eBay

You are bidding on 2 hours of AdHocnium’s consulting services to be delivered byAdriana Lukas and Chris Heuer in London on Wednesday 13 May 2009.  This is a one time only opportunity (for this moment in time 😉  This is a low cost way for a smart company to take our minds for a test drive, to see if what we know, and to improve what you are doing with social media, marketing and web strategies to make your organization more succesfull in these efforts.  At present, the bidding hasn’t begun, so it is starting off at $50usd!

Place your bid on eBay now.

Why would we auction our time off instead of working hard to get our going market rate of $350 per hour for our time? While the answer is a bit complicated, its also very simple. In short, it comes down to these primary reasons.

Our Story

For a long time now, I have been proselytizing the idea that companies need to stop selling and start helping people buy.  This is one way in which this can be done.  We advertised our rates on the AdHocnium site for this reason, and are extending the concept to see what people are willing to pay.  While we limit the market for our services to a specific geography while I am traveling, reducing our ability to get top dollar perhaps, it is another chance to ‘eat our own dog food.’

The Economy

The mid size businesses, or even smaller ones that are seeiking real competitive advantage and are willing to take bold risks also dont have as much money.  An auction gets us in front of people who normally wouldn’t seek out our services. Of course, even if you are in a big company, and perhaps especially so if you are trying to sell the idea of social media within your organization, we can create tremendous value to help you thrive while your competitors are struggling.

Our Experience

No, I dont mean that we dont have any experience and are forced to do this, but rather that we get more chances to work together, on short burstable projects.  Doing this auction with Adriana Lukas is a fantastic oppotunity for me to get in front of a client together – to get to know each other better, to learn from her while helping others.

Of course, we also get another client to list in our case studies too. Naturally, the more experience we have, and the more we have doing this together, the more valuable our time becomes over the long run and the more we can charge.  The more people giving us testimonials, like Kym Wong, the more you and people like you are going to be willing to trust us too.  Kym told me she had a huge return on her investment of $162.50 when I offered this up in DC back in March as an experiment.

Kym’s feedback on eBay was “Got tons of actionable ideas and advice! Worth 10x the price, highly recommended”.

Our Time

While my time and Adriana’s time is maxed out regularly, I always have a few hours when I am traveling to sit down with people and talk about their business and innovative ideas to help drive to the future.  When I do, as was the case after my session at Next09 with a few people, I always offer up some free advice… to them as individual’s, not to their company.  So if we can get paid a little something, instead of nothing for this, it creates a win-win for everyone.  The reality is though, that we both spend a large percentage of our time on community works and big ideas that dont pay the bills in the short term.  We simply dont invest as much time as we perhaps should selling outrselves (partially because we dont like doing that).

If we were to try to sell our time actively during my visit to London, it would take dozens of hours over several weeks.  If you factor in all the time making the sale, along with the time delivering the education or training, we have to charge a lot to make a reasonable rate of pay.  This auction path allows us to be more effcicient, and hopefully get a better per hour return on our time then we would if we worked hard to sell that halfd day so some of the same people who would buy it.

Increasing Awareness

Is this story interesting to you? Might it be something you might try yourself as Rebecca Caroe suggested? Well, that means more people are going to hear about AdHocnium, about me, about Adriana and about others who are doing this with us.  Our business model is pretty unuque too, so we get a chance to highlight the fact that we have reimagined what a gobal agency should look like, how it should operate, how we can attract the best and brightest talent and how we are leading our clients into the future. So while some may call it a stunt, it is much more (and honestly, it’s a little bit of that too).

The Auction

So what do you think? Anyone in London want to bid on a 2 hour consulting session with Chris Heuer andAdriana Lukas on Wednesday 13 May 2009? Let the bidding begin.