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 ELB or El, I guess, who asks, I've been stoked about choosing a vertical and sticking to it ever since I've watched your Pigeonhole Yourself talk. Now even more excited with the new, for me, idea of a psychographic approach. Something that's been really bugging me for a while now is the issue of conflict of interests. Working with, for example, a real estate agency, then another and another, or all of them at the same time even, will make your clients start asking questions like, is he starting to share our secrets with our competitors? What if they pay him to sabotage our project? He's using the experience and knowledge that he gathered while working with us to improve the solutions owned by our competitors. In my head, what you're proposing is like a footballer that plays for as many teams battling for the World Cup as possible and at the same time. Your job is literally to win with or even destroy the other businesses in the game. This has been a huge block for me going forward with the concept, so I'd love for you to share your thoughts. Okay, this is a question I get pretty commonly. It's almost always a hypothetical question. In this case, it's a hypothetical question. This doesn't actually happen that much because if someone is hiring you to be a trusted partner to do some important thing for their business, they trust you. They're already trusting you. They're trusting you with their money. So there's a lot of trust there. Or if there's not, you shouldn't be working with them. But if you are working with them, they trust you already. I don't think I have ever had any question like this, even from my most paranoid clients. And the reason is clients, these may be fears that are in the back of their mind, but a bigger fear is incompetence. So if they trust you and they believe that you're, because all of these things would be like, it's certainly unethical, if not illegal. So if they just assume that you're not a criminal, which is probably a safe assumption if they trust you, then what they're more concerned with is that you're competent and that you've got experience in their vertical. You're much more likely to get the question, what kind of experience do you have working with real estate companies? What did he say? Real estate developer. Was it developers? Doesn't matter. So the point is they love it when you have experience in their vertical already because you speak their language, you understand the nuances of their business, you understand their specific concerns. And rarely, I don't know exactly, I don't think you said what you do, I get the impression you're a developer, but if you're doing something like SEO for plumbers in the same region, like the same city, that can get weird because you're bidding against yourself. But if you're consultative in nature or there's like a regional distribution or there's even the slightest difference in differentiator between one real estate agency and another real estate agency or they're in completely different towns, then there's just not, the problem doesn't happen that much. If it does, if someone actually asked you, how do we know you're not sharing our secrets with our competitors? If they said that to me, I would say like, well, first of all, that would put me out of business immediately. Second of all, if you don't trust me, we can't work together because you're going to have to trust me quite a bit to take my advice on these things that I'm going to insist that you do. So, you know, but literally again, I don't think anyone has ever said that to me. Some other things that do come up that are kind of in this area, some folks will want you to sign an NDA. I've done that many times. I will not do it, almost never do it for a meeting, but I will do it once where like it's like a paying engagement. So once they become a customer, I'll say in advance, like, you know, just so you know, I'm happy to sign an NDA once we start with the project or whatever. And that usually solves any kind of like concerns like this because then it's a criminal act that you would be doing and they feel like that would have them covered. So, yeah, so just think about it like this. Would you want to hire like, you know, someone to redesign your bathroom that had never done it before, you know, for a homeowner? Like they only do commercial places, but yeah, I guess I could redesign a bathroom for a homeowner. You don't want that. You want someone with experience in your particular situation. So clients that usually, in my experience, always outweighs any kind of concern that you'd be sharing secrets with the enemy. So, you know, maybe if it was Coke Pepsi type of thing and they have like one massive competitor, maybe, but these are all, that's an exception. That's not the rule. Okay, so I would say try and get over it. You're probably imagining it. If it comes up, then you've got a trust building exercise to do. It's not a question of like, oh, I shouldn't pigeonhole my...

In this niche, it's more about, I need to do something in my marketing so these people trust me that I'm not a criminal. Okay, so I hope that helps. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn, and we'll find it and add it to the queue. 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.