Ditching Hourly

Hello, and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today, I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com, and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy.

Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a question from Alex, who asks, how can I transition smoothly from working remotely in a fintech company to becoming a solopreneur delivering strategy and branding for blockchain startups? I've been getting some leads through LinkedIn and Word of Mouth, and I want to position myself better on LinkedIn and double down on my side job, build a better online presence, et cetera. My concern is that as I ramp up my side job, that might raise a few eyebrows at the current job. All right, this is a fun question. So I don't know the specifics, obviously, of Alex's working arrangement with the fintech. It doesn't even say if, I don't think it says if he's an employee or not or a contractor. It just says working remotely. So of course, whatever the agreement is should be honored. Whatever the expectation is should be honored. Hopefully, it's not some sort of draconian policy that prevents employees from blogging or building an email list or talking to customers or starting a website. I have heard of things like that with really protective employers. But assuming that that's not the case, then I would say it's a great sign that you're already getting leads. What that means is you're already positioned somehow in people's minds. So probably the first thing I would do is go back to the referrals that you've gotten in The Word of Mouth, and hopefully you're on the email or you can reach out to the person who made the introduction or made the referral, and you can ask them to forward the email so you can see exactly how they described you to the other person. And that will give you a good sense of how outsiders describe what it is that you do, what your discipline is. Maybe they say blockchain expert or who knows. But it'd be very interesting for you to see what your friend thought would be persuasive to their friend, if you follow. So that's one thing I would do. And then the next thing I would do, it's not clear. You never said full time, I don't think. But you evidently believe that you have time where you could ramp up your side job. So a couple of things I would do, and this is, I think, general advice for employees who aren't explicitly forbidden from doing things on the side. Yes, you might raise eyebrows at your current company if you're doing something in public, then it probably will signal to your direct manager or someone that you might be looking to make a move, you might be looking to leave, you might be a flight risk. That might be good, that might be bad, it might be weird. You kind of just have to navigate that. You know, whoever's listening to this, you just have to navigate your own situation. Is your boss a really bad micromanager or are they super cool? If you wanted to, you could even say, hey, I'm thinking about starting this thing on the side. Is it cool if I work weekends or nights doing this side hustle thing? All of that, whether it's cool or not stuff, depends on your current main client, whether it's your employer or not. So I think the more helpful thing I could focus on here is if it's not super cool with your boss, it's frowned upon, but it's not explicitly forbidden, then just to keep things smooth sailing, I would do as much of it under the radar as possible, not jam it in their face so that your fellow employees are seeing that you're doing this thing and everybody knows the boss doesn't like it, but you're doing it anyway, so you're sort of this rogue employee. You don't want to jam their nose in it. So you could do things under the radar. For example, you could start building a strong pipeline of maybe you build an email list or create some kind of really useful lead magnet, all stuff that you'd be doing for free on the side that would eventually turn into a rich source of leads for you when you do decide to either go solo or take more of a plunge. Maybe you start taking a day off a week from your main employer or whale client. You just work four days a week, and then on Fridays, you do this side hustle or you do the side hustle on the weekends. But the things that you can do are to start to position yourself on LinkedIn in the way that your referrers were introducing you to people because that is evidently language that works. You're getting leads from it, so that's good. And perhaps creating an asset like, I don't know, like a This Week in Blockchain newsletter or This Week in Blockchain for Startups newsletter, and maybe there are things out there that are already like that, but maybe you've got your own angle on it. Maybe you've got some...

expertise that you can share for free to a group of people and if you can attract them to your list, that's a really good sign that you're not going to have a hard time getting leads when you are ready to start cashing checks, asking for money. So, okay. A couple things. So, you could update your LinkedIn bio, you know, that little sort of headline that goes underneath your name to be specific to whatever, however you're pigeonholed in your friends' minds. That would be one thing. Another thing is you could, you know, start a website or a blog or a newsletter that has a very clear value proposition, you know, blockchain marketing for startups or blockchain marketing for bootstrap startups or blockchain marketing for startup founders looking for funding or, you know, something really specific. Whatever your sweet spot is, the folks that you would be able to just hit home runs like crazy with, whatever situation, whoever they are, however you would describe them, you could start this content factory, you know, I shouldn't say factory, you'd be doing it, but you'd create this channel for them to read or listen to. Maybe it's a podcast. So, what you'd be doing is positioning yourself based on how your friends are referring you as the expert at this thing for these sorts of people and you'd start producing content for it, whether it's a podcast, mailing list, blog, medium articles, helping out in answering questions on Quora. You know, you just have an online presence. Whatever is the easiest for you, whatever makes the most sense for the content and start to just increase awareness of your expertise in this area with the people who you seek to serve, as Seth Godin would say. So, start building an audience is basically what I'm saying. And, you know, if your employer is not 100% cool with this, then you can do it kind of under the radar. Maybe it's on a different domain name. Maybe you don't make it obvious that it's you. Maybe you just have amazing content and nobody really cares who it's from quite yet. Maybe you do private things like webinars. I didn't mention webinars yet. You could do private webinars that are invite only where you're reaching out via email to people. Since you're concerned about raising eyebrows at work, I would probably go with an email list because it's not like published online anywhere. It's not going to accidentally pop up into somebody's feed. They have to explicitly sign up for it and ask for it. Like, they're asking for it. So, just don't promote it to your employer. Don't promote it to people that you work with, but get the word out to other folks, highly targeted other people who would be interested in whatever the value proposition is, whatever expertise it is that you're here to share with them. And if you can build up a list of like 500 people, there's no doubt in my mind that you'd be able to close deals from that. Once you've got like 500 or so people and you're interacting with them and sending, you know, answering questions that they have and learning about them and their specific needs and, you know, where they're at, what their concerns are in the marketplace, you'll be able to, you're going to start, you're automatically going to start getting leads. Eventually, people are going to be like, oh, we really want to do something more formal. Could you send us a proposal? We want you to do X, Y, and Z. And at that point, at that point or perhaps before that point, you could start developing productized services or info products that you just straight up sell to them and your employer maybe will care less about somebody buying a PDF from you than say someone hiring you to do some consulting thing that's going to take you away from them, you know, that sort of thing. So, I feel like I wasn't able to give you a super specific answer. There's a couple of gray areas here that make it tough, but at the end of the day, nail your positioning, nail your audience, do it as under the radar as you want. I think email is probably the most under the radar and build up an audience while you're still at your current employer or whale client. And then you're going to, at a certain point, you're going to be like, oh, I could have five clients tomorrow if I wanted to. All right, cool. Hope that helped. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube and we'll add it to the queue and answer it as soon as possible. See ya. Hey, Jonathan again. The next time someone asks for your hourly rate, I want you to stop what you're doing and go to valuepricingbootcamp.com to sign up for my free value pricing email course. That URL again is valuepricingbootcamp.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call C-A-L-L. That URL again is...

jonathanstark.com/call. Hope to see you there.