Meet Sam Carlton | Software Engineer helping SaaS teams master healthy customer growth

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sam Carlton and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sam, is there something that you feel is most responsible for your success?
Understanding the value you provide: What your value is, how much you can charge for it, and all the methods at your disposal to capture profit from that value.

Clients and customers will talk about how expensive you are and then pick the most expensive option you offer them.

Listen to their actions before you trust their words.

Also, always offer multiple options. 3 is a good start.

When your customers consistently pick the most expensive option that you provide, they’re communicating something with their actions that they would never tell you with their words:

You should charge more.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
Working in Software Engineering can be a very polarizing experience.

At first, clients may discount your value in implicit ways to get a better price.

Then when you have to move on, they scramble to hold on to you or scramble to get you back 2 weeks later when they realize just how much value you were bringing.

I once had a client threaten legal action to get me to keep working after we agreed we were finished.

The reality is that you can’t take it personally. You have to stay professional, respectful and avoid saying, “I told you so,” at all costs.

The best tool I’ve found for this is a concept David C. Baker teaches: You always sell your “Thinking” before you sell your “Doing.”

Selling your Thinking can be:
– Paid Consulting or Advisory calls
– Paid Video courses
– Paid Diagnosis

Selling your Doing is:
– Writing code to be shipped in software
– Building graphics in Photoshop or Figma
– Filming and Video Editing

If you’ve ever done freelance, I’m sure you have the experience of giving a client advice to avoid the brick wall just to watch them slowly crash into the brick wall and get frustrated with the experience of working with you.

Something magical happens when you start requiring clients to buy your Thinking before they get access to your Doing.

I’ve found that this is a powerful filter for finding clients that actually care about your Expertise and your opinion and filtering out clients who only want a set of hands.

Providing your Expertise and Thinking is the most valuable service you can offer, and as you can already see, more and more of the Doing work is going to get outsourced to Upwork, GPT3, and Stable Diffusion.

Another way that’s helped me think about is the Stairway to Heaven and the Highway to Hell.

This comes from the harsh reality that the price you charge will always affect the perception of the product even if the client explicitly tells you the opposite.

You’ve likely experienced the Highway to Hell already:
1. Lower your price for a project
2. Client trusts the cheap work less
3. Project has poor results from low trust.

Then rinse and repeat with even lower prices and less trust.

However, this means we can flip the cycle upside-down.

I call this the Stairway to Heaven:
1. Raise your prices
2. Client trusts the premium work more
3. Project succeeds due to high trust.

You wrap up the project with a great feeling and decide to raise your prices again.

Higher prices lead to more trust, leading to higher prices.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I live in Tulsa, and Tulsa excels and two things very well:

Bing proud coffee snobs and making fantastic Barbeque.

I’d introduce them to some of the great and unique Coffee Shops like Notion, Cirque, Doubleshot, and Topeca.

I’d recommend coming the first week of the month since that’s when the Barbecue stops get restocked on Beef Ribs, specifically Killer Wail and Oakhart BBQ. These Beef Ribs trigger an involuntary moment of silent bliss as your brain has to readjust to a new definition of what juicy and tender are.

The worst part is when you wake up from your Beef coma to realize you have to wait another month before you get the opportunity to experience it again.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
When I first started my consulting business, I had no idea how you grow your own thing, so I wandered around aimlessly, trying to get customers through portfolio sites and social media.

After 2 years of this, I came across a friend’s Facebook post where this guy explained how to figure out the price of a logo.

He explained the concept that clients aren’t actually paying for the hours you work or your Photoshop skills, but the real value your providing is access to your expertise.

This changed everything about what I thought my business was, and things started to click together from my past client experiences and frustrations.

The guy was Chris Do, and the YouTube channel is called “The Futur” and it changed my life and business.

I came to find out that all of the videos from this channel were about the “Business” side of running a Creative Business, something that there was a severe lack of education around.

I started watching every video and discovered even deeper experts on the topic like Jonathan Stark, Blair Enns, and David C. Baker.

These guys, especially Jonathan Stark, had their own deep well of content on how to build an “Expertise Business” and all the critical details to build a business that works for you.

They’ve done more for me than any other resource and given me a consistently unfair advantage and confidence among my peers.

Website: https://samcarlton.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatguysam/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-carlton-99884629

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/thatguysam/

Other: https://github.com/ThatGuySam

Image Credits
Seth Roche, Abby Wells, Amy Bell, Allison Swift