Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. A little while back I wrote an email with the subject line, What if you had no competition? And it said this, Worrying about competitors is a sign that you haven't yet embraced what makes you unique. Once you embrace your uniqueness, you'll never have to worry about competition again. And list member Kenneth Taylor wrote in to ask, Do you have any material about how you did or how you suggest doing this? Yes, I do. Quite a bit of it. The answer to this question in my worldview is positioning. So what is positioning? Let's start there. Positioning is a marketing technique that you use to make your business or product or service more memorable. That's it. So for service providers, this is done by focusing your marketing message on a particular facet of your business or your offering, your target market, or some combination of all three of these things. And I've written maybe over 100 articles on this, so I want to pick one out that I think summarizes this answer best, and you can find the links to it in the show notes. But here it is. It's called XY Positioning Statement. When it comes to your pricing, wouldn't you rather race to the top than race to the bottom? Of course you would, but how? Strongly defining a positioning statement for your business and or your services is a great way to escape the race to zero. It sets you apart from the crowd. It insulates you against clients asking, Why are you the most expensive? Entire books have been written on the subject of positioning. It's a big topic, but you don't need to be an expert to begin to enjoy the benefits of positioning. A good first step is to get really clear about articulating who you help with what. Ideally, you could define a full laser-focused positioning statement for yourself and use that as an internal mantra to drive the rest of your marketing messaging. I call it an LFPS for short. So an LFPS takes the form of this. It's like a little Mad Libs template. I am a blank who helps blank with blank, unlike my competitors, blank. So there are four blanks there. The first one is discipline. The second one is target market. The third one is expensive problem. And the fourth one is unique difference. So it's I am a discipline who helps target market with expensive problem. Unlike my competitors, unique difference. But over the years, I have found that people have a really hard time completing an entire LFPS when they're first getting started with positioning. So that's where this XY positioning statement comes in. So what is that? What's an XY positioning statement? It's sort of like a minimum viable positioning statement. It leaves out the discipline and the unique difference aspects of an LFPS and focuses directly on the core value proposition. So if you're visual, you can think of an XY PS as the primary colors of marketing. Or if you're musical, it's like a one, four, five progression. Or is a chef. It's like meat and potatoes. It's like nothing fancy, but wow, can you do a lot with it? Who do I most want to help? And what do I want to help them with? Answering these questions will give you a very effective reply when someone asks, Oh, what do you do? And your answer will be, I help X with Y. In an XY positioning statement, the X is your ideal buyer, your who, and the Y is your ideal buyer's desired outcome, what you help them with. It's not what you do. It's not that you code or that you take professional photos. It's the desired outcome, the transformation that they're looking for. So how do you solve for X? The X in I help X with Y is your ideal buyer. It's the person you seek to serve, the person who will most benefit from your expertise. There are lots of ways to define your ideal buyer. You could use a vertical focus like dentists, a horizontal focus like people who need a MySQL expert, a platform focus, people who need a Shopify expert, a demographic focus like 45 to 55 year old females who live in New York City, or a psychographic focus like environmental advocates or preppers. I used to think that having an ideal buyer was so important that picking one at random was better than not picking one at all, but years of experience coaching people through this process has taught me a hard lesson, which is that picking an ideal buyer at random just doesn't work. It's not because having a laser focused ideal buyer is bad, quite the opposite in fact, but because picking at random results in marketing to people who you don't care deeply about helping. This makes everything awkward and unnatural and laborious, so you end up giving up pretty quickly. We're in the service industry. The service industry is emotionally demanding. If you don't genuinely care about your clients, things don't click, conversations are stilted, engagement is non-existent, everything feels like pulling teeth, you want to charge for every phone call because they're so tedious. So in short, if you pick a buyer who you don't really care about, you'll give up on your marketing efforts. It doesn't matter how rich they are if you can't stand them. On the other hand, picking a buyer who you do genuinely care about, an ideal

