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 ShowScene, which is this. I want to sign up retainer clients, but I'm a designer. Will it work the same? So I've talked about this before in other videos, so you can look around for those. But the answer is yes. But let's talk about retainer real quick, because I've talked about this before. To me, a retainer is advisory. It's not prepayment for hours. You're not building stuff. You're doing brains work, not hands work. You're answering questions or perhaps proactively making suggestions based on the customer's context. But you're not building stuff. You're advising, answering questions or making suggestions. So if you're a designer, can you advise people? Can you answer questions? Can you make suggestions? Of course. You need to be viewed as an authority, though, in order to land a retainer client. You need to have some sort of street cred. You need to have credibility. They need to trust you. You need to be an authority. You need to have a particular worldview to land a sort of a high-ticket advisory retainer for which you're paid monthly for access to your smarts. So absolutely. The answer is absolutely yes. I mean, you could be an architect. You could be a landscape designer. There's a million things. Any kind of expert or authority can do advisory retainers. How do you become an authority? I suppose that's an interesting question. The obvious things are write a book. Another thing is speak at conferences. Become well-known in the conference circuit. It helps if you have a really clear mission or purpose or big idea or unique worldview or contrarian stance so that you're interesting to your ideal buyers. You attract their attention. You exert this gravitational pull on the right kind of clients, people who you're going to click with. And then they believe that they want access to your expertise because usually they have some kind of big, risky project that they want to get done properly the first time, and they're willing to essentially pay you for insurance or at least some sort of increased confidence that the project is going to work right the first time. Okay, hopefully that answers your question. You can look around. I've talked about this before, so there are a bunch of other videos and audio files and podcasts that you can check out. But that's it for now. I'm Jonathan Stark, and if you have questions, just hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and I'll get to it as soon as I can. See ya. 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.