A Freelancer Helping Freelancers, Episode 135

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Howdy everybody! Welcome back to officehours.fm. Today I am pleased to have Jason Resnick on the show. He is a fellow developer and freelance/helper enthusiast. Jason? How are you doing?

Jason: Good. Thanks for having me on.

Carrie: I don’t know if freelance/helper enthusiast came out a little bit weird. For those of you who have that not been following Jason online, he puts out a lot of content specifically aimed at helping freelancers. We are similar in that regard. He has done years and years of work as a freelancer himself. Jason? Why don’t you tell us officially a little bit about who you are what you do?

Jason: Sure. So you kind of dated me a little bit there, going years and years. I help establish eCommerce businesses mainly built on WordPress. I help increase their sales through online optimization, conversion strategy, and implementation. Basically, so they can spend time on their business rather than figuring out things on the web. I also do help freelancers as you mentioned trying to help them build a sustainable business. As you said, I’ve been doing this for a long time, probably the better part of 15 years part-time and full-time. You know I’ve kind of been down the road and I enjoy helping those wanting to do freelance so that they cannot live the kind of life they want.

Carrie: So your primary gig (you day gig) is services to your clients. When did you start figuring out that oh my gosh! I have this passion for sharing my own freelancing experience and helping others.

Jason: I don’t know when it actually happened. I always kind of liked casual hallway talks, events, conferences, meetups and that kind of stuff. I guess a couple years ago I was like ok. You know what? I was trying to write blog articles and things tailored to my clients but not getting so much the traffic. I was kind of getting the traffic of my colleagues. In answering those kinds of questions they came around the freelance gig kind of thing. For me, it was a natural progression to say hey! Maybe I have something here. I’ve built an established business. I live in New York City so it’s not exactly cheap. I’ve been down the road of feast or famine more times than I care to think. It’s just been something that I’ve been able to do. If I can do it, so can someone else. There’s nothing here that’s rocket science so to speak but it does take effort. It does take a lot of work. When I started freelancing I would’ve loved to be able to have some of the resources like yourself and some of the other ones out there that could kind of help pave that way. That’s kind of why jumped into it.

Carrie: I like that. Back in our day, Jason, there was no Internet (I mean there was the Internet) but not with the vast quantities of information that is available now. It was not available when you and I were starting out so there was definitely learning the hard way.

Freelancing “back in the day”

Jason: Yeah. I was going to say I started full-time freelancing back in 2003. The only reason why did it was because I was laid off from the consulting firm that went under because they put all their eggs in the startup baskets then. I was like hey! I’m doing freelancing on the side. I can run a business. I have a skill people want. Maybe I can do this. But I was sorely mistaken. I found myself inside of two years back working full time so there was a lot of lessons to be learned there. Having that conversation with other freelancers where hey! You’re not in this alone. There’s other people that have gone down the road. Maybe you can learn from them.

Carrie: I do want to dig into some of your tips for freelancing because that is a lot of who tunes into the office hours podcast. Before we go down that road, I would like to explore this idea where you’ve been providing services for a long time and then you came to determine that you could provide this content for freelancers. For the moment, let’s say it doesn’t matter. You’ve got X as your full-time money making gig. Then you decide hey there’s Y. I can do Y.  I enjoy Y and then you got to the point where now you’ve actually been able to monetize that (I want to talk to you specifically about what you have going on there in just a second). I pulled out that idea because I think that is a common journey. People who have been doing this a long time find this sort of secondary aspect of their business. It’s a way to roll out something that’s different from their primary business. When you started writing articles and such for freelancers. Were you like Oh my gosh! I think I can monetize this.

Jason: Yeah. At first, I think it was more of sharing the knowledge, you know? I’m an open source kind a guy. I didn’t start out doing WordPress. I started out in the lamp stack.  I was doing (before the lamp stack) I was doing java development and rails development and that kind of stuff. For me, it was like hey! I have this information that other people might find useful. As I started kind of putting things together and seeing like there is something else here where maybe I can turn this into something that’s more formal for people and help them in a more formal way. That’s when I had this idea for Feast, which is my online course and coaching platform. There were many iterations before that where I had kind of thought about…like throwing the spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks. This version of that stuck. It was the freelancers that had been doing freelancing for a little bit and were now like hey! What did I get myself into? I don’t know why I feel like I’m always chasing down the next project or I’m stuck. I hear about people doing recurring revenue. How did they do that? I have kind of gone down that road. I was like ok. I can relate to them. If I formalize this in some sort of way that can help people live their dreams and live the way that they want to live… because we all started freelancing not because we wanted to work more, right? There was some other reason, you know? For me, that was a win-win.

Carrie: So you mentioned Feast. That is the formal version of what you’re talking about? With your offering, can you share a little bit about what that involves?

Jason: Sure. It’s a six-week online course and coaching platform. It’s not just a course where you get a video module every week. You basically get on the line with me every single week and I try to help you get unstuck with whatever’s going on in the module itself, with the homework, with the lessons, the worksheets or anything that’s involved in there. Or where you ask how do I apply this to my business? I think that’s where a lot of courses lack, you know? You get this fantastic value and then you’re like ok. This is awesome and sounds great but how do I actually put this into my business? How do I take that time? How does it fit? Feast itself is just that. I kind of help you over the six weeks to implement these things. These are all things that I’ve done myself. A lot of it is templates, processes and systems that I use on a daily basis. So you’re kind of getting what I’ve used to build the foundation of my business.

Carrie: Cool! For everybody tuning in, I will have links in the show notes over at officehours.fm so you can check out some of the stuff in more detail.  Jason? I’m going to do a little advertisement for you here. I don’t like a ton of work. Just like Jason said, you don’t get into freelancing to work more. I don’t sign up for email lists because I want more emails in my inbox. I try to get rid of emails in my inbox. Jason’s is a list definitely worth signing up for. I put a little plug in there. He’s got some great content.

Jason: Thanks!

Carrie: So with monetizing and recurring revenue…everybody wants that, right? Who doesn’t want this passive revenue coming in? I think the mindset is a way (I say that because that’s been my own mind set at times) like okay what am I going to do to get recurring revenue? Am I going to offer some maintenance services or maybe I’m going to write and sell a book. Those things seem forced if it’s not something that you’re excited about. Do you have advice for someone who is looking to create something that brings in that recurring revenue that’s just sort of a natural with looking inside themselves and saying I already enjoying doing this. Let me see how I can formalize it and make some money off of it.

Turning passion into a revenue stream

Jason: You have to really (like you said) enjoy what you’re doing. The way that I came about it (you know it doesn’t always work this way for everybody else) but it’s kind of how I approached looking at it. Look at what you do on a daily basis. If you have a number of clients…you don’t have to have 100. You can have 3, right? Is there something that you’re doing for all three of those clients that you think is solving a big pain point of theirs? Is that pain point chronic? It comes up again. So this could be a thing like (if you’re a content writer you have to write content for landing pages, blog posts and what not). For myself it’s eCommerce. So they’re always running sales and they are always adding things into their online store. With their business lives, they need to fit their business into the website. They want to try things. There’s a lot of like cart abandonment and stuff like that. These things take time to analyze and properly implement so that they’re humming along. For me, I always liked eCommerce, even way back when I first started development. That for me was cool because I felt like I was literally making a difference to that business’s bottom line. I was able to do things online that could or could not result in a sale, right? I was hoping that it would always result in a sale. So for me I was like ok. I’m building online eCommerce stores. This is great. Then I would just hand them off. Then I’d go back six months later and it’s a disaster. I just was like hey! Maybe I could figure out a way where instead of let’s say (I’m just kind of spit balling numbers here) instead of charging them $15,000 to build them an eCommerce website, maybe I could span that out over few months and get a smaller amount monthly but also be able to do the things that the business owner doesn’t necessarily see as a recurring kind of thing. I constantly provide value in that and show them that hey look! This is the some of the stuff that you didn’t think about that you need to think about moving forward. I can do it for you for this price.

Carrie: Do you have some examples of that off the top of your mind?

Opportunities to upsell clients (while offering great value)

Jason: A lot of it is marketing, email marketing, and behavioral marketing which is where somebody buys a product and then checks out another product. You kind of upsell and cross-sell (that kind of stuff). Maybe you do some on-site tweaks around what your purchase history is and that kind of stuff. Outside of what I do, it could be something like designers right? A designer could do something where you know hey! You’re always producing social media images instead of creating some template (which I am at fault with this because I do have a template for social media. They don’t look as good as when a designer does it. It’s things like that. You kind of have to look at a pain point that your clients have. I would say that it falls into one of three buckets. It’s going to fall into earning them money, saving them some time or earning money faster. So if you can really dig deep into the problems that you are solving for your clients into one of those three things and identify that with the client then that’s when you build the recurring service.

Carrie: That sounds silly (actually talking to clients and understanding them) even if it’s not inside the context of an existing project. Figuring out who that target audience is and what exactly it is that is bugging them.

Jason: I did it in a way with all my clients (I always do what I call quarterly temperature calls). It’s just a 15-minute conversation outside of the context of anything that we’re working on. I want to ask them four questions really. How are you doing? How is the business going? Is there anything I can do to help you and your business? Is there anything I could be doing better? In the context of that conversation, I kind of ask them in that order because with the last one nobody wants to offend anybody. If you get them starting to talk about themselves and get them in the rhythm of the conversation that question will flow, right? I want to know what I can be doing better, too. Then they are going to love me even more if I fix it. So being able to just kind of touch base with them on a regular basis, you start hearing these recurring things. You’re offering a service and these clients know how they work with you. If you can provide a better service by basically solving their problems, because that’s what we do as freelancers, then you’re going to be able to figure out that the recurring side of things. Things will become more evident.

Carrie: Fantastic! Jason? We’re talking about conversing with your client, finding out what’s going on and where it is that they could use some help. Before you can even get to that you’ve got to know who your client even is or who your ideal customer is. One thing you do really well…look at you practicing what you preach…over on your website, you’ve got three distinct buckets. So you can either be subbed out by an agency, you can work with a designer who needs a developer, or you can work with that site owner who needs some help maybe on a one-off basis. In 2003 did you say these are the three types of people I want to work with?

Jason: No. Absolutely not.

Carrie: So walk me through how you refined who that ideal client is over time.

Jason: Yeah. In 2003 it probably would’ve been like hey! Do you need a website? That would’ve been the call to action. It evolved. It wasn’t an overnight thing. It evolved in the way like you were saying before. Hey, there is recurring revenue! I want to be able to do this. It started out first with me being a WordPress developer and providing development services one off to build sites with features and add-ons into sites. Then I was like hey! I can do maintenance. That’s a thing you know? This was years ago. So it was like I can update websites and charge them $50 a month for that. When I did that I noticed how my revenue went up but my actual support hours went down. So I started being able to see the effect on the business just by doing that kind of small tweak to say hey! I can provide you WordPress maintenance. You don’t have to worry about this. Then I started niching down to only taking on WordPress maintenance for eCommerce businesses. Then I’d niche down from there to say basically the only development I’m doing is on eCommerce websites. That allowed me to really start answering the questions of whom I work with. Those people that were seeking me out were able to say hey! I know that this guy does this stuff. A lot of it came through WooCommerce subscriptions (that plugin). For a while, that’s how referrals came to me. The subscription says you’re the guy to talk to. So I was like ok sure. Or somebody referred me and they were like you’re the WooCommerce guy. It was kind of like that thing where I just saw the opportunity to say once I am able to let go of myself and that apprehension to say if I don’t niche down I am going to lose out of work. Now looking back at that, that’s kind of reverse thinking. I don’t even really know the term. It’s almost idiotic really. I think about it and I’m like you don’t lose work. You actually gain more work because you’ve niched down and have been able to solve and provide a specific service to a specific person. That for me was a game changer. Once I did it the one time, I realized that there is something to this. So I kept on going until I got to the point where you know hey! This is who I serve and what I can do for them.

Carrie: Provide a specific product to a specific person. That’s awesome! Do you have any advice if someone is struggling to figure out exactly either who that person is or what that product or service should be?

Taking time away from work to work on your business

Jason: Yeah. As rah rah and rudimentary as this sounds, is just take some time away from work. Sit down and have a cup of tea or a beer (whatever it might be). Just kind of take stock in the type of people that you like to work with, the type of projects that you like to work on and see if there’s something there that kind of falls through, right? The reason I say that is because I did that for about three months. I still have the notebook with all my notes and stuff like that. It came out with traits of people, companies, and projects that I wanted to work on. It was funny because the people and the projects (the traits that kind came out) were very similar. By doing that kind of exercise, it allowed me to say oh! This is who I want to work with. Business is about relationships. If you can’t get along with your clients, they might have all the money in the world and pay you a great rate but if hate doing work with them then the relationship is not going to be good. The project is not to be successful as it could be. That’s kind of where…like I said…it took me three months to kind of really narrow down the type of client. Now that I do, I only need a couple of clients every month to basically live my life in the way that I want to.

