Ask Rezzz

First, you want to create a page on your website to send folks you are talking to who are looking to you for your specialized service.

On this page it’s important to put 4 sections:

• Who the service is for?
• What problem you are solving for them?
• How you solve that problem?
• Social proof of the problem and solution

Keep it simple and make a call-to-action to reach out with their request. This can even be to your email address if you want.

The idea is to test the market, not build something complex that you don’t even know will work.

Making funnels and ad campaigns and email automations will come much later on. The time here is best spent talking with potential customers and gauging your new market.

Second, review your existing footprint online, and if your niche market is essentially a re-vamp of your pricing and such, you may want to consider removing your pricing from your website if it’s there.

Just so that there isn’t confusion for your new lead should they find your old pricing.

Keep in mind that you are running your own business, there are no rules to say that you need to have or not have your pricing on your website. If pulling the old pricing down for a month or 2 allows you to freely talk about your new pricing without worry, do it.

Lastly, get those conversations going. In order to see if this niche is viable, it’s not about building out funnels and marketing campaigns. Not yet anyway.

It’s about 2 things:

• Is the problem of the niche painful enough for you to build a business around?
• Can you fully understand and grasp the language of that market?

You can only get the answer to these questions through market research.

Think about your early days in building the business you have now. Did you set up marketing funnels and campaigns? No. You spoke with someone, drew up a contract in Word, got a payment via a PayPal link and did the work.

Those roots are where you need to go to when breaking into a niche.

If the answer is “Yes” to the above questions then you can start building the business bit by bit from there.

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This is something I hear asked quite often. Sara Dunn asked me how I did it after the first time she appeared on Live In The Feast in fact.

Sara has embarked on her journey to publicly share her journey on specializing her agency’s business. As you can see, everyone is trying to figure out the answer.

It’s important to put some context around this question. Your journey is your own. I can’t answer this question with a foolproof plan for you. This is something that you need to be able to go on yourself.

## Your fears of niching down

I understand that it is scary because you may be feeling like it’s an all or nothing deal. What happens if you go all in and it doesn’t work. Then you are left sitting there wondering what happened and how can I recover from this.

There’s another fear here that is the real reason you may not want to jump in. You’ve built up a reputation in the market, have great clients and are getting referrals for new work. Losing all that hard work and effort you’ve already put in the business would be devastating.

Am I right?

You want to niche down because you fully understand the benefits to the business and becoming an expert. You get that once you learn who it is and what you are selling, everything else tends to become easier, you can command higher rates, and get back some of your time to explore other things.

Maybe the biggest reason I see most folks like yourself looking to niche down is because of sales and marketing. Once you specialize, sales and marketing becomes so much easier and that’s what you want to get better at.

Your niching down strategy

What I tell my coaching clients and those inside the Feast community is this.

You are working with existing clients and may even have leads with proposals in hand. There’s no way you are going to drop them, so let that go right away. You have to finish up what you said you would.

If you are working on specializing your business, you aren’t going to flip the business around overnight.

Bottom line is that this is a transition. This transition needs to be as simple as possible. No reason to overbuild, overcomplicate, and put a ton of time into something if it doesn’t work out, right?

Niching Down is Marketing

No doubt you’ve either seen, heard or read from people who say to use FB ads, point to a video or post, build a lead magnet, create emails to market to those people and then give them something to buy.

This is known as a marketing funnel. Yes, you’ve heard me say these sorts of things too. But when breaking in, this is the worst thing you can do.

You suck at marketing. Ok, maybe that’s a bit harsh. Maybe it’s more that you want to be better at it.

To be better at marketing, you need to understand who will buy. See this vicious cycle here?

How is going out and trying to market to someone who you’ve never marketed to in the first place going to end up?

Probably be a waste of money to be perfectly honest with you.

I’ve even seen some gurus talking about adding niches to your existing generalist services like it’s a simple process.

And while this makes sense to me, right now all you want to do is to break into one niche, not many, right?

My experience of niching down is that it is marketing. Positioning your business is about selling a particular part of your business to the customer that needs it.

