Ask Rezzz

You can find all the steps and questions to ask yourself over in the show notes. So don't sweat trying to copy all this down. Just have a listen first.

Yesterday I gave you a dose of reality.

Harsh? Maybe. Blunt? Somewhat. But if you are still a skeptic in this whole niching down thing. I want to give you a bit of a game plan so that you can test the waters and see if specializing your business has an positive impact on your business.

In business, you need to experiment sometimes. I’m a HUGE fan of making some assumptions and building an experiment.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD EXPERIMENT

A good experiment has an assumption, a set time around the experiment, and a measurable goal.

Parameters for testing the waters of niching down:

• Assumption: niching down has a positive impact on your business
• Time: 45 days
• Measurable goal: Get 2 new clients

I want to disclaim that there are no guarantees. Your mileage may vary, but what I want you to get from this exercise is a feeling for what being a specialized business can mean for you. Is messaging easier? Is finding the right kind of client easier? Is the pay better?

Your First Week

Over the next 45 days, take 90 mins per day and dedicate it to working towards being a specialist.

Pick a type of customer to focus on.

Pick the type of work that you’ve done in the past that you enjoy doing.

Pick a specific solution that is scaled back from your current offering. Something that may be a piece of your current services in fact that you can deliver quickly and effectively.

Look at your services and select a piece of it that you can deliver to a specific type of client quickly.

This could be building landing pages for non-profit events. Could be writing about pages for coaches and mentors. Could be designing Facebook Group banners for groups that are larger than 1000 members.

Remaining Month

Then over the next month and a half, go looking around for clients, set up sales calls, reach out to your own network of colleagues and have the conversations around your new offering.

Reach out to lost leads and see if your new offering fits a need they have.

Build a simple landing page on carrd.co or even your own website to at least direct people to.

Goto Megamaker and follow Justin’s template of building out that landing page.

Pay attention to the language you are hearing in these conversations. How are they talking about problems they have? How are they talking about the solution to those problems?

Over the course of the next 45 days, note down in a spreadsheet how many people you reach out to, how many engage in conversation with you, and how many buy the thing you are selling?

At the end of the 45 days if you’ve given this a genuine effort, meaning you dedicated 90-minutes a day, then take an afternoon and review your results.

Post Experiment analysis

How does it align with the results you have with being a generalist?

Was it easier to speak the language when you had the solution to present?

Was it easier to go to the places to find prospects that fit for your offering?

By the end of the 45 days, did you have a better grasp of the solution and potential customer?

How did the offering change over the course of the 45 days?

The answer to these questions should give you a good sense of how niching down can make an impact on your business.

How do I know, because I’ve done it 4 times myself. 3 of which allowed me to pivot my business and the 4th allowed me to steer clear of a road that I needn’t not go done.

If you want some help in executing on this, head on over to askrezzz.com, find the chat bubble in the bottom right corner and let me know.

I would love the opportunity to execute this experiment with you.

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For full show notes, a customized Ask Rezzz playlist, and bonus material, head on over here for it all. 
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Let me ask you a question, why are you niching down?

What ever that reason is, that’s your focus. It’s that “why” that brought you to this conversation in the first place.

You’ve heard this before from Marshall Goldsmith, right?

It’s the idea that sometimes you need to be a bit uncomfortable and out of your comfort zone to achieve the results you want.

This fear of niching down aligns with a similar fear of gambling.

It’s easy to stay being a generalist because that feels safe because you’ve been able to build a business around it. But you are at a point where you are starting to think about your value, whether that’s your rate or time or both.

While niching down can feel like you are betting it all on one-hand, in reality it’s betting on a hand where you know what everyone else is holding.

If you are solving a problem, have a track record of success at solving that problem, and have social proof of that reliability from past clients, that’s your winning hand.

A lead with that problem, who identifies with those past clients, and sees that you understand their problem fully will always choose you above someone else who may have had a generalized and limited experience with that problem.

Let me illustrate this with a simple example.

When you have a cold, you goto a general practitioner right? What you are looking for is that quick fix, the medicine that will get you feeling better and back on your feet.

But it’s also why Walk-In clinics exist. So that if your GP isn’t available, you can feel better by going to a walk-in clinic and they’ll be happy to pick up your payment.

