Whether you choose to build an agency or be a solo entrepreneur, you will need clients, and if you want to grow, you will need to figure out systems to find and close big clients. Jason Swenk has mastered the process of finding clients, working with them to develop a proposal and win the project. He did this as an agency owner himself for 12 years, working with big clients like Porsche, AT&T, and Home Depot. After he sold his agency, he has been consulting and helping digital agency owners figure out their strategies to build and scale their agencies.
Jason shares the secrets on how to specialize, find brands, reach out to targeted companies, turn research into proposals, and close the deal. Jason learned all these secrets by having to figure it out on the go while scaling his agency, and shares them so you don't have to make the same mistakes and go through the same stresses.
In productized consulting, you package up your services and offer the same set of services to all your clients. So rather than customizing every project for a client, you instead offer a set menu of services with standard pricing for each service. Of course, each project will be different since each client is different, but the processes and the systems are the same. This approach allows you to scale quickly and find security in monthly payments, avoiding the feast and famine cycle.
Matthew Newton, founder of Tourism Tiger, has built a great example of a productized consulting business. Mat knew from the start that he wanted to scale his business, so he set it up with scaling in mind. He tells us why he chose productized consulting rather than building an agency, how he chose a niche, how he markets his business and finds clients, and how he is growing the business.
A frequent and common mistake that freelancers tend to make when approaching a project is to price out a project based on the specifications that the client gave them. This approach places you as a commodity, yet another skilled professional offering some commodity technical skill at some price. This approach doesn't necessarily address what the client really needs, after all, the client isn't a technical expert, that's your job. Your expertise is finding a way to solve the client's problem.
Ben Seigel will share the process of how you can assess a client's needs and even get paid to do it. Ben is the author of Website Planning for Small Business and owner of Versa Studio, a web design agency.
Getting paid and seeing that bank account go up is a very rewarding part of freelancing. But are your finances on track? Are you leaving time for both billable and non-billable work such as marketing, bookkeeping, billing, and so on? Do you know if you are going to be financial solvent three months down the road?
In today's episode, Ryan Battles, expert on freelancer finances and co-founder of Harpoon, shares how freelancers keep their finances on track, the big financial mistakes to avoid, which billing methods work best for freelancers, and where money fits into life.
The vast majority of guests on Freelance Transformation either work remotely or have their own offices as agency owners. In this episode, we explore a different way to freelance and speak with Prescott Perez-Fox who has worked primarily on-site, that is, actually inside the client's building.
Prescott Perez-Fox started his freelancing career a bit differently than the typical path by working with a recruitment agency to find on-site freelance gigs at agencies and corporations that needed a designer for a few weeks at a time. As a result, Prescott had the opportunity to work on projects for some major brands and earn a diverse range of experience.
In this episode of Freelance Transformation, Prescott shares what it's been like working in these different environments and the lessons he's taken from each company's culture and workflow. We also explore the recruiter-based model of finding clients, the good, the bad, and when it might make sense to work with a recruiter.