Look at your specialty like it’s another revenue channel into your business. Car makers don’t just have one type of car they sell right? SUVs are targeted more to families, and sport cars are targeted to individuals. Yet, Chevrolet sells both of them.

Have conversations and learn as much as you can, just like any other marketing research campaign. Then on the back-end of that, decide if the niche is viable.

And before I wrap this up, I want to mention something important. Just because you specialize, doesn’t mean that you can’t do other things.

You run your own business, you can do what you want, work with who you want. If you enjoy some of the generalist projects, continue doing them. No one is saying not to.

In order to build a sustainable freelance business and avoid the feast or famine cycle, niching down will allow you to break through that glass ceiling of your rate. It will also allow you to gain more time freedom as well.

Before the next episode where you will learn the 3-step process to break into your niche, I’ll leave you with this.

Looking to niche because you need help with your marketing is smart.

Looking to niche because you want to stand out is smart.

Looking to niche because you want a more predictable revenue stream and profits is smart.

Don’t think that the answer to breaking into a niche is is by doubling down on your problems in the first place.

Go back to your roots. Go back to when you first started your business. How did you get work then?

Learn as much as you can through conversations with the market you want to get into. Then you’ll be breaking into your new market in no time.

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In episode 180 - What is the structure of a weekly review, you learned my framework for performing a weekly review. 

• Look back
• Look ahead
• Execute

When I found that this framework worked for me, I started applying it to all reviews I did, including weekly, monthly and yearly.

I’d like to replace the monthly with a quarterly review. Also sprinkle in a daily review as well, but those I’m still working out.

1. Look back on the month.

Very much like the weekly review, I look back on the revenue, only this time, it’s the first thing I do. I’ve got a few different revenue streams into the business and I have certain goals for each.

Looking back on which stream brought in what revenue is important for the business to understand if I’m meeting the goals I have.

I’ve started only recently taking a review on the expenses during the month. Only just so that I’m not overly surprised at the end of the year and it allows me to curb and keep those $10 per month services under wraps.

Then I take a look back on the projects. It’s a quick look just to make sure that everything is moving forward. Really only because I tend to do these reviews the same day I’m doing my weekly review.

I have a monthly spreadsheet that I record the KPIs of the business to make sure the business is healthy and trending in the right direction.

2. Look ahead.

Similar to the weekly review, I look at the calendar month as a whole. I look for personal vacations or events, holidays, and anything that may throw priorities or projects off track that I need to be aware of.

This is when I review the longer term projects and the “some day” projects too. If the past month ended with finishing up one, or one is close to wrapping up, I’ll line up the next one.

I also review them at a high level to see if they are still important and/or needed. This is how I curb my distractions. If I have an idea, I put it in as a long-term project, and then let it bubble up later to make sure that it’s still relevant and important.

3. Execute

This is the hardest part because I really just go back to work.

Since I do my monthly review at the top of my weekly review, not at the first of every month. I allow the natural course of monthly review flow into my weekly review.

So once I’ve done my monthly review, made sure that all the ducks are in a row there, I dive right into my weekly review.

I put a recurring task in my task management tool, Todoist for the first Sunday of every month to do the monthly review prior to the weekly review, and that’s it.

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I was chatting with Greg Hickman over Instagram and he asked about my review and planning structures.

He shared a story on his daily, weekly, quarterly and yearly reviews and was open about which ones he’s still working on getting better at and that sparked the conversation.

I thought that since I’ve spoken about how important and what I do in my weekly reviews, I’d share with you today the exact structure, the framework if you will, of all my reviews.

• Look back
• Look ahead
• Execute

It’s a simple framework to remember and stems a bit from the GTD methodology. But see what works for you.

Look back on the week.

Review the sales pipeline. Clients and cash is lifeblood of your business. You have to be ridiculously involved in it even when you are heads down in a project.

Supplemental to this is looking back on the revenue. This is essential to see how much came in to the business.

You know when you are doing well and when you aren’t. Even if it’s a week where $0 come in, if you do this look back every week, you’ll see patterns and trends in your business.

