Ask Rezzz

There’s so much to learn and as business owners, we love to absorb as much as humanly possible.

But that’s where the pitfall happens. We consume and consume and consume. If we applied half of the actionable information that we consume, we would have zero time in the next 10 years for anything else. (And yes, that figure is statistically backed by science ;) ).

Seriously though, like myself, I would assume that you have had periods where you are reading, watching, listening to amazing and valuable information, taking notes and making countless todos for days on end.

Especially around the end of the year when all the sales and marketing kicks into overdrive we get teased with all these shiny objects that seem to be the answer to all our questions.

Financial Aspect to think about

If you haven’t already listened to A184 - How to budget as a freelancer? where you will learn that if you are buying something for $100 and you bring in 20% profit, you need to bring in $500 of revenue, not get another $100.

Marketing tactics messing with us

Let’s evaluate another thing here for a second.

Most products and apps serve a purpose, not all purposes.

Most of the marketing around these products, if you look, market to a specific audience with a specific problem.

It’s us that say “Oh I need that!” or “This has to be better than what I’m using right now.”

This goes for courses and education as well.

I want to share with you, 5 questions to ask yourself when evaluating an educational product.

1. Has the person/company selling the information done it in the past? Are they still doing it?

Not everyone does what they say to do. They preach things that they’ve never tried.

The business world moves fast. Sales, marketing, and client management are the fastest movers.

The specific strategies and tactics that worked last year, 5 years, and 10 years ago, especially in client services, most likely will not work today.

Sure the methodology may apply still in some capacity, but collecting leads via a popup on your homepage saying “Join for updates” worked 8 years ago, but not today.

If the person no longer does what they are teaching, then for me, they aren’t up-to-date. I want to have the best possible information and strategies that are going to keep me out in front.

2. Am I getting the team or the individual and are they engaged?

I’ve purchased programs before thinking that I was getting the individual, but then didn’t even once see the individual. You know, the one that actually knows the thing being taught and sold me on buying.

Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t anything wrong with working with the team. It’s just that if that’s not conveyed up front, I feel a bit duped.

My thought too is that if the teacher is the one I’m looking to sign up with that has that “thing” I want, working with someone else, I may only get 80% of the “thing”.

3. What is available for free?

Do the research! Read some of the other content, listen to podcasts, watch videos of the instructor. Make sure that you can see yourself hanging out with that person.

If there’s just not a fit from a personality perspective, how likely are you to learn something from them.

Think back on the teachers in school that you didn’t like at all vs those that you still remember how awesome they were.

The other side of this is does their free content deliver value? Or is everything they put out lead you to buy something?

Their teaching ability can be explored here as well. If they don’t explain the steps or answer objections in an insightful way, maybe they aren’t the best teacher.

4. Where does this fit in with me?

Am I buying this for the “someday list” or is it something that will help me accomplish something today?

The “someday list” is great, but my experience with buying products that go in with this is that they collect that digital dust. It also falls into that trap of point 1.

By the time I get around to it, has a year passed?

If I’m working on something today or in the very near future and the program can help me accelerate learning and get to implementation faster, then I’m more likely to buy.

5. Can I find out about the course from someone who’s been there?

No doubt there are all sorts of testimonials and social proof being displayed about how awesome the program is.

Find those people on Twitter, FB, wherever and ask them what they liked and didn’t like about the program. That will help you in the evaluation department. Chances are that they bought it for a different reason than you would.

After evaluating the purchase for 24 hours and it still makes sense to go ahead and buy, then do it. But if not then don’t. If it’s good and worth it, it’ll be there when you are ready to buy.

If it’s not there, then you saved yourself a lot of wasted time and money.

-------------------
👉 For full show notes to this episode & more resources for you.
-------------------

This question came by way of a Twitter DM. Yup, my DMs are open and love engaging with folks there.

TLDR;

If you need to keep the lights on, then offer the services you know that you can deliver.

Then after you are settled in, take a look at what you've done and for who. From that see if you can then start to specialize you business somehow.

Do what you know first

Keep things simple. When starting out, you need to give yourself the best chance of success. The only way to do that is by providing services you know you can fulfill.

When starting out, there is so much that you don’t know about. Billing, client management, delivery, onboarding, support, marketing, sales, that you will need to learn about and get better at. Don’t complicate it any more.

Specializing is really just marketing

Once you have a few projects under your belt, then reflect back on what you’ve done and who you’ve done it for.

Are there any similarities? Anything common in the clients? Anything common in the solution you are providing?

Then on the other side, are there clients and projects that you didn’t like and not want to do again.

In episode 174 How to demand higher rates and on my other podcast, Live In The Feast, Episode 8 in Season 2, I share with you my step by step guide to specialization.

In episode 182 How do you go about breaking into a niche you’ll learn about how specializing is really just a marketing strategy, especially at first.

You don’t have to go all-in on a niche. In fact, why would you? You need to land a few of those projects first just so that you can understand the language and problems in such a way so that you can position yourself as the goto person in that market.

If you can’t even articulate the problem as your client would, the marketing won’t go very far. You’ll be restricting your business from the start.

Specialization is all about putting an effective process around a solution for clients. Once the process has been ironed out, a system around those processes can be built to increase your profits and elevate you and your business.

Building custom content and marketing campaigns around your specialty will give you signals on if the niche is viable. It could be that it’s viable enough as another revenue stream into the business and nothing more.

Meaning that there is a ceiling on how far you can take it.

Then in other terms it could show you that it’s something that you need to dive all-in on or even stay away from. This can’t be known when you first start freelancing.

-------------------
👉 For full show notes to this episode & more resources for you.
-------------------

In the last 5 episodes I shared with you a course called Stop the Cycle where Curtis McHale and myself to be delivered to you on November 30th at 3:30 PM EST.

A few people who have registered, jumped in and shared some feedback they had, well because we asked them what is it that they hope to get out of the course. What sparked you in deciding to join us. We want to make sure whoever joins us, gets the most value from it.

This came by way of some feedback from one of those people.

So with anything in business, it comes down to who you are, who you work with, and most importantly what’s working right now.

The great thing about the Stop the Cycle course is that you will get 2 people’s point of view on running a business that is quite similar.

What’s worked for me hasn’t for Curtis and vice versa.

We are going to give you our best strategies and techniques that has landed us great work over the past decade, and still does to this very day.

What I want you to do right now is to think about what’s working for you today.

Also I want you to think about what is it about that lead generation strategy that you want to get away from? And why?

Podcasting

See for me, podcasting has been a great lead generation strategy for me. Ever since I started my business I found podcasting to be beneficial to me in a variety of different ways including widening my network and positioning myself in the market.

Writing

Curtis is a writer of several books and does a ton of writing very well. He gets paid to write for other companies and it also brings in clients to him as well. He does a lot of content marketing, writing specifically, well to be honest, hasn’t worked as well for me.

Seeking out specific conversations

Another tactic that I will dive deep on is jumping into highly specific conversations on Twitter and Facebook. By targeting certain keywords, I built a system to look for those keywords and then ping me in Slack when a tweet contained that keyword.

This way it allowed me to be mindful of my time so that I can not be distracted for 20, 30, or 60 minutes down the social media rabbit hole.

If my sales bot pings me in Slack, I can look at it in realtime or later even, and if it’s relevant, jump into that conversation and then get back to work.

Time Management

Curtis will dive into the time management since he’s much better at this than I. He has literally written the book on Analog Productivity. Curtis has built his business to work around his schedule and he’ll show you how to do this so that you actually have the time to market yourself.

If you are wondering what else you are going to get out of this course is that you’ll get lead generation strategies. A huge benefit of this course is that you will get both of us and hear our takes on various strategies, how we approached them, and hear how different things worked for us.

We both have families that we enjoy spending time with, businesses that are stable that support our families and afford us to enjoy the kind of lives we want.

Stop the Cycle is the foundation of our businesses.

-------------------
👉 For full show notes to this episode & more resources for you.
-------------------

This is part 5 in a 5-part series called Stop The Cycle where I ask you a question and you’ll get an actionable item to take away with you at the end of the show to help your sales and marketing so that you are on the way to stop having the feast and famine killing your business.

Positioning is simply marketing

What if you only talked with high-quality leads that viewed you as an expert?

You want people to respect you, right? You want to be valued as the expert in the conversation, right?

What are you as the expert doing to facilitate that?

Experts ask the right questions, they try to ask the right questions early on in the process. So that they identify who they can help as well as those they can’t.

Respect is earned, it’s not given. If you aren’t asking the proper questions and the lead or client doesn’t recognize them as questions that lead them to their transformation with you, they won’t respect you.

