Ask Rezzz

Being a freelancer for 15 years, I've learned a few tricks.

Knowing how to start the week off on the right foot, starts with planning Monday morning before Monday!

This is critical for me since I feel like if I don’t do my weekly review on Sundays, I’m lost. I feel behind on the week because my review is usually about an hour of time.

In this episode I walk you through my 10 steps to performing a weekly review so that you know your week starts off on the right foot.

Firstly, there’s no moving forward with a proposal if you can’t nail down a scope of work right?

Often times if you are in one of these conversations, you can tell within 10-15 mins of it that you are in one. It’s usually filled with meandering paths to loosely based goals.

The best thing about these conversations is that they do lead to paid discoveries. These are lower risk, high reward engagements for you and your lead.

How you ask and present this is the best way to get these types of freelance engagements.

I’m going to start by saying that this question seems to have a sense of urgency and a result of lack of planning.

That’s not a knock by any means, I’ve been there :). So I definitely am qualified to answer this question.

You may be surprised at some of what I say in this episode, but as a freelancer, there are times when a reality check needs to happen and brutal honesty is needed.

I outline 3 things you can do so that you can get income fast.

In the service based industry, if you delight and make an impression on your leads, clients, and past clients, that will continue to ripple through them and the people they know.

Look, as a freelancer you have the best opportunity to make an impact on someone else, whether that’s them personally or professionally. Why not do it?

That is the stuff that doesn’t scale.

As a freelancer, it's such a luxury to be working from home. However it is so easy to be distracted when you work from home.

As a was having a conversation with another father at my nephew's little league game over the weekend, we traded our best 4 tips to work from home effectively.

The 4 tips are:
1. Discipline
2. Making sure family respects the work place
3. Get out
4. Support

Regardless if you are a developer, designer, marketer, writer, in sales, etc, these 4 tips will help you work from home more effectively.

There’s no easy and quick answer to getting the messaging right. You need to learn what it is and apply that learning over time to really get it right.

The best things that have worked for me are:

1. Conversations
2. Testimonials
3. Support

Get yourself away from the generic headers and think about what your clients are saying and use them. That’s where you’ll find the right messaging to attract the best kinds of clients.

This is a great question, because as a freelancer, you should be mindful of where your time goes.

I don’t schedule the time in specifically, however I do read a ton.

I tend to read articles more at night or early morning after waking up. This often times is the best time for me because it’s quiet, I don’t have to think about anything else and it allows me to wind down or up, depending on the day.

I do read tons of articles, and I do have a process around them, I just don’t schedule the reading time in. I just do it when I feel like it and pick off the articles from the list.

In this episode you'll hear how I process an article to read so that I don't go fumbling around down rabbit holes and more importantly take action on the article.

There are many certifications out there in the market that a freelancer can grab. It can help your business grow, both as social proof, but also in your lead generation and sales.

If you are specializing your business, sometimes you focus in on a particular piece of software that helps your clients’ business. Sometimes you focus on a specific coding language. Sometimes you focus on a platform.

If you are focusing on these things and know them in and out, having a certification in them gives you that badge of honor. It says that the company recognizes you as someone who can work in all the nooks and crannies of that thing.

If it’s something you can justify and get that return go for it. If it’s something that is more of an ego thing, then maybe check yourself on it.

Scope creep worries even the most experienced freelancer. After a heard lesson early on in my career, I don’t look at scope creep as being something that’s a bad thing anymore. It’s more of an opportunity to be honest.

Now don’t get me wrong, scope creep when handled wrong can kill everything about a project. The deadline, profitability, the trust. So it’s so very important that scope creep is handled in the best way possible.

Remember scope creep starts with a simple ask. Usually, it’s the client asking if something can be done.

Don’t immediately jump on it to get it done, but don’t immediately dismiss it either. Take note of it. Write it down some place even. Time to keep track of it.

You will learn the easy 3 step process on how to handle scope creep the best way possible so that you can maintain client trust and successfully complete the project.

It is natural as a freelancer to want to look down the road of another path. Catering to 2 target markets is not easy, especially if they are vastly different.