On the other hand, let’s say you need to brain surgery. Are you going to use a walk-in clinic? I didn’t think so.

You are going to do research, find someone with a track record of success and then choose the best.

Now that brain surgeon went through medical school just like your GP, but took it a step further, went down the road of niching down.

Are they leaving money on the table? 

Yup, for sure they are.

Because of niching down, they’ve become an expert at solving a problem. They can then charge a premium for their services. They can spend an hour with a patient, have a consultation, know exactly how to speak to the patient that will result in tens of thousands of dollars with them, then someone who has a co-pay of $50.

That’s a lot of co-pays they are giving up. 

When niching down, you leaving money on the table. However you are able to focus on a number of things. The customer, how they speak about their problem, remain on the pulse of new strategies and techniques and delivering on high-ticket solutions for clients rather than the commoditized services.

The fear of FOMO when niching down is an excuse of being outside your comfort zone. It’s when you get outside your comfort zone that you can achieve the results you want.

If this dose of reality still doesn’t sit well with you, tomorrow I’m going to share with you game plan that will allow you to stay being a generalist but test the waters of niching down.

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For full show notes, a customized Ask Rezzz playlist, and bonus material, head on over here for it all. 
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I’m often asked this question around niching that seems to question either or.

Yes, you can pick the type of work you do and specialize your business.

Yes, you can pick the type of customer you work with and specialize your business.

But, the type of work you do and the type of customer you work with are both part of niching down to specialize your business.

When I’m working with clients on finding their specialty, I have them reflect on the type of work AND the type of clients they’ve had in the past.

A key part of the exercise and self-reflection is figuring out what they liked and what they didn’t like both about the people and projects.

The reason is simple. Ultimately it’s the customer that you are helping with your solution in the end. You can’t be fully successful with just one piece of the puzzle.

If the type of work you like to do is something that the market doesn’t need, then you have no business.

If the type of customer you like to work with is someone who doesn’t need what your selling, then you have no business.

Build it and they will come is not reality. Just because you sell something, doesn’t mean that someone will buy it.

I feel that when someone is thinking about niching down a thinks about the customer, they think more about the customer as a business. Do they have money? How hard is it to reach them? How hard is it to sell to them?

These are valid thought exercises to walk through, but I’d argue that there’s a key element missing here.

Think about any job you’ve ever had. What is the one constant in each job that you had?

You were forced to work with whoever else was there and deal with any customer regardless of whether or not you liked them.

Now think about your closest friends or who your partner is?

You chose them because you truly enjoy being around them and your personalities mesh well together.

There’s a reason why those relationships last for years.

As a freelance business, if you want profitability and sustainability, you won’t be excited to all the things you need to for the business if you do not like the people who you are helping. 

You won’t be able to build the long lasting relationships and referral network with people that you don’t feel connected to.

It’s just not going to happen.

Business is about people. This is even more the case in your freelance business. 

You want to genuinely like and enjoy working with your customers. You want to be able to love their problem enough to be able to solve it over and over again for them day after day. 

You don’t want to build yourself a business that’s soul sucking and something you don’t want to get out of bed for each and every day.

Might as well stay at the cube farm for that.

When niching down, yes, target the type of work you love, but always keep in mind your customer. 

Make sure that you enjoy working with them and solving their problems. To do that, you need to like them as people.

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For full show notes, a customized Ask Rezzz playlist, and bonus material, head on over here for it all. 
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Why is the Nike Swoosh so effective? And if you don’t think it is, my one year old son points to it anytime my wife and I wear Nike apparel and says “swooo”. 

Why is the red for Manchester United or the navy blue from the Yankees so widely recognized?

These things are all apart of branding. When you see them outside of their normal context, it puts it right into context.

In 2015, I decided to hire Megan Gray for the branding of my company. I gave up the reigns and gave her complete creative control over all things rezzz.

I didn’t know it then what sort of an impact it’s had on my business, but looking back over the past 3 years, it’s done a 5 things for my freelancing.

• Took a lot of the decisions away from me when it comes to imagery, text, font, etc.
• Elevated my professionalism
• Sets a tone that branding and other things are important for my business
• There’s a thought process to what I do and that translates down to clients
• Stand out in a crowded market

Branding is very important in freelancing. Standing out in a crowd of other freelancers is hard, but when you have a brand and a way to be front-of-mind with leads, clients, and past clients that puts your brand out there.