Are you talking budget? Are you talking timeline? Are you setting expectations? Are you asking questions about their business not just technology? Are you talking the same language as your leads and clients?

Are you helpful and serving?

Being empathetic and showing humility goes a long way in getting answers to all these questions.

The awesome thing about asking questions like these, is that you are showing your expertise, but also vetting leads.

You want to work with clients of a certain budget.

You don’t want to work with clients who have unrealistic timelines.

You don’t want to work with clients that look at you as labor or someone they can just pluck from Upwork at the lowest bid.

If they are open about their business goals because you asked them about some specifics, that’s a good sign they see you as an expert who knows what you can do for them.

Stop the Cycle

If knowing what the right questions to ask is something you have been trying to figure out, you aren’t alone. Which is why Curtis McHale and myself have built a workshop called Stop The Cycle.

During the workshop, Curtis and I pull back what we’ve done in our sales processes that have let us build 6 figure businesses without 60 hour work weeks.

If you haven’t already done so, head to [Stop the Cycle](https://rezzz.com/stop-the-cycle/) to learn about the details of the workshop and all the resources for you and how you will stop the feast and famine from killing your freelance business.

-------------------
👉 For full show notes to this episode & more resources for you.
-------------------

This is part 4 in a 5-part series called Stop The Cycle where I ask you a question and you’ll get an actionable item to take away with you at the end of the show to help your sales and marketing so that you are on the way to stop having the feast and famine killing your business.

Make the time, don’t wait to find it

What if you had the time to keep marketing while doing great work for your clients?

When I started my business, I sat on my couch every single Tuesday night doing lead generation tactics and then again every Thursday night filling up my queue to share relevant and valuable resources.

This is what I had to do in order to get this one-man show off the ground. Why Tuesday? Why Thursday? Because that’s what I choose to do.

If you aren’t going to market yourself, no one will. How I got referrals was because I was sharing colleagues content and resources. By doing that, I put myself on their radar which then started building the relationships I have today.

Don’t overwhelm yourself with what it means to do marketing. Simply carve out one hour in the next week dedicated to getting your name out there.

Don’t write or record something that you don’t publish.

Take action and do something that literally puts your name into the feed of someone else.

Over the years I’ve tried so many different time management strategies. Some worked, some didn’t. However, when it comes to being structured with your time and focus, Curtis McHale has been my Yoda.

“You can’t find time. You won’t find it in the couch cushions. You make the time for the things that are important.”

This is a phrase Curtis has said time and time again that I constantly remind myself with.

Stop the Cycle

Curtis will walk you through his process for time management in our workshop called Stop The Cycle.

During the workshop, Curtis and I pull back what we’ve done in our sales processes that have let us build 6 figure businesses without 60 hour work weeks.

If you haven’t already done so, head to Stop the Cycle to learn about the details of the workshop and all the resources for you and how you will stop the feast and famine from killing your freelance business.

-------------------
👉 For full show notes to this episode & more resources for you.
-------------------

This is part 3 in a 5-part series called Stop The Cycle where I ask you a question and you’ll get an actionable item to take away with you at the end of the show to help your sales and marketing so that you are on the way to stop having the feast and famine killing your business.

Level up the experience you provide to your leads

What if you could give your leads an experience that positions you as an expert?

I ran a highly scientific and analytical poll on Twitter and the results can back with an overwhelming 79% of people do not have a follow-up process in their sales.

This is a shame, because it’s so simple, and powerful when done right.

I’m going to paint a picture for you and tell me if this is you?

When you get a new lead, you have a call, and then send a proposal. A few days go by and they you send another email saying “Just wanted to check in and see if you had any questions about the proposal?”

Is this you? If so, you did exactly what everyone else does. Proven simply by the stats.

You want to be respected as an expert, right? By writing this email, you’ve completely put yourself right in the bucket of all the flakey, desperate, and laborer freelancers.

Instead, I want you to replace your lame email with one that shares a link to a useful article and send it to your lead.

I have no doubt that you are reading industry articles, watching videos, listening to podcasts and then using that information as a part of your conversations to talk with leads during your sales process to sign with you.

Send them those links!

It positions you as a someone who is an expert, keeps up-to-date on your expertise, and someone who isn’t desperate for work.

It shows your prospect that you are providing value even when you aren’t getting paid.

It sparks interest in you to want to work with you even more.