Buyer makes everything way easier. Things click, conversations flow, engagement is high, opportunities present themselves serendipitously. You feel bad charging for things because you're enjoying yourself so much you would have done them for free. So if you can, pick a buyer who you deeply care about helping and then figure out what they need help with. And don't worry if they're broke, there are simple ways around that. Okay, that was solving for X, who's the ideal buyer. Now we're going to solve for Y. Once you have an idea who you want to help, your ideal buyer, we can talk about solving for Y, clearly defining your ideal buyer's desired outcome. In a B2B relationship, that's business to business, the desired outcome will be a business outcome. Things like increased revenue, decreased risk, improved employee morale, stronger customer loyalty. You can almost always put increased or decreased in front of the desired outcome. Please note, again, that what you help them with is not things like front-end development or portrait photography or content marketing. These things are your discipline, and your discipline is relatively unimportant to your ideal buyers compared to the business outcomes that you can help them achieve. I'll give you an example. Here's an X, Y positioning statement, as might be written by a copywriter who wants to help independent software developers. The X is pretty solid, but the Y is discipline-focused and therefore kind of weak. Here it is. I help independent software developers with their copywriting. Here it is again, but this time with a stronger Y that is outcome-focused. I help independent software developers convert existing traffic into more leads. Which do you think would be more interesting to an independent software developer who has a very popular blog but almost never gets any leads from it? The takeaway here is that your Y isn't the activities that you engage in, it's the business outcome that you deliver to the clients. So to bring this back to Kenneth's original question, like how would you do this or how did you do this? Merely being specific in your positioning with something as simple as an X, Y positioning statement will dramatically set you apart from the competition. It's so common for whoever you compete with, whatever kind of freelancer you are, whether it's a software developer or a copywriter or maybe you're a lawyer or an accountant. Almost everyone in your field, I can just about guarantee, has a super soggy positioning statement. They just talk about what they do, the activities they undertake on your behalf. We'll do your taxes, we'll write a white paper for you, we'll create an email sequence for you, we'll build a feature for you. Those are not business outcomes, they're deliverables. Clients don't really care about those, even if they might ask for them on the way into a relationship with you. What they really care about is a business outcome. And if you just pick a positioning statement comprised of who you want to help, your ideal buyer, and what you help them with, your ideal buyer's business outcome, their desired business outcome, you will drastically set yourself apart from everybody else in your field who has super duper soggy positioning. So that's about it. I do want to mention that when I wrote that email, I was also thinking a little bit about brand in this, and I don't talk about brand as much. If you want to hear more about brand, you should probably check out The Business of Authority, where my co-host Rochelle is a real branding expert. But in general, I'll just quickly say that once you've got a strong positioning statement down, and you'll know it's strong when people start randomly reaching out to you like magic, it might be time, you could do this first theoretically, but if you didn't, if you did your positioning first, you could also start infusing your marketing materials, your website, your LinkedIn profile, your social media activity, your email signature, you could start infusing it with your worldview and personality and just being yourself in public, whether that is professional or unprofessional or hippy-dippy, you know, whatever. Whatever you're actually like, you are going to make yourself even more unique from your competitors. You know, maybe you like to talk about drinking wine on the job, or maybe you drop F-bombs all the time, or maybe you're super professional and have like a genius level vocabulary and that's how you talk. Maybe you wear three-piece suits, you know, which is very unusual. Whatever. Whatever is unique about you, if you kind of let your freak flag fly, you're going to repel people that you probably shouldn't work with anyway, and you're going to attract people who you will probably get along with great. The combination of being yourself in your marketing and being super specific in your positioning about who you help with what is going to, you won't have any competition. You'll never have competition again. If you can do this successfully, it takes a little time, but if you can do this successfully,

will never have competition. Alright, that's it for this time. I am Jonathan Stark, and I hope you join me again next week for Ditching Hourly. Bye. 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. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.