Ask Rezzz

The very first step in specializing your business is to say "no". Once you identified what it is that you don’t want to do, then don’t do it.

It sounds simple, and it really is that simple. Remember you are a freelancer and can do anything you want to shape your business.

The very next lead you get that requires you to do anything in the right 2 quadrants that you defined in the last episode, "How to choose your niche", say “no”.

It’s not about finding and launching yourself into a brand new business direction at once.

It’s the incremental changes that you do in your business, the “testing” in your business, the small steps you take in your business to progress forward, that gets you to your destination.

In this episode, you are going to develop a working niche and specialty so that you can vet it out.

You are you going to define the likes and dislikes of both projects and clients in this episode. By exploring your past and current projects and thinking about certain questions and aspects around them, you will end up with a basis of an industry and a problem you are solving for someone.

This will be what you use as a starting off point for exploring your niche further to see if there's a market for it and most importantly profitable.

You have heard that you need to niche down or specialize your business for a number of factors.

I share with you 4 reasons why you should specialize your business.

Point #4 is something I haven't heard many people but in realty it is THE reason you should start specializing today if you haven't already.

There is this huge sense of overwhelm at times, but it’s important to remember what you need to get done and what you’d like to get done.

So Google and many other companies have adopted an 80/20 rule. I myself like to employ this method too. Which basically says that 80% of the time you work on business stuff, 20% of the time you work on your own stuff.

I use this with regards to 80% client 20% rezzz.

I often ask myself:

1. What sort of impact does this have on my business?

2. Will this make an impact on my business today? next month? next year?

3. Am I already exploring another rabbit hole?

That helps me in figuring out the shiny objects.

The biggest takeaway for you is to understand the want vs need - if you are feeling overwhelmed with all of the things you need to do, take a step back, take a 10-min break, re-focus on what’s important for the next couple of hours and then focus on that.

Sales is hard as a freelancer. Even myself tend to leave it behind until I need it. But that's the wrong way to do it. Freelancing businesses need a healthy pipeline in order to be stable, profitable, and build a successful business.

There isn’t a silver bullet or magic beans when it comes to this. It will take time and effort, but well worth the work when you do it.

I'll share with you the 10 steps I use in order to keep my sales pipeline healthy.

One of the mistakes that I didn’t do early on in my freelance career was to build an email list. Not having a list, or rather not spending some amount of effort into building one with high-quality emails, put me in a bad spot because I didn’t have any way to reach out to folks for referrals, outreach, overflow work, announce new services and solutions, and most importantly have a pipeline of leads.

I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did.

Not every single person on this list will be who you want to sell to. Some of these people on your list are people that you want a network with and want to know about your services.

If you have been freelancing for some time and still don’t have a growing list outside of your clients then you’ll want to do this so that you can get the word out about you and your services.

Trust me, you may think that folks know what you do, even folks that you talk with regularly. Well, they don’t!

Here are the 5 steps...

Your client hired you as an expert, they expect that you’ll know what to do and if you don’t that you’ll figure out a way through the crisis.

You and your clients are in business together, work together and I promise you, in the end, it’ll all work out for the best in the end.

Some things to think about when you are presented with such a crisis:

- Put together a timeline of events

- Back any evidence up with data, leave any opinions at the door - it’s so easy to be angry and let emotions get the best of you, but in the end that does no one good

- If you don’t have evidence, get some

- Put together some recommendations past the event

- If this is affecting business today, figure out steps needed to address it until there’s a remedy

- Ask your client for their thoughts and suggestions

- Keep open communication, even make yourself available in ways that you never have

- After careful thought and consideration of options, put together a game plan to implement and stick to it

Managing client expectations is one of the most important pieces of your freelance business.

For one, most of the time you are working remotely and not seeing the person on an every day basis. So trust and reliability can wane very quickly.

During the sales process, you as the professional are earning the trust of the client with your experience and knowledge around the services the prospective client is looking for.

This is when that trust is being earned. During this time is when you should be talking about the aspects of your services that you will do. Equally as important though is outlining those aspects of your services that you will not do.

I’ve seen people, and I too, have gotten into trouble where there wasn’t a clear definition of services.

There isn’t anything wrong with explicitly telling a lead what you won’t do. Look, most won’t know that SEO and development of their website are 2 entirely different aspects of the live site. They just see it as work on the website.

This episode is a bit different in that you'll get to hear a bit of my story that I've never really spoken about too much.

Our businesses are personal. As much as we want to keep personal feelings and business separate, there really is no line in between. Looking back at clients projects can help enlighten some of the likes and dislikes you had in regards to them. But your emotions and feelings and even ego can get in the way of opportunities that can allow you to get closer to your life goals.

Thank you Sara for the question.

Go check out Sara's journey at http://sara-dunn.com/

Having no portfolio really shouldn't stop you from getting clients. It's more of an opportunity for you to scale back a little bit, solve a problem, and get quick wins for you and your clients.

By showing what you can do and deliver on what you say you will earns trust and that above anything will get you more clients.