No one wants to work with someone who’s desperate. They can smell it a mile away.

If you want to stand out from among the crowd, from among the 80% of other freelancers out there, provide value in your follow up. It will define you as an expert leads will want to work with.

Stop the Cycle

Over the years I’ve built a proven follow up sequence for various stages of the sales process, that continuously adds value and growing education for the leads. Join Curtis McHale and myself in a workshop called Stop The Cycle and I’ll walk you through it completely.

During the workshop, Curtis and I pull back what we’ve done in our sales processes that have let us build 6 figure businesses without 60 hour work weeks.

If you haven’t already done so, head to Stop the Cycle to learn about the details of the workshop and all the resources for you and how you will stop the feast and famine from killing your freelance business.

-------------------
👉 For full show notes to this episode & more resources for you.
-------------------

This is part 2 in a 5-part series called Stop The Cycle where I ask you a question and you’ll get an actionable item to take away with you at the end of the show to help your sales and marketing so that you are on the way to stop having the feast and famine killing your business.

Always be selling

What if you could have your sales process running 24/7 scouring the web for opportunities?

Yesterday we talked about a simple share as being a part of your marketing and awareness to the world. That was about being out there when someone is looking for you.

The second part of that equation though is that you need to have a process in place for you to jump on opportunities when they happen.

This is a much more proactive approach.

Still, to this very day, I have my very own sales bot that scours Twitter for certain keywords and then pings me in my Slack when a tweet with that word comes up.

I don’t need to be on Twitter all day long, but when something interesting happens, an opportunity arises, I can jump into the conversation first.

When I first started my freelance business, I landed clients like Canon, PGA, and Adobe using this.

Then in 2016, I built a new service in my business in 5 months solely by using this method. That service is now 50% of my revenue.

By using Zapier, you can create your own sales bot to do just this.

Stop the Cycle

If this social media is a distraction for you and you find yourself using sales as an excuse to be on it you aren’t alone.

If you’ve always wanted to leverage automation, but don’t know where to start with it.

Curtis McHale and myself have built a workshop called Stop The Cycle.

During the workshop, Curtis and I pull back what we’ve done in our sales processes that have let us build 6 figure businesses without 60 hour work weeks.

If you haven’t already done so, head to Stop the Cycle to learn about the details of the workshop and all the resources for you and how you will stop the feast and famine from killing your freelance business.

-------------------
👉 For full show notes to this episode & more resources for you.
-------------------

Going to do something a little different over the next 5 episodes where I ask you a question.

This is part 1 in a 5-part series called Stop The Cycle where you’ll get an actionable item to take away with you at the end of the show to help your sales and marketing so that you are on the way to stop having the feast and famine killing your business.

Don't let the client work always trump your own

When you are deep in project work, it’s so easy to let your marketing slide. We’ve done it, those client problems you’re solving mean money right now.

You need to have something in place at all times to have your marketing going.

It’s not today or tomorrow that will hurt when you are heads down on a project and not marketing your business. It’s next month or 3 months from now.

See when you don’t market yourself today or tomorrow or the day after that, you fall behind quickly. The fall you take is much further than if on the fourth day you do market yourself.

Consistency above all else matters.

It’s not just because of an algorithm, it’s the human nature.

Don’t you see successful people doing the small things every single day. People like Chris Ducker, Ryan Carson, and others.

Not saying you need to create a daily post or podcast or highly produced video, I get it. But no doubt you are scrolling through your feed and find inspiration, value and useful posts that you can then go ahead and re-share to your audience.

That’s marketing, that’s creating awareness of you and that’s how you stay top of mind.

You have no idea where that next potential client will learn about you for the very first time. At least not yet anyway.

Consistently putting your name, your business out into the world will give your potential leads and clients an opportunity to find you.

Stop the Cycle

If this is something you are finding difficult, you aren’t alone. Which is why Curtis McHale and myself have built a workshop called Stop The Cycle.

During the workshop, Curtis and I pull back what we’ve done in our sales processes that have let us build 6 figure businesses without 60 hour work weeks.

If you haven’t already done so, head to Stop the Cycle to learn about the details of the workshop and all the resources for you and how you will stop the feast and famine from killing your freelance business.

-------------------
👉 For full show notes to this episode & more resources for you.
-------------------

You hear a lot about niching down on this show. Many different actionable takeaways for you to be able to work through defining your specialty.

