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 Lindy Design Lab and it goes like this. It does feel difficult to narrow down on something. Each time I learn something new, I want to focus on that, but then my existing portfolio makes no sense. How do you balance constant learning with specialization? All right. So back in the day, years ago, years, years ago, I was, I sort of blogged, I had a blog and I kind of blogged like I think a lot of people do. Every once in a while, something would catch my attention. I would blog about it. And over time, like if you looked back at it, it's just this yard sale of random stuff that has no obvious cohesion around anything. It had nothing in common. It would be things like some weird quirk of iOS in Interface Builder back when that was a thing. And then the next time around, it would be something about a user agent string in Windows Phone 7. It just made no sense. No one would read it. It was mostly for me to just go back and be able to find things so I didn't forget them. So what I think the thing that you need to do when you have lots of interests and you're excited about those different, you know, all these different things and new shiny object and all that, I think that's fine. If, you know, maybe the, what you need is what I call like the sun in the center of a solar system of interests. So you've got this central theme and around it will circle these planets that are individual topics that without the central theme in the middle would just fly apart. They wouldn't make sense together. They don't kind of gel into a body of work because there's no central theme. So it could be that you have some central theme. There might be something that draws you to these different things that is in common. And once you can identify that, maybe you have some mission, maybe, well, I'm guessing from your name, you're a designer. So maybe there's some aspect of design that drives you. It's the reason you picked design in the first place. It's what you love about it. And if you can find that central focus or this mission or purpose or big idea or this thing that drives you, makes you want to get out of bed in the morning and do your job, then you can sort of, every time you blog about these other things or you design these different things and they're sort of exploratory and they don't obviously connect with each other, you tie them into your central theme. So you give a sort of gravitational pull to the center of all these things that otherwise might seem disconnected and you project them through this lens of your theme. So for me, ditching hourly is my theme, pricing your work instead of billing for your time. Like that's my core theme. And I'm about to go off on a rant about why I think that's amazing, but I'll stop. So with the central theme that's around pricing services instead of billing for your time, I talk about lots of different topics. So I'll talk about positioning, which is how to present yourself to the world in a way that makes you make sense to them. That's not a pricing thing per se, but I'll present it to people through a pricing lens. Like if you aren't attracting lots of clients, you're going to have a hard time having any negotiating power in the sales process and you're not going to be able to sort of command high fees if you don't have a strong positioning statement because you're not going to get enough leads. People aren't going to see your value proposition. So positioning is an important pillar on which a good pricing strategy is supported. There are other things too. Publishing. I think it's super important to do things like this and share your expertise for free as much as you can, whether it's in a blog post, a video, a podcast, a book, whether it's free or relatively inexpensive. I think publishing is critical to commanding high fees. Back to the pricing thing. I could go on and on. Speaking of conferences, systematizing your business, that leads to decreased costs, which increase profits if you're not trading time for money. So I can tie all of these different, I probably have like six or ten different topics that I talk about regularly. I've got a daily mailing list, so I have to talk about a lot of, I have to come up with a lot of things to talk about every day, but they all tie back to pricing. So how to increase the amount of value that you deliver to your clients and therefore can justify higher prices. So that's a long way of, it's just me giving an example of what perhaps you could do.

To take all of these things that don't seem like a body of work, they seem like a yard sale or flea market of all these just random things that don't hang together, figure out what your core drive is. What is the mission that you're on? What drives your interest in these things? And if you can come up with a really good one that your ideal buyers would care about, something that's meaningful to the people you seek to serve, as Seth Godin would say, then you can tie all of those things together around that central theme and they'll cohere. It'll be a body of work. They'll sort of create a solar system around that sun in the middle, but without that sun, they just fly apart and they don't make any sense. Okay, so hopefully you can figure out what that thing in the center is. If you can't, maybe you should, you know, maybe it's a self-control thing or maybe you do all these fun things, you know, but you don't necessarily, you know, but some things are a hobby and you don't publish them. You don't like share them with the world. You just like do them for fun and they inform your work, but you're not going to, wherever you're sharing things, you're not going to put it on Instagram or your blog or Twitter or whatever, and you're just a little bit more curated about what it is that you put out to the world. But I would guess probably the better approach is to find out what that sun in the middle of your content solar system is and project everything through that lens as you publish it. Okay, I hope that helps. If you have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we'll add it to the list. Bye. 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.