If you are building a product, course, writing a book, whatever that thing is alongside your services, it's not uncommon to feel overwhelmed.

It’s definitely hard and something that I do struggle with.

The biggest thing to do is remained focus on the tasks at hand.

It’s too easy to get overwhelmed or get off the rails with the shiny objects.

Setting goals and knowing what those incremental steps to achieve those goals help greatly.

A lot of it is planning and being effective in that planning. Implement quickly, fail fast, learn and improve, seems to be the recipe for me.

As a freelancer, there needs to be a balance between your business moving forward and your clients’ businesses.

As a freelancer you should think like a business owner, not an employee. If your business is not moving forward, your clients will ultimately suffer too.

It’s a scary thing because you have all your eggs in one basket so to speak. If that client doesn’t need you anymore, then what?

I think this is a question that most freelancers ask themselves but are hesitant to act on it.

I get it, if it’s the bulk of your income, what can you do right? You don’t want to rock the boat.

In this episode you will learn what the very first step is to get out from that one client being more of your income.

Instead of thinking about automation as this big complex behemoth, think of it as something that connects 2 actions together that makes your life easier.

So when I started freelancing, I would meet people for sales meetings at their office, at a coffee shop, or restaurants.

I wanted to save a few minutes so that I could grab a cup of coffee for everyone at the meeting, so I used automation to connect my Google Calendar to Evernote.

As a freelancer, you are always looking to optimize your tools and work with the best out there. But “What is the best” is such a subjective term.

When looking for tools, it’s easy to get into the features and all the shiny objects thinking that you need it.

Often times you get so into the tools that you don’t actually get work done.

I suggest you work backwards.

What I mean by that is start where you get money.

This episode covers the things to think about from working backwards in your business.

I also share the tools I use in my own business, and why.

If you are involved in a project or client but at a point where you are starting to figure out your niche. Or maybe you are starting to specialize your freelance business even more to refine your services.

It’s always tough to try and figure out how to handle the current clients.

There are several things you can do though and one thing that you have to do.

You have to finish the job. Plain and simple. Whatever you said you would do, you have to deliver on that.

Then based on if they fall into your new specialty, how can you serve them best. Present them a no-brainer offer and have them as your very first client under you new business services.

“Freelancing” itself is a business and reliability of income for any business depends on the health of that business and the processes of getting the income.

If you build a business of your own, which freelancing is, you need to understand all the aspects of the business, at least at a basic level. You should always be learning, marketing, and growing. Evolving your business processes as you grow.

You make your income reliable, by doing all these things in your business.

There are no guarantees of course, but if you’d like to have your income reliable and build yourself a future-proof business where you are the brand, freelancing is the way to go, and it can lead to reliable income.

Want to specialize your freelance business?

This is the 5th episode in the series to niche down and I'll walk you through how to find and land that first client.

There are 6 steps that you need to do in order to find and land that client.

Can you land 1, 2, maybe 5 new clients in this first test of your market? Obviously, it depends on your availability and service. But if you can land one or 2 then you’ve moved in that direction towards your specialty.

It may not seem like a lot, but you need that first step into it. As you learn from these interactions, talks, and projects, you’ll position yourself better for the next round. You’ll start to build a library of case studies related to the specialty. And more importantly remain on track because you have focused your organic sales around a specific market and away from being that generalist.

In freelancing, the best way to research is to talk with people.

You want to jump into some quick and easy questions.
1. How is everything going?
2. What made the decision for you to choose me over someone else?
3. Is there anything that I can be doing better?

As you wrap up the conversation ask them if they know of anyone like themselves that has a similar project and that you would appreciate a quick introduction.

Now if you don’t have any past clients in that quadrant you built out in "How do I choose the niche?" because you are just starting out or you haven’t worked with anyone that you really enjoyed yet, you can still do this.

Take the 3 questions above with you and start up some conversations. To make it less overwhelming, go to the event and have 3 conversations at a minimum where you get these answers.