But one thing I found myself to be beneficial is to hear how others do it. Especially others that I feel may not be too much further down the road than me. Which is why for me it’s important to always be in the freelance services side of things so that I can provide you with the best content possible that works for today’s market.

If you are interested in hearing stories about someone else’s journey, head on over to [Live In The Feast](https://rezzz.com/podcast).

Season 4 is such an amazing season for some many reasons.

If you aren’t a listener to Live In The Feast podcast, it’s a seasonal show. Each season has a theme, Season 1 is Getting Clients, Season 2 is Marketing, Season 3 is Origin Stories, and Season 4 is Niching Down.

Then in each episode, there will be a deep dive into a specific strategy, question, tip, or storyline for about 30-40 minutes. At the end of the show, you’ll be able to walk away from it with an actionable takeaway to implement into your business right then.

I’m all about taking the action. Consumption of information only works when action is taken on that information.

I’m so excited to bring some amazing and brilliant people who run very successful businesses. And their success is defined by themselves and how they run their business.

Each episode will go into a bit of their story and then myself and the co-host will discuss a specific topic based around specializing your business.

Questions like “how do you test the waters while still doing existing client work?”

“How to fill-in the gaps in a niche that’s already occupied?”

“How to build a proper value proposition to explain what you do?”

“How to position yourself as the go-to person in your niche”

“How to get and use the language of your client?”

Each co-host has niched down and has a very specific business model that serves a particular client extremely well.

The episode they come on will be focused on what they’ve been more successful in.

Head on over to Live In The Feast to listen to amazing folks like Josh Doody, Sara Dunn, Matt Medeiros, Chris Blintiff, John Locke, Elliot Murphy, Troy Dean, Lianna Patch and more.

While your there if you enjoy what you hear, then why not subscribe so that you get notified each and every week when a new episode comes out.

-------------------
👉 For full show notes to this episode & more resources for you.
-------------------

Get your clients to pay

To budget means that you need to know (or at least be relatively sure) when your clients pay you.

You obviously can’t reach into their pocket and pull out the money they owe you, so there’s some trust there you need to have, but there are systems that you can use and put into place that will help you nudge and remind clients.

Don’t be afraid of doing this. No business can run without money so if you are doing work, make sure you get paid.

Track your expenses

You have to stay on top of your expenses. Taxes being your biggest. Remember it’s not your money, but here in the U.S. you will need to take a percentage of what you bring and put that away. Pretend it doesn’t even exist because it’s not yours anyway.

Aside from that, you have to be mindful of the phrase “it’s for the business and I’ll just get more revenue in to cover this.” It’s a deadly phrase and here’s why.

If you have a 20% profit margin on your services and you buy something for $100, that means you need to bring in $500 in revenue, not $100. Make sense?

You really want your expenses to fight for their worth in your business.

Keep your business and personal separate

This is something that’s extremely important and helpful at the same time. This will make your accountant happy. If you don’t have one, and you do you own tax filings, well this will make your life so much easier.

As a part of this, you’ll want to build up that business account too. Make sure that you have a buffer in there. You need to maintain a certain level of cash in the business.

How much cash should you have really depends on what your plans are. This is an inception moment, because you need to really understand your budget to figure out what this number is.

Pay yourself

You need to pay yourself. There are so many different philosophies around this, but try and pay yourself as soon as you get revenue into the business.

This will be your lifeline of sustainability. If you need $5k in personal monthly expenses, food, shopping, and living your life, then don’t think that all you need is $5k in revenue.

Remember you have expenses to pay, the business to invest into, profits, and spending cash for the business. This is overly simplified but you get the idea here.

Save for your future

This sounds like what an old man would say, but it’s important. Especially when you are young. You don’t want to work forever. So you want to capitalize on the flexibility you have to build a nice nest egg for yourself.

Put a percentage away of your salary into some sort of long-term savings account, like and IRA.

Automate your plan

Whether you have an accountant or not, leverage automation to move the money around.

Most payment systems and banks these days allow you to set up rules to transfer money around.

Whatever your percentages are for your salary, retirement, expenses, and business accounts, consider using tools like Freshbooks, Quickbooks, or whatever your choice is, to setup these rules.

While you are in there, set up reminders to check in on your budget and numbers. Make sure you are on top of your budget so that you can adjust accordingly.

-------------------
👉 For full show notes to this episode & more resources for you.
-------------------