Business Insights For Creative Firms w/ David C. Baker Livestream

happy Friday everybody welcome to the future on today's episode we're gonna be talking to the one and only David C Baker I did a little research about mr. Baker he's a very interesting person super interesting here's things that I know about my guest today that he studied language history and theology this is like really interesting path into what it is that he's doing he's considered by many as the experts expert what a great place to be he's advised over 900 firms and he's written this book which were him talked a lot about today if we get the chance and this is just one of five books that he's written the business of expertise so you could say our guest knows something about expertise he's also the co-host of two Bob's with a guest so that's been on the show before you guys know him blends he's taught motorcycle racing he drives a tractor lives on a large plot of land super cool he also flies helicopters and airplanes he Deniz worked in over 50 countries he's a lifetime member of Mensa the requirement is you have to be genius everybody so everybody please help me welcome the world's most interesting man David Steve Baker welcome to the show David how are you I'm gonna be very disappointing to people after that but thank you it's very gracious most of that was true it was now we're wearing magic hats we coordinated you guys it's very good to match your guests and your in your workshop right I am this is I don't have an office so this is where I work it is all woodworking equipment some metalworking equipment and I just I was gonna have a separate office one day but yes I just I don't know I don't I feel like it's in a sterile environment so I love working here having sawdust at my feet I can play with tools while I'm talking to people so this is my office yes now is that two adult beverage behind you there on the it is there's some tequila back here if you're a little boring today that I'm gonna start that you if it gets worse really quickly then I've got this mask I can pull up oh yeah and here's yeah so I'm monitoring the temperature it's like I'm I'm right here in Mission Control I'm good this is fantastic no I see on your Twitter handle you make things and you do lots of things of course I would expect nothing less from a Mensa member but you also make like things with like wood and I'm super envious like one day I hope that I have a workshop like that I dream about it my workshop looks nothing like that though yes I do make things I'll I make furniture I make I have a lathe so I'm starting to turn things that just got delivered last week so I'm setting that up and I like building really ornate boxes so small boxes so the equipment I can do most anything the house is way over there across the field so I can do what almost anything I need to or at least pretend I can't yeah that's amazing now I know we talked a little bit before the weird so I just want to let people who are tuning in I've asked for permission from my guests to ask all kinds of super sensitive things David's like go ahead ask me anything it's super cool and it's not always that we have a guest who's willing to agree to that so in case you guys think I'm pushy or not I've already asked for permission now I want to tell you a little bit of story here there's a story because we're tied to two people in common the first person I want to talk about is a person that's a friend of mine Fabian guerre halter and I have to tell a story now here's the story about Fabian and then we'll talk about Blair maybe a little bit later so Phoebe and I are meeting up for lunch and I had just recently met him we spoke at a conference together and we get together because we're both Arts Center people and he tells me he's thinking about hiring this person and this person charges $10,000 to have one day meeting with with him and you also have to cover his airfare and his hotel and I was thinking in my mind my limited mind back then this is many many years ago it's like wow what does a person have to do to warrant a $10,000 day fee this is incredible and I kept obsessing over this and one of the reasons why I do what I do now because this idea was just started to burn a whole night brain lo and behold several weeks later it turns out Fabian did hire you David and I understand your rates were much higher today but he did hire you and you came in that day you worked with him and you changed his life and his business permanently for the better so that's how I know about you and it was really interesting one day when I get this book the business of expertise it's like the connection all my world is like coming together and so I have I just wanted to say this much belated thank you to you for just putting that idea out there in the universe that a person could be worth so much and do something that's valuable to people that I started to become obsessed about what I could do to create that same value oh well that's that's such a great story I didn't know that you were connected to Fabian but I remember Fabian just like it was yesterday I remember what his office looked like I remember how many people he had there I remember the blank looks he gave me a few of the statements I was making yeah and then part of the engagement was you know to have three phone calls with them afterwards and I could see the light coming on in his eyes afterward and every once in a while I know when to expect it but everyone wants my he'll send me a note just thanking me for that time which was quite a few years ago but I thank you that's that's really interesting right it's um I like to hear things from the other perspective I don't like to hear that it's so expensive to work with me bright yes is true right it is true well expenses relative it really is and it's can you afford not to work with you sometimes and I think about that so without reviewing too much about Fabian can you tell us like what you saw and how you guided him out of the business that he was in yeah I do I can do that I remember I thought he was thinking too small I felt like he was so much more capable than he was seen himself at the time and his positioning wasn't narrow enough he was doing almost everything for everybody he had a mix of really great clients and then some that he he would agree with me weren't great clients and I started to help him see a different future which was the fun part of all this and it it started to change when he changed his positioning so that he became a lot less relevant to a lot more people which is a really fundamental concept but in the process became a lot more relevant to fewer people and it doesn't it never works when our outside consultant or advisor says you're worth a lot more you can kind of listen to that but it doesn't really change your thinking that thinking does it change until your clients or the marketplace confirms that they're willing to pay you more than you thought you were worth in the future so it took a little while to catch up for him mm-hmm but then it started to be a self-fulfilling prophecy where his confidence rose and his work was better I think even exchanged some employees who weren't necessarily seeing the same vision he was seeing for himself so that was really how it unfolded right so this is this is not a typical right like when you choose to go narrow and decide that you want to specialize or become an expert at something there's always a gap a lag between what you want to become and the market catching up to you and validating that is that correct yes exactly right and that assuming that you've made the right choice for positioning but yes that's exactly right it's a terrifying process though I mean we're not terrified with the end result because we know that if this works we'll be making more money will be doing more effective work and so on but the interval the process between now where we are and where we'll be in the future is a little terrifying because it means we're saying no so much more frequently to the opportunity that we said yes to in the past and so you have to have this you have to have somebody sort of pulling you into the future and giving you the confidence that this has been done many times before and it's effective so how do you get somebody who's on that ledge of making a very big life-changing decision where they can only see the negative where they can only see all their current clients and the revenue stream disappearing how do you help them to get past that because this is where I get stuck with a lot of the people I talk to right and the truth is you I can't really do this for everybody all we can do is tell them the truth and be empathetic but also courageous as we tell them the truth because I tell this I tell roughly the same things within different mixes right it's I'm using the same tools in a different combination as I as I work with people and some of them make no progress at all some of them make immediate progress and then most of them don't make immediate progress but over time they start to see well this where where this works so I encourage them to minimize the disruption and to just be slightly out ahead of their skis and start doing things that hurt a little bit more so you talked a lot about pricing an example there is if you're giving somebody a price and you're fairly confident you're going to get it then it's not high enough mm you need to push the envelope just a little bit so that there's at least a little bit of nervousness that you might not get it whenever you get too comfortable with something then start pushing that just a little bit and don't be afraid of losing something I that's we're we're hoarders of opportunity right and the notion of sifting through opportunity and saying yes or no is something that that experts don't have a problem doing but people on the path to that expertise do have trouble doing because they're back in their minds they're always afraid will I run out of opportunity so the notion of saying no to some opportunity is very counterintuitive to them hmm okay I just want to set the bar of expectations there forever but it's tuning in I see the numbers starting to grow here so let's see if we can get this to five six seven hundred people to watch and I just want to let you know how expensive David's time is so do not sleep on this video right now if you're just tuning in you haven't missed a whole lot but I imagine you will miss if you tune out of this go tell