These conversations will also lead in to you getting work overtime because you are talking about that “one thing” and starting to lay the groundwork for being the expert.

The very first step in specializing your business is to say "no". Once you identified what it is that you don’t want to do, then don’t do it.

It sounds simple, and it really is that simple. Remember you are a freelancer and can do anything you want to shape your business.

The very next lead you get that requires you to do anything in the right 2 quadrants that you defined in the last episode, "How to choose your niche", say “no”.

It’s not about finding and launching yourself into a brand new business direction at once.

It’s the incremental changes that you do in your business, the “testing” in your business, the small steps you take in your business to progress forward, that gets you to your destination.

In this episode, you are going to develop a working niche and specialty so that you can vet it out.

You are you going to define the likes and dislikes of both projects and clients in this episode. By exploring your past and current projects and thinking about certain questions and aspects around them, you will end up with a basis of an industry and a problem you are solving for someone.

This will be what you use as a starting off point for exploring your niche further to see if there's a market for it and most importantly profitable.

You have heard that you need to niche down or specialize your business for a number of factors.

I share with you 4 reasons why you should specialize your business.

Point #4 is something I haven't heard many people but in realty it is THE reason you should start specializing today if you haven't already.

There is this huge sense of overwhelm at times, but it’s important to remember what you need to get done and what you’d like to get done.

So Google and many other companies have adopted an 80/20 rule. I myself like to employ this method too. Which basically says that 80% of the time you work on business stuff, 20% of the time you work on your own stuff.

I use this with regards to 80% client 20% rezzz.

I often ask myself:
1. What sort of impact does this have on my business?
2. Will this make an impact on my business today? next month? next year?
3. Am I already exploring another rabbit hole?

That helps me in figuring out the shiny objects.

The biggest takeaway for you is to understand the want vs need - if you are feeling overwhelmed with all of the things you need to do, take a step back, take a 10-min break, re-focus on what’s important for the next couple of hours and then focus on that.

Sales is hard as a freelancer. Even myself tend to leave it behind until I need it. But that's the wrong way to do it. Freelancing businesses need a healthy pipeline in order to be stable, profitable, and build a successful business.

There isn’t a silver bullet or magic beans when it comes to this. It will take time and effort, but well worth the work when you do it.

I'll share with you the 10 steps I use in order to keep my sales pipeline healthy.

One of the mistakes that I didn’t do early on in my freelance career was to build an email list. Not having a list, or rather not spending some amount of effort into building one with high-quality emails, put me in a bad spot because I didn’t have any way to reach out to folks for referrals, outreach, overflow work, announce new services and solutions, and most importantly have a pipeline of leads.

I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did.

Not every single person on this list will be who you want to sell to. Some of these people on your list are people that you want a network with and want to know about your services.

If you have been freelancing for some time and still don’t have a growing list outside of your clients then you’ll want to do this so that you can get the word out about you and your services.

Trust me, you may think that folks know what you do, even folks that you talk with regularly. Well, they don’t!

Here are the 5 steps...

Your client hired you as an expert, they expect that you’ll know what to do and if you don’t that you’ll figure out a way through the crisis.

You and your clients are in business together, work together and I promise you, in the end, it’ll all work out for the best in the end.

Some things to think about when you are presented with such a crisis:
- Put together a timeline of events
- Back any evidence up with data, leave any opinions at the door - it’s so easy to be angry and let emotions get the best of you, but in the end that does no one good
- If you don’t have evidence, get some
- Put together some recommendations past the event
- If this is affecting business today, figure out steps needed to address it until there’s a remedy
- Ask your client for their thoughts and suggestions
- Keep open communication, even make yourself available in ways that you never have
- After careful thought and consideration of options, put together a game plan to implement and stick to it

Managing client expectations is one of the most important pieces of your freelance business.

For one, most of the time you are working remotely and not seeing the person on an every day basis. So trust and reliability can wane very quickly.

During the sales process, you as the professional are earning the trust of the client with your experience and knowledge around the services the prospective client is looking for.

This is when that trust is being earned. During this time is when you should be talking about the aspects of your services that you will do. Equally as important though is outlining those aspects of your services that you will not do.

I’ve seen people, and I too, have gotten into trouble where there wasn’t a clear definition of services.

There isn’t anything wrong with explicitly telling a lead what you won’t do. Look, most won’t know that SEO and development of their website are 2 entirely different aspects of the live site. They just see it as work on the website.

Having no portfolio really shouldn't stop you from getting clients. It's more of an opportunity for you to scale back a little bit, solve a problem, and get quick wins for you and your clients.

By showing what you can do and deliver on what you say you will earns trust and that above anything will get you more clients.

In order for you to continue to do business and have a successful freelance business, or even side hustle for that matter, you'll need to raise rates.

It's easier to give your new rate to incoming leads and projects, but often times the hurdle is with current clients.

If you are looking to raise rates with your freelance clients, I share with you my 3-step process to do this in this episode.

If you want to be profitable, sustainable, and have successful business, you will have to raise rates.

Let’s assume 3 things:
- You’ve defined a service offering
- You have an ideal client
- You’ve vetted out the lead to a point at which you are at a tipping point of moving forward

But the sticking point is recurring vs one-off work.

There are 3 steps to help you sell someone your recurring service.
1. Re-establish the trust factor
2. Compare the benefits of recurring vs one-off
3. Show them how it gets them to the end quicker

As a freelancer or consultant, it's hard to set aside time to try new social platforms. So Joe reached out and asked me "How do I determine what social platforms to spend time on?" He followed up with "How do you know you'll get something from it?"

The short answer to that followup is that you don’t. The long answer is that you need to be aware of why you are on the social platform in the first place and if your audience is there as well.

A few different criteria to pick which platform to try
1. Does my current audience exist there? Will my current audience exist there?
2. Why am I expanding here? What’s the purpose of me being here?
3. Know how I’m going to measure success
4. Give it 3-6 months, but abandon quickly, because as you mentioned, it can spread yourself thin and can be a huge time.

If you are wondering if you should focus on social media for your marketing and sales, I share my answer with you.

Forbes says that it is 50% less effective than in 2015. Of course, it is! But you don't have to be.

If you are looking to build recurring revenue in your freelance business or your side hustle, you don't just need to show that the value you bring, but also have customers and clients recognize that value.

It's not too difficult to do, but you should address it as early on as possible.

The struggle is real no matter how long you have been a freelancer. I think at some point in every work-from-home person's life they are faced with this, especially if they have kids. I answer this question and give my 6 tips and tactics to make sure that I stay on point, that I am able to get stuff done, and that I'm ultimately able to be home with my wife and son.

Creating a lasting memory with clients can be the way to creating a long-lasting client. We tend to beat ourselves up over the smallest of mistakes and quickly gloss over the biggest of wins.

Celebrating a milestone, whether that's a launch of a site, creating a new logo, even moving something like a new feature to staging for testing, gives you and the client an opportunity to connect in a unique way to celebrate the hard work.

By adding in some personality into a win, you can really put your stamp on the memory of a client.

In this episode I share 5 ways to add your stamp to the next milestone in your project.

This is always a question when you start to build recurring revenue. It's something that is scary because you don't want to turn down work. In this episode I share 5 pieces of advice to pivot your business.

A question from Justin Jackson of MegaMaker is a great one and one that I think alot of freelancers wonder about. I go pretty in-depth in my answer this time and highlight some priorites and opportunities.

As a freelancer and consultant profits should always be front of mind. Profits will go right out the window if you are dealing with a lot of tire kickers. You want a lead or prospect to be as close to the buying decision as possible. Make sure that they've properly thought their project. If you still can't get them to say what the budget is, then it's as easy as telling them why you need it.

In freelancing or providing services you'll run into problem clients. Being able to spot them before they become a client will keep your profits and sanity intact.

If you are working a full time job and thinking about quitting to become a full time freelancer, this is a question that has to be running through your mind. Freelancing is a HUGE risk, there's no doubt.

If you are a freelancer and have any questions about building your business let's chat!