Ditching Hourly

Hello, and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. This episode is an anonymized question that I answered in one of my Ditcherville Live Q&A sessions inside of my group coaching community. The question was essentially, what products or services have I stopped offering over the years? In the answer, I describe why you might want to stop offering something, what the signs are that you should stop offering an offering, and maybe give you an idea for a new one if you are newer in your journey. Here it is. All right, the next question is, you mentioned you might do a course on daily emails. Sign me up. Okay. This made me wonder, what other successful courses, services, or products have you offered in the past that you no longer offer? Some of your successful early steps might be worth trying for us newbies too. The only thing I don't offer anymore is roadmapping because I probably did, I don't know, a dozen, maybe two dozen roadmaps for people like us, just like mostly soloists who were early stages trying to get off the hourly treadmill. And I found that I did enough of them. Every time I did one, it was custom to the person, but I would bring in a lot of support materials that were the same. So like articles that I had written or other people had written. So it was kind of like, here's your situation. Here's what you want. Here's where you want to, here's where you currently are. Here's where you want to go. Here is the sort of step-by-step procedure that I would recommend you follow for the next 12 to 18 months to get you there. And then here's some supporting material so that you can, you know, when you get to this point in the journey, you've got a reference point. And as I did this more and more and more, it ended up that basically everybody needed either one thing or another thing. So there was kind of like two paths to go down and it depended on where they were starting. So the more freelancer-y early stage people were, they just needed the basics. And, you know, so it was like positioning, all this stuff, positioning, product, type, services, and pricing, so forth. So it was very, it wasn't all that customized really. And the deliverable, the PDF kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then it hit about a hundred pages. And I was like, this is like, this feels like it's turning into a book. And then I was like, light bulb, I wrote a book by accident. So that's the freelancer's roadmap. And that's for the sort of earlier stage, like freelancer, someone who's anywhere from like just going freelance to maybe two years in and they're really starting to feel the pinch. That's who that book's for. And it used to be a roadmap for people that was custom every time, but I just, I started to dread having to write it. It felt really repetitive. And so now I just, so I just turned it in, I abstracted it slightly and it just became a book. So I don't offer that anymore. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think roadmapping is a really good thing to offer for people who are trying to, you know, for people who are just getting started and that journey from like execution to higher level advisory type of stuff. Roadmapping is a great thing to do. And ideally you'll get sick of it too, because you start to see so many patterns that you're just like, oh, I've got this down. I've got a framework now, or I've got, you know, this seven step proven process that's worked over and over and over. And then you can, you'll get sick of doing the roadmap and you'll get sick of doing implementation. And you just take all of that knowledge up a layer, up a level to the strategic level, advisory level. So that, you know, roadmapping is a really interesting thing to do because it, you start to see patterns in segments of your audience or segments of the kinds of clients that you're attracting that can turn into intellectual property and more advisory type content and engagements. So it's a good phase to go through, but I do think, you know, I think eventually you'll get sick of it. Right around the time you get sick of doing implementation, you'll get sick of doing roadmaps. I think they're almost causal. That'd be my guess, but I've seen it happen multiple times. All right. 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.