three friends right now to tune into this livestream we're gonna have a conversation with the experts expert David C Baker so I'm gonna quickly transition here because I just want to prompt you to talk about the book a little bit here why did you write this book the business of expertise mmm Oh every time I write a book it's for a different reason and this one I started out with a very specific reason and ended up flopping on it so I wanted to write a hundred and twenty thousand dollar tome or like a reference volume with everything about being a smart strategic advisor and I outlined it and I'm sitting down and I'm writing it typing away and I was getting bored with it myself and if I'm getting bored then imagine what other people are gonna feel when they start reading this thing so I just stepped away from it for a day and I said what am I really feeling passionate about this book needs to be a lot shorter it needs to be in color it needs to be Illustrated and it needs to be something that I'm really passionate about and what I'm passionate about is helping people not take the notion of expertise lightly I think it's on it's just wrong to cheat our clients we need to have something that they're buying from us that is very difficult to get somewhere else so all of that starts by figuring out how do i position myself as an expert how do I learn a lot more how do I make money from that so it came from my heart and it was a third ended up being a third of the length now that's so that's the specific reason why I wrote that book the specific reason I write books though is because it's the only way for me to get smarter if if I know I'm going to put something out there and the same is true of speaking the fear of looking stupid is a huge motivator the fear of a book going out there that people pan is terrifying so it forces me to articulate more carefully what I think about something that's why I love that and I picked up the idea in the book that you gain clarity through articulation and that was just one of those things that once you read you're like oh yeah you're right because prior to that point in time I always thought like you must know something and then you write the thing that you know but you write to discover what it is that you know is that right yeah exactly you have this hint of what you think you know you have a direction but it isn't clear yet and if you just try to think about it so that it becomes clear and then you'll write about it you'll never clarify it as much as you could so you have to just dive in before the fog lifts and in the articulation of your thinking the fog will lift not before it doesn't come 1 2 it happens at the same time mmm and you gave a really great tip at the back of the book towards the end there where people I know that people are listening to this like I'm not a writer what can I put down on paper and I'm not that smart I'm not a Mensa genius okay and you gave this great tip you said you never be as smart as you are when you're in front of some of that matters like in front of a client so you have a very practical tip can you share that with us yeah and I've thought about this so frequently and I'll admit to people this is so true in my life I am so stupid when I'm back at my home or working in my shop I'm just I just don't come up with too many intelligent brilliant new things the only time I do is when I'm on the phone with a client or I'm in a meeting face to face of course we're not doing those nowadays right right and and I'm on the stage so to speak so when I'm talking with one of my clients who's struggling with that same thing they're thinking I don't know if I have enough depth their brilliance to share what I say is you've heard what you say so many times that it's its second place to you and it doesn't seem intelligent so what you need to do is you need to have somebody else with you either listening to your phone conversation or with you in the meeting who's watching the other person and when that person nods their head you've just said something worth writing down have the other person who's there just monitoring this write it down and you'll discover that you probably say 10 to 15 really smart things a day but because you haven't because you've heard yourself say it so often it doesn't strike you as really smart right we're not very good observers our own brilliance or our own gifts right I don't want to share it's a little story with you like my wife I was always wondering like why do you do so many meetups why do you go out and do so many of these workshops or talks it's because in those moments I have to be smarter than I normally am and the questions that I'm peppered with draw out something for me that I know I had inside of me and the reaction the confirmation the validation from the person's like wow that was really good and then right I go and write that down afterwards like oh they want more of that I think and so that's kind of like I'm fully into that now now we're gonna do some a little different with you David okay you have some really fun graphics and that explain complex ideas inside your book I don't know if this is all from this book but I just went on the internet I pulled up five slides please explain the slide so we're gonna play a game with you tell us about your own graphic okay so I do have the original ideas for these yes they're not the the Patrick who does these for me out of New York he oh my god he can take what I think and he can picture it perfectly if you saw my drawings they'd be very very desperate people people ask me all the time what's the right size for my creative practice yes and some of your listeners are working by themselves they don't have a team others might have a small team the right size is is a mix between not too much doing and not too much managing so if you want to do more then it's a bad idea for you to grow because that will by necessity move you away from doing towards managing but if you find that you like managing and what usually happens is that people get better at managing over time as they have more practice doing it then it's smart for you to grow let me add another thought here that isn't it in this graphic but it's really important and that's another way to answer this question about how big you should be is it as a very small firm and the answer is always smaller than your opportunity in other words you have to have more opportunities to say yes then you have capacity to say yes because that gap between those two represents your ability to say no and to push back and to retain the integrity of your pricing keep it high enough so that's a natural tendency for people who run businesses that as soon as there's greater demand they may be quick to hire and expand capacity and then therefore get caught in this really negative cycle where they're saying yes to more jobs because they're trying to keep up with capacity right right trying to keep people busy yes and that's what I just call feeding the Machine right yeah so we've fallen into this trap - oh and and now that I know the concept it makes perfect sense now recently I was like binge listening to a bunch of your podcast with Blair and you were talking about right-sizing that sometimes when we're looking especially in the economic times that we live in today that we need to kind of be decisive we need to make bold but you said something in that podcast about not ignoring the upper management or management and what account managers and production managers when you're thinking about laying off people can you talk a little bit about that yeah in in an environment that's tough where we have to adjust our staff it's natural to try to say okay the AMS account managers and the PM's of project managers they're not as essential of what we do actually that's not what clients are buying from us so maybe we need to dismiss them or furlough them and we need to keep these core creative people and it's really the opposite the way you should be doing that you want to keep the core role players and then flex with the skill players which would be the writers and the designers the UX people and coders and so on the the other thing to think about in that is it's just how do you decide you know these are such difficult times right yeah I'm I'm I my heart breaks for some of the decisions that people have to make right now even folks that don't have employees that are struggling to get enough work right and so if you get rid of some of the account managers and the project managers that may mean for a period of time that you might actually wind up doing a little bit more of the work yourself it's not what am i right and the other point I was trying to make in that episode was that as you grow you may be five or six people and then you add a middle layer and those are that middle layer those are the folks that you're closest to emotionally and the ones that have freed you up from doing the things you didn't really enjoy doing so it's easy to protect them in your mind when in fact what you should be doing is actually reverse building that pyramid otherwise you'll end up with a very top-heavy organization you just pull from the bottom right right right okay so getting back to some of the ideas from the book I think this is really important because we talked about the need for a specialization narrowing down and finding a niche there's something intrinsic about creative people that that goes against the core they're fiber they resist with all their might and a lot of people who think they have narrowed down actually are really far from it so there's a graphic here and I'd love for you to explain to our audience what this means sure so most folks particularly if they start young are at that undifferentiated side over all the way over there and what I ask them to do is to walk on this path from one side to the next it takes courage it takes focus and you want to keep walking until you get to the point where you have the optimum number of competitors and prospects if you keep walking too far you run out of opportunity but if you don't walk far enough then you're too easily interchangeable with other firms so the book talks and it gives specific numbers which I can get into if that interest you that gives people guidance about how far to walk on this path so you're looking you're walking you're walking towards a more specialized position you're watching the light and it turns green at a certain point and it keeps stays