The New Inspirer

Entrepreneur Sanne Roemen never makes an invoice. She lets her clients decide what they want to pay her. And how they want to pay her.  Sanne, who consults on how companies can apply web 2.0 principles in their business, knows by experience by now that clients generally pay her three times as much as she would have offered before the job was done. The side-effect of clients paying less than expected therefore isn’t too much of a problem. “I can’t determine for the client what the value of my services is. That’s something which is different for everybody”.  Although Sanne totally trusts on her clients to judge her value added, so far she hasn’t had any negative experiences. Above that, it’s part of the entrepreneurial risk. “When making an offer it’s exiting to see whether or not you’ll get the job. Now it’s exiting to see how much you get once the job is finished”.

Michiel Kahmann from Pentascope says that determining the value of a service is generally difficult. However he does think that this is the way the economy is headed. ” There are many young people who you can’t bind with a paycheck and who are interested in more than money, such as their own development. If you put things in a formal contract, that might be clear, but it also prevents people from being creative”.

It’s a very interesting topic to think about. One of the key elements in our view is the factor trust. This business model only is a problem if you don’t trust your counter party to compensate you adequately for services offered. But then again, who wants do business at all with somebody he doesn’t trust? And even if you were to be scammed by a parasite, how long a life would such a person have and how long would it take before his reputation would be smashed?

Another dominant factor is payment. Money is currently the main medium of exchange for services rendered. But who’s to say that payment can’t take place in a different fashion? You could get paid in goods, other services, intellectual capital, network or in good old “favors”.
Now the interesting side-effect of this “open payment system” might be that total compensation (in terms of money, network & trust) for providing the service might actually be a lot higher than when you’d simply write an invoice.

A final factor worth considering is that the open payment system would create some very beneficial side effects. Service providers would have to focus on delivering value in stead of merely spending time, intrinsically upping the quality of the service. If the prospect of providing value would be slim, then the provider would think twice before wasting his time. Clients would not only love that, but at the same would love to postpone the budget headache until after the service is provided ( i mean who can really be against paying handsomely when great value is delivered?).

In a sense the open payment system isn’t that new. It’s the way business has been done before the lawyers & accountants created the fear that one wouldn’t be compensated for value added, unless all the details of a proposed transaction were buried in piles of triple signed paperwork. Wouldn’t it be nice to do business like our grandfathers did? By a simple handshake. There’s really no reason we can’t. Just let go of the fear and have a little faith in others >:)

Some links of possible interest:

• How the Dutch are pioneering open payment and self-determined revenue sharing practices for creative individuals.
• Martijn Aslander. Dutch website but some English stuff here and there.
• Part of this post as well as the picture was sourced from an article in NRCNext. Dutch only.

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