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 Bank Photo who says, just wanted you to know I appreciate your content. Thank you. I'm into multimedia, photo, video, graphics, and printing. And at some point, I'd like to have an agency, aka become a consultant. At this moment, we do more of weddings because that's where the daily bread comes from and I love it too. I'd like to be in an agency where big brands will come for multimedia solutions. How do I go about it? All right, so this is a good question. First of all, I would say that it's cool that you have, it sounds like a steady flow of income from the wedding work and that you like it. So that's great. My first recommendation would be to keep doing that in a sort of a part-time basis or, you know, what am I trying to say? Do it not so much that you can't also work on your business. So maybe limit it to 20 hours a week of actual wedding client work, whatever it is. You probably shoot weddings on the weekend and then you're probably processing the images after that and then maybe, you know, doing sales for future weddings and that sort of thing. Try and limit that amount of work to 20 or 30 hours a week. You want to have 10 or 20 hours a week left over to work on the business. You want to have energy left over after you've got what I call your keep the lights on money from the weddings. Okay, the next part of the question is, how do you build the next version of the business? How do you become an agency where big brands come for multimedia solutions? So first I would say, what big brands? You know, I talk to a lot of people who are like, I want better clients and I want bigger clients and I want big brands. I want to work with A-listers and I'll say, okay, well, like who? And they usually have never thought about that. They're like, well, I don't know. And I'm like, okay, well, like Nike, Apple, Starbucks, who? Target? And I'll ask them, if you could just wave a magic wand and have like 20 dream clients, who would be on that list? And this is an interesting exercise because all of a sudden it takes this sort of fantasy of having better clients or bigger clients and it makes it concrete. And you think, well, I'd love to work with, I don't know, Lululemon or Tom's or whatever. Make that list. All of a sudden it's concrete. You can find people that work at those companies. You can connect with them on LinkedIn. You can follow their news feeds or their blogs or their press releases to see what kind of strategy they're working on for the upcoming quarter or the upcoming year or whatever. You can check their earnings. You can follow news about them. You can connect with people at the company based on the reality of what's going on with their business. And you can start a conversation with people who actually work there. So that advice is basically, well, if you want to work with big brands, tell me which ones, 10, 20, 40 of them, however many you can think of, and start going after those people in that time you have left over after the wedding work. Okay. The next thing is to... I'm a huge fan of specializing, especially when you're trying to get started. It's not as necessary once you're rolling because you're getting good word of mouth and you've got a client list that sort of speaks for itself and you've perhaps even got work that speaks for itself. But at the beginning, when you're trying to start that fire, you want to focus down your energy, like with a magnifying glass, just focus down your energy to start a little fire. So if you've picked the, let's say, 20 clients who you'd just love to work with, and you're sort of networking your way toward those people who work there, you also want to be thinking, well, what problem do they have? What problems do they have? What are the big things that they're trying to solve? Or what are the big opportunities they're trying to capture? What strategic direction are they taking? And how can I help them reach that with my skill set? And then come up with a way that your skills overlap with the problems they're trying to solve. So you come at these clients who you'd like to work with from a standpoint of like, I see you have this problem, this expensive problem, or I see that you're trying to capture this big opportunity. And I help people with that. I help people like you with that, or I'd like to help people like you with that, or I've helped people similar to you with that. Would it make sense to have a conversation to see if there's a good fit? And then once you're having those conversations and you can really articulate their problem in their words, and then talk to them, you know, to learn the specifics of their situation, and then talk about how you could apply your skill

solve those problems, and not talking about your skills so much, but saying, well, if you've got a problem like this, wouldn't it be great if it was gone and your world looked more like that? You know, you're here right now, this is the before picture, what would the after picture look like after working with me? Or after this problem is solved? Maybe it's not even after working with you. And then start to talk about, okay, well, I don't want to go into a value pricing thing in this video, but the idea is, the overall summary of this is, carve out some time to work on the business while you're still keeping the lights on with the wedding photography, make a list of your dream clients and start connecting with people who work there, and then figure out what problems they have or what opportunities they're trying to capture, and figure out how you can create solutions for them to solve those problems or capture those opportunities using your skill set. And I mean, it takes time to do, but if you follow these steps, it gives you something to actually do instead of just like most people just think, boy, I really wish I had better clients. All right, I hope that helped. If you have questions, just hashtag ask Jonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we'll get to those as soon as we can. 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.