If those normal patterns of income change, that’s when maybe you could adjust what you do based on your activity based selling.

I run through my email with the Inbox Zero methodology. This is something I try to do the times I check my email during the day, but there are times when by the weekend I haven’t fully cleaned it out.

Look back on the calls and meetings I had as well to refresh my memory on what was done, talked about, and see if any priorities came up that need to be accounted for.

This also means gathering up all the stickies, notes, and things sitting in my Inbox in Todoist. Seeing if I need to file anything if I haven’t already.

Look ahead on the week

I pull up my calendar, which I use Google Calendar to see what’s planned for the week. Every single appointment, personal and professional goes in there.

Then take all those and write them down into my weekly desk planner. This allows me to visually see what the overall day and week look like. It forces me to not over schedule and be mindful of the energy I have on any given day.

Then I go into my project management tool and schedule any tasks on the dedicated days if needed. Most of the time they are planned already, but if adjustments need to be made, this is when that happens.

Finally I look at the long-term projects and if they are already started, I make sure that at some level, the needle on them is moving forward. If it’s a busy week, then I fit in some smaller tasks in between everything else to keep the momentum going.

Execute on the week

I take a final review of what the week looks like to make sure I didn’t overload any of the days. I try to make sure that I don’t work on more than 3 high energy tasks per day.

Before I get up from my weekly review, I plan out what Monday morning will look like. This way when I get up Monday, I’m not looking around for something to do. I’m sitting down ready to tackle something.

It’s a simple framework to remember, especially for any review that you do. In the next episode I’ll share with you my monthly review.

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How do I know Matt Medeiros?

Matt is an account representative at Pagely, a managed WordPress hosting company. In his prior life, he co-founded a successful digital agency. He is the host of a number of podcasts, one of which he invited me on.

I’ve known Matt for a number of years in and around the WordPress space. I’ve met Matt on a couple of occasions as well and when he asked me to be a part of a panel of other niche business owners for his podcast, Matt Report, I easily accepted.

Matt and I have an east coast bond together where I guess for lack of a better term, we are all about figuring things out, just putting it out there and not messing around about it.

In this episode, I had a chance to talk about the following:

How to adapt and change to the WordPress climate?

In case you don’t want to read the rest of this, you can check out the full episode for all the details.

In the episode, I shared a variety of things including

• How WordPress isn’t my business, but a tool I use to solve a problem
• Ask the hard questions of your business  
• What my work goal of the year is

Specifically I talk about the benefits of specializing. Where I share how I will experiment, but always do so with the goal in mind of benefitting my clients and my own business.

With regards to specializing, you can leverage your expertise by simply answering questions. There is no shortage of emotion and complaining online, especially when it comes to business and companies. If you can jump into those conversations and be a voice of solution, you immediately position yourself as an authority.

I learned a ton from Sara Dunn and Nathan Allotey as they shared their thoughts and opinions on the ever-changing landscape.

The biggest reason I was excited to be a part of this panel was because Matt doesn’t shy away from asking the hard questions. WordPress is a large community and in recent years it certainly has taken its lumps.

Many businesses that WordPress was a core of have either gone under or been acquired or completely pivoted direction.

The 4 of us share a common bond in that we solve problems for our clients. And if WordPress, Frontpage, Adobe Photoshop or whatever the technology of the “day” is doesn’t help us in doing that, well time to adapt and change.

Definitely go check it out.

If you have a chance too, check out a few of the other episodes as well.

I’d like to thank Matt for being a part of it and including me along amazing folks like Sara Dunn and Nathan Allotey.

Performing a search on Google of the biggest mistakes in freelancing and you’ll find over 10 million results.

Yikes!


Sad thing is that prior to this episode, I took a look at the lists in the first page to see if my list had any overlap.

There are a ton of mistakes any freelancer can make. But what I think you want to hear are the mistakes that another freelancer has made.

So that’s what I want to share with you today. The 15 mistakes that I made throughout my career of nearly a decade. And how to avoid them!

1. Not positioning yourself within the market
2. Taking on a partner that doesn’t align with your goals
3. Jumping into every client request immediately
4. Reacting right away to a potential lead
5. Client work always winning
6. Discounting
7. Not always doing some sales and marketing
8. Not following up with everyone
9. Not respecting your time
10. Not building your own personal brand
11. Not trusting your gut
12. Time management
13. Thinking like an employee
14. Settling
15. Not keeping your goal in mind

We all mistakes. But those mistakes don’t have to be failures. A failure is something that happens that you don’t learn from. Making these mistakes isn’t the end of the world, but if you can understand the mistake, how it’s happening and then address it, you’ll grow your freelancing business.

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Without a doubt having a child changed everything. We don’t nearly go out as much alone as we used to. We travel, but to places like Sesame Place rather than the Caribbean. We don’t sleep anymore. Even the business has changed.

I love you, Joanna

Before I jump into it I want thank my wife for everything that she does each and every day. She is absolutely the rock of this household and family. Without her, I know you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

The goal I had at an early age on why I wanted to have my own business was so that I could have the time freedom to spend it with my family and friends when I want to.

I wanted to be around for first steps and first words. I want to go out on a random Tuesday afternoon just because it is nice out and not have to ask someone for permission to do so.

The day it all changed

When my wife and I had our son TJ, our first, it was a very different scenario than what it is now.

My wife worked full-time and after her maternity leave was up, she went back to work. Which meant that I was home with TJ. This was both very rewarding and stressful.

See before TJ, I had my schedule fully booked up with work and some days would wake up at 5 AM and work until 9 PM. Having a strict work schedule suddenly meant that every single day there was a lot left undone at the end of the day.

No nap, no regular time to take calls, crying in the background, crankiness all add up to not getting much work done. Maybe even lost a client or 2 in the process.

In case you aren’t a parent, babies under 8 months in age don’t care what’s on your schedule, the day is run by them.

I started to really think about how my business would be. I would need more flexibility than I currently had. I may have needed a different type of business altogether. Then the opportunity came when my wife would leave her job.

Tough decisions

I won’t bore you with all the details of the conversation, but when the opportunity presented itself, it was something that she really desired so that she could be around TJ and not sitting in traffic.

We had probably our most candid conversations ever over the next few days. She was half our income. She was the carrier of our family health insurance as well. She was the one contributing to our retirement. There was a lot that went into the decision.

This also was the time at which we realized that TJ didn’t like serious conversations. Every time my wife and I would talk about the leap, he would do anything and everything to grab our attention.

We decided that she would stay home and become the primary care taker during the day of TJ and I would continue the business and grow it in various other ways to eventually make up for the loss in salary.

My routine

Now, I wake up anywhere between 5 and 6 AM to get the day started. I end the day usually the latest 5 PM, most days it’s closer to 4. In between I try my best to take breaks and spend time, especially when there are days we take him to the Little Gym and other things.

Be better by 1%

I certainly can be better at this but I am trying to be better 1% every day through scheduling my time, guarding my time, and focus.

It’s that focus that sometimes can be my best friend and worst enemy. There are days where I feel like I’m super focused and others where I can’t focus if my life depended on it.

I’ve learned to leverage my energy levels in ways that I never did before. If I need to do some real deep work and know it’ll take time, I wake up even earlier because that’s when my brain works best.

Having the business I have allows me to take those random days off. Move things around so that we can take a long weekend and drive someplace fun. The time freedom is there, not fully, but close.

The business overall still isn’t where I would like it to be, but it’s getting closer. The time that I want to spend with my wife and son still isn’t where I would like it to be, but it’s getting closer. I know that all this takes time.

Lessons I’ve learned

The biggest change is me as a person. I’ve learned to be patient much more than I ever was. I’ve also learned that procrastination is your worst enemy. If something can be done right now in the time you have available, do it.

If I save it for later, there’s a good chance something will come up that will block it. Whether that’s TJ being sick, not sleeping, or some other client project will pop up unexpectedly.

I learned that I tend to take on too much and still working to be better at not doing that.

All these things are improving me not just as a business owner, but as a husband and father. The honest truth is that I am still working to improve all these things.

