How do you connect with influencers in your industry and build a freelance business off of referrals that you receive from them, even when you’re just starting out? In this episode of the Freelance Transformation podcast, Sean Smith explains how you can connect with influencers in your industry and amplify your freelance business.
Sean Smith is the co-founder of Simple Tiger, a small remote agency that specializes in search engine optimization. Sean started this agency – and the rest of his freelance endeavors – from the ground up. Through reaching out and networking with the people in his industry, Sean was able to create an entire client listen organically. Sean explains how you can connect with influencers in your industry and amplify your freelance business.
Being a freelancer and running your own business sounds pretty glamorous. There’s no boss, no schedule, and you have the freedom to do things the way you like to do them. But with no manager breathing down your neck, you don’t always have the motivation to get things done. Reality starts to sink in, and you suddenly realize that you’re responsible for the things you don’t really want to do. If you’re a freelancer who finds it hard to stay motivated and finish all those tasks you don’t really want to, tune in now! Today’s episode of Freelance Transformation is all about getting things done even when we don’t feel like it.
Chris Cooper is a motivational speaker, mentor, and author. His book, The Power to Get Things Done, really speaks to freelancers like us. It breaks down ways to help prioritize our business goals and form consistent strategies to bring in new clients. If you’re running your own business or creating a freelance brand, your ultimate goal is to grow your business, right? You can only do that if you bring in new clients, and that’s exactly what Chris is talking about today.
One of the biggest mysteries of running your own business is bookkeeping. What does correct bookkeeping even look like? There’s a massive learning curve that comes with bookkeeping, and many freelancers have to tackle it on their own when they start their business. If your books just aren’t as great as they could be, this episode of Freelance Transformation is for you!
Donna Zanger, owner and founder of Dbooks Bookkeeping, is a certified public accountant in Manhattan. She and her team of 20 CPAs help many business owners like yourself manage their books. She teaches business owners and freelancers how to do their own bookkeeping and keep track of their monthly invoices and expenses. Donna de-mystifies bookkeeping and shares how you can overcome the common mistakes freelancers make so that you can finally stay on track financially.
It can be difficult to look at someone who has achieved success in something like building out a consistent way to attract clients, and to picture yourself ever being able to achieve that same level of success. It can feel like they got to where they are overnight, as if by magic. But obviously that’s not true. Behind all of these success stories are journeys with unexpected twists and turns of months and much more frequently years of consistent hard work to figure it all out.
Josh Doody has an awesome niche: he is a salary negotiation coach. As the title implies, he helps his clients to negotiate a higher salary, helping them to be earn thousands of dollars more per year. Not a bad problem to solve. But Josh didn’t start out as an expert on salary negotiation. In fact, he originally worked as an electrical engineer, and the path he took from that career to salary negotiation was definitely not a straight or obvious one. Josh shares how this transition happened, the twists and turns along the way, and steps that he took to build his business, one small piece at a time.
Charlie Hoehn, author, speaker, and head of author marketing at Book in a Box, is the real deal when it comes to marketing expertise and achieving outsized results. He has worked for and advised great minds like Ramit Sethi, Tim Ferris, Seth Godin, and Gary Vaynerchuck.
But behind the successes is a story of paralyzing anxiety. Charlie experienced terrifying panic attacks that made him think that he was going to die. One particular attack led Charlie to begin a long and difficult mission to cure himself of his anxiety, and ultimately to write the book Play It Away: A Workaholic’s Cure for Anxiety. Charlie shares that story and more importantly what worked for him for ultimately getting rid of his anxiety, getting his life back on track, and what he recommends for others in the same boat.
Disclaimer: Hopefully, you find this episode helpful for bringing this important topic into the open, but it is not intended as medical advice. Everyone’s situation is different and you should consult your doctor before acting on anything in this episode.
Going out on your own, finding your own clients, not being tied to an employer, that’s what this podcast is all about. There are multiple ways to accomplish this and structure your own consulting or freelance business, just like there are multiple reasons that people do so in the first place.
One of those ways is working, usually full-time, on a longer project at a giant company and, of course, at consulting rates. It can be the perfect opportunity to have tremendous freedom while not needing to find clients as frequently.
Jonathan Dison, founder of Lightrock Consulting and Bench Watch, started his career working for Arthur Anderson, built his own consulting firm, and now helps people find and get matched with consulting positions at major corporations. Jonathan shares how you can break into the consulting market and start getting paid more to work on longer-term projects.
https://freelancetransformation.com/episode125
When most people think of sales, they think about walking into a potential client's office, or calling them up on the phone, and pitching them to convince them that their services are the best. The thought us unpleasant and has prevented many talented freelancers from getting great clients.
But the good news is that winning clients does not have to look like that. In fact, approached properly, it doesn't really have to feel like selling. It's more of a diagnostic approach, like going to a doctor to find out the cause of your symptoms.
