Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I want to talk about symptoms and diseases. An interesting question came up in my coaching Slack. The student was asking me about a live presentation they were going to give and they wanted my advice and this is what they asked. If you were going to give a live presentation to a conference audience, would you take a minute to explain why they should care? I think I've seen you do that with your Ditching Hourly billing stuff. There's a brief amount of time spent explaining why hourly billing is madness. The answer to this question is yes. I try to always begin presentations by explicitly stating the problem to be solved. I think it's important when you state this problem to put it in their terms, the terms of the audience. For example, lots of credit unions have an atrocious onboarding experience on mobile and I do presentations explaining what to do about it. So you might think I'd lead off a talk like that with something like, your onboarding experience on mobile stinks and it's killing your business. But in their opinion, they're proud of their mobile experience because they've spent a lot of money on it. So if I opened a talk like this, I would completely lose them. They would just close down to anything that I had to say after that because I started off by insulting them, essentially. The way I think of this is that the patient doesn't see the disease, they see the symptom. So if you imagine the client is my patient, they'll see symptoms but they usually won't see the bigger picture, they won't see the underlying cause. So the symptom that the credit union leadership sees is that they're not attracting younger members. Their membership is just aging. So they need to be attracting younger members, but they're not and they know it. So I'll start a talk to a group like this by leading with something like, your membership is aging and you can't figure out what to do about it. This opening will perk them up because they recognize the problem, it's in their terms, and I've stated it in their terms and they're wondering, hopeful even, that I'll offer a possible solution. So this question was about how to hook an audience, how to deliver a presentation to a group of people in an engaging way that is going to inspire them to act when they are done listening. But you can extrapolate it to marketing in the same way. You should really talk about problems in the terms that buyers are going to recognize, your ideal buyers. To paraphrase Dale Carnegie from, I don't know, 50 years ago, he's got a great quote where he says, don't bait your hook with food you like, bait your hook with food fish like. If fish are your clients, you want to put worms on the hook, not Pop-Tarts. That's it for today. I'm Jonathan Stark and this is Ditching Hourly. Thanks for listening. Hey, would you like to be in my coaching Slack room? I'd love to have you. I recently added Slack access to my mentoring program. So if you'd like to find out more about that, you can go to expensiveproblem.com slash mentoring and find out about the different options available to you there to get 24-7 access to me in Slack. Again, that URL is expensiveproblem.com slash mentoring. 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.