green until you keep walking then it turns red again you want to be somewhere in that Green Zone defined by a certain number of prospects and a certain number of competitors as well right now you write in the book there's some tests that you can perform to see if your niche down enough and I know a lot of people listening to this are gonna think yes I'm really nation it's far from that so can you share some of that test to know if your niche down enough yes so one of those would be kind of Part B of what we were just talking about how many other people are saying they do the same thing you do so the classic mistake there would be to say yes I'm a stranding specialist as if that's really really unique right or nowadays the new version of that is I'm a storytelling specialist or something like that so look at how many people are claiming to do the same thing you do and the category is so many of your listeners would be design firms creatives that's the category but who do you do it for that's what we're talking about if if thousands of people would say the same thing another way to think of it this is a little bit silly but picture there's a thousand of you in a room and I'm at upfront and I'm at the point where I'm gonna help people test their positioning and I say all right Linda stand up tell us what your positioning is Linda stands up and tells us and I look around and say alright how many of you do that same thing and almost everybody's gonna raise their hand that means its it failed the test normally you want to have only ten maybe at the most 200 people who say they knew the same thing that makes you less interchangeable mm-hm so Linda raise their hand and say I am I do I'm a brand strategist or specialist and everybody in the room raises their hand - right what does Linda need to do to kind of narrow that down to get to that under 200 sweetspot so Linda has one of two choices in front of her she can either choose to specialize in a vertical that means she might focus on a particular industry or she might focus horizontally which means that she focuses on a particular demographic or target so she does brand work for challenger brands that are climbing quickly to the top but they're they're not at the top or she does branding work for firms that reach the elderly or Millennials those are the examples of horizontal position so she has to choose between vertical or horizontal okay that's great I think you also talked about the the isn't the 30 mile test to see if you're easily replaced or not or something like it there's the idea that that the world would Google Isis right so before Google came around in the late 90s you were probably a little child at that point but they would you could you you had a protected marketplace and so you weren't worried about people coming in from somewhere else like if you're in LA you weren't worried about Phoenix firms taking your work the world became Google eyes and now Phoenix firms can do work for LA clients the good news is that LA firms can do work for Phoenix clients too so what it is there is there some element of travel because expertise usually means that somebody is a little bit afar or not as reachable so somebody's going to travel in a professional relationship let's say that you have 20 clients ideally only six or seven of those we'll be local where you could get to them in person within an hour so ideally the rest of those clients would be a long ways away that signal is that it's inconvenient to work with somebody that's a long ways away but their expertise is so essential and irreplaceable that it's worth bridging this distance to do it mm-hmm that's great guys did you guys hear that if somebody is willing to go out of their way to work with you it's a good signal that you are specialized enough that somebody's willing to do that so if you're only working with clients within a certain radius of yourself you may start to think am i specialized enough okay I want to thank woody land Rose for supporting the future thank you very much so here's another graphic and I think you have a clever saying about this one so there's looks to me like there's a house or a room with two doors right yeah I was speaking to a group in New York City it was a big AJ convention I wanted to do something really different and stretch myself a little bit I don't remember when it was but as years ago and I just and I came up with this idea of one building and two rooms and it's such a simple idea but it clarifies so much of what we do and how that relates to positioning so everything you do is represented in these two rooms part of what you do is strategy part of what you do is execution at the moment you can see that both of those doors are open in other words a client can come in first and buy your thinking or they can come in first and buy you're doing your hands the execution the first thing you'd want to do as soon as you're able is to close off that door to the execution room so you're forcing your clients your new clients to buy you're thinking first and then if they want they can go through that connecting door into the execution room but the execution room that's the stuff you do with your hands that you couldn't do if you lost your the use of your hands the stuff you're doing in Adobe or whatever they can't have access to that execution room unless they they buy you're thinking first so the first thing you do is you close off that door the second thing you do is think about the positioning that you do so you're not usually going to be able to charge up premium for anything that comes from the execution room because that's the it's it's almost a commodity now what you can charge a premium for is what comes out of that strategy room out of your head out of your deep thinking the stuff that you could present to a client with a five page Microsoft Word document it doesn't have to be in color that doesn't have to be any drawings it's simply helping them understand how they need to go to market with whatever it is you're helping them sell so that's the very simple concept that I use to think about this stuff a lot it's a great analogy Jonah can we pull up that graphic again so a lot of creative firms especially the ones that are watching our channel or maybe new to our channel there's no other room there's just the execution room that's all they're selling so are there steps that they can take to start building that out and what does that look like because this is going to be a foreign concept for a lot of people it's a global audience a lot of people unfortunately kind of stuck at that easily you replace commodity thing where they're bidding on projects purely on price and the lowest price wins right I would say that this will be most difficult for you if you in a in a kind but courageous moment called yourself sort of an order-taker where your client is telling you what you need to do and you find yourself sitting there taking notes and then going and doing it that is purely in the execution room but as they begin to trust you they may they may ask for your input on the deeper problems they may call you in earlier before the execution decisions have been made and you'll see opportunities where you can inject yourself in a conversation and say okay I understand what you want me to do here I think there might be a better way to do it so you're just taking the directions before any execution starts and you're redirecting that somewhere else insane and this is strategies happening here you're saying let's think about some other way to execute this there's another really important point that might help people and that's that many firms are getting paid for their execution but they're giving a way to sync and they're giving away their thinking often in the proposals especially if they write long proposals and so what I'm doing is suggesting that instead of that you work with your clients and say listen until you engage me I can't really start to solve this challenge you have but what I can do is I can explain to you the process I'll use to solve this problem and and I can show you how I've done this and many other times it's led to great results and then so what you're doing essentially is you're pulling all that strategy from the proposal that you were giving away and you're saying listen the first step in the process is to figure out how we need to solve this problem and then if you want I can solve the problem - that's the execution room you're separating those two things out I have a friend he's a rather stubborn guy super creative runs a small firm and he's resisted this idea of selling strategy in the thinking part he bakes it into his pricing he justifies to himself - I am getting paid for this and here's how I know this I've I do workshops and I'll ask the room usually how many of you guys here charge for your thinking and I'm always surprised when a bunch of hands go up like how do you do that is there a separate line item is this delineated in a very clear way and then almost all their hands go down and it's just they think they're selling their thinking but it's all baked within execution so is it important to separate those things it is absolutely critical and not is such a great question because it's not only important to separate them it's important that the pricing looks different so the thinking needs to be to the nearest thousand dollars and the execution needs to be broken out to the nearest ten dollars right so maybe it's a thousand for thinking and then it's 2380 for the execution it just needs to look very different yeah absolutely and you know it's natural though for us to fall into this trap because none of us got much education on the thinking on the strategy from school it was all around the execution side the rest of it we've just simply picked up because of being smart humans mm-hmm I would like to go a little deeper with you on the how to charge for the thinking part let's just say I'm really excited right now this is all hitting me in the face and this is awesome and amazing how do we charge for thinking and you mentioned this already but I just want to go deeper like what is thinking look like because the client scream has like so what am I paying you for yeah so the thinking now this might be difficult because it the the challenge comes when you try to apply this with an existing client where you try to convert an existing client who has you in the execution box and you try to drag them over to the strategy box and hey say you you realize that I'm much better than this right that doesn't that doesn't often work so what you want to do instead is try this with new clients and you would want to have a package on your website it's so much easier to point to something on your website and not invent something on the fly so explain what your service offerings are and separate them very specifically on your website and it'll take it may take a year or two years for you to make that transition it's okay you just every time you get an opportunity to try it with a new client then just don't here's another way to do it um just ask them brilliant questions that indicate that you have thinking about this from a strategic standpoint don't ask them how many copies of something they need or or how many words it is or just ask them the bigger deeper questions about their audience and what you're trying to convince that audience of and the price points and the competition asked all that stuff is strategy and people are better at than they think they're just kind of not used to doing it right so you're asking a whole different set of questions that starts to indicate that you're thinking in a very different way this is wonderful because of for a lot of you guys who are actually practicing this and report back to me what's happened is the relationship is transformed you are seen and held in higher regard with their client you're asking the bigger questions the questions that ultimately can lead them to having or making meaningful impact on their business growing awareness conversions or something like that and you're not just asking like what logos do you like what colors or the things that designers tend to obsess over right exactly right you nobody cares too much about the font except you and you to care about it that's something that's important to you the clients noticed that stuff when it's bad they don't usually notice it when it's good so concentrate on other things that they well and here's another point it's not just a strategy it's it's the relationship it's how you wrap this work you're doing in great project management and great account management clients notice deficiencies in those areas long before they notice deficiencies in the quality of the work the quality of the work that you're doing is already better than it has to be you're doing it to please yourself and to please your peers and it's fantastic work it's being honest about how good the work is you want to do but the truth is that clients don't have the same ability to judge things that you do ooh okay it's fantastic I want to give our audience a little moment to kind of process all the knowledge is being dropped on you right now so we're going to switch gears and then want to come back two more ideas from the book because I think it's gonna be very valuable to you in case you're just joining us right now I'm talking to David C Baker he's considered the experts expert and we're talking about his book right now the business of expertise which retails for $38 you could buy it at Rock bench publishing or you can buy it on Amazon I believe it's it's a wonderful book now David I have a request for you when you do the next edition of this the second or third printing or whatever printing you're on if possible this is a request from a designer is it possible for you to use matte uncoated paper because I'll tell you why I like to write in my books I like to highlight things and the ink sits on top of the coated paper that you use so just a quest for me I really want to make my books work for me and I make them my own when I when I impact or change the that you know the the pristine quality that they came from the from the bookseller or whatever so maybe you consider I will I will I will consider that I will I spend a lot of money on the paper but maybe I didn't do the in terms of thickness but maybe it's the wrong coating so thank you for yeah yes thank you very much now I want to take us back to the other person where we have a shared relationship with and his name is blur ends and he's the gentleman on the right there the good-looking Canadian and I have a little funny story to share with you about Blair in that I think initially when Blair found out about he was mildly annoyed and it happened on Twitter because he's probably wondering like who's this guy who's repeating everything that I'm saying and talking about me all this way and I'm happy to report that the relationship might have started with an annoyance and at least in my own mind my perception of it that he was annoyed to a some kind of like a professional friendship that's develop and he's been on the show a couple of times so now you're friends with Blair I'm just curious how did you guys meet what was a relationship like and how did that lead to the podcast the to Bob's oh yes so I started the conference called my OB which stood for mind your own business and it was for about 350 principals and freelancers who would meet once a year and he was living in Canada where he lives now and I was looking for speakers and I'd heard of him I've read his stuff and I was really excited to have him speak so I had him speak and he polarized the audience I know that's not right because he he presented really black and white concepts and people either completely absorbed and loved them or they really didn't at all but it was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for anyway and then later I was doing this three-day new business conference and I had it was Wednesday Thursday and Friday and I got a kidney stone have you ever had one of those you know I hope not I would not recommend it right and I went in the hospital didn't pass it had to go back get Latinos there so I'm thinking oh my I got all these people flying from all the world to come to this event I can't do it by myself again so I called him and I said Blair can you please come down here I'll pay you well I'll speak when you see me kind of ready to to tag out you come in and and and and speak for me so that that became then the very first of what we call the New Business Summit we did that for ten years then he came back to me I guess it was two years ago and he said David you want to do a podcast together I wasn't excited about it I was excited about the opportunity to work with Blair but I didn't think it would go anywhere yes and it was it was crazy how how it's it's just been so well-received and I love doing it so it every second Wednesday and I think we're about 70 or 80 episodes in we just we just absolutely love it so it's a chance for me to be with a good friend as well mmm I know it's a real treasure and resource for a bunch of people so you guys go check out the two bobs it's a podcast now by my observation as an outsider I don't know you this is our first time really talking together like this so I see that you guys are quite different in terms of your personality and I've heard other people describe you at conferences like you don't really like to talk to people you'll you'll share things here's my ideas and then you kind of go away where I think Blair is a little bit more outgoing more gregarious he wants a meet and talk to people he's smiling it is that about an accurate snapshot of the two of you yeah it's very accurate although you presented me as more of an extrovert than I really am so I I'm pretty much over people and my life oh I love it's not that I don't love people I just don't enjoy talking to him all that much I like um I've got friends and family obviously I love public speaking I'll speak to 5,000 people and just love every minute of it but then I kind of hate talking to people individually afterwards I mean it's inefficient and I'd rather do it to the thousands so yeah I'm a strange bird I will freely admit that so we'll just set the record straight then so oftentimes what happens is and we're quite different to that you speak and then people are going to actually going to be drawn towards you they want to stand next to the expert on stage how do you react like you just go over to the green room or you give them the stiff hand like stay like I mind well one thing you can do is you can pretend that you've got a phone call that's one nice trick nice yeah and I'll be very nice and cordial I'm always respectful to people but I'm not interested in going to dinner with somebody I never go to dinner with a client before an engagement or after no client has my cell phone so they can text me it's just not how I operate I want to keep a really clear distinction between my professional life and my personal life hmm well that's so interesting because I hate doing the talks but I like talking to people afterwards we do this together you could you could you could handle the people part and I guess I could be the root speaker and you could be the friendly I don't do that yes there we go I'll just match up with your clothing and then you'll just step into the back and say I gotta make a phone call and I'll just step back out you know yeah people have taste very quickly though you'll have to eat very quickly I'm a lot older than you are I love that okay there's something here I want to share I'm gonna switch my screen Joey give me a second here I'm gonna mirror my screen I read this kind of just digging into your your website now if you guys want to find out more about David go to expert is is that right expertise expertise is expertise is go check it out but I'm on your your other site David C Baker and I dig into it I'm on your FAQ and I want to read this to our audience let me zoom in here so they can see this I love this I was like who's your ideal client right cuz recourses is your company and you write this and you get a lot of your personality in here so who you are the ideal client runs a small one to 100 to 20 percent privately held firm that sells expertise works directly with me as a decision maker not through another staff member is facing a hurdle transition so they're in a crisis moment they're trying to figure something out and I want to skip down here this is really important this is kind of how your position is is willing let me highlight this is willing to let me decide which symptoms are relevant diagnose them proper diagnose the problem accurately and suggest the best solutions that can lead to real change but minimizes disruptions as much as possible now I want to ask everybody that's watching this right now how many of you guys would be thrilled to be able to have the confidence to be able to say this to all of your clients allow me to be the expert that I am and decide what problems are worth solving how does one get to this place of confidence and being able to put this kind of information out there hmm well it sounds a little arrogant when I said you read that but I loved it though I love it I really do yeah well I I know what I'm really good at and I know what I'm not really good and there's no confusion about those two things to me and I don't want to waste my time with clients that aren't going to listen or aren't going to value the advice and I also feel so strongly about my own positioning that I would rather starve or go out of business or find another job than compromise on that stuff there's even some I was afraid you were gonna pull up some different places on the website that summer even worse none of them is no I will not give you a reference if if anything you I should ask you for a reference I like it's not I'm not trying to be rude I'm just trying to be efficient we think in this world we think that our marketing efforts are so fragile that we don't dare say the wrong thing to a client or they'll turn away and go hire somebody else what a crazy notion we ought to think about marketing as if the if the relationship is appropriate in other words if they are respecting you for your very carefully defined expertise and if you should be working for this client there's very little you can do to wreck it you almost view marketing opportunity as a whack-a-mole where you kind of lightly tap it on the head and it disappears and then if it's real it'll come back up again oh I see and rather than treating this so carefully like what's the word e92 use and how do i how do I respond it's like no it's not that if you really think about all the other experts that we're trying to emulate you think about doctors or lawyers or architects or engineers and we in the professional segment are the most cautious and and meek about what we do and it drives me crazy hmm so um your marketing your positioning in a way is kind of tests how badly somebody wants to work with you seer some some of us are gently pushing some of us are not at all you're pushing pretty hard to make sure that people can self-select like I I know this I don't want to coach or help somebody who doesn't isn't ready to be helped like they just want to pay to talk and that's not really what I'm in it for so if I put up a little bit more resistance and push back then we'll know the people who are at least mentally at that point considering change right it exactly and this is something that I learned from Blair just honestly my podcast partner because in in spite of the rough exterior I do I can get my feelings hurt pretty easily and so there's this sense that I was before this before I learned this I was not really wanting to know to what extent my clients thought I was an expert in that relationship what he taught me is that you should never be afraid of the truth don't be afraid of the truth okay so if you get to the point where you're not afraid of the truths and it takes a while right it's more than a few seconds and they take a few years of therapy so that you're not afraid of the truth once you're not afraid of the two truths wouldn't you rather know the truth right away so that means before you get too far down the road with this client if it's not going to be a great relationship wouldn't you want to know that right away so that carries over into your very early conversations with them during the prospecting stage so instead of being a yes person in every facet of the conversation you might choose one place where you can legitimately push back so you might say oh that's really interesting that's not what I expected you to say at that point because normally when this then this so I didn't expect you to say that that really surprises me so you're pushing back on them a little bit and you wouldn't do that if you're afraid of a reaction right but what you're you're not afraid of the truth so you push back a little bit see how they react to your expertise and that gives you a better clue to whether or not you really are gonna have a useful effective relationship mm-hmm okay I think that also tied in with something you said earlier about I I don't want to mess up the phrasing because you said it so beautifully I'm have to like rewatched episode but like if you're not comfortable by setting the price it's not high enough so it's like it's always testing and pushing a little bit to kind of see how far you can go right right exactly yeah that price the $10,000 thing you mentioned that's now 18 I don't remember how long ago I worked with Fabian mm-hmm and the best time to set your pricing is not when you're desperate for work it's when tired after something or maybe even a little hacked off about something so me the best time to adjust my pricing is on the airplane on the way home after I poured my soul out to help somebody and I'll say to myself do I want to do that for X amount again or is I see should I really be charging more yeah so you're kind of living in that emotional pain like that was just frustrating as hell if I'm gonna be frustrated it's gonna cost them this much now right right okay now I have to ask this question okay you're you're a person who sought after you've worked with a lot of people at what point in your life in career when you started consulting for a creative firms did you start to feel like I have the courage to say this like is there well besides what you just said is there like a really like tactical or like a flexion point where you're like you know what you know it definitely wasn't always this way I don't know exactly how long but I think it was around four years into it okay do you do you remember Margot chase yes Sheila okay so she was one of my earliest clients and she's a she's she's dead and gone now sadly but she was a famous designer and she called me up and asked if I would consult with her firm and I remember and I asked if you knew her because she's from the LA area and I remember thinking what do I have to teach Margot chase and Terry stone was the office manager and the CEO Oh at the time and I remember all hiring okay I remember always admiring Terry's thinking and I felt so intimidated being there there but I remember and that was about I think four years into my early work when years that would have been let's see 98 or setting all right so the other thing that that changed my life completely as an adviser was recognizing that I was getting similar questions from different clients and I did not have a carefully articulated point of view and I felt and I kind of thought they felt like I should have one mm-hmm this started to embarrass me and I sat down and I said all right what are all of those topics that my clients are expecting me to have a point of view on and I don't have one and I definitely can't defend the one that I have I wrote all these down it was 55 topics I talked about this in the book a little bit and I forced myself to develop one of those topics every month and that's what really changed my perspective I'm still reaching back to that early research in that writing and using that stuff modifying it obviously because a lot has changed so that's what had happened for me is when I started to notice that other people were willing to pay me good money and I was stepping into the shoes they were almost thinking more highly of me than I was myself and I decided just to embrace that terror and do what I could okay let me see if I understand this correctly because I was half reading the comments and just listening to you as well thinking about this so when you are forced to write down and do the research is that where it started to build for you yes where I decided to that there were all these topics I had no idea how many I'd come up with an enamine 55 right I did not have a clear point of view when I started to write those things out all of a sudden everything changed because a client could say hey what do you think about this and it doesn't like I'd already thought about I could just immediately without hesitation say this is how I think about that mm-hmm and what was the the genesis for the 55 things or things that you're interested things that your clients are interested in how did you generate that list it was it was a summation of the questions that I was getting from my clients I said they thought I should have an answer and I didn't have one I see perfect okay and in a little bit I want to share or at least ask you about this idea drop and give me 20 but before we do that because that's directly related to what I think what you just said I want to read a couple of comments from people who are watching this live stream we are currently at 468 people watching live with us so the Marine from Texas saying he's quoting here I would rather starve or go out of business rather than compromise and he's like I love that and axel was saying the talk is already too good for me for sure rewatching it a few times so there's a bunch of like really positive comments I just want to let you know maybe you don't care about I'll just read them to you anyways okay let's get back to it drop and give me 20 tell us about that concept and how this could help people yes so one of the tests of your positioning is do you know something I don't know so let's you let's use you and me as an example let's say we don't know each other we're flying on the plane let's say we sprung for first class we're sitting next to each other you're wanting to talk to me I'm not wanting to talk to you we're close to landing and I decide okay I'll strike up a conversation with this guy and I say what do you do for a living Chris and he says you tell me what you do and I say oh really I'm in the same field we we okay then I say okay tell me more about specifically what you do then I discover that your focus is a little bit different than mine and then I start to ask you questions and so your assumption there's a two-fold assumption in this exercise one is that I am smart enough for this and second that I know quite a bit about your field those two things have to be true now will Chris give me 20 aha moments in a half hour where I could be listening to create you talking about your life and your work and your business and we're the same feel but we focus in different ways and I'm thinking I never realized that wow that's amazing and