A past client or lead won’t say “Let’s go to Upwork”, they’ll be saying “Wait a second, I know someone, let me dig up their name.” Because your branding stuck out in their mind.

But as a professional, it’s your job to protect your time, which protects your profits. And I want to share with you 2 things that I use to keep the conversation going.
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For full show notes, a customized Ask Rezzz playlist, and bonus material, head on over here for it all. 
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When you have a phone conversation or video chat, always set a time limit and an agenda for the call.

These will be the 2 lifesavers for you to keep the conversation on point, focused and effective.

This is especially true with sales calls.

When you are on a sales call, often times the lead will want to unpack and explore their project with you. 

They want to start defining the requirements of their project with you on the line.

This is a surefire way for you to lose time and money. It will turn a half hour call into and hour and a half.

Before you hop on the call, define the parameters of that call. For example, that it’s a 30-minute call to talk about any specific questions about the project and if at the end of the call the next steps are not clearly defined, another call will need to be scheduled.

For me this is where I transition into paid discovery. I explain that this initial call is a free 30-min conversation, but if at the end I can’t define the scope of work, then we will need a paid discovery session. I go into what that would look like, which in a nutshell is a paid 2-hour session in which we deep dive on the business and outline the scope of work.

Because I let the lead know this prior to getting on the call, I’ve framed the conversation in a way that if they want to take the conversation over and talk off topic, then it could potentially cost them money to move forward.

Now during the call that doesn’t mean that I’ll be some warden to keep things on track and only focus on the topic of conversation, but I will be mindful of the time.

I’ll say things like “we’ve got 10 mins left for what we scheduled for this call” and “I want to respectful of your time today.” “Is there anything else that we need to cover?”

Things like that will prompt the conversation back on track if it’s been astray.

It’ll also trigger my email that I know they read before. Why, because inside that email is the link that they used to scheduled this call we are on.

So there’s never any excuse for going over time unless we both allow it.

There’s not a surprise that the next step in working together could be a paid engagement.

Everything is said up front and center, which keeps me, them, and the topic of discussion on track.

To sum this up nicely.

• Set the agenda and email it along with the link to schedule the call
• Set a time limit for the call
• Set expectations about what could happen as potential next steps

Before I share with you my answer, are you new to the podcast. Maybe you are simply overwhelmed and not sure which episodes you want to listen to first. I bet you there are a few episodes you’ve missed that pertain directly to you and can help you with your business right now!

I’ve got the answer for you. You can get a customized playlist of Ask Rezzz episodes based around you, your business, and your experience. This playlist is made by minifigs and gremlins directed by me of course, that are handpicked especially for you.

I’m always going to suggest you niche down. Let’s get that out there straight off the bat.

It’s just a matter of how fast you specialize to that niche and how strongly focused you stick to it.

Regardless of your situation, you should always be working towards that niche. In the end, that’s where you’ll want to be to avoid that feast or famine cycle.

With that out of the way, I’m a realist. I know you’ve got bills to pay. They will never stop coming in and how well positioned you are on being able to pay those bills will guide my answer to this question.

The only time where you’ll here me suggest taking on generalist projects is when you don’t have an income coming in or a nice nest egg of savings that can support you while you structure your specialized business.

Let’s face it, when you niche down, it will take longer to get a few projects under your belt than it will as a generalist. That’s just the way the world works. 

You’ll find way more $15 bottle of red table wine than $250 50-year old bottles of Merlot. I have no idea if that’s the thing, but you get my point.

There are more low revenue generating projects out there for many different businesses than there are premium revenue generating projects.

So if this is your situation, then go get yourself a generalist project or 2. But all the while you should be spending at least half the time targeting the niche you want your business to serve.

Now, if you have a severance from a position you once held, or a savings, or you are even working full-time, go straight for the niche.

You have a cushion to sit on for a little bit. You can be a bit selective. You don’t have a HUGE urgent need to bring money in to pay bills because of that cushion.

Build yourself some constraints, especially when starting out and you don’t have a full-time job. Tell yourself that you are going to give yourself 2-months of dedicating 100% of the effort towards the niche because you’ve got 6-month cushion. 

If you can’t get a project or 2 within that timeframe, then dial back the focus to 50% and get yourself some income.

