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 Tasik Yoon. Hope I said that right. And the question is, I've found many small business owners who usually have one to five designers making their in-house designers to become generalist by giving them diverse work and complaining about low profit. How would you handle that problem? Okay, so I think the question is business owners who are... Okay, I think there's two questions here. One is a question about specialization and one is a question about effectiveness or profitability or, you know, that sort of business outcomes. So I'll talk about specializing first. It's not clear to me if these are employees or freelancers. That's the tricky part here, but I'm going to assume, let's just say it's freelancers for the time being. If the company is complaining about low profit or that they're complaining about your price and like, geez, it's really expensive to pay you to do this, that's an opportunity for you to back up and say, well, what are you trying to achieve? Like, what is it that you want in a business, from a business standpoint, like described in business terms? If they say, well, we want you to make these flyers faster. It's like, okay, why? What are you trying to achieve? What is the business outcome? Are you trying to make more money? I can't make you more money with these flyers, but if you're trying to increase awareness and you believe that's going to make you more money, then yeah, then that's okay. How much awareness is there now? How are we going to measure awareness? And the client, whatever metric the client suggests, they'll know how to measure it because that's why they're asking you to do it in the first place. They just don't usually share that with you. They decide it in advance, like, I've got an awareness problem. If I could just increase awareness, it would increase sales. And then they come to you and say, I need a bunch of flyers. And if you say, why do you need flyers? They say, because our sales are down. Well, what are flyers going to do for sales? Well, it'll increase awareness. Oh, okay. Where's awareness right now? Well, it's really low. And these are the reasons why I know that it's really low. Okay. How do you think flyers are going to increase awareness? And then you can have a conversation around increasing awareness, and maybe you'll use flyers. Maybe you'll update the website. Maybe you'll do some other design thing, some other deliverable or some other consultative engagement to increase awareness, which the client has suggested as a leading indicator for increased sales downstream. So again, if someone's complaining about your price, they're not seeing the value. So you need to figure out what they value and then connect those two things. All right. Now, the other question here is about, it sounds kind of like, oh, my clients are forcing me to be a generalist in my skills. And there are lots of different ways to specialize. And I understand that this is pretty confusing. You can specialize in a lot of different things. So you could say, in one hand, you want to do a bunch of different types of design activities. So maybe you do websites and logos and maybe a little bit of photography, maybe a little bit of illustration and some typography, and you do all of these different things, maybe UX. You do all sorts of different design things, but you're specializing in a vertical, like you just do it for pizza places. So you still get to be a generalist, but you're specialized in your marketing, where you're only doing outreach and campaigns, and on your website, you're just talking to pizza place owners or whoever the buyer would be in a pizza place. You could get even more specific and be like, pizza places that run regional chains. And you still get to be a generalist in your skill set, but you become a specialist in a particular vertical. Another thing, you can specialize in your marketing around psychographics or sort of like, an example would be, I do design for mission-driven businesses, or I do design for people who are environmentally conscious. So these are, and someone who's environmentally conscious, yeah, okay, conscience. Someone who's into the environment could be male, female, young, old, rich, poor. So it's not a demographic specialization. It's a way they think. It's a worldview that they have. So you could do a bunch of different design-

activities and deliverables for a type of client that believes a certain thing or has a certain worldview and therefore has certain goals that you can help them achieve using this broader big toolbox that you have. So other ones that you could specialize demographically, just 30 to 45-year-old soccer moms, that's like a demographic specialization, and you could maybe do something for them. Usually the examples are something more health-related or lifestyle-related where – I don't want to get into a gender thing. But anyway, demographics might be a way for you to specialize but still be general in your skills. So anyway, the point is if you feel like you're being forced to be general in your skills with your employer or your clients, you can still specialize in different ways, or you could quit and just do logos or whatever it is that you like the most. Okay, hopefully I answered the question. I'm not 100% sure I understood it, so I hope that was useful to you or someone. Anyway, I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube, and we'll add it to the queue, and I'll answer it as soon as I 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 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 slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is JonathanStark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.