Transcript of Increase Profits Through Specialization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: One of the ways to really drive up profit is to specialize, is to go into a vertical market, is to go have a niche, to get known as an expert in X, Y, or Z. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, we speak with Philip Morgan of Philip Morgan Consulting, and that’s what he does. He helps people specialize and position their business in a way that allows them to get more profit, to drive the cost to acquire customers down, to become really known as the expert in their field of specialization. Check it out.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Philip Morgan. He is a consultant at Philip Morgan Consulting, but he works with specialization and helping people find niches and helping them position their firms based on those niches and that specialization. That’s what we’re going to talk about today, so Philip, thanks for joining me.

Philip Morgan: Hey, John. It’s great to be here.

John Jantsch: A lot of consultants, a lot of businesses today, I think, can benefit from specializing, from becoming known as the person that can help with X. I think there’s a lot of really good reasons to do it, but I do think there’s a lot of confusion about maybe how to do it or why to do it or what it’s going to mean. Let’s break a little bit of that down. Let’s first, I guess, get a baseline. When you’re talking to a company about specializing or position some certain specialization, what are you actually talking to them about?

Philip Morgan: I work primarily with self-employed software developers, so I’m going to pull an example from their world to make this super concrete, and hopefully it’ll be relevant for enough other folks in your audience. If you’re a self-employed software developer, it’s very likely that you got there through some circuitous route like you had a job for a while and you hated working for the man so you started working for yourself. Or maybe you got booted from your job, like a lot of people got laid off in, I don’t know, 2006, 2007, 2008. 2008 is when I sort of involuntarily accidentally became unemployed because I got laid off along with a bunch of other people.

Anyway, you probably arrive at self-employment through some sort of circuitous route, and you find yourself in this world where you have to help clients understand what’s valuable about you. If you’re a self-employed software developer, you’re going to gravitate towards your technical skills as the way that you tell clients what’s special about you. If you’re not a software developer, maybe if you’re a designer, you’re going to also likely gravitate towards your skills. You’re going to say, “Well, I do front-end design,” or, “I do user experience design.” If you’re a writer, you might say, “I write white papers,” or I’m this kind of writer. The common thread you might notice across all these things is they’re all focused on you, not your client.

You asked for me to kind of break down what specialization is. I would say the first thing that people need to understand about it is you have to specialize in a way that matters to your clients. There’s exactly five ways you can do that, and we can kind of walk through them. That’s the first big picture idea that I want to make sure people understand is you will be tempted to specialize in something that’s about you, like your skill set, like I’m a Rails developer or I’m a Java developer. You’ll kind of want to go around and start saying that’s how you specialize, but that’s not really a specialization. First of all, so many other people are doing the exact same thing, so there’s no meaningful differentiation. To explain what’s different, you have to bore people to death, because you’re telling them the intricacies of this approach to Java development versus this other approach. It very quickly becomes a not helpful way to think about specializing if you think about specializing in a skill set. So what’s left?

John Jantsch: It’s Java development for dentists.

Philip Morgan: Maybe, right? That’s one of five ways to do it, is to pick a target market, let’s say. That could be a market vertical, or that could be an audience. It works basically the same way. Market vertical would be what you said, dentists. An audience would be female entrepreneurs, for example. An audience is a group of people that have something they share in common, but it’s not the type of business they’re in. It’s something else like one that I’ve heard about recently is encore entrepreneurs, people who are kind of later in life and starting a new business later in life. That’s a fairly well-defined audience. Dentists would be market vertical. Manufacturing, retail, those are all market verticals. That’s one way you can specialize, is to pick a market vertical. I know I’m making it sound simple. It’s actually terrifying to people to do this. You pick a market vertical and you say, “My services are for this target audience.”

It feels weird to do it. At first, you have all kinds of questions like why would I pick one? Why wouldn’t I just serve all of them? That’s a whole nother thing we could talk about. I think the easiest way to think about why you would pick one is it makes it easier for people to refer you. You start to become more memorable, rather than, “Oh, I met this guy at this barbecue this weekend. He said he’s a developer, whatever that is.” All of a sudden, you move out of that category into a different category of, “Well, I talked to this guy at this barbecue this weekend. He’s a developer that focuses on helping manufacturing companies cut cost.”

John Jantsch: The implication is that he knows our business better, or he knows the challenges or the problems, or he’s seen how to get a result for a business like ours, because ours is so different from everyone else.

Philip Morgan: Exactly. That’s what you’re trying to do by specializing. That’s kind of the end goal, is that you can actually do that. You can actually produce measurably better results for your ideal client because you know how their business works. You’ve worked for other businesses like them. That’s the end point that you’re trying to get to by specializing, is that you can actually prove that you can do a better job for them or move the needle for their business more than you can for others, because you’ve specialized in that kind of business. That’s also what makes it scary at first, because if you’ve been a generalist, it’s quite common for you to have worked for a lot of different kind of businesses, but you haven’t really built up a pattern of working for the same kind of business.

John Jantsch: I’ll tell you something I’ve discovered in working and really trying to get people to narrow their focus. I’m not necessarily a proponent of you have to niche, you have to have a certain market, but I will tell you that in working with small business owners for a lot of years, one of the things I try to get them to do is rank their clients, their most profitable clients. I can’t tell you how many times they’ll go, “You know, I didn’t really know this, but 50% of our business, our most profitable business, comes from this vertical.” They’re actually doing it already. They’re hanging on to some of that other business to the detriment of doing it better. It really is kind of interesting. I think that scariness is actually probably just really kind of a myth.