you start asking me questions and you could say what are some of the things you've noticed that I would I would have no idea about and I would say to you well the most introspective moment that principals have is when their lease is up nine months before their lease is up because that's the only long-term commitment they make to their business and I could go on and on and on my that is a test of positioning so can you come up with 20 topics and maybe write a LinkedIn article on each one or a blog post that's going to help me learn something and not just repeat what everybody else is already saying alright that's fantastic so everybody understand that there's a test here and what David is saying if we're in the same business same industry and I'm relatively smart are you gonna tell me 20 things that I don't know and so if somebody's like I don't know maybe I have three things what can they do that mm-hmm then they write down the questions that they're getting from their clients right and then they start to think a little bit more deeply about them I have no I have no fear that your audience is smart enough at all the only fear I have is that they may not be disciplined enough at developing their thinking that's the difference what does that mean it means that nobody listening here should say oh I can't do that because it just simply is not true that the difference between people who really accomplished something than those who don't is really a matter of discipline and good fortune there's the intelligence has so little to do with it it's really about are you diving in are you trying to be a deeper thinker than the other people around you are you a little bit bored when you hear people talking in your industry thinking listen we talk about all the same stuff all the time here's an issue I've noticed that other people haven't let's talk about that that's what I mean okay this is perfect so guys let's exercise some discipline right now let's make this super tactical and you guys get take take steps take steps right now imagine yourself on that it's that kind of imaginary plane talking to somebody who's in the same industry as you who's relatively smart go ahead make that list today after you watch this episode whip out your notepad and start to write down 20 concepts that somebody who is in the industry would not know who would really appreciate you sharing this with them and if you're sure than that list go and write the questions the other questions that you then need to dig deeper and do research so that you can feel pretty confident you have those 20 insights this gets back to this slide here where is that slide right here okay so you're can you talk about this because I think it's kind of like you're telling into this yeah it reminds me I wrote an article for LinkedIn and the one that got the most not the likes but actual comments it was 110 or 115 comments was was the one that said quit posting all this crap on LinkedIn and and that's one that got the most because for one thing the world if you're thinking about building a an email practice where you send out something to your prospects and your clients the world doesn't need a newsletter from you they might need content in which case they will probably unsubscribe or ignore it but what they really need is insight hmm when it's insight you they stop in their tracks for just a minute and they either agree or disagree with it they either unsubscribe because they don't want to follow you anymore or they think it's so good that they want to share it with somebody else you don't want to create that division in the audience just to be mean or rude but you do want to have a clearly articulated point of view that does force some sort of a reaction in the audience so people listen to you let's say somebody let's say you're putting something up Chris and and somebody disagrees with it they they're probably not going to never listen to you again they may want to listen again to see if you're gonna say something else stupid in their mind right the worst thing that could happen is for them to just say was a waste of time and not have a positive or a negative reaction so the best insight is one that makes the audience pause and think and then either share it with somebody else or unsubscribe yeah so I think that's having a point of view Seth Godin writes about this in one of his books I think it's all marketers or Liars that we tell ourselves stories so when you tell me something that I don't believe in you're challenging my worldview and I don't want to admit that I'm dumb so I'm gonna get angry and hopefully there's enough angry people still like tune in next time to listen to either one of us is like what is that idiot have to say next and let me see what else I can disagree with now right a lot of people who are trying to grow on social media to grow their influence I have the same problem with them is they go through the the time and effort of making a 10 slide carousel but when I get through it it's like you have to be an idiot not to already know this is like breed drink water like this is what you're offering the world right it's just that's a problem exactly and that so that goes right back to that exercise of the drop and give me 20 because when you read those 10 slides you didn't pick up anything and I want you to pick up a bunch of aha moments you're smart you know that field can I learn something from that if you if people can't learn something from what you're doing then just shut up and don't say anything until you can share something that's really valuable to them right and that's probably good sign for you to go read a book watch a video take a course and do something right right fill out a knowledge gap okay there's a concept here from the book that I would love for you to just set the record straight it's about conflicts of interest like when you have one client it's you know in the book content of interest people are scared about this they are so a conflict of interest requires in our field you'd have to have what's called a conflict strategy so in other words you're doing a lot of work for American Airlines and that means that they're probably not going to be too excited if you decide to take on Delta or United or Southwest that would be a conflict of interest and that becomes more common if you have a vertical positioning because you're focusing in an industry and then you might have one client who objects to the fact that you work for another client the truth is though that unless you work for a lot of similar clients it's very difficult to be an expert so your clients in this setting could be a little bit nervous about the conflict of interest issue but they're flat terrified of incompetence and they know that you know if one it's great if it's two it's a conflict if three it's a specialization that's sort of the way I didn't write that but that's just a joke that goes around so that's one reason that leads people to a horizontal focus so that there are no conflicts of interest but I think it's sort of a Bugaboo I don't know that it's really that much of an issue anymore yeah I think a lot of people operate on mostly fear and misinformation or just gut instinct and feeling don't actually look into it so when you explain it like that they're more afraid of incompetence that you've never done this for anyone before then they are that you're going to have a couple of people that you service and you've seen the problem problem many many times and you forum or you've you've spotted patterns and insights like you said people are being introspective about nine months before their lease is up yes exactly right yeah okay maybe something a little lighter I want to ask you about accessibility influence and expertise I think you either tweeted it or was in your book about like an expert there's a they're not always so available and so I'm thinking like god I am too available I'm too accessible right now and so I want to get your thoughts on that yeah I would say you're not accessible because I in a good way because what you're doing is you are providing really valuable expertise that's unapplied so people have to apply it themselves so the difference you so you want to be an influencer or a thought leader you've got to be widely relevant so people are a lot of people are listening and they're finding it useful but for you to work one-on-one with them they're gonna have to pay quite a bit of money that's the difference they're in I in a very different culture my parents were medical missionaries we grew up with the tribe of Mayan Indians in Guatemala we didn't have running water or electricity and barely had any roads and in that world in a developing world experts were the most accessible people this was you the village elder back then it was always a male of course it's different in other parts of Africa and and you anybody could come and talk to him in the town square it could the kids the the women whoever and are in developed cultures experts tend to be in accessible so we flipped that around and when experts or important people mix with the unwashed masses I'm just joking here then they have an entourage or they wear a uniform like if you go to an airport and you see a pilot they're wearing a uniform that gives you some sort of psychological confidence that this is a different a separate person you look out the window and you see the pilot helping to load the baggage while still dressed in that garb it's gonna send a weird conflicting signal to you so be very very accessible with unapplied ideas and then be very inaccessible when you're helping specific individual people okay I love that talking about accessibility all that stuff I saw on your website and under the whole speaker tab expertise is it said some very clear outlines as to how you can book you as a speaker and you're one of the only people I've seen who's put this information out there except for myself about like what you need so can we talk a little bit about how people can book you for speaking and what that means to you sure so and and it's kind of backwards people assume that okay for a little thirty person gathering in a small town it shouldn't cost that much but in my mind it's really the flip side of that because I'd much rather speak for no money or a little bit of money if it's five thousand people these are potential people who might buy the book or might do something else for right so yeah it's um it it's it's a matter of