Double Your Freelancing Podcast

This week I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Sherry Walling, a clinical psychologist and counselor and the wife of Rob Walling, who we talked with in Episode 12.

Sherry gave a fantastic talk at MicroConf last year on ways that entrepreneurs can manage their own anxiety, and I wanted to bring her on to discuss how you can make sure that your life as a freelance consultants doesn’t end up hurting your health, your relationships, and your family.

You can follow Sherry on Twitter at @zenfounder

Subscribe to the Business of Freelancing Podcast with Brennan Dunn

This week my special guest was Rob Walling. He’s known for the following…

And I thought I did a lot!

We chatted about how you can move — either partially or fully — from freelancing to making money from products.

In this episode, I talked with Marcus Blankenship of CREO Agency. If you don’t live in a tech hotbed like SF or NYC and you worry that your location will hinder your ability to recruit clients, you won’t want to miss this episode.

I also mentioned my upcoming Skillshare course on value pricing proposals. Here’s the link.

Today I talked with Nick Hance of Reenhanced about ways of setting yourself apart from your competition. If you’ve ever wondered how you, as say a Ruby developer, are any different than me (a Ruby developer) or thousands of other Ruby developers, you’ll want to listen to this discussion.

I also opened the show by talking about my upcoming bootcamp with Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on how to create recurring revenue for your consulting business. Here’s the link to the bootcamp.

I’ve recently been to quite a few “product” conferences ( LessConf, MicroConf and soon BaconBizConf), and what I keep finding is that a LOT of freelancers are in attendance. It’s no secret that most freelancers want to one day build and sell a product or two of their own, but how? How do you figure out what to build and ultimately sell it to the right people?

In this episode, I cover four ways that you can quickly start productizing your consulting business and escaping selling your time for money:

This is the first episode of 2013 for The Business of Freelancing Podcast, and inside I cover everything you need to know about dealing with those pesky clients who want to know “How much is it gonna cost me?” We explore how to qualify new leads, offer an initial consult, and how to make it known that we’re consultants — not just guns for hire.

Here’s the letter that John wrote me that prompted this episode:

Biggest fear with new client? Pricing, definitely. What’s their budget, when it’s near impossible to drag it out of them? Will a standard quote, without knowing their details, turn them away without discussion or negotiation, before budgets or even depth of project is really known. It’s amazing how many times an initial contact requires blind quotes before required info can be determined. If I’ve at all described the situation, besides abandoning such clients, what to do?

Hosted by  Brennan Dunn,  Eric Davis, and special guest  Obie Fernandez

Obie  -  Sell Your By-Products by Jason Fried of 37 Signals,  Obie’s Document Templates,  750 Words

Do an analysis of the work you’ve provided and that you’re getting referrals for, identify the commonalities, list them out in the ways you would list the features of a product and slap an identity on it. There’s your productizing effort!

It’s a surprise (aka, we don’t know yet).

We’re hoping to get a transcript later.

Hosted by  Brennan Dunn and  Eric Davis.

Brennan  -  Obie’s Document Templates,  IndieConf 2012

Reflect on your own business and put together a checklist of things that you ask a new client to qualify them and to bump up your professional factor by having a systematic icebreaker.

Obie Fernandez

We’re hoping to get a transcript later.

Hosted by  Brennan Dunn and  Eric Davis.

Eric  -  Levenger Circa and  Staples Arc notebooks.  15 Minutes to a More Creative You: Steve Leveen

Brennan  -  5 Pricing Tips to Earn More on Client Projects: Ruben Gamez

Instead of writing a blog post for your own blog, find a different blog or a podcast that accepts guests and get yourself booked.

Sales Pipelines

We’re hoping to get a transcript later.

Hosted by  Brennan Dunn and  Eric Davis with guest  Nathan Barry.

00:19 – Nathan Barry ( twitter  blog)

01:14 – Show topic goals

01:53 – Nathan’s professional career background

12:36 – Books as the new business cards

22:48 – Teaching what you know and giving away information generates income

Nathan  -  Smashing Magazine’s The Mobile Book

Start teaching. Setup a blog, pick 1-3 topics you know and want to be known for, and write them. Don’t over-think it, just start teaching.

We’re hoping to get a transcript later.