More than anything else though, I’ve reached a new level of happiness that I never imagined.

The balance is tough, in fact, I don’t even like calling it a balance. To me it’s more a mesh than anything, even if you are working full-time in a cube.

I wouldn’t give any of it up though for having TJ come in to the office and play with his trains for a little while.

Being around to watch my kids grows, smile, laugh, cry, pee and poop was my goal and it is my happy place.

I can’t imagine my life any other way. No matter what happened during the day with work, no matter how crappy or awesome it was, I know that I want to be present once away from that screen. My family doesn’t care too much about the work, they just want me for me. And I’m trying to be the best me possible.

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In episode 84 - Did hiring a mentor really help you with starting your business you learned how stubborn I was in getting a business coach. If you haven’t already done so, take a listen to that episode because I think it will reinforce what you’ll hear here.

If you are running a business of any kind, there’s a good chance that you are not an expert in every single part of that business. Maybe you are exceptional at sales but not so great at the implementation. Maybe you are technical, but suck at marketing.

The great thing is that you could learn all these things. Just about anything you lack as far as a skill you can read countless articles, listen to tons of podcasts, and even watch thousands of videos on that topic.

All for free too!

The downside is that you’ll be spending all your free time doing so.

There’s a good likelihood too that you’ll be completely overwhelmed with varying point of views and opinions on what is “right.”

This overwhelm will leave you scattered and stretched thin.

I know this because I’ve been there.

Hiring a coach has a number of benefits.

• Accountability
• Efficiency
• One-on-One Attention
• Habit forming
• Trust

Trust

When you hire a coach, you undoubtedly trust this person, otherwise why hire them, right?

You trust them because they are a bit further down the road than you and you can see the results they have had with past clients that you are looking for.

Accountability

Because of that trust you have, there is this inherent accountability of not letting the coach down.

The accountability also comes in the form of scheduled meeting times. As well as some exercises and actions to take before a meeting.

The reason accountability works is because you don’t want to disappoint that other person.

One-on-One Attention

The trust you have in the expert will save you having to figure out what’s “right” because based on what your goals are the information the coach provides you with will be relevant to your specific situation.

An example of this is when you were a kid, did you take piano, dance, maybe even karate lessons.

Maybe you were into sports instead.

Whatever lessons you took, didn’t the teacher or coach meet you where you were? If you were a beginner learning the piano, they showed you how to sit properly and what the keys were. Not how to play Mozart. If you were a baseball player and couldn’t hit but fielded well, didn’t you get extra time in the batting cage to work on your swing?

Efficiency

Same goes for a business coach. It’s the most efficient way to ramp up the skills that you are lacking and smooth out the edges of your existing skillset.

Hiring a coach is an investment of money without a doubt. Sometimes a very big investment. I would argue though that no matter what the investment is it’s something that you will reap the benefits from for the rest of your career.

In the wise words of Ferris Bueller “Life moves pretty fast.”
Hiring a coach is about valuing your time and what an expert can  bring to you and your business.

It may seem like a big investment, but you only get from it what you put into it. So if you want to accelerate your business growth and get further down the road quicker, then hiring a coach is without question the best way to do that.

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During a coaching session I was asked how to properly ask someone for a phone conversation.

The context of this question was that this person wanted to reach out to specific people in larger organizations in order to  simply have a phone conversation with them, not necessarily to sell to them, but for research.

This is cold outreach and let’s be honest with ourselves here and just call it like it is, it’s spam. It’s unsolicited communication, even if it can add value to the recipient by making it you focused.

In the post-GDPR and Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation era we live in we, as businesses we have to adjust and be respectful of a recipient’s privacy that a lot of businesses hadn’t in the past.

With that in mind, nothing really has changed other than shortcuts that businesses used to essentially carpet bomb an email list with a broadcast are now closed off.

By now, you’ve heard that when performing outreach of any kind, you should be doing it in a way that makes the recipient feel like it is a direct email to them specifically, even if it’s not.

Avichal Garg, Managing Partner at Electrical Capital and an Expert at Y Combinator, posted a thread on Twitter on this very topic.

As someone who essentially gets asked many many many times a day for things, it’s refreshing to see his input on how to do it.

I wanted to share a couple of points from his 10 that I find interesting.

Offering Context

Letting the recipient know who you are and if there are any contacts you share in common. If you met some where, jog that person’s memory. Doing this quickly before anything works best. If they recognize the connection, they’ll more likely continue reading.

Be Precise

Get to the point quickly, but be as specific about what you are asking for. Don’t make it vague. In Avichal’s tweet he gives a perfect example, one that I know you can relate to. “Can we get on a call?” is bad. No one will want to jump on a call with someone who they’ve never heard from before.

But “I am performing research in your industry. Here are 2 questions about your website and how it helps your business.” is good. Avichal offers up these 2 examples as “great.” “Do you know person X and could you forward the following blurb to them?” and “I am applying to YC. Does our application make it clear what we build?”

Be Gracious

Remember that whole respectful thing I mentioned early, well be gracious too. If they don’t respond, don’t bombard them every day for a week. That’s only going to make them annoyed and ignore you more, maybe block you or report you as spam.

Follow up a week later, then maybe a month after that. If you haven’t heard anything, stop emailing.

Chances are good that if they can help and/or have the time to help, they will immediately upon reading the email.

One final thought

“If you talk, or you do something, you have something to bring.” is something that Gary Vaynerchuk said in a recent video of his.

Say what you will about Gary, this statement aligns directly with asking for any sort of help or sale.

We know Gary is a talker and he loves nothing more than to hear himself talk. He said this specific quote when sharing a story about a meeting he had at Google with the president of Cuba and Twitter and other major players in the tech space.

He had it in his mind to share a story going into the meeting, but then thought better of it in the context of the meeting because it didn’t add anything to the meeting. He walked away from that meeting without ever saying a word.

Asking someone for something, who you don’t know and they have no clue you even exist is a fine art. There’s no one formula that works. The only thing that I can say is to think about you as the recipient and how you would feel about getting your outreach.

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## How do I know James?

James owns a company called [Content Snare](https://contentsnare.com/) that helps freelancers and agencies get content from clients.

This was a really fun episode because James and I are in the same circles around the web, we just haven’t had an opportunity to meet yet in person being on opposite sides of the planet and all. We both have a fondness for automation that, well can border on the line of obsession.

So when James DM’d me and invited to me come onto his podcast, [Agency Highway](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/), it was a no-brainer. I knew that we’d be unpacking so much together.

In this episode, I had a chance to talk about the following:

## Demand higher rates by following this specialization framework

In case you don’t want to read the rest of this post, you can check out the [full episode](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/016-demand-higher-rates-by-following-this-framework/) for all the details.

And for the second podcast we did together on [Lead Generation](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/017-an-epic-lead-generation-strategy/)

In the episode, which was jammed pack with laughs, I shared a variety of things including:

- What was the best thing that happened to me this year
- How taking time out to reflect on your business can help in so many ways
- How niching helps you raise your rates, and not niching leads to burnout

Specifically I talk about the 4 quadrants of niching down. Which is the process I teach my [coaching clients](https://rezzz.com/coach) and those inside of [Feast](https://rezzz.com/feast) on.

The main takeaways from this show are:

- Fears are just excuses
- You will leave money on the table when specializing, but the opportunity to deliver better solutions to fewer clients, positions you as an expert that commands higher prices.
 - Get a list of red flags to filter clients through when going through your sales process so you don’t end up working with bad clients.
- Put everyone through your vetting process, especially referrals from previous clients. Good chance if they are from your “generalist” days, they won’t be ideal for you now.

Definitely go [check it out](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/016-demand-higher-rates-by-following-this-framework/).

If you have a chance too, check out a few of the other episodes as well.

I’d like to thank James for being a part of it and included along amazing folks like [Troy Dean](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/011-building-recurring-revenue-with-troy-dean/), [Jennifer Bourn](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/009-client-management-system-jennifer-bourn/), and [James Schramko](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/003-work-less-make-more-james-schramko/)

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