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 Pratham Hasabnis. Hope I got that right. And it is this. How do we move out from a vendor-customer relationship, which is usually short-term, to value-added partner-customer relationships, which are usually longer-term and trust-based? Well, you've kind of answered your own question there. It needs to be trust-based. So they need to trust you. And how do you get strangers to trust you? In a case like a B2B relationship, a business-to-business relationship, you need to become a recognized expert at something. So you will be differentiated from the other people who maybe do the same discipline, whatever your discipline is, whether you're a web developer or brand consultant or designer or whatever. So you need to become a recognized expert in a particular area. That specialty or that area or that focus could be horizontal. Maybe it's network security and you're just like the go-to person for network security. Or maybe it's a vertical. You're sort of a generalist, but you specialize in dentists or international restaurants or something like that. There are other ways you could specialize, but you're not going to become the go-to recognized expert for just generally being a web developer. You want to be able to say, you want to be able to switch from saying I'm a web developer to I'm the something. I'm the ditching hourly guy or I am the self-driving car security expert, something like that. So something really, it has to be really specific. It could be, again, you could specify around a lot of different things. You could specialize around a problem space or a skill space, horizontal, vertical, psychographic, demographic. You could specialize in a lot of different ways and you can combine them to create a tighter and tighter specialty. How tight do you go? You can tell when you've gone tight enough when people start to become interested in you, you start attracting people to you. Say, I am the expert on security for self-driving cars. Oof, that's interesting. And automatically you know who might be interested in hiring you. So that's the first thing. So you want to become the go-to expert first by specializing in something and then you need to speak and you need to write. Some combination of speaking and writing. So speaking could be you go on podcasts, you speak at conferences, you speak at meetups, you do webinars, you do live streams. All of these are speaking gigs of one kind or another and you need to share your expertise for free. It doesn't have to be for free, but some of it should, it doesn't all have to be free, but some of it definitely should be. So you're sharing this expertise for free online and positioning yourself as this expert at this thing that you've chosen to specialize in. Writing, what are things you can do in terms of writing? You can blog, of course. Mailing list is my favorite. I do a daily mailing list. I think it's a game changer for your business if you have something that you're passionate enough about to write every single day. It's a total game changer. You could blog, I already said that. You can write articles. Guest blog is what I meant to say. You can guest blog on other people's sites. You could write for magazines depending on what it is that you do. There's probably some kind of trade journal or some sort of respected brand in the publishing space. You could try to write for them, do a guest post or a guest article. You could get a column in a newspaper or some, you know, on like a newspaper website. There are all these things you can do inside of speaking and writing, but honestly, I think those are the three steps. If you pick something to specialize in or you find something to specialize in that you're really interested in, it's like a superpower for you. It's easy for you. You're good at it. You love it. And then you write about it and you speak about it. You're going to start attracting the kinds of people who care about that thing. And then you're going to be differentiated from everybody else. You're going to be the obvious choice. You're not going to have to debate price or anything like that. Not nearly as much as when, you know, people are like, well, your choice is expensive as the security expert down the street. Why should we pick you? Because I am the security expert for self-driving cars. So if you just want some rando security expert, yeah, go hire that cheaper person, but I am expensive. So that's the idea. I hope that answers the question. Yeah, I think that answers it. One last thing I want to mention is the term, I don't necessarily correlate the type of relationship vendor customer versus partner customer with long term or short term. It can be, but I don't always associate it with that. You can have short term engagements at a partner level where you're doing like an innovation workshop or some sort of roadmap or planning session or something like that.

They don't have to be long-term, but as you said, they're usually long-term. They tend to be. People tend to come back for more. Depends on the offering. But anyway, I hope that helped. My name is Jonathan Stark, and if you have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and we will find it and add it to the queue. 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.