And finally if you are working full-time now, there’s no excuse to take on a generalist project. You’ve got income coming in. No doubt you want to leave your job for something better, why would you waste your time on building a reputation in something other than what you want to leave your job for and live the kind of life you want?

I hope these scenarios make sense to you. There’s a lot of gray area in between each of them, so please take what I say as a guideline, not gospel, and apply it to your own personal situation and comfort level.

But always keep at least half of the effort focused on the specialty.

Before I share with you my answer, are you new to the podcast. Maybe you are simply overwhelmed and not sure which episodes you want to listen to first. I bet you there are a few episodes you’ve missed that pertain directly to you and can help you with your business right now!

I’ve got the answer for you. You can get a customized playlist of Ask Rezzz episodes based around you, your business, and your experience. Head on over to askrezzz.com today to get your custom playlist made by minifigs and gremlins that are handpicked especially for you.

Now let’s get back to today’s show shall we?

When you first start out selling a recurring service, you’ll start to make it out be an afterthought in the conversation. You’ll focus on what the lead came to you with in the first. 

What you want to do is re-frame the conversation so that the solution is the recurring service, not the one-off project.

How you do this really depends on you and your business, but there are a few things to keep in mind:

If you listened to the show way back in episode 12 you have heard the first 3 points before. They are crucial to framing the conversation so I going to go over them quickly for you.



1. Point out to them the path on why they are here talking with you in the first place.
   Whether that’s by referral or some other pathway. Then talk about the process and everything that they did with you so far to highlight the value that they’ve received. To put their mind in a frame of positivity.

2. Align you recurring service against the one-off project.
   Share with them the benefits of the recurring that makes it a complete no-brainer. Chances are that you came from doing one-off projects in the first place, right? You understand the hiccups and headaches that occur in the one-off projects. Explain why those don’t exist in your recurring service.

3. Lay out the path to move forward.
   They want to get the ball rolling. Plain and simple. The last thing they want to do is go back and forth for a week or two with NDAs, Scope of Work documents. Show them why starting today eases that and gets the ball rolling on the work tomorrow, not 2 weeks from now.

I’m not saying don’t define the detailed scope of work document. What I am saying is since you’ve define your recurring service offering, which is your general scope of work, but to lay out a roadmap for this particular project, kicking off tomorrow under your offering will get their project underway and moving towards their goals quicker. 

If you’ve gone through all that and still getting push back.

Then you’ll want to share with them how the one-off project will work with you. 

Share with them the negatives of making the project one-off. That it could take longer to see results, could cost more, could cost less until something is needed down the road which by then would cost more than all the recurring fees.

Since you are a business that is focusing on recurring services for your clients, one-off projects should be a last resort option.

As the last resort option, there is a different process to get things setup, there’s scheduling to be done, this becomes a custom service for that project. Custom projects cost more due to the added time and resources.

Share with them this.

Position your recurring services in a way that it makes your one-off option the wrong choice for them.

Now I’m not saying that all projects are meant for recurring. But if you are focused on building recurring revenue in your business, then those one-off projects and clients aren’t for you.

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For full show notes, your very own Ask Rezzz playlist, and bonus material, head on over here for it all.
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Having a track record of solid, reliable, work will go a long way to helping you close sales. Having just your own website won’t do.

You’ll need to do a bit of hustling, maybe even barter with some folks and trade your skills for an opportunity.

Reach out to some local agencies to see if they have any overflow work. Agencies aren’t the most ideal to work with if you want to drive the ship of projects, but they are an amazing starting point to build up a reputation and place in the market.

The idea is to get work that you can do and build up a nice track record of good work.

SOME THINGS YOU’LL WANT TO KEEP IN MIND

When you start this journey, you’ll want to make sure:

1. You can showcase the work on your own website.
2. You can talk about the work you are doing.
3. To try and stick to the same type of technology, or same industry, or even same location.
4. The smaller the project, the faster you can deliver. The faster you can deliver, the faster you can tackle the next project and build a track record quicker.

You’ll want to get #1 and #2 in writing on your contract.

#3 is something I wish I had done early on.

The reason why this is important is so that when you start your own sales, you are solving a problem that you have solved before over and over again.

So as an example…

If you are taking designs from an agency and building out landing pages for lead magnets and the delivery of that lead magnet. That’s the solution you can pitch over and over again to any business.

If you are building out Laravel apps with Vue for startup Saas companies. You know have a track record for both a technology and sector of business.

These 2 examples are much more marketable and easier to target potential clients than if you are just a generalist developer who builds PHP, Ruby on Rails, Laravel, but also plays around with various front-end technologies.

The generalist web developer will always be compared to the next developer on price.

Creating a specialty for yourself makes your solution appealing to businesses that need it and they will compare your price to that of their expected return.

This is all well and good, but you do need the skills to do web development in the first place.

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For full show notes, a customized Ask Rezzz playlist, and bonus material, head on over here for it all. 
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Today’s show is going to be a little different. I’m always asked what I look for when it comes to red flags in talking with leads and clients.

Like you, I always try to learn from what other folks do in their business so that I hope not to fall into those same pitfalls.

And so when I get asked this question I try to put myself in their shoes. Maybe there is something they are experiencing at that moment where they are looking to get insight into something they are missing.

So what I’m going to do is list off 26 red flags for you. These are a mix of my own and other business owners that I’ve spoken to both inside and outside of the Feast community.

Some may be obvious, some may not. But I’ll leave that to you.

1. Had issues with the other developer / designer
2. Their values, what they represent don’t align with your own
3. “I’ll know it when I see it”
4. “Maybe we can work out something if this project turns out good”
5. Everything is quick & easy
6. Step on each other while talking
7. Don’t understand their own limits
8. Seem desperate
9. Seem to be a hard sell
10. Disorganized
11. Vague goals / Can’t nail down why they don’t like the results, but instead just “feel it”
12. Unrealistic expectations
13. “Let’s just start the project, I’ll get accounting to send out the payment”
14. Want to always go against your processes
15. Haven’t thought through on the project / “don’t know the budget, but maybe you can help”
16. Late payment
17. Don’t follow directions / boundaries
18. Changing things last minute
19. Think that you’ll run their business for them / non-responsive
20. Micromanage
21. Pick their own set of tools and expect you to conform
22. Don’t respect the collaboration part and then wonder why “its not working”
23. Constantly miss scheduled calls then want to make them up by saying “let’s hop on a call right now”
24. Want to re-structure your process or payment terms
25. Email follow-up 
26. Cut corners / modify core functionality

Now that you have the list, which ones had you not thought about before. Any stand out?

When it comes down to red flags, you really need to take care of 2 things:
1. Trust your gut - if something feels off, that’s a red flag
2. Just because it’s someone else’s red flag, doesn’t mean it’s yours too. And vice versa, just because you make it a red flag and I didn’t list it, doesn’t mean it’s not a red flag. 

As a business owner you need to protect your time and profits. As a person you need to protect you sanity levels. Take this list and adapt it to your business and add in your own.

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For full show notes, a customized Ask Rezzz playlist, and bonus material, head on over here for it all. 
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I’ve found that freelancing clients are often the ones that need the motivation on the longer projects. They are the ones paying, so really they’ll want that return on their investment as quickly as possible.

I’m always saying “be consistent” in both my personal as well as professional life. In fact, “be consistent” is just one thing that I’ve been whispering in my son, TJ’s ear since the day he was born.

Being consistent means showing up each and every day you say you will for the client. 

I find that any and all projects have both short term and long term gains. Even if they are simple and small milestones along the way to those longer term goals.

Long term projects will always have stepping stones to the end game. Things like a feature being built, a set of designs completed, beta testers coming in, even something like content has been written and signed off on is a short term goal.

These are all things you can set up within a project plan with your client.

We are humans, humans do feed off of gamification. You see it in apps like Todoist and others where a simple streak of doing something every day keeps you opening that app.

If you need your own motivation play games with yourself.

It can be as simple as I’m putting 10 hours on this project this week. Or putting yourself into a process where you email your client at the end of every single day with the progress that’s been made on the project.

This is more a game of accountability than anything else. Because it’s the accountability with your client that you don’t want to disappoint.

Staying motivated on long-term projects isn’t hard, it’s delivering on the expected results that is. 

If the client is fully educated on how long the it will take to get results, then they may just need to be reminded of that from time to time.

And you need to be consistent to show up, get the job done, and fulfill the work as expected or better.