trying to be efficient and help prospect self-select out of the running so speaking fees in the early days I couldn't charge anything obviously and and it's hard to charge much unless you have a book but then once you do have a book you sort of I view it as a as almost like this path you're on so you might be on a panel and I was on a lot of panels and I loved the influence I could have there I loved meeting other people other speak then at some point you're not doing panels anymore you're speaking you're doing a breakout and then at some point you say no let's let's not do breakouts anymore let's just do keynote things and so everybody's career sort of climbs a ladder at a certain point right but I saw now that you okay so everybody just so you guys know what's gonna happen here and I love that you say you talk about this very openly so that we all know there's a standard I noticed that when you go to design conferences for whatever reason mismanagement I don't know then lack priorities they don't seem to have a lot of money for speakers so no kidding right getting it so yeah let me just go through what I remember from your website David wants to fly business or first-class 4-star hotel speaking rates are between ten to thirty or forty thousand dollars and some exceptions are made and he will only speak on a panel with other authors so you're very clear about that tell me what like like what does that mean like and and how do people react to that well a lot of people would never get past that page and I never have an opportunity to work with them right but I view that as great because it in the early days I put my pricing up not to be arrogant at all and it sounds so arrogant when I hear you say that I don't mean it that way the reason I did it in the early days is because I was too tempted to compromise every time I had an opportunity be based on whether I was busy or not busy at that point and so I was putting prices up there for my for my own weakness not because I was arrogant but because I knew this was the only way I would have the courage to not compromise and then later I decided that again back to this point if you're not afraid of the truth when then why not find out the truth as soon as possible so it's better to not spend time on the phone with a prospect if they're never going to be a client so I'd rather just find that out at the beginning right hmm okay and that when you make some exceptions right because it says there are some exceptions rights on this site like what are those exceptions or is it not safe to talk about it on air oh no I'm happy to so like you can't get paid to speak at a TED or a TEDx right so I'm happy I'm speaking at my third one coming up later this year assuming it's not postponed and I would never turn that down because it's event it forces me to develop new content it's good for my career and so on so that would be a great example I don't speak at design conferences anymore and I miss it because I love those people but they just don't pay any money they think that you ought to be grateful just to have an audience and I'm not grateful just to have not yet I can have I have an audience in other ways so the last time I ever on your show no you're welcome in our show I just love how bold and straight you are and it's nice it's very refreshing just to say I don't want that don't need that and I think what happens is design conferences are run by other designers and it's it's problematic and why do I say that because they're so willing to give up their time for free why shouldn't you and right if you really look at it you guys just just let's just for a minute here and and now I may never be invited to another conference myself but look at all the bodies that are in that room look at the ticket price assuming you know there's a good percentage that don't pay because that happens as well where the priorities is in the sandwich is it in the soda or the beverages at the bar that they serving where their priorities shouldn't it be to get really qualified speakers who take it seriously who who will write who will produce some rehearse not just to show up on stage and show you their portfolio it's something to really think about and I think a lot of event organisers are a little scared so they take a scattershot approach they're not following your rules for sure they're just going very broad with as many speakers as they can line up first is just saying this event would be powerful if they invited four speakers instead of 40 and that's what happens every single time yeah absolutely I'm I'm a little disillusioned with that field i we all have things we can learn from those speakers but we could when I go to an event now I want to be so challenged I want to leave thinking so differently I want to learn three or four things that will completely change my life and I'm often not gonna hear those if it's just the same old white guys I'm one of those like the same old white guy standing up talking about how you know showing their portfolio again it's like that's not what we need and we don't need to focus just on our craft in the design field we need to learn how to run the business and that's that's you you've got a great mix of that you know you're helping people with typography but you're also helping them think about pricing right you're helping them run better businesses that's great yeah so I'm curious how did okay so I remember from reading your bio that you studied language history and theology mm-hmm how did that lead you to becoming a consultant for creatives well I was happy so it was a five-year graduate program I was studying Latin Greek hebrew syriac aramaic arabic and i was going to teach those languages so i wasn't headed for this field at all and as well as anthropology and and you had to pick that up in a theology environment because they were the only ones that were studying those dead languages so to speak the old versions of those languages I discovered about halfway through grad school that I didn't there were a lot more politics in higher ed than I thought and I didn't think I'd be a really good fit for that I thought it would wear me out so I decided to do something else meanwhile I finished the degree but I decided to do something else and I was just in my home we had two young children at the time and I was reading the newspaper and I said man these ads suck surely I could do better than this and I decided to open a firm a creative firm so it was a small we had 16 people at our height did it for six years and then through a really strange set of circumstances I began to consult with other principals and very quickly within a period of like 6 months it took over my life entirely do you do you know did you know cam foot of creative business from years back no okay he's the one that is responsible for getting me in this he said why don't you just advise clients and I'll put an ad in the publication and and just give me 10% of everything you make and I didn't think anything it would come of it but people started calling so it worked out great Wow okay more comments coming I don't think people even know what to ask right now is there giving a lot of love link patron is saying David it's a straight talker and I love it David Tallis is saying this is fantastic and David cozying in your face or I love how to love it so I'm gonna try to spend a minute here to see if there any questions that people ask now I'm gonna prompt our audience that are tuning in live to reward you I don't want to ignore you guys go and drop a thoughtful question in the comments right now you mean while David and I will stare at each other until you guys come up with something and if you're joining us late I'm talking to David C Baker the experts expert and his fifth book and the one that I'm holding my hands and I've read this book it's marked up to heck with post-it notes and everything all of throughout the book and it's called the business of expertise it is $38 it's available on Amazon it's also available I think through your site right Rock bench yes it is Amazon - easier but you can buy it through our site as well yes yes and who does the fulfillment when you guys sell directly we we have we own a publishing firm and we've got a big warehouse of climate-controlled pallets and pallets a book so we publish lots of other books as well so we have an MSA with Amazon we shipped to them three times a week oh wow yep okay I published Blair's books as well yes I know that now taken those taking those back over he's too big an author for me I can't handle his popularity Blair are you watching ok let's see here oh and I just want to say one other thing giving our audience a little bit more time to think of their question is I heard one of your podcast when it was live and you're on stage and I'm just here's how I came about how you felt about doing it live oh we did it down in New Orleans for the Bureau of digital and it was a request by the executive producer of that group Carl Smith and it was fun we really enjoyed it I didn't know what to expect we were nervous about the text so we had him pay we had him pay to send our producer down there to New Orleans to manage that side of it and it was really fun I enjoyed it there and I'd never do it face-to-face so we actually had we did a live taping of two Bob's today as well for the first time so that yeah yeah and we had 800 people register and about 450 show up for the first and it was really fun you know I I got to see Blair's eyes roll when I said something with never used to see that before right so when you guys to your podcast it's just audio only you don't even look at each other right right he's recording from a little village caslo in BC and I'm recording from a farm in las casas Tennessee we record an HD to our local and then we just sync up something using clean feed and then we throw it together yeah I say watching each other yeah I have to say I'm rather envious that you have this creative partner in your podcast to bounce ideas off to talk and it's a wonderful conversation if you guys haven't checked it out go and and download subscribe to it's to Bob's and it's Blair ends and David Baker who's our guest on the show today definitely check it out and I was like God now I want my own like person in wherever they are in the world so they have these kind of conversations with it so that's that's super that this person who was invited to your conference to speak with super polarizing and you