Blair Enns, founder of Win Without Pitching, a sales training company for creative entrepreneurs, and author of A Win Without Pitching Manifesto, shares the philosophies behind the idea of winning without pitching and how to actually approach closing deals without feeling like your a sleesy salesperson.
It’s no secret that there are a lot of very effective ways to find clients, but it can create the temptation to immediately try to jump into the fanciest and most complicated approaches, and to ignore the simple time-tested methods that will get you clients the quickest.
Take networking and referrals for example. I don’t know of a faster way to find clients than using your existing network and going out and building that network, such as by attending events.
Paige Wilhide used networking and referrals to build her business, Paige Media, a wonderful video strategy and editing business. Paige shares how she systematically used networking to build this business and, of course, how you can use those same strategies to find clients for yourself.
If you’re a solo freelancer, it’s so easy to think that hiring an assistant is just plain out of reach and expensive. But that’s just not true. Hiring an assistant is one of the biggest wins that you can create for yourself. When an assistant does the low value work of billing, invoicing, emails, scheduling, etc., then your time is freed up to do the high value client work or getting new business or levelling up your skills. But it is important to find the right person, the kind of person that will take work off your plate instead of creating more of it.
Tim Francis of Profit Factory and GreatAssistant.com has spent a lot of time working with entrepreneurs to match them to great assistant. Tim shares what makes a great assistant and his process for finding that one amazing one.
Content marketing is an excellent strategy for reaching clients at scale. But inevitably there’s a hiccup that holds people back. To execute a content marketing strategy, well, you need content.
Austin Church is the founder of Wunderbar, an agency that helps consultants and tech companies to grow their businesses through content marketing. Austin shares how you can actually create content sustainably, and do so without it being an endless time suck. If you’re currently using content marketing, or considering doing so, this conversation can help make it much more feasible.
Adrienne Richardson manages Facebook ads. So how much is managing someone’s Facebook ads worth? Is it the $100/month that you’ll find on some offshore job boards? Is it $1,000/month? What about $5,000 a month plus 10% of the Facebook ad spend? That’s what Adrienne’s clients pay, and she is frequently booked solid. She’s also not a massive agency, as you’ll learn, her business is mostly her.
In this interview Adrienne spills the secrets of why she is able to command these fees, and work with amazing clients, despite plenty of other people fighting to charge the lowest fees possible. Pay close attention to why her clients are actually hiring her. And pay attention to how she finds her clients, and I’ll give you a hint, it’s not super sophisticated, but it’s incredibly powerful.
Andy Crestodina is the co-founder of Orbit Media Studios, a Chicago website development agency that gets tonnes of local leads and excels at standing out to clients. How? He implemented a content marketing strategy from the very start, and one that didn’t rely on having a massive audience or huge success right out of the gate.
Andy is also the author of Content Chemistry, a beautiful and comprehensive book on content marketing that doubles as his business card when he goes to meet clients. Andy shares how his agency used education to teach his way into landing client work.
Often as a freelancer it’s tempting to just work with whatever clients come our way, instead of figuring out who is really an ideal client and what you have to do to get in front of them. But being intentional about finding and winning the right clients can make a massive difference in the kind of freelancing business or agency that you end up building.
Brent Weaver, of Ugurus, shares how he built and ran a web agency for 13 years until selling it. Now he helps other agency owners to build their business with Ugurus. Brent shares his experiences of identifying who high value client are, how to intentionally connect with those client, and the intentionally length process that he goes through when he believes that a client is a great fit.
If you are looking to build up a client base at serious scale, and have leads consistently coming in from your efforts, then content marketing is one of the most effective approaches out there.
Johnathan Dane, of Klient Boost, is an expert content marketer. He built up a $3 million dollar a year pay per click management agency with $350,000 in monthly recurring revenue by relentlessly building a brand through their unique content marketing. Such as animated infographics, or gifographics. Jonathan shares how he used content marketing from the get go to rapidly build up a client base, and how he’s continuing to build the agency. Oh and he’s got a pretty crazy story of how he first got into business.
Jason Resnick is a solo freelancer that has built his freelancing business very intentionally so that it works in the way that he wants to work. Jason is particular with the clients that he takes on, how he works with them, the highly automated processes that he uses to keep things running smoothly, and the approaches he takes to keep working with the clients.
Jason shares how he built his freelance business, including why he failed the first time he started out, and the specific realizations and changes he made to create a sustainable freelancing business when he gave it a second shot years later.
Jessica Freeman quit her full-time job at an agency, started freelancing, and booked herself up with clients. In fact, she now has a waitlist.
Jessica, of Jess Creatives, built up her client base primarily through content marketing. Specifically, she built a blog, email list, and surprisingly enough, leveraged Pinterest as a major source of traffic and clients. It turns out that Pinterest is a very different social media platform that encourages content sharing, making it an excellent tool for getting your content out there.
Jessica shares how she quit her job and decided to go full-time, how and why blogging has been so effective at keeping her booked solid, and how she’s been able to build up an audience of prospective clients through Pinterest.
Have you ever spent a crazy amount of time writing a proposal for a prospective client, only to have them say no? Or even worst, go completely dark on you and not respond at all?
Curtis McHale shares his sales process and the approach that he takes to write super short and sweet proposals, only a page and a half long. And even better, he collaborates with the clients on these proposals, so that by the time the client receives the proposal, they have had a significant part in its creation and are completely on board with moving forward.
The story begins with Pia Silva and her husband opening their own graphic design agency, complete with employees and office space, and selling massive $30,000 projects to their clients. Then finding themselves going out of business with $40,000 in credit card debt and no savings after a year and a half.
But rather than giving up, they took a deep look at what was and wasn’t working in their business, scaled down the business and what they offered, and started again. Within the first year, they had half a million in sales and had completely turned things around into a successful business, Worstofall Design, where she and her husband, Steve, create Badass Brands for their clients over an intensive 1-3 days.
It’s a brilliantly simple business, which is why it works so well. Pia shares how her business model works, why it is so successful, how she finds clients, and so much more.
A few years into building websites for people, in the very beginnings of my little agency, I picked up a book with a pretty bold title: Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss. Picking up that book was one of the biggest game changers of my entire consulting career.
Alan Weiss wrote about how to create value for clients, how the amount of time that you spent on a project should have nothing to do with the fee that you charge, how the very idea of trying to sell your time for money was unfair to the client and to you. I wish I could say that this was an overnight change for me, but it took time for those lessons to sink in and to make the mindset shifts needed to realize that it really is all about finding ways to create value.
Now, I’m very pleased to welcome Alan Weiss, best selling author, and million dollar consultant, on to Freelance Transformation. Here, Alan shares his personal journey through consulting and coaching, how to market yourself as a consultant, what makes a consultant, the psychological challenges of being a consultant and selling, and common mistakes made by beginner and not-so-beginner consultants.
Kevin Gibbons is the founder of the UK branch of Blue Glass, a content marketing agency based in London. Coming off the successes of his first agency, Kevin deliberately decided to challenge himself with something new, building a second agency, Blue Glass, from scratch.
The many mistakes and learned many lessons along the way of building both agencies has allowing Kevin to create an agency that he, his team, and his clients love. Kevin shares his strategy for managing client relationships (spoiler alert, it involves coffee, football, and pubs), winning clients through his personal network and referrals, and how to grow by making the top priority to do great work for your existing clients.
Getting started in freelancing might be a deliberate step or it might happen serendipitously. But how can you make sure that your freelancing business is successful? Eric Covino, founder of Creative Signals, shares his story about building an agency from freelancing.
He started freelancing after he volunteered to make a website for his sensei. Over 8 years, he grew this side interest into an agency, through chance, deliberately seeking out knowledge, learning from mistakes, and actively deciding what he wants his business and his personal life to look like. Eric shares how he got started with freelancing, how freelancing became his full-time job, his decision to build an agency, and how he’s done it in a financially sustainable and stable way.
Alma Abreu, from 360 Agile Pro, is a project management pro and specializes in showing small business owners, start-up founders, and entrepreneurs how to manage a virtual team and how to do project management for service based businesses. She also owns a content marketing business where she applies all of the best project management strategies, allowing her to take a step back from the day to day business management.
Alma shares her story of stumbling onto her perfect niche, trying to do it all herself, getting overwhelmed, and then hiring freelancer writers and editors to complete the content work. Alma went beyond just removing herself from writing content to creating processes to manage her virtual team and training a virtual assistant to do the project management, allowing her to pursue the lifestyle she wants.
Zvi Band built a successful software consultancy directly from building and maintaining relationships with people. By networking and maintaining relationships, he was able to build software for agencies, startups, venture capital firms, and even fortune 500 companies like Ford.
Zvi Band is also the cofounder of Contactually, an amazing piece of software that makes it easy to track and maintain the relationships in your network. Zvi shares how to connect with people, and how to maintain and manage relationships in a way that leads to clients.
One of the hardest things about owning an agency, or being a solo operator, is that a lot of us get into it without necessarily being an expert on how to run this type of service business. We tend to have nothing to benchmark ourselves against, because we don’t really know how other agencies are doing, and if we’re on the right track.
Drew McLellan is the head of the Agency Management Institute, an organization devoted specifically to bringing agency owners together to help them build better agencies. Through research, AMI has figured out the formula to a successful agency: What are the key financial benchmarks? What is the role of the agency owner?
In FT episode 101, Chris Evans, from Traffic and Funnels, laid out a strategy for using paid traffic to get clients for high-ticket services (a service that is at least $10,000). Chris's business partner, Taylor Welch, shares how to convert the prospects coming from the paid traffic funnels and other sales funnels into paying clients.
Taylor shares the three steps to his sales process, how to attract the right prospects who can benefit from your services, how to prompt prospects into recognizing that they have a problem that you can solve, how to close a sale through honesty and recognizing whether a prospect is a good fit, and how to set expectations so you have happy clients.