Guide To Freelancing w/ Jonathan Stark

[Music] oh he got it just in time hey everybody welcome to the show normally we do freelance Fridays but today in lieu of that we're doing freelance Fridays you know he's back he's back he's back I want to put a Jack Nicholson clip in here from the shiny he's back but it we just had the attorney on about copyright infringement so I didn't do it Matthew I'm on good behavior today he's a fan favorite he's been dropping knowledge bombs on your face guys who am I talking about I'm talking about Jonathan Stark he's in the house holla you guys what's up all right here's the abbreviated thing in case you missed him last time and you better watch that episode okay it's former software developer he's an avid martial artist so if you see him the street could kick your butt his mission is to rid the world of hourly billing what an incredible mission he's on he's written five books translating seven languages today today's episode we're gonna talk about how to transform from a commodity freelancer to an in-demand consultant he's written a book about this it's called the freelancers roadmap so we're gonna be tight mmm we're gonna be taking your questions today you guys but we're doing something a little bit different we're gonna be using slide Oh calm no relation just like third cousin slide Oh calm okay type in this number w5 23 you'll be able to submit your question and you can upvote or downvote questions that way we're going to tackle the most kind of the most favorite questions the ones that are most in-demand the ones that you guys want answer it first in that order okay go to slider calm you can use your phone you can use your desktop type in that code w5 23 all right Jonathan welcome back welcome back I'm gonna ask you this question just to start off with how do you define freelancer and is there is that different than being an independent business owner absolutely yeah even if it's just a mental difference I think there's a big difference and it comes like I mean it's right in the word so if you if you think about the word freelancing freelance yes it's like an available Lance like an available weapon it's like if you if you look at the root of the word it means mercenary and if you look up mercenary murse canary is you know basically the definition is someone who cares more about making money than the ethics that you know that they engage in to me oh yeah so it's pretty bad and it's pretty bad right and I work with a lot of freelancers and I know that they aren't you know you know there are ethical people who are trying to do a good job for their clients but I feel like maybe that stigma persists and that clients have a tendency to view freelancers as mercenaries they certainly treat them as mercenaries in lots of cases and of course I'm gonna suggest that has a lot to do with hourly billing but it has a lot to do with your worldview as a freelancer and thinking that sort of mentality when you're assertive when you're billing by the hour that hey I put in the hours they owe me the money is it's really it's a mercenary attitude and if you put it in hours and you didn't improve that person's business I don't think they should pay you frankly so if that means that what that means is that you need to start out your client relationships understanding how to deliver value to them how to satisfy them how to make them happier and make their business better in some way tangible or intangible quantitative or qualitative that is valuable to them and then you can charge based on that and those numbers can get really big okay we're just gonna start off really easy like that you're a merc your total mark all you care about is money and we don't care about that so well we're just gonna try to end and abolish the word freelancer right now at least in your mind and and I know it's a bit of common term and Retin burns and I have debated about this before and it's like you know don't use that word freelance okay so there's lots of ways according to the post that you put up on your website in terms of how one might consider themselves a freelancer and here's a couple ways that you describe you might be a freelancer a contractor using staff augmentation a developer design a copywriter somebody's looking for work on up work on any of those platforms right we're gonna lump all these people in and you're you're having struggles all right now I'd like for you to explain why your first year as a freelancer you have a built in marketing story yeah so when you let's say you're working at you know some day job full-time and employment and you gain some skill at that job you become good at whatever Photoshop Adobe animate something you become good at it and for whatever reason you start to get disgruntled you start to get dissatisfied with that job maybe you feel like they don't pay you enough for maybe you think your boss doesn't appreciate you or maybe you know you just you know you're just not getting any career development whatever the reason is it doesn't matter a lot of people in that situation they think you know what they're billing me out at this hour to their clients or you know my salary is so low I'm getting you know whatever it is they said they think I'm gonna go out and do this on my own so they basically take the tell the boss take this job and shove it and they hang out their own signal shingle and they're gonna start freelancing and you know it's natural that's a big life change for someone who you know if that's the first time you've worked for yourself that's a huge life change you're gonna tell people about that you're gonna tell your family and friends and colleagues your other people you work with are all gonna know about it so everybody in your life is gonna know this story yeah it's got this built-in underdog thing to it everybody wants you to succeed there's probably some story behind why you quit that gets told you know maybe your boss was harassing you oh who knows there's some story though and that story's gonna spread it's gonna spread through your network and those folks are gonna want to help you they can I say oh here's this person who's you know putting their you know going out in the world and taking this risk and people just want to help someone in that situation so as scary as it can be to make that leap the first year is actually not the hardest year because you've got that built in marketing story people help you they're introducing their friends to you to maybe maybe there's a good fit maybe you can do some design for them or build a website the when it starts to get hard is 12 to 24 months in when that story doesn't have the magic anymore and now you're just another freelancer scrapping for work and there's nothing interesting about it it's you've exhausted you're now at work so all of that all the easy low-hanging fruit is gone you know maybe you've done some jobs for folks that were friends and friends or whatever but those jobs are over now so when it when you hit right around you 18 months right around there yes depending on the size of your network that's when you need to that's when you realize that you haven't done any marketing you don't know how to sell you don't know how to do all of the other business things that your ex boss used to do for you that you didn't appreciate or didn't weren't even aware of so now all the sudden you realized that oh wait a second I didn't become a freelancer I started a business and I haven't really done anything to to improve my business skills maybe I'm better at Photoshop or whatever my craft is but yeah I haven't really gotten better at the business stuff you know it's it's it's interesting that you say like that first year you have a built-in marketing story cuz people want to root for you I think it's a part of the American spirit to kind of root for the underdog like I gave it to the man and I'm on my own and I was a press and now I'm a free mercenary or whatever it is and you tell that story but oddly enough I'm gonna I'm gonna guess that many in our audience don't even take advantage of that built-in marketing story so you're talking about like yeah that story runs out but some of you guys haven't even used that story yet right I could and you get many examples on the site it's like you could say this you could say this and it was really cool to see that okay so now that you are kind of beyond that take this job and shove it you know it's old news how do you generate interest and leads now now the work is starting to dry up you've exhausted that circle of friends and family and now nobody cares about you anymore what do you do right yeah it's really hard because once you get to that point I'm gonna answer that but first I want to paint a picture of how hard it is okay because once you get to that point you the the the sort of amateur marketer the refuge of someone who doesn't know how to market and who doesn't know how to do a good job in the sales process is they lower their price that's the obvious thing to do so you're probably getting paid by the hour and then you know you're you're getting a trickle of leads maybe a little bit of word-of-mouth and every time you get one of those you're so desperate to land that job that you're either gonna offer a really low a lower hourly rate than you'd like to just to get the work or you're going to give a project estimate that is way too low mm-hmm and you just you're creating this vicious cycle where you have to work harder more hours to make the same or less money and it gives you less time to work on your business instead of just doing client work working in your business so it's super hard if you get to that point and what I'm hoping is people are listening and they're like well not to that and that's the end of my networking I think I should start doing marketing now yeah once you get to that point you need to figure out how to carve out some time to get better at marketing and this is a huge topic of course but I think the first thing to do is kind of like just decide what you want to be when you grow up recognize that you're running a business now recognize that you that that part of running a business is marketing and take it seriously this is something that if you don't do you're gonna end up in the feast famine cycle you're gonna be on that hamster wheel you're gonna be working harder and harder for less money over time you have to become a marketer if you don't you might as well go back and beg you're old you're your boss for your old job back if you don't want to do marketing you're gonna have a really really hard time you could hire someone to do it but someone in this phase is not gonna have the kind of budget to hire anyone good you you probably need to learn how to do it and the first step the easiest low it's not easy but the the most bang for the buck thing that you could do is create a positioning statement for yourself a laser-focused positioning statement to use in your marketing start talking about your business talking about what you do in a different way in a much more focused way and you can still do the same kind of projects and you can still take on whatever kind of clients comes through the door but you want to begin talking about your business in a much more focused way so what I mean by that is when I say talking about your business when you meet people at say a conference or a meet-up or whatever networking event in person talking about your business differently but also on your website and your business cards it during a product delivery everything everything you do start talking about your business in a much more focused way mmm all right fantastic guys I know there's some confusion here I think my own team maybe I sent out the wrong email but they actually have to go to slide Oh SLI do calm not slide doe guys slide Oh calm type in that word the password on w5 23 that's the hashtag it use and then you can enter into it and then you guys can up and down both questions as they come in okay we're good okay what's the I mean I have my own questions but I don't want hogging up all of Jonathan's time let's let's open it up there's a bunch of people in the room what's the first best question that people want to ask okay Mike Mike please Mike yes share share Ricky alright go ahead I'm not a specialist in strategy should I still sell it not like I can I can I can riff on this yes so so I'm gonna assume that I mean I'm gonna rephrase the question the way that I get this kind of a question yeah so usually when someone asks this kind of a question they probably heard me talking about the importance of selling things that are farther upstream like strategy your design planning type things not implementation but strategic level things that's where really really high value high margin work exists imagine that that's it's not a question people who usually ask this are usually at the implementation layer of the thing that they provide in other words someone delivers them a design or someone delivers them a strategy or someone delivers them a plan and they execute it they build it a did you the creative execution they write the code or whatever it is they create the you know it's kind of like an architect giving their plans to the Builder mm-hmm so this question is kind of like from a builder who say hey how do I become an architect so the the answer that is you need to learn how to get good at it the question asker said that they didn't know how to do it yet well you need to kick you need to learn how to do it before you can sell it so the first thing to do would be to understand what strategy and how it's different than tact which we can get into if you like but the way that this the kind of backdoor way into it is when you're working with a client on an implementation you're building something out it's probably a maybe it's a decent-size project three months six months a year and you're doing this big website build or whatever it is what keep your eyes or your ears peeled for the client asking you a question in your area of expertise that doesn't necessarily relate to the project so the example I usually give is you know you're doing a website build-out maybe you're implementing a really complicated WordPress theme and adding all these plugins you're doing all this this grunt work for them to create this new execute this new design or implement this new design and then your project contact pulls you aside and says hey we've got a different project and we know that you are kind of a web expert would you mind sitting in a meeting with the CEO and some other folks to talk about I don't know cloud architecture or migrating to the cloud off of their local servers or some kind of a security thing or a rebrand that they're thinking about doing or a new expansion they're planning to do into another region and they the whole website localized in other words they want you to sit in a meeting and ask for your advice that is the kind of thing you want to look for when someone does that do not charge them by the hour to sit in that meeting just go to the meeting because you basically just got handed a gift they are there they are basically opening up their minds and viewing you as a consultant in that moment they want to get your advice that's what a consultant does if someone goes to consult with you that's what a consultant does a lot of freelancers who build websites or slice Photoshop files they say oh Chris told me to stop calling myself a freelancer I'm gonna start calling myself a consultant but not actually change what you do that doesn't work so you have to actually start consulting and that means giving people advice when they ask questions so so long long answer wait for or perhaps try to encourage folks to start asking you for advice basically so while you're while you're working doing execution implementation work for a client look for any opportunities to give advice not unasked-for but you know what I mean like you want them to be like mmm maybe you overhear someone talking about whatever and you're like oh you know if you guys need help with that I could give you some answers be helpful and try and foster that because then they'll start thinking of you hopefully this is the tricky part is to get them to start thinking of you in a different way get out of the friend zone and you know how you get out of the friend zone you slowly present yourself in a way that they don't view you they don't currently view you as a consultant they view is as someone they tell what to do so to start viewing you as a partner or peer level person whose advice they value is a big shift so when that door opens run through it mm-hmm okay I have so many questions so many follow-up kinds of things to talk to you about I love that example let's kind of dive into this I think you as part of a natural evolution of someone who does a really good job is that you know you get beyond that first like do I know you don't like you eating you earn the clients trust and so they invite you into these kinds of opportunities right like just like the one that you said like hey can you sit in a meeting and give us your thoughts on XYZ so you say yes run through that door don't worry about charging just you've been invited this is your first opportunity to kind of level up so how do you structure that do you just do it to kind of be exposed or is there a roadmap to go from that to being a consultant and charging for value so to me to me this opportunity is an educational one the odds of you actually closing a deal with an existing implementation client that is strategic in nature are pretty low okay I my experience it's much easier to just find new clients that meet you in that way they immediately see you as that and you don't have to reposition yourself it's it's hard to get new clients and you do already have trust with this existing client but changing where you are pigeon-holed in their mind is incredibly hard so I balance I think it sort of depends on your level of skill to begin with it could be that you're really good at this already but you just haven't been charging for it like a lot of people I mean not you know maybe 25% let's say a non-trivial percentage of people I work with do strategic engagements at the beginning of each implementation they just don't charge for it or they charge by the hour for it right and they think of it as like the kickoff or like the discovery process there are design phase that has to happen before they can start building stuff mm-hmm if you're already doing that kind of work it's probably not going to be as hard for you to to go to productize that strategy engagement and sell it independently but it's still gonna be hard to sell to an existing client because you already put them through it and they don't need that kind of thing constantly right that's like something you only need every time you're gonna build a house you don't need an architect every day so it's just really tricky to slow in to existing clients so for folks who don't currently do any kind of strategic stuff they don't do any planning stuff they're not doing designs a hard word to use here because I don't mean design execution I mean designing like you're coming up with a new status quo you're coming up with a whole new brand or a whole new you know I don't know whatever you know something sure something brand new a brand new idea you're building a map or you're building a diagram or you're building a schedule you're not building files and like this tactical stuff that is much more interchangeable type of work so yeah so once you for someone who doesn't have a lot of experience doing that and is basically just an order-taker and they're they feel like they're being micromanaged all the time and when they get a new a new prospect or a lead the lead is like hey we want you to do these 25 things we've got this backlog and JIRA and we want you to blast through it and knock this stuff out that client is not gonna hire you for strategy and if that's the only kind of work that you're doing you're probably not that great at delivering strategy so when the opportunity comes up and I said run through the door it's for you to learn how to do it though okay I don't I think that's that's the opportunity there is to be in the room with people who are like what you want your future buyers to be like but these problems these be probably not gonna write you a check for it it's just educational it's it's an educational opportunity for you okay I'd love to get your thoughts on this because I've been able to do this successfully you're saying to us and and I makes perfect sense to me it's very difficult to pivot from where people see you as today to something else probably those are easier to do with new relationships right and right I've had a couple of instances before when we were transitioning from doing creative services to doing brand strategy and people you succumb to are shot mostly to produce video that's how most people know of us for for two decades they know us so somebody would come into their meeting usually the decision maker and I would sit down and chat and they already have in their mind want you to make a video first that's what we need we need a video I'll let them talk for a little bit and then what I say to them is like okay look I'm happy to make a video for you but before we do that I'd like to engage you and asking you a few questions do you have 20 to 30 minutes so I can help you to understand the problem in a deeper more meaningful way this is the bridge to the strategic thing I'm about to deliver to them so then I say then they're like yeah okay and I say you I said usually charged quite a bit of money for this usually $20,000 but you didn't come here for that I don't want to force it on you so what I'd start to do immediately is ask him why are we having this conversation to begin with the video part is that the decision like the tail end of a decision process what problem are you trying to solve that go okay so here's the thing we don't have great penetration in the retail space bubble so they start talking and then I help to kind of just break it down and I see something happen in them that their their mind seems to open up right before me and they're out I came in here for X I'm walking away with Y and then I say at the end of that meeting if you enjoyed that I'd love to engage with you in a strategic level discussion first for that I charge X and then we can proceed with that and that's all I want to do I don't want to get into any deliverables I just want to talk about how I can be a consultant to help you solve your problem your thoughts please I wouldn't change a thing about that side it's exactly what I do oh so but you've got 20 years of experience doing business with people before you can have a conversation like that right so and you know confidence and sweat you know cocky bastard after all ladies yes yes sir you what I'm talking I'm talking to the person who asked this question who's new to it and is looking for ways to like start to start to climb that tree you know once you once you've got your lines down exactly what you see it's almost identical to what I do and but it takes experience and you need to be a there's so much subtle stuff going on in that conversation you know you don't want to accidentally give off what Blair hands calls the stench of desperation you know like like being needy or anything like that you need to be really secure you need to be perfectly fine with losing the business you need to be perfectly fine with them saying no but you need to take over that meeting drive the meeting and that that takes that takes a while to get good at so you know I that's a goal so like what you just described is what people should be working toward okay and getting experience with that with existing clients is an interesting way to do it and then once you have a once you've got a little bit of experience perhaps even some results maybe you can get a testimonial from the client before whom one of these call it a free strategy session right then you can start to put that on your website you can package that up as a particular thing you can start to talk about that with some level of confidence because you're not just making it up right right okay I think Ricky has a follow-up question I'm just going to beg my team please speak into the mic yeah of course thank you how do you apply value but value based don't worry about guys come on pricing strategy we need to turn up his mic a little bit it's a little low right it's very low say again how do you apply really based pricing when selling only strategy that's from the slide out thing all right all right I thought you had a follow-up question I want to make sure we understand that word follow-up question based on what you just heard not a random question from outer space guys asking a lot of our audience is a little lower level and their own Fiverr a lot of the time that's their 100% source of getting jobs so guys asking if I want to stop doing Fiverr work and get a real client outside of five or what should I do all right all right okay all right you guys when you have a real follow of a question let me know then when I ask for questions from the audience that's perfect question I like that but Matthew do you have a follow up questions so dozen you guys are interrupting him for no good reason all right I'm sorry go ahead Matthew yeah so my follow-up question is it sounds like you're just practicing this you're in these situations where clients are already hiring you for your skill to execute right and can you guys hear me yeah yeah that's better man okay great so so yes so you're in the situation where someone's hiring you to execute right and then you're just trying to ask these deep questions you're why questions your three why questions right and you're just trying to surface all of these these issues you're trying to make them understand that they have bigger problems and that you're actually thinking about their problems in a more in a broader scale and and a further scale other than just pixels and colors you're talking to them about things that are more important for their business so just by doing this just by the sheer process of asking them these why questions you're able to move up right you're able to start establishing this and I guess with your situation Chris it sounded like you were able to still do this with the same client eventually you got paid with the same client to get to get paid for strategy yeah where it sounded like Jonathan was saying that this is something that you practice on current clients and then you could apply this to new ones I'm just wondering if we could impact that a little bit because I feel like there's a lot of people in this situation where they're already serving their clients for some high-end execution are there other tactical things that we can do to start getting people to start charging for their strategy ok so a couple things there several things there so I think I think at least I understood the Cris example to be that this was a client came for execution or implementation work but it wasn't I mean it might've been a past client but it didn't sound like a current project was ongoing so it was the beginning of this particular segment of the relationship which is your opening that's your opening - perhaps pivot them to a strategic engagement the previous question asker didn't have experience doing strategy so my answer was all about getting the experience so there's sort of two different things going on there it's like how do I get the experience doing it and how you know and at one point in the relationship can I open that conversation the answer is the beginning so I don't know if that clarifies at all and then the other I guess the other thing was a separate fiber question that's unrelated yes do you want to answer that one or the fiber question is actually pretty straightforward if you're if you were if you're I mean just look at the situation on fiber like the name of it right the whole premise of fiber is about the cost and like how much it isn't that it's cheap right so you know but it's not just five or it's like up work and job boards and all these other places we and I understand that this is like people's lifeblood you know especially when they're starting out the thing that you have to do is come up and this is a marketing thing you have to do some marketing and the marketing piece of it is you have to differentiate yourself from all the other people on Fiverr and upwork and Craigslist in a way that's meaningful to the people who you want to work with if it's meaningful to you and your peers it doesn't matter if you're if your desired target market does not see a meaningful difference between you and anybody else on faller there's one thing that they do understand and that's how much you cost so they don't understand if if the untrained I cannot tell the difference between Jane and Joe they're gonna go with the cheaper one right good money they might not go with the very cheapest one in the entire list because that sends a signal that it's low value or they're bad or new or not that great mm-hmm but they're probably gonna go somewhere on the middle and they're gonna pick someone based almost completely on price so if you look the same to your the clients that you want to work with you're doomed doomed to race to zero there's no way around it you have to race a top and the way that you do that is you come up with something about you that is different in a meaningful way to people you want to work with and it's tough to I mean I can't give you a silver bullet here but but I can tell you that because it's different for everybody that's kind of the point it needs to be it needs to be really specific I talked to someone yesterday who I'm a designer I was like okay what kind of design that's giant right right right and I assumed Web Design but he was like yeah well I do web design but I used to do interior design so sometimes I do fitter sets also you know and like like talk about anything like they'll just do any they're just and it just screens desperation it's just like oh I'll do anything give me 50 bucks and I'll wash your car you know you need to be you need to be very specific I can't tell you I can't tell people you know an anonymous audience what to pick to be specific but you need to pick something really specific and talk about your business in that way even if even if once you take on the client you do other things too that's fine because you've established a relationship and you're having communications and it's one-on-one you've got trust but in your marketing that tip of the spear you know marketing people always talk about the tip of the spear I don't think that's a great analogy but this is what they mean when marketers talk about the tip of the spear needs to be pointy pointy pointy that you start focused it's like analogy I like better is a campfire so if you put a bunch of kindling on the ground I don't care how hot a day it is no this is probably a terrible analogy you guys in California apologies but usually the ground will not automatically catch on fire but if you take a magnifying glass and focus the energy on a particular point you can light a piece of wood on fire right that's cool yes that focus is what you need to do to start the fire so the starting the fire is the beginning once you have a you know a nice campfire going you can probably put the magnifying glass down but for people who are beginning that is the focus is the way you take your limited resources and you create this this like flame this success with starting this fledgling business again apologies for the fire metaphor that was awful that's great I think I understand that and I think I know you're trying to do it as broad as possible but so what you're saying is pick a niche specialize and make sure that you're tackling very specific things for your niche that's going to be out be valuable to that audience so if I was a graphic designer and I'm focusing on brand identity I might start making marketing pieces on maybe 10 tips to improve your logo today or brand is not just a logo but it's more about the personality how it acts and speaks in different situations so I just want to give a few tactical examples so people can map it to it to their own situation and these would be pieces of content like we're doing right this is video blogging putting on your LinkedIn these are posts that you just put out there so that the community around you can start seeing what you're about and can gather around this campfire that you're starting to set right yeah yes share share share share share so I mean that's like a very easy marketing tactic but before you'd spend it but it takes a lot of energy as you guys well know so the first thing you want before you put all that energy in to create these pieces which hopefully will be valuable for a long time evergreen things that will work that will continue to benefit you in a year two years three years create a flywheel effect you want to create stuff after you have a an axle for the flywheel you want you don't want to start creating tons of stuff until you know that you're onto something so I talked about this laser focus positioning statement you want to find something like the example that you gave oh we just do branding I think that's still way too broad I don't really know but I imagine that that is not gonna be like you know someone's not gonna come to your website and say finally someone who focuses just on branding right I feel like there's probably a lot of options there it's even more specific we focus on branding just for co-working spaces or we focus on just for people who are environmentalists or we focus on branding just for people who I don't know run karate schools right you know something something so that when someone lands on their page their eyes are like I can't believe this exists this is exactly what I need right wait wait I gotta jump in here Jonathan I got your email and you talked about this and I love the way you write so I'm gonna geek out a little bit here and that you talked about positioning and being very specific I think in it was a couple of weeks ago you talked about a gym like you want to open up a gym and yeah it's like everybody wants to open up a gym can is that enough of a prompt for you to talk about that or do you need a little bit of more of a trigger maybe a little more okay all right and you talked about like your gym for moms who are just trying to get back into shape yep yep that's a good one yeah so I mean here's the thing when people hear that when people say when people hear like focusing on a vertical or demographic or psychographic or an audience they triggers this fear reflex I have a friend Phillip Morgan he's a he's a positioning guru and he just talks about this positioning fear reflex he just calls it the fear and when people imagine going from hey I'll do anything I'll do Photoshop I'll do animation I'll design your set for a play they met and they think no like geez I only made X dollars last year casting the really wide net and I didn't catch that many fish and I barely got by working my tail off so and starts to hear telling me that I should just focus down on you know branding for what I'd say environmentalist that's crazy I only had one environmentalist project all last year and in the the brain has this like loss aversion thing where they think oh well that would means I would only have 10% of next year I'll only have 10% of the business I had last year I'll get fewer lead because I'm focusing too narrowly on a particular market but there are millions of environmentalists there probably hundreds of thousands of businesses that have an environmental mission and that is way too many clients for you to service and the paradox of this like laser focus positioning is like the smaller your focus the bigger the market gets the more effective your marketing gets the more leads you'll get the more easier it is for you to write for them I think this is a little bit of a side note but I think it's really hard to write or create content for people you don't know who you're talking to so if you understand your audience that is to me that's the source of a lot of writer's block is because you you keep on having these false starts like well do I need to describe the this word or were they going to understand this we're right am I being too technical am I being too broad am i going over their heads am i kind of sending to them if you're having these kinds of writers brought box prop block problems is probably because you don't know who you're talking to you haven't had this specific enough sort of avatar to to even know what to say when people are talking they don't get speakers block as Seth Godin says because you know who you're talking to so once you once you pick someone it becomes so much easier to write so much easier to to create content for them so much easier to create value so much easier to deliver value when they're paying for it whether you're giving away for free or you know as like I do with my email list or they're paying for it you're doing a strategy session it's just way easier because you communicate so much better because you understand them you have an empathy for their situation and you just click so it becomes it becomes like a virtuous cycle because the more you learn about environmentalist businesses and the challenges the unique challenges that they face you'll become the only option they'll start telling their friends like oh you know they go to a conference of like-minded people and someone's like and your rebrand was amazing how did you do that oh well we talked to these guys you got to talk to them they were amazing mm-hmm so now word-of-mouth becomes a real a real factor that you can control it's not just random thing right okay there's I've spoken to our audience many times and this comes up quite a bit and amber perfectly captures this she says that's interesting I've always been told to keep your services very broad to seem more desirable I don't know who's saying this to people but this is a disservice to yourself and to our industry and I think it also resonates with creatives because they get bored they don't want to just work on one thing and go deep they don't they want to play with a little bit of this so when I look at portfolios they send me things like oh here's some life drawing that I did and here's a here's one poster I did and here's one really bad website I did and I'm like I don't know what you do and you're not good at any of them so I'm done right so Johnson please give us the definitive answer to this thing so we can put this thing to bed we're going to edit this thing down and with a loop it for a thousand times for you guys okay yeah so what you just described that like this is part of the fear one of one of the three bullet points under what the fear is work causes the fear I said the first one which is that you're afraid you're not gonna get any more clients and that's just the paradox of it you'll get more clients I can almost guarantee it mm-hmm so the next thing is that I'll get bored if I specialize I'll get bored and if you look at any person who's ever given a TED talk those are every single one of them's a specialist every single one and they don't look bored to me so it's like the the idea that skimming across the surface of a big lake is the only way to maintain your interest or to not get bored he's ridiculous I'm just saying jump out of the boat and go way down to the bottom and it's just as much surface area that you're covering it's just in a different direction and having that it and it's fine to have this be sort of t-shaped I don't know if this is a common term but how a bit of an understanding of a broad range of topics you almost can't avoid having that after you've got a few years of experience you're gonna have be exposed a lot of different things so you get this general idea about all the things that sort of circle around your skill set but then go deep on something and whether it is going really focused it into a vertical like pizza places or dentists or some sort of vertical market or it's a psychographic specialty like I said environmentalists or whatever it is or demographic like soccer moms look whatever the the vertical or demographic or psychographic specialty is or it could be part of your skill set I don't know you tell me what's like a hyper focused type of skill set like I don't know grating flashy animations or something like that it doesn't it's not even around anymore but something super specific I don't love those I don't love the I don't love horizontal specializations as much because he's still moving too much to chance and I'm a control freak I want to have control over my business mm-hmm and if I'm up if I'm a horizontal specialist where I just get amazing at augmented reality you know I'm amazing at creating augment building augmented reality into into iOS apps that's a horizontal specialization I'd like that a lot better if the specialization was I had augmented reality to education well I wasn't gonna say big retail like fortune 500 no yeah like IKEA target is you know you focus on doing that particular horizontal skill that you love you're in love with this you just think it's super fun to create these like virtual objects in physical space but then sell it to people you know pick someone who's gonna benefit greatly from that particular skill set and and just go you don't have to bet your whole business on it a picture does like a marketing campaign like a six-month marketing campaign I'm an a art expert and for six months I'm gonna try and get clients that are in you know retail space physical retail fortune 500 companies all right start connecting with them on LinkedIn write blog posts that are of interest to them interview people who have worked with them interview people who work inside of those companies creating connections with those people creating content for those people delivering value to those people you're gonna start getting leads because here you are showing up in front of all these people in this delightful attractive target market that you selected and you're wearing a t-shirt or a hat that says I do AR it's a real babe magnet that's our next hat you guys I do AR yeah okay that was awesome okay Wow I mean you guys okay I'm gonna just restate this really quickly for you guys the thing that you have to do is you have to kind of think beyond the short-term because you're looking for the next buck you got to make rent you got to you got to buy diapers whatever you got to do it's kind of hard to get out of that mindset to start thinking longer-term it's going to take time to develop a specialization a niche a vertical expertise but if you set your mind to it you can do it I love the tip that you gave like today you are not an AR expert but in six to twelve months you will be and one of the things that you can do is to start marketing yourself is just to interview people who are either AR experts who are looking for and you can write blog post you can share what you learn so you're building a community and an audience with you while you get there so by the time you're ready they'll be calling you up as the AR expert it doesn't happen overnight but you got to think long term and that's one just great wait it was a hot tip sorry Jonathan go ahead you become the obvious choice and it takes it takes 18 months like it's if you if you like pick a really clear focus and you stick with it and you do it you know a few hours at least a few hours a week I'd like to hear ten hours a week you put into it it'll it taking probably 18 months ya get to get to become that go-to person it's just like whoa I am like magically getting leads like people are just like recommending me to their friends left and right mm-hmm like you start to feel attraction around usually no faster than a year but usually 22 months okay no Matthew in a minute we're gonna take your questions from slide Oh Matthew I think you need a so there's the number one hot question that I think both Ricky and Aaron want to ask on behalf of our audience but before we do that I need to show you guys something because I just want to it took me while to create this graphic because I'm trying to encapsulate some of the things that Jonathan's talking about when he's talking about somebody going on five-hour up work or 99designs what is the buyer mindset what are they coming into that with and most of the times they're there to shop based on price meaning lowest price wins so it's gonna be very hard for you to separate yourself out I mean you could do handstands and juggle chainsaws but you're still going to lose out to a lower price person okay so then the other kind of buyer mindset is the person who we've described before it's a price Fisher and they're super indecisive and we need to recognize the mindset of these people quickly so we know we should spend time or we should just get the heck out of Dodge the third type is the know-it-all client like I know more than you like oh I'm also an artist and designer and those people I run away from it's like no you already have all the answers don't you so really you're just looking for hands to execute the type of buyer that you're looking for and you guys go ahead and type it in right now what's the fourth type of buyer that you're looking for go and drop it in the comments on YouTube I'll give you five seconds because I know there's a little bit of delay the of course the value person the one who wants results they don't really care about price and you know these people because they usually shop and buy very expensive things they don't really care what it costs they care more about what how it makes them feel or the results that they get and if you can switch your conversation away from the price definitely run away from that move into the fourth quadrant so that you're talking about results that's when you start to be able to command value-based pricing now based on that math you take it away ask the number one hot hottest question on slide all right now what is it yeah so on slide oh the number one uploaded question is how do you apply value-based pricing when selling only strategy good question good question the answer is the same it's the same for anything how do you value price to anything and I gotta start off by saying value priced and cuts both ways it's not this magic bullet that is going to suddenly make you rich it could be that what you're doing is not worth anything to anyone and you do value pricing your prices are still going to be super whoa because you know the exactly usually is is you teach the Vulcan language to people and no one's like you're not gonna value price that I mean I'm a Trekkie so maybe like it's not you might love it calligraphies another one actually you guys you get big big customers of calligraphy and illustration but in general the average person is not gonna pay 200 bucks an hour for like something calligraphy even though that person will might have spent 20 years 30 years perfecting their art they might be the best in the world I just don't need it I'd doesn't it's not worth anything to me it's worth probably a lot more to you guys you know he's gonna put it on t-shirt and make a ton of money off of it so it's value pricing is not a magic bullet it cuts both ways so whenever you go to value price something the thing that you need to find out and it's not easy and you can't you kind of have to dance around a little bit you need to figure out what the thing that they're talking about what let's call it a project or engagement what is the engagement worth to them that's it and when you figure out what it's worth to them you know it's not good it's never gonna be exact but roughly within an order of magnitude anyway then you can set a price that's less than that so if somebody if somebody comes to me and says hey we really need you for a strategic engagement we're thinking of reinventing our retail experience bricks and mortar retail experience with an augmented reality mobile application immediately I hear that and I'm like giant giant amount of work this is gonna be a huge project that would be very expensive they also hear self diagnosis the patient is diagnosed there own problem or their prescribing their own solution I should say and so I'm gonna do exactly what Chris said before I'm gonna listen to them they're gonna bring it dump all the information about the reason why they think they need an augmented reality application to transform their their bricks and mortar retail experience and then I'm gonna sit back and say r8 this is this is everything you described to me screens giant project this is a seven-figure project probably so I don't want before you spend that money before you take this risk because someone will get fired if this goes wrong right someone's sitting around this table will get fired if this goes wrong so it won't be me right let's back up for a second and can you walk me through why what you're trying to achieve here how are we gonna measure this why would you do it like that you know the whole why question Integra talked about the port and it's going ventually they're going to have to come down there eventually they're gonna have to come up with some kind of measurement or I won't take the job because if you don't have some kind of measurement you've got scope creep so if I have some kind of measurement it could be tangible could be intangible it could be qualitative fine I can measure it Net Promoter Score or focus groups or something I can measure user testing I will be measuring and they know what it is because they're all already measuring it that's why they know they need to do this project or that's why they think they need to do this project but I want to determine that the prescription or the therapy that they're prescribing for themselves is actually going to work they might just have shiny object syndrome and that happens a lot so it could be that they've decided that they need a series of really sexy videos or something it's like okay I'm happy to do that for you just like Chris said happy to do that for you but let's make sure this is gonna be a profitable engagement for both of us not just me so what are you expecting these videos to do how are you gonna know if they if we hit a home run how are we gonna know if this is a huge success what would what would it look like if this blew up in our faces what what are you gonna be looking at so I basically begin with the end in mind how am I going to deliver amazing customer satisfaction here in order to know that I need to know what how they're gonna judge the results of the project because they will whether it's subconscious or conscious they're gonna judge the outcome of the project they might not blame you if it doesn't go well they might think it's their fault but I don't want that either I don't want to be blameless at the end I want to be like I want them to build a statue of me outside the building at the end I want them to be like man that was the best money we ever spent can we give you a testimonial we're gonna recommend you to all our friends can we hire you again you know down the road so all of this is to say that if you go through that conversation and you get to the end and they don't really need the video I don't really need the augmented reality app didn't really need any of that or even if it's a strategy session oh yeah we came to you we wanted you do an innovation workshop but now that we're talking through it I think we actually have a morale problem and I would say all right I think you're right I don't help help we move morale problems but I know someone who does you know it's it's like not magic you can't just like value price everything all this in you're rich so you go in you figure out what it's worth to the people you set a price then that's less than what it's worth to them in its guesswork but you can do you can get good at it and then you give them a proposal for a few options where you can help move that needle for them so the the classic question I would say if they came to me for strategy and they said hey we need to do this strategy engagement like an off-site strategic planning meeting with the entire IT team I'd say all right why why not not do that what's gonna happen if we don't do that and they'll tell me what the bad result is and then I'll say all right what would a good result be and the difference between the bad result and a good result at Delta that's the value so if I think I can do something in that space that's gonna improve things I'll say no all right well here's a $5,000 option here's a you know no $12,000 option here's a $50,000 option here different things we can do different guarantees for each one or different expectations for each one different level of involvement for each one and the you using the three options approach is how I how I sort of mitigate the risk of doing money on the table and also it makes it easy deals but it mitigates the risk of leaving money on the table when I give three pretty divergent price options so long long answering that question but is it's a good question hmm right so if I could summarize that I think what I heard is that you just have to ask enough questions to get them to say it you just have to ask the questions to surface it they have to tell you what it's worth so that you can capture a fraction of that a percentage of that and then that's when you provide the three price options you were the highest option would be your most level of engagement on there and then the cheapest option would be the least amount of engagement that you had actually into it to help them out yeah alright so in case you guys are joining us and I apologize some of you guys are on mobile and you can't switch back and forth between slide oh and YouTube cuts cuts the stream off and I'm gonna put up the screen here so you guys can see it Jonathan can you see my slide off screen or no no no okay I'll switch things okay give me one second guys and I'll switch top for you Matthew what else would we even talk about oh well I feel like Jonathan's been covering a lot of these but let's ask there's a question here from Derek Elliot and he asked do you devalue yourself as a consultant if you are also performing the actual work oh good one oh great question yeah yeah so here's the thing there the short answer is yes kind of yeah so I mean imagine if the if the architect then was like pounding nails right it doesn't make sense right right but you know a surgeon has the skills to go pierced someone's ears but that is gonna you know at a pagoda in the mall but that would be a terrible used to their time and it would totally be the repu to be terrible for the reputation like why is this brain surgeon here piercing kids ears it doesn't make sense right that's dead people have a tendency to start out at the lower what I would call altitude of engagement where they start out in the earlier phases doing support and maintenance you're basically you know you're kind of like the nothing against janitors but you're basically the maintenance person in the building and you're you're helping maintain an existing status quo and and the and the client who hires you to do that is gonna stay that way and it's gonna be really hard for you to move up a level the next level being implementation so the person who builds the building person who's given a plan for a new status quo and creates the new status quo that has been given to them you know the next level down will then maintain it once it's built but the middle level implements it a lot of people operate probably a lot of people in this call operate at one of those two levels or somewhere right on the border you know they're doing support maintance type work and occasionally they're getting new build type stuff or creative creations and stuff but not creative so I know you use creativity in your job but you're still being told what to do so at the highest level you're defining your working with a client to define the new status quo which will then be handed down the chain so anytime you're you've got a foot in both of those areas it does tend to devalue in the clients eyes so when when you take on a new client you always wanted to take them on at the highest possible level that you're confident delivering all of your marketing this is a broad is a very broad because people are in different stages but ideally your marketing would be all about the highest level altitude that you offer and as again I Blair ends and David C Baker they would say they want you want your new clients to come in through that door the highest level door you want them to come in through this strategy door so you are the most highly positioned in their minds you are seen as a peer a partner not a vendor not a pair of hands you're seen as smarts you've seen as expertise you're seen as brains and in a situation like that you're not gonna get micromanaged you're not going to get second-guessed people are going to take your advice it's a it's much more fun way to operate if you have the skills to do it not everyone does you need to grow into those skills you can build them but not everyone has them right now so if you then say okay now that we've made this plan we'll build it for you I know a lot of developers who do this it's not impossible you can do it but I think it's bad I think as a goal you should be looking to slough off any lower to your work so a lot of times I'll I'll meet with someone and they're basically a developer and they build stuff there at that middle level implementation level they still do some support maintenance work I am almost in very rare circumstances will I not say get rid of that support maintance work fire those clients nicely like let them you know transition them to someone else but stop doing that support means work unless you're gonna just do that and you're gonna you're gonna set up your team to just crush it on support and maintenance you're gonna operate it thin margins but at scale fine like so operator or small firm try and get rid of that layer and just operated this middle layer where you're trying while you're trying to get this higher level stuff where you're creating architecture diagrams or drawing up cloud migration plans things that are much more or high level for a while you will still need to also execute them and a lot of times they'll ask you to because they trust you now and you came up with the plan so you understand it right but if you do with it you proud it's luh I feel like that is it's lower profit work frankly yes so over time I found myself being like why am i doing these really risky long-term projects when I could just do this strategy stuff and eventually I just it takes time but eventually I just transitioned into pure strategy stuff and one last thing is if you're operating at the advice level where you're giving strategy and plans and pure design to people and then implement it it's a little bit tough to it's a fine line to walk it's a tightrope between like you know if the advice is you should hire me to build this giant project you know some what should we do you should hire me that's kind of you know it's tough to trust that motivation I tried it once it was mistake but not that I couldn't couldn't have worked it out but the problem is when you're giving people advice on how to spend their money which is a great place to be in mmm-hmm then advising that they spend it with you creates a perceived at least at least perceived conflict of interest so not only does it devalue you but it really it makes it hard for them to trust your advice because you could it's easy to imagine that you're not impartial and having someone who at executive levels of a company having someone who's going to give the straight dope unvarnished truth to them all the time is extremely valuable because they're used to being just yes to death so having someone that's going to tell it to him straight is very valuable and jeopardizing that in any way I always found very scary so I ended up jettisoning jettison jettisoning say that layer of my business with these new you know I would have an advisory retainers with with businesses and I just refused to do any kind of implementation work I just introduced them to people who I trusted right we got started a little bit late Jonathan I want to be respectful of their time and I love the long kind of answers that are just really just deep and thorough but I'm gonna try and ask you now because we want to try and hit as many these questions as possible and extract as much knowledge from you in the time remaining so I'm gonna kill ya I'm gonna cue up Aaron because Aaron wanted asks a question so Aaron you get the next question I'm on slide all right now so guys the number one question right now it comes from Tom how do you price dude we were asked this how do you price strategic engagements when you were not offering implementation should use fixed prices or price based on value to the client you can do either okay [Laughter] that was too short [Applause] two more sentences please yeah great if your price based on value you'll leave less money on the table but you'll have a much harder sales process if you fix price in advance you sell it as a product a service it's $10,000 for strategy engagement much easier to sell nice but you'll leave money on the table yes yes yeah I'm with you I'm with you I'm leaving money on the table shoot all right just just kind of just to make a nod to the international audience that we have we have people from Bulgaria we have people from Ethiopia and believe it or not somebody said I'm from North Korea so here's a question from Kendy he's asking or she as the designer working out of a non-english speaking country it's hard for us to decide if it's better establish ourselves internationally locally that's not even a question but that was the number twos top-rated question Rob sir I understand the quite good oh man you you read Internet I get a lot of I get a lot of international people so okay the core the core problem is that probably what this person is saying is that you know operating in the US or maybe you're you know there's just a different GDP it's a different financial situation regardless of political boundaries what I would say is if you're going to pick a target market it's yeah well on in whatever way that I described before demographic psychographic vertical or whatever if you're gonna pick one you might as well pick the one with the most money that you feel like you and confidently interact with so it's not as easy as just saying I'm a designer in I forgot where you said but you know let's say I'm a designer in Pakistan mm-hm and I want to work with only I'm gonna only work with like fortune 50 CEOs well good luck I mean if you've actually got the confidence to do that great you could probably if you have the confidence to do that and you actually have the skills to back it up you might be able to do that but that's very hard so if you because those people are you know for obvious reasons I suppose so what I would say is target someone target a market that you feel you could operate as a peer and then partner with people at the highest levels of the company that you're selling to and pick the ones that are swimming in the most money because more money someone has the less they value any certain amount so like ten dollars to me in when I was 18 was worth a lot more to me than it is now and you know when people have more money they value it less and what what do they value they value their time they'd much rather they have more more money than time versus more time than money mm-hmm so you want to find people who have more money than time bigger budgets that sort of thing who are not so high up that you feel intimidated by them but are high enough up that they would really like to solve problems by writing checks and you just be the person who solves the problems some of the problems are and I will solve them not tell me what what to do but tell me what the problems are on I will fix them or I'll tell you how to fix them and they're they'll write you checks all day long because we're solving problems for them that's leave them time mm-hmm great I like that I just wanted to add on top of that just to get super tactical for people who are looking for these types of clients with high dollar amounts and they're looking for your services right now just go on the internet and search for any company in your vertical that just got funded so if you're doing vegan products look for somebody who just got funded in that space and then start making content for them if you're in the tech space look at the people who just got incubated or coming out and just have gotten their investment look for people who have this point in their position of their company where now they had just got this huge cash infusion and now they're ready to spend it so now they're at that point where they have more money and time and they're ready to grow so I think that would be a little pro tip for any of you guys who are looking at any vertical no matter what you choose for the niche to look for those types of clients and and develop and grow in that space alright so now I've given Erin plenty of time to prepare Erin now it's a good time for you to ask that question go ahead fire away a question from you like as a freelancer as a former freelancer do you have any questions or know something quick I don't know what are some things that people should be doing when they're in an agency to make sure that if they were to get released they're not unprepared for where are some practical things that can be doing well they have a set job can you hear that listen yeah yeah yeah build an auto that's easy answer build an audience so it's probably an NFL's gonna be get even more tech lights they build an email list the caters for particular nice okay yeah yeah do that great job okay Matthew another question for Jonathan maybe we have time for one or two more and we got to wrap it up no I feel like my brain is swirling with a lot of stuff right now so it's hard to pin it down on anything I feel like we've covered a pretty pretty big gamut I can't okay I don't have anything then I know what I'll ask Jonathan asked himself a question Jonathan what's your best question ask yourself oh wow okay well there was there was something that came up earlier that I didn't loop back to that I'll just get to now which was it's the why conversation and value pricing and and and the example Chris gave where it was like you know hey let me you want me to make these videos but let's talk about strategy type of thing mm-hmm I think was Matt that asked this question and sort of as an aside casually remarked and I know a lot of people think this you it feels like or you might imagine if you've never done it that the goal here is to pivot them into giving you more money or a higher profit engagement it's really not like the the fundamental feeling that I'm experiencing when I'm doing one of these meetings it's not this jousting thing where I'm trying to figure out how to get the most money out of this client it's absolutely not the thing that I'm trying to see is first of all they if they come to me and they say hey we want you to build this augmented reality experience for our retail stores I am gonna treat that like it's my brother or my mom or something and I do not want to take their money it could be a million bucks it could be ten million bucks I don't want to take that money if they're gonna be disappointed at the end and they're what at the end if we don't deliver some kind of results they'll get a fire at those kind of numbers they'll probably get fired right I don't want that I have been there I've seen it happen I've seen people get fired failed software projects I can imagine this thing what happened with a big design rebrand just completely flopping I don't want that I would rather not have the money and I'd rather find another different client or have a different engagement that's less lower risk for everybody so I'm not trying to talk them into a bigger job I'm not up selling them at all I'm trying to make sure there is a good fit for a mutually profitable arrangement and a mutually profitable arrangement is one where both parties profit even though they're giving me the money seems like only I'm making a profit but if I'm delivering value over and above how much they gave me they also made a profit and in a b2b situation they are not writing you checks for fun they're writing checks to make their business better aka make their clients or their customers more happy aka increase their top end increase their top line or their bottom line or something they're trying to make more money somehow and they believe that you can contribute that in some small way perhaps or in some big way I want to figure out what that is make sure that I'm confident that that we have agreed on a plan that is going to be beneficial to both of us then I'll move forward I am never ever trying to upsell somebody into something that they don't need or something like that I'm looking for something that's gonna be a giant win for both of us and when you do that you start to do that regularly marketing takes care of itself hmm this is a big kind of mindset shift for a lot of people because I often hear from creative said it's like all the clients to just have such bad taste they're ruining my art and that's again that's a disservice to create a people who are gonna actually go out and be successful in their lives in their career it's because it's all about you it's all about me me me it's the Marshall Marshall Marshall kind of thing that's going on right hang on fibre all the time you're getting the worst possible clients and you start to think all clients per like that yes they're not they don't believe us so Jonathan what can you say cuz like where I'm from they paid $5.00 for this and you guys are smoking glue you're sniffing yeah I get that all the time it's easy for you you're well-known it's like one get well-known hashtag get well-known done well you know all right excellent I'm typing in the last little bits of my notes here okay Jonathan before I do the summary I want to let people know how to get in touch with you I think with some encouragement now you have a YouTube channel right yes and what is the YouTube channel it's called the Jonathan Stark show hey it's kind of hard to remember Jonathan Stark the Jonathan Stark show you guys check him out he's putting out content and he's got a podcast also I don't know how have you done like 500 episodes yeah all together I mean I got a bunch hourly the business of authority terrifying robot dog yes and he writes very politically so if you guys sign up for his email list I think there's some really valuable information he's sharing with the world you guys so whatever floats your boat if you like to read if you like to listen if you like to watch he's got something for everybody okay you guys it's a time it's time for me to do my summary I could not keep up with you but here we go Johnny you got this summer here we go having laser-like focus you described a magnifying glass that's how you start a fire that leads the marketing fire and once the fire is burning its raging bad analogy for what's going on right now then you can diversify because now you're known hashtag it known right experts become the obvious choice so you want to be the obvious choice right now you're not and when you know your audience there's no such thing as speakers block and if you're worried about specializing becoming spurtin you're getting you're gonna get bored Jonathan said hey look I watched TED speaker they seem to enjoy themselves they're highly focused and they're not bored at all since we didn't totally reference this but we just talked about it the three questions that you asked and I love this why this why now why me try asking those questions you guys in your next conversation with a client see what happens see what you learned think long or midterm versus the short term according to Jonathan if you put in 10 hours a week it's what this is what its gonna take you could possibly build expertise in 18 months so you got to start planting those seeds today all right and when you're invited to give advice to be seen as up here as an equal jump on that opportunity run through that door that's you starting that path towards leveling up and you want to find people who have more money than time because they're more likely to solve problems by writing checks and you want to be the recipient of those checks always be building an audience I wanted it to be ABC but I just couldn't do it always be building an audience better yet an email list that's more powerful right and finding a good fit means creating a situation finding situation that is mutually profitable for you and the client my last little bullet point I should I get well known you guys Jonathan is the author of freelancers roadmap this is not the book cover in it he talks about tips tricks and tools and you guys know it's $299 you guys can download it but I've asked Jonathan I've asked Jonathan to give you guys all very special price check out check out this keynote animation guys yes I just break out all the stops actually he's gonna give it to you guys for $49 so instead of paying $299 everybody that's a future member subscriber you guys can have a $49 I just lied to you guys I just use price anchoring it's probably one of the things he's gonna talk about when you float a really high price the new price seems much more palpable you see that 299 $49 sounds very very reasonable okay so before we say goodbye I just want to thank you guys all for hanging in there we did break 500 people watching the livestream that was awesome to see it must because of me no no person eyes about me it's all about Jonathan so thank you very much thank you sustaining number for supporting us you guys can get more information by jonathan jonathan stark dot-com jonathan stark comm you guys thank you very much Jonathan all right and we even ended on time even though we sir

Channel: The Futur

Views: 31,306

Rating: 4.9728355 out of 5

Keywords: jonathan stark, freelance, freelancer, transform from commodity freelancer, in-demand consultant, advice, career advice, freelancer hell, consultant, value based pricing, roadmap, strategy vs. tactics, transition, go from, buyer mindset, build an audience, chris do, the futur, matthew encina, plan, how to, mercenary, hired gun, freelancer's roadap, the pricing seminar, make more money as a freelancer, get advice

Id: 9xF0kcs9lm4

Length: 74min 28sec (4468 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 30 2018