Philip Morgan: You identified what would be the ideal point for someone to move away from being a generalist and start operating as a specialist, is if they could look at their previous clients and identify this pattern of, oh, that’s where the profit it. It’s whatever, these type of companies, manufacturing companies or some other type of company. The decision is a lot easier if you can see on paper some evidence that this is not going to blow up your business to narrow down and specialize. That’s the ideal sort of inflection point, is when you’ve got that critical mass of clients and you can see the pattern of, oh, these clients are better, and it’s always this of client that’s better or almost always.

John Jantsch: It’s amazing how often that’s there. They just don’t take the time to look at it or to analyze it. A lot of times, it’s happening for good reason, and they just haven’t identified it.

Philip Morgan: Yup. When I’m working with people, a lot of the work that I do, I take a step back from it. I’m like, “This is so simple. We’re just going to make a list, and we’re going to see if there’s any patterns in that list.” The list is your previous clients and the profitability and what market vertical they were in or what kind of problem you solved for them. Sometimes I’m almost embarrassed at the basicness of what it is that I do, but when people see those patterns, you’re absolutely right, John, they can say, “Oh, I see. Now the next step is much more clear.”

John Jantsch: Is it possible to specialize without actually identifying an industry? In other words, I’ve always felt like I’ve specialized, because I said, “Here’s how I’m going to work.” Somebody who wants a system that is a soup-to-nuts approach with a monthly retainer and they’re going to know what I’m going to do, what they’re going to do, and what the cost is. I can work across industries, but what I’m going to do is I’m going to attract a client for whom that is an approach they want.

Philip Morgan: There’s two ways of specializing that don’t involve focusing on a particular industry or vertical or even an audience. One is to focus on solving a problem. That’s part of what you just described, is the problem that you’re solving … and it’s not just this one problem. I know that. To sort of simplify what you just said, you’re focused on solving this problem, and the problem is I need a soup-to-nuts system. I need a comprehensive system for doing marketing. That’s one way to look at how you specialized, and that is a very viable way of specializing. Another example might be let’s say that you’re a marketer or a software developer and you focus on companies that are being disrupted by Amazon.com and helping them compete more effectively through whatever it is that you do. That’s another example of what we’d call a horizontal problem. Lots of different types of industries might be suffering disruption at the hands of Amazon, not just retail. I mean, now they’re moving into groceries, so there’s the perfect example. That’s one way to think about what you’re doing.

The other is you have packaged your services in a specific way, right? That’s another way to specialize, is where your focus is on a somewhat unique or very specific way of delivering your services so that it meets a certain type of client’s needs better than anything else. You’re sort of providing some kind of packaged materials combined with ongoing support or consulting at a fixed cost. I mean, a lot of people can go, “Marketing is scary. I don’t want to have to do all the work of developing this,” or, “It’s this kind of black box, and I’m not sure what I need to do.” You show up and say, “Well, do this. Do the following things. It’s a very well thought out system, and you’re not on your own. I’m going to be there via a retainer or whatever for an ongoing support role.” That’s another great example of specializing by customizing how you solve the problem.

John Jantsch: It has the effect, in some cases, of sort of making the competition maybe not irrelevant, but at least incomparable.

Philip Morgan: Exactly.

John Jantsch: That component alone allows you to stand out, I think.

Philip Morgan: Exactly, yeah. Software companies do this a lot. They’ll create these feature comparison tables where they’ve got columns and rows and their product in the first column and then all the competition in the columns to the right and lots of green checkmarks on their product and lots of red x’s on the competition. Of course, those are always a little bit cherry-picked.

John Jantsch: Sure.

Philip Morgan: They’re based on this idea, this principle, that you just mentioned, which is if you can be completely unique, then you effectively have no competition and you’re effectively a monopoly. That’s such a nice thing to be in that the US federal government tries to keep people out of that place because it’s so nice.

John Jantsch: Would it be your contention that every business should do this? You’re not probably going to say every, but would you say most businesses should be looking for some sort of specialization?

Philip Morgan: I would say for services businesses, for sure. I think you can make the argument that there are product businesses that work better without specializing. In other words, I’m willing to admit that there’s plenty of edge cases where specializing is … Maybe it’s something they need, but they don’t need it now. They need something else now. Every business goes through a sort of life cycle or an evolution.

John Jantsch: Sure.

Philip Morgan: Services businesses, small services businesses in particular. I’ve seen very few that could not benefit from specializing, with one big exception, which is if you’re brand new. If you started freelancing a couple months ago or just one or two years ago, if you started working for yourself. Earlier, John, you mentioned a lot of your clients can look at their client roster and see a pattern, and once they spot that pattern, it’s obvious that’s how they should specialize. If you’ve just been working for yourself for a year or two, you probably don’t have that body of previous experience to draw the pattern from. In that case, it may be beneficial to just spend a couple of years learning the ropes of working for yourself and functioning as a generalist.

John Jantsch: I actually advise a lot of consultants that I work with, because a lot of people have this what should my target market be? How should I narrow it? To some degree, my answer is, well, just go out there and try some stuff and see what works. See who you like working with. See what kind of engagements work. Maybe what’ll happen is you’ll work with a certain industry, they’ll tell their buddy, and next thing you know you’re like the modeling contractor marketing guru. When you’re coaching somebody and they’ve decided that it’s time for them to maybe specialize, what’s kind of the decision-making process for how to specialize? I don’t think you wake up one day and say, “By golly, we’re going to be the specialist in this now.”

Philip Morgan: On the one hand, I kind of wish people could have access to that experience, because that would be a lot easier. They wouldn’t have to spend money hiring me. For a lot of us, it’s a difficult decision. I think the reason why is it’s so personal. If you are more of an entