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 Ali Rematullah, who is responding to a previous video and I just want to cut to the chase of this new question. He asks, as someone who is relatively speaking just starting out, I'd love to move straight into strategy work. While I don't think years necessarily translate into expertise, what would you say are some of the skills and or experiences required before someone can make the jump from implementation into strategy? All right. So, I mean, this is a big question and I'm going to kind of break it down a little bit. I think the main thing is that clients need to trust you enough to take your advice. So trust, which isn't really a skill set, is what needs to exist for people to trust you with something as important as strategy. So if we think of this strategic level of engagement is advisory, where if you imagine a building model, the analogy I like to use is you've got an architect who designs the future state or helps the client with the client designs the future state. Then you've got a general contractor who builds the building based on the plans and they create the new the future state. They create the future state. And then you've got a maintenance level that happens after that where people like janitors and maintenance people take care of the new status quo. So any mistakes in the architectural phase are disastrous later on. You know, you could create let's say you design a bad roof and later on that creates just untold hours of maintenance people mopping floors or whatever the case may be replacing drywall. So any activity or engagement that you have with a client early in a big project is super important. So they have to trust you like crazy. They have to trust that you know what you're doing. So the question becomes, how do you get people to trust that you know what you're talking about? And as Ali says, you know, maybe it's years of experience that you can put on your resume and say, hey, I've got all this experience. I must be good at this. But I think I think I don't want to call it a shortcut, but something that's that you can do more quickly, certainly, and something that you can that is perhaps even more trustworthy or a stronger credibility indicator is if you can demonstrate results. So not, you know, I've been a network administrator or I've been a Rails developer for 20 years. Maybe you stink. Just because you've been at it for 20 years doesn't mean you're good. It doesn't mean you deliver good results. But if you can say, you know, if you can just you've only been doing Rails for three years, let's say you're you've only been a network administrator for three years, but you've been hyper focused on a particular space and you're actually amazing at what you do, then you've probably been delivering really impressive results to your clients. So if you focus your website around the results that you deliver or not just your website, but all your marketing marketing materials, here are the business results that I've delivered to my clients. And you get testimonials from them that say, you know, Ali changed the way we do business. I don't know what Ali does, but, you know, whatever it is that you do, if you are delivering amazing results, that is going to it's going to get people's attention. It's going to increase their trust. There are other ways to increase their trust. You can, you know, present at conferences and really connect with people. You can talk to them. You can get referrals from people that they trust. I mean, books, entire books are written about how to build trust with the clients. You have to present yourself with confidence, all of these things. A lot of them come with years of experience, but not necessarily. So I would say if you're just starting out and you want to be an advisory, sort of in an advisory role with your clients and you want to stay away from implementation, then I would pick a hyper focused market where you are highly confident that you can deliver good results in a very, very, probably in a very narrow use case. So pick an extremely narrow use case or an extremely narrow vertical or an extremely narrow target market based on a psychographic or a demographic or something really, really specific where you are confident that you can deliver good results and then deliver the results, get the testimonials, put them on your website, ask for referrals to other people that are in the same hyper focused market. And you can sort of quickly build up that trust by focusing very, very carefully on a specific, on solving a specific pain or...

Pacific opportunity for a really tight group of individuals. I know this is kind of a vague answer, but I think essentially you can kickstart the trust process by delivering results. And the way that you can kickstart delivering results is to pick a really, really focused problem space and just crush it in that space. All right, hope that helps. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we'll find it and add it to the queue. Thanks. 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.