This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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If you are selling a product, one of the things you have to decide at some point is, are you going to offer some kind of satisfaction guarantee? Are you gonna offer a money-back guarantee if people don't love the products for whatever reason? And I tend to think if you're gonna offer a guarantee, make it a really good one, like a strong guarantee provides reassurance, it increases trust. A weak guarantee is worse than no guarantee at all. For certain types of services, you don't need to have a guarantee.
You don't necessarily need to say for everything that you do, hey, you get your money back if you don't love it. But in some cases, it's very helpful. So it depends on the category, the topic, what you're selling, what you're offering, and so on. Today's listener is starting to get paid for real estate photography. Should she offer a money-back guarantee in case a client is unhappy?
That's the question. And we'll try to adapt it to other categories and topics as well. If you're trying to think about your next side hustle, what do you do in the world of guarantees? Let's hear the detailed question from Kathy along with my answer right after this. [Music]
Hi, Chris, this is Kathy.
Thanks for all the helpful info you provide on the show. In your book, "The $100 Startup," you wrote about the power of an unconditional guarantee, and you also said that it's better to have no guarantee at all than a weak one, which makes sense. But in my case, I'm starting to do real estate photography, and I can't figure out what's better. If I offer an unconditional no limits guarantee of my service, anyone could take advantage of it. Say a home I take photos of doesn't sell.
The real estate agent could come back to me and ask for their money back. But then I worry if I don't offer some guarantee, the agents will wonder why they should hire me. Many of them do their own photos, and they're not great, but they seem to work well enough for them. Am I overthinking this? What should I offer as my money back guarantee, if anything?
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Okay, great question, Kathy, thank you so much. I think this will help us to make a distinction. In this case, in this situation, you're not guaranteeing that the house will sell. Your job is to provide the photos. Everything else depends on lots of other factors, right?
The real estate agent, the market, the price, and so on. So I don't think you need to have a guarantee that the house is going to sell for the exact amount that the seller wants, et cetera. You don't have to touch that at all. I think if you have a guarantee, it's just that the person will love the photos. And most likely, if you're a good photographer, they're gonna love the photos.
Worst case scenario is you have to go back and do it again or something, or maybe in some case, you might give money back. But I think the great majority of the time, it's not gonna be an issue. So in this situation, your guarantee is not so much about the ultimate outcome of the home sales process, which is outside your control. It is specifically about the service you are providing. So I would say don't stress about it.
You could either have the guarantee or not have the guarantee, but the purpose is merely to provide reassurance. In this situation, I think the most reassurance people will need is more of a portfolio. Like let me see some other photos that you have done. If you have taken photos of homes that have been sold quickly or sold at an attractive price, then of course, that's great. You might as well highlight that in that portfolio, but that is not ultimately your responsibility.
So that's what I think there. And again, as Kathy mentioned, you wanna have a strong guarantee or none at all. Going in the middle doesn't really help anybody or provide any reassurance, which of course is the purpose of the guarantee, to increase your conversion, to solidify in the customer's mind that this is a good decision they are making. All right, listeners, that's it for today. If you have a question, sidehustleschool.com.
You can also access, stream, download, your choice. Every one of the archival episodes, 3400 plus, all for free at sidehustleschool.com. The new episodes, of course, come directly to your podcast player, Spotify, Apple Music, wherever you like to listen, seven days a week, and it's all free. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
