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. Got a question from Aileen Cooper who says, Hello Jonathan, thanks for this open forum opportunity. My question is about people who see needs in a specific niche and are willing to help by means of consulting. One, what processes do you suggest for one to take in the changeover from employee to a self-employed consultant? And two, how does one know when they are pricing too much versus too little based on pricing packages they've made for clients? All right, so I'll take those one at a time. The first one, changing over from being an employee to a self-employed consultant. I'm going to assume for the sake of discussion that the employee is doing the skills that they're planning on doing when they go solo as a consultant. So you're in-house doing, I don't know, software development, you're building Rails apps, and when you go solo, you're still planning on building Rails apps. You just don't want to do it for an employer anymore versus going solo and doing something completely different. That's like a whole other can of worms. But you're an employee, you've built up this skill at your job, you feel like you're really good at it, and you become dissatisfied for whatever reason with your employer or the employment arrangement. You're not making enough money, you don't have enough freedom, not enough autonomy, whatever. So you decide to go solo, you're going to use those same skills to go solo. So now the processes I would suggest, depends on the level of urgency, but ideally if you could be sort of patient about the changeover, what I would do before I left is start to try to build an audience before I leave. So let's say, so this involves a lot of steps, but I think you're going to have to do them anyway, so you might as well do them while you're gainfully employed and kind of start it as a side hustle. So let's say you're doing Rails apps, you're building Rails apps for your employer. Find, first of all, decide who you're going to want to serve when you do go solo. So pick to start, imagine you're just going to start just focusing on a very specific problem that a very specific kind of client has. Could be a vertical, like I always say dentists as a vertical, just so you understand, or it could be small manufacturing companies, or it could be something like a line of business that someone is in. Or it could be something a little bit more demographic, like maybe you're not a Rails developer and you do coaching and you really want to coach first-time moms who are in their 40s, or you really want to coach CEOs of mission-driven businesses. Anyway, the point is that there are all sorts of ways that you could pick an initial target market, an initial ideal buyer while you're still employed. Once you know who that is, and I understand that you could probably help lots and lots of different kinds of people, but pick one that you really care about, or one that stands out, or one that you have a lot of access to already. You sort of have an unfair advantage because you're connected with all of these people already, maybe through a spouse or through your family, whatever it might be, and start talking to those people, back channel to those people, DMs, private messages, emails, phone calls, meeting up for coffee, meet with those people, and just ask them about their problems. What things have they paid recently to solve that are similar to what you do? What problems are keeping them up at night? Really get to know this initial target market so that you can kind of read their minds, so you see all of them have the same problem, all of them need more leads, or all of them need to close more deals, or all of them want more traffic to their website, or all of them need their web application to be faster. It's very common, you know, look for a pattern among this group that all needs the same thing, all has this same desire, the same expensive problem, the same big opportunity they're trying to capture, and start to help them for free before you leave. Now, I don't mean to do work for them necessarily, what I mean is start taking questions for them like I'm doing right now, start taking questions from them, and answer those questions, say, in a one-page PDF, or in a short email sequence that they can sign up to for free, and then create a web page, or it doesn't have to be a web page, it could be private, it could be a private mailing list that you put together, so maybe your employer doesn't, maybe you don't want your employer to know about this, but regardless, create something valuable, some answers to burning questions that they have, and publish it. Publish it as a PDF that they can...

Download, publish it as, like I said, an email, a short email course. So you can start connecting with these folks, getting them on your email list. You want to start building this audience, preferably as an email list, and seeing if you can actually attract them. Once you do start to attract them, see if you, you know, sort of extend the conversation, reply to their emails. If they leave comments on your, you know, if you're doing YouTube videos, they leave comments, read them, respond to them, interact with these people who are starting to be attracted to you for this problem that you can solve for them. Deliver value to them. Every single time they invest five minutes of their time to watch your video, read your email, listen to your podcast, reward them. Make them feel like it was worth it. Make them feel like, wow, I'm glad I spent that five minutes of my life. It wasn't a waste of time. It wasn't just some spammy sales, you know, thinly veiled sales come on. Really deliver value to these folks every single time so that they get positive ROI on their time investment. Keep doing that. Keep talking to them. They're going to start to want to know more about you. They're going to start, well, maybe we could engage at a higher level. I'd love to jump on a phone call and get like specific answers to my questions, that kind of thing. So once you start to see patterns and people start to ask for more of your attention, they ask for more specific answers to their specific situation, not just general best practice answers for the skill set that you do. Once they start to ask for consulting, they're asking for specific advice in their situation. Now you know you're onto something. Like, oh, interesting. Okay, these people do want my advice. So at this point, and this is probably getting a little long here, but at this point, I'll just paint a quick picture of next steps. Next steps that would take place over time would be to come up with some kind of, probably a small product or a productized service and start to, and get like three or four beta customers for that, for which you do the productized service or you give them the product or the course or video course or whatever it is for free or cheap in exchange for feedback on your marketing, your delivery. And if they like the thing, a testimonial about that it was good, why it was good, how it changed them, what the improvement is in their business or life. And then you can put that on a sales page. And of course, you would ask them at that point, you would say, well, how much, would you have spent a hundred bucks for this? Would you have spent a thousand bucks for this? Would you have spent 10,000 bucks for this if you had to pay for it? And get a sense from them about how valuable it was so that you can imagine that people in a similar situation to them would consider that price to seem reasonable. So yeah, so that's another topic for another time. And I still have another half of this question here. So the second half of the question is, how does one know when they are pricing too much versus too little based on pricing packages they've made for their clients? Well, I accidentally answered it. A really sort of safe, easy, non-sexy way to do it is to deliver a product or service, a productized service, not a custom engagement, but like a product or productized service to a client, usually a minimum of three as a beta and get pricing guidance from them about it. You say to them, would you have paid $10,000 for this? Would you have paid $100 for this? And they'll have one of three reactions. They'll say, oh yeah, I absolutely would have. Or they'll say, no way, no way, that's way out of my price range. Or they'll say, yeah, that's about right. So what you wanna do is bounce a number off them and get the reaction. And you know when it's about right, then you're probably at a good starting point for that product or productized service. Okay, hopefully that answers your question. Hopefully that helps. And if you, viewer or listener, have a question for me, 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 among 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/call. C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com/call. Hope to see you there.