it's developed into this wonderful friendship that you guys have yeah it makes it so much easier so he'll we'll take turns suggesting a topic so if it's Blair's term he'll say hey David I think I want you to interview me on this and I'll say yeah great idea or terrible idea or whatever usually it's a great idea and then he'll see if that's okay then he'll send me three or four sentences and then that's what we use to walk through this thing so and I'm throwing my opinions in here and there but we'll take turns sort of leading that from one perspective to the next yeah okay so we've been talking to David for coming up on on almost 90 minutes here so we're gonna start to wrap up I have a few more questions and then we're gonna put up your screen where people can find out more information about you Idris is asking this question what are your thoughts in working for free for clients in a specific industry in order to gain expertise mm-hmm I think it makes a lot of sense as long as you're not telling yourself this over and over and over again I could see working for free at the very beginning and that makes sense but what I don't like is people who are constantly working for free because they're always wanting to break into something new you need to figure out what your positioning is and then dive really really deep and start offering different service offerings to the same people and that doesn't require you to work for free so I think it makes a lot of sense at the beginning as long as it's not a usual practice every time you want to experiment with something else right and that could be the habits that you fall into it's like this is interesting today let me do that for free and keep going right exactly okay another great question here from Daniel prego his question is what would be your take at this point of uncertainty around the world if you are trying to sell creative related services any particular strategy well if you and here I'm mimicking what Blair says a lot so it's really more his thought but I just so believe it and it's this notion that if you understand selling as not convincing anybody of anything but if you understand selling as predominantly helping your prospective clients get what they need to accomplish then all of a sudden it doesn't seem so rude and tone-deaf to keep selling because what you're really doing is you're continuing to help them during this very rare unique moment in time I think it's acceptable to keep helping your current clients and be open to helping new clients but I would be here's the test you would give to yourself before you write something or before you make a call to a prospect to reach out to them just put this artificial constraint on your business right now and say I am no longer taking any clients what would I say if I did not want this client to hire me at this point and then that will lead you down the right path because they'll actually hear what you're saying they won't smell this desperation and they're actually more likely to hire you if you give off this sense that you don't need to be hired so that would be the approach I would take it's it's a strange kind of funless and it looks almost unintuitive like the more you want something the less you get it unless you want it the more you get right right exactly right yeah you can't what and we talked about this on one of the episodes that Blair led and that's that the more you whoever wants it worst is the loser so and you want it more than the client or the prospect then you have very little leverage in that conversation we have a great episode on that one so if I like in my mind like how do I trick myself how do I psych myself up for this when I know I got about two months of rent that's it and that's my runway and record our prospect I'm trying to tell myself okay I don't want this I don't want this can you give us some advice on how to deal with that this might be it might be a question that we all have to answer for ourselves the way I answer it for myself is I say what's the worst that could happen I go out of business and I go get a job doing something else could I face that and if the answer is yes then I just tell myself well then just be a little bit reckless don't worry about it if that's the worst that can happen but if you're trying to hold on tight to your business and the notion of closing it down and going to work somewhere else if that terrifies you then you're gonna hold on to it tightly so I'm not as how I deal with it I'm not convinced that everybody should do that but that's how I I really like that so I'm going to ask you this question what would happen if what's the worst thing happened what other job are you gonna do if this is not what you do well I've got a list it's a Microsoft Word file I put together years ago it's got about 20 21 lines in it there are things that I would do if I were ever decided to grow up so I would just pick one of those I was a corporate pilot before I mowed lawns I was an automotive relocation engineer that means a parking lot attendant so I would it's not that hard I'd figure out something to do okay that's great I for me I I would just get a Jo be I don't want it but I would I just go out there and work for the man if you will I just find an agency job somewhere that's a great way to look at it so what's what's kind of harmful for you is to to kind of have these unarticulated fears and just act and make decisions based on these things so think about it what's the worst that can happen and it's probably not that bad that should give you some courage okay next question is from David Coe so here's a really good question here this is very specific to him other than niching what's the most common advice you give to creative micro studios less than five employees mmm it might be that you probably should never count on selling your business you might but it's very unlikely that you will so you need to pull enough money out on a fixed regular basis to force the business to be profitable people don't usually need that advice except more towards the earlier parts of their career but just helping them realize that there probably is not a pot of gold at the end of this only one in 400 firms ever sells so and this is particularly true for really small firms right like I don't have any employees it's just me I'll never sell my business so it's really important if I'm if I don't want to be pushing a cart at some point when I'm retired I need to make enough money along the way because I should not expect to get this big payday at some point mmm okay very good so he took away probably your number one answer which is Denise does a whole book on it the whole book is about niching and establishing your expertise right David right exactly so that's how strongly David believes in this David Baker so David Coe I know a lot of people in your shoes in your position have a small firm and they are resisting with all their might they don't want a niche down and then they wonder what else can they do so maybe we just have to re-examine that position that you're holding and to consider the possibility of niching okay I think this is going to be our last question I have to ask you this question mostly because it's been repeated so many times in the chat here okay I think it's Marian I don't have to say it your last name David how do you organize your focus you have many interests go please go back to the hoarding concept yeah so if you think that you're not good enough and you'll run out of opportunity then you're going to be hoarding this opportunity and one of the things that I ask people to do is to think ahead 10 or 20 years and then turn around and look back at their lives and say alright if I wasn't as successful as I could have been what was the reason for that was I not as successful as I could have been because I didn't have enough opportunity and that's never the answer no it's because you didn't focus down and do something really deeply so in my business I have a I have a rigid focus I it's about making money and doing really effective work for my clients that's it those are the two things but in my personal life it's crazy it's all over the place it's it's full of a dee dee it's full of doing things that just interest me and fooling around and trying to master something and that's what keeps me grounded but it's a separate thing so my business life is about making money and making a strong impact on my clients and I get the stimulation from the other things outside perfect okay David thank you ever my very much for doing this I hope you enjoyed yourself I think you've given a lot of information IQ Slee tell because the chat is fairly quiet with questions and more like oh my god mind blown those kinds of things so here's how you get in touch with David normally normally I would be doing the recap but I can't keep up with what's going on so that's not possible so you guys won't just have to rewatch it five times okay his name is David C Baker the book that we've been talking about is the business of expertise it retails for $38 super easy to pick it up either on Amazon or on Rock bench you guys can order from hi there probably better if you ordered for him directly and his website is expertise is expertise is dot is right so the expertise dot is David C Baker he's very active on Twitter where else are you active David I'm trying to be more active on LinkedIn and they as well now if if business picks up again after all this maybe I won't be but actually I'm enjoying being on Twitter more yeah may be out there I see you there so I I'm encouraged to see a little bit more active because trying to have a conversation with you is not that easy so there yeah thank you for having me I've had a this is the time has flown by I really enjoyed it and you've asked such fantastic questions thank

Channel: The Futur

Views: 39,280

Rating: 4.9611874 out of 5

Keywords: the futur, chris do, pricing, design, entrepreneurship, business of design, Entrepreneurship (Field Of Study), Designer (Profession), start design business, run a design business, graphic design business, design business, how to run a business, design job, profit, niche, niching down, david baker, business of expertise, david, baker, specializing, podcast, marketing, podcasts, business podcast, 2 bobs podcast, blair enns, specialization, insights, the business of expertise

Id: 9FBfO6A1PIw

Length: 82min 31sec (4951 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020