice and counsel without charge as a prelude to receiving a large instruction, you are far more likely to get the major work in the first place. If a regular client wants some general free advice over lunch, perhaps about the strategic direction they want to take their business in, or how to structure a major acquisition or contract, then providing this not only cements the relationship but opens the door to being instructed on the resulting major corporate or commercial deal.
And any way nowadays as technology advances free services are a matter of fact in a world of “freeconomics”. Here is a great article in Wired Magazine titled FREE! WHY $0.00 IS THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS which explores this phenomena from giving away free Gillette razors in the early 1900’s (for which of course you then had to buy blades) to this freaky land of free namely the Web, commenting Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy and observing that this is driven by the underlying technologies that power the Internet as the cost of bandwidth and storage continually drops.
I also like this blog The Power of Free which cites the Wired article and suggests that the trick to doing Free or Freemium business models right is to ensure that the product/service that you are giving away free is of very high value to the customer.
Of course there are limits as discussed in this Forbes article Ten Things A Professional Never Does For Free and there will always be clients or customers who seek to take advantage. And maybe as Albert Einstein said Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
But I still think an element of free services or products is very powerful as a business development model particularly as we proceed post haste further and further into the digital age.
Let me return if I may if I may to the Wired article for a final thought From Freecycle (free secondhand goods for anyone who will take them away) to Wikipedia, we are discovering that money isn't the only motivator. Altruism has always existed, but the Web gives it a platform where the actions of individuals can have global impact.
The same applies to an extent in the context of professional services. If you are prepared to provide some advice and counsel without charge as a prelude to receiving a large instruction, you are far more likely to get the major work in the first place. If a regular client wants some general free advice over lunch, perhaps about the strategic direction they want to take their business in, or how to structure a major acquisition or contract, then providing this not only cements the relationship but opens the door to being instructed on the resulting major corporate or commercial deal.
And any way nowadays as technology advances free services are a matter of fact in a world of “freeconomics”. Here is a great article in Wired Magazine titled FREE! WHY $0.00 IS THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS which explores this phenomena from giving away free Gillette razors in the early 1900’s (for which of course you then had to buy blades) to this freaky land of free namely the Web, commenting Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy and observing that this is driven by the underlying technologies that power the Internet as the cost of bandwidth and storage continually drops.
I also like this blog The Power of Free which cites the Wired article and suggests that the trick to doing Free or Freemium business models right is to ensure that the product/service that you are giving away free is of very high value to the customer.
Of course there are limits as discussed in this Forbes article Ten Things A Professional Never Does For Free and there will always be clients or customers who seek to take advantage. And maybe as Albert Einstein said Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
But I still think an element of free services or products is very powerful as a business development model particularly as we proceed post haste further and further into the digital age.
Let me return if I may if I may to the Wired article for a final thought From Freecycle (free secondhand goods for anyone who will take them away) to Wikipedia, we are discovering that money isn't the only motivator. Altruism has always existed, but the Web gives it a platform where the actions of individuals can have global impact.
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