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 Greg Lanchion, or Lantion, and Greg asks, would there be a situation where someone inexperienced could become a consultant right away? Hmm, interesting. So let's first by defining the term consultant. So to me, a consultant is someone who answers questions. They give advice. People consult with them. So somebody needs answers. They believe the consultant has the answers. They pay the consultant to get access to those answers. That's the way it works. The term consultant is sort of bastardized by like a Deloitte and the big consulting firms where they send in an army of developers to like code away by the hour. To me, that's not pure consulting. To me, pure consulting is advisory. You're giving advice. You're answering questions. Maybe you're being proactive and making suggestions about a given situation. But it's really about answering questions from an expert perspective. Now let's talk about the word expert. Expert to me is a relative term. You could be an expert. You could be a technical expert compared to one person but not another person. So if you deal with, if your clients are people who run shoe stores and you know how to set up WordPress websites, but you're sort of new to it and you know you're not the best WordPress developer in the world or you're not the world's expert on WordPress, you still know way more about it probably than someone who runs a shoe store. So compared to them, you are an expert. So if you imagine that expertise is relative, it's possible to consult with people if you can find people who care about the information that you do know about and they don't have it themselves. Now the inexperienced piece, the implication is that the person is brand new. So if we stick with the WordPress example, like the person is excited about WordPress and they say I want to be a WordPress consultant, then you're going to have to find somebody who's you know you could probably build up the skills in a week to know more about WordPress than somebody who runs a pizza place or a shoe store is concerned with a completely different kind of business. So yeah you probably could but that would be it feels a little hard to recommend that but it is true. If you know more about something than someone else, then you could answer questions about it. And the question is does that add enough value to their business to warrant charging for it? That is where it gets a little sketchy. But I will say this, even my nine-year-old knows more about some things than I do. So in certain regards, he's an expert at things even though he doesn't have any work experience whatsoever, he's still smarter about certain things that he's more familiar with than I am. So he can tell me who the top YouTubers are or he can tell me how to use Adobe Animate because he loves animating things, he knows how to do that and there's a whole bunch of things that he knows about. My five-year-old could give me Minecraft recipes and Minecraft cheat codes and you know it's not a question of worldwide absolute expertise. You don't have to be the worldwide expert to be a consultant, you just need to know more about it than the people who you seek to serve and the advice that you're giving them needs to be so valuable that they will pay you for it. So one more thought on this. It could be that, you know, let's say you're 20 and you're in a full-time job and you want to go solo and you've heard that it's a bad idea to call yourself a freelancer so you want to call yourself a consultant and at your day job you do Photoshop, you do stuff in Photoshop. Well, maybe you're actually, maybe you've got expertise or maybe you've got skills other than what you've been doing for work that are actually more valuable to people. Maybe you're amazing at, I don't know, fundraising for your church group. Maybe you just have an amazing street credit. You've done a great job of that in the past. I mean, you're gonna have some life experience even when you're as young as 20, which sounds young to me. You're gonna have life experience doing all sorts of things even if it's just understanding the people in your age group and selling that expertise. I shouldn't air quotes it. You could sell this expertise about your demographic and how they interact with social media or something to people who are just dying for that kind of information. So what I'm saying here is maybe this question asker is thinking that they're focusing on a very narrow skill set that they have and they're thinking, well, I'm not very experienced at WordPress or something or Photoshop, but I really like it and I'm working in-house right now but I'd like to go out and be

Well, maybe there's a better thing for you to go be a consultant about. I don't know, but what I'm saying is think really broadly about your life experience and look for a place where you have really, look for the place where you have the best street cred, where you've got the best story, you've got like an amazing backstory. You know, think of like a summer job that you had that was super weird and gave you a wild perspective on some industry. I'm thinking of my summer jobs in college I worked on inside of a printing press at a newspaper. It was insane, and it gave me a really interesting perspective on a whole bunch of things. It doesn't matter. But what I'm saying is think really broadly about your life experience and what's unique about you, what is not just necessarily the kind of skill you'd put on a resume, but it could be something from a hobby or maybe you're an Eagle Scout or a black belt. There could be all sorts of things. You're like amazing at playing scales on guitar. There might be other things that you could go consult about where it's easier to find people who are less experienced than you and are therefore interested in your expertise and perhaps willing to pay for it. I feel like I probably confused the question asker more than I helped, but it's food for thought. So I'll leave it there. And if you have questions for me, just hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we will find it, and I will get to your question as soon as I can. Thanks. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon, and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at thepricingseminar.com. That URL again is thepricingseminar.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 slash call. Hope to see you there.