Carrie: Did you ever read Book Yourself Solid?

Jason: No but people ask me that all the time.

Carrie: It’s funny because the advice you just gave is very on point with what he talks about in the book. You need to figure out those character traits of what kind of people you like to work with and what kind of projects you like to work on.

Jason: I’ve read Pat Flynn’s Will It Fly last year. He had an exercise in their which is something similar to this. It was like you kind of take stock of where you want to be in five years. He had you draw out this quadrant on a piece of paper. So you had these four spots. What are the four aspects of your life that are most important? So you have family, business, travel or whatever. You kind of take stock of where you want to be in five years. Then the following exercises (once you have all that stuff) is what does it take to get from this point to that point? What do you need to do to do that? A lot of it is soul-searching and thinking about what you wanted and how you want to get there. A lot of stuff, like you said, we didn’t start freelancing because we wanted to work more. We started freelancing because we wanted to spend time with family, travel or work on projects that we want to work on. There is no reason why you can’t do that.

Carrie: So you said something in there that I think is really important. Take the time to get your tea, get your beer, whatever it is and actually to through the exercise of thinking through these things. The broader application there is spend time on your business. Spend time working on your business. At least for me, when you get under this pile of work, you’re like I don’t have time! The last thing I have time to do is work on my business. I’ve got all this work to do. It’s kind of a fallacy just like niching down that you have more work. The more time you take to work on your business nets a great return.

Jason: That was a big thing too. I was like marketing! How am I going to market myself with all of this work that I’ve got do for clients? You know what it was? It’s a decision that you have to make. I make the decision that every day I wake up I actually spend an hour on the business. This way at least I know I’ve moved the needle. Then I jump into client work. When I first started it, I had to wake up earlier, you know? Nobody ever said that this stuff was easy. You have to put the effort into it to make it successful. So for me, it was like ok. I can wake up at 6 am instead of 7 and start work. In that first hour, whether it’s a blog article or interacting on a form somewhere, answering questions on core or whatever it might be, I’m doing stuff for the business. Then I’ll tackle the client stuff.

Carrie: I admire you that you can get up an hour earlier every morning. I have a love affair with my pillow. Now that you’ve got a newborn you’re probably up anyway.

Jason: But the thing is, I’m not capable of spending any time on the keyboard at that point. I might get up at 4 am but I actually don’t start work until 9. It is what it is. It’s a great time, though.

Carrie: I am curious if you have any mistakes that you’ve made in your freelancing career. Maybe there is a lesson to take out (or maybe we just enjoy a good laugh at your expense). Did you have anything that happened where you’re like oh my gosh! I will never do that again?

Jason: Yes. There’s actually plenty. I do have a blog post about this too if you want to go check that out and get a good chuckle. All you have to do is go to my site, search for mistakes and you’ll see it. One thing that I wouldn’t do again is try to build something (a product or service) that was never asked of me to do and then try to sell it. You can spend all the time in the world building something and think this is a great idea. So many people are going to buy this thing. This is going to be the best thing ever. You spend all his time and all his effort and then you launch it. Then it’s like crickets. Where is everybody? You do all this publicity. You might buy ads and things like that. So I will never do that again. I did it twice and it took me three times to ask “What are you doing?”

Carrie: You didn’t learn your lesson the first time!

Jason: Right. Just be able to listen. Listen to your clients. Listen to who you’re catering to, who you are serving and see what they want from you. They are already there listening to you, taking your expertise and advice and things like that. They are the people who are going to buy from you. Build stuff that they want. That’s where you are actually going to make some money.

Carrie: Fantastic stuff! Jason? Where can people find you online to follow up with you and get your newsletter or say hi on Twitter?

Jason: I’m @rezzz everywhere (that’s 3 Z’s). If you want to go to Rezzz.com/officehours.fm there’s a free bonus there as well as my five-day email course which helps you figure out how to search Twitter and LinkedIn for the best kind of clients.

Carrie: Awesome! Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge with us. I look forward to seeing you on the inner webs.

Jason: Thanks for having me!