There are many ways to monetize your *Notion knowledge and experience including:
- building workspaces from scratch,
- improving or re-working existing workspaces,
- advising customers on good Notion practices and organizational principles,
- installing, configuring, and maintaining templates,
- setting up integrations,
- and so much more.
However, when it comes specifically to building and/or improving existing workspaces, it’s often tricky to know how to price the scope of a build until you learn a little bit about the company and how they are using *Notion (if at all).
This is why I prefer starting with a discovery phase that often includes “Office Hours as a Service” (“OHaaS”).
What are Office Hours?
Office hours are a set time during the workday when a person, often a teacher or professor, is available to meet with students or colleagues to answer questions and provide assistance or guidance. They are often held in an office environment, but they can might also take place in another designated space or even be held virtually via software (such as a Zoom meeting).
Office hours typically recur on a regular cadence, such as once a week, and allow people to get help or advice on a specific topic or issue.
In a modern Notion context, participants could join a Notion expert in a virtual session to get their Notion questions answered. Hosted as a group session, this can also hugely benefit other participants because they can see answers to questions that they may not have known to ask!
When we’re just getting started with something, we often don’t know what we don’t know.
In the Notion Mastery program, Marie Poulin and I host our office hours twice a month (soon to be more in 2023) and provide a space for screen-sharing, questions, and solutioning for participants in the Notion Mastery program.
What is Office Hours as a Service?
As well as Office Hours hosted inside the Notion Mastery community, I also offer Office Hours as a Service to organizations and teams looking to improve their collaboration.
These are paid private sessions where anyone from the company can get support with Notion specific to their internal needs. This allows for the focus to be entirely on one company’s goals with Notion.
I often bundle these with other consulting services, but one standard way I deliver this is a weekly 1-hour session that all employees of the company are welcome to join.
Here’s an example of an offer I recently sold to a customer which included building, training, and office hours:
After reviewing the notes from our Friday call, I’ve outlined a small project for phase two of REDACTED’s Notion workspace:
- To start, this week (25th–28th) I will develop your new OKRs system:
- It will be wired up to your Projects and Tasks systems.
- I will copy over your existing content for your review
- I’ll also do about an hour of cleanup work to fix a few issues I’ve seen pop up since our last build time.
- How would 10:00AM PT on Nov 4th work for a 90-minute REDACTED-specific training work for the team? This will be a guided training with Q&A, so partially office hours, part training.
- Following that I can be available for 1-hour general internal office hours on Friday at 10:00AM PT on Nov 11th, Nov 18th, Nov 25th
- Starting next week I can build out a Products database using your example PDF as a starting point. This’ll be connected to your existing databases and templatized as needed.
Benefits of Office Hours as a Service
Deeper hands-on training
Standardized training with Notion can be a really effective way to level-set organizational knowledge with Notion. However, standardization typically leaves a lot of specifics unanswered. It also can miss more complicated concerns within an organization. Often, individual users of Notion have very specific goals with the software that won’t be covered in a standardized training. OHaaS gives companies an opportunity to explore the edge cases and learn how to address such topics by watching an expert solve them in real-time.
Product/problem discovery
A secondary benefit of running OHaaS is that complex problems and projects will tend to naturally fall out of the discussions. For example, a recent client of mine had some very complex data modelling questions and wasn’t able to successfully import said data into Notion. During our office hours session, we captured an outline of a project that might solve the concern.
When things are too complex to solve in a one-hour live session, you can use office hours to collect and organize new projects to be done. During or at the end of your office hours, you can pitch your customer on extended services like Notion Architecture, data sanitization, etc.
Using a paid discovery engagement helps you earn revenue and identify the problem space, giving you new opportunities for growth.
Office Hours Templates
When I run office hours for a customer, I install a mini dashboard in their workspace where I prepare some structure the sessions and give them a place to ask questions. Each session has a template where I upload the recording of the session and take notes. The HQ itself has a place for me to capture future project work that falls out of the discussions.
The “Office Hours HQ” template is part of a much larger system I use in my consulting work, but I’ve split it out for you below if you find this could be a helpful part of your Notion consulting toolkit.
Get my Notion Office Hours Template
You can grab the free Office Hours HQ template here.
Get my Notion Lean Coffee Meetings Template
I’ve also got a Lean Coffee Meetings template that is somewhat related. Lean coffee meetings have a format, but do not start with an agenda. Participants gather together and discuss topics that are relevant to the group. The goal is to have a productive and efficient conversation, where everyone has a chance to contribute and ideas are generated and discussed in a concise manner.
Within the Notion Ambassador’s community, I host a monthly monetization mastermind. I use lean coffee at these sessions, using a Notion template to capture notes.
You can grab my free Lean Coffee Meetings template here.
[*For full disclosure, I’m a Notion Partner, so when you sign up with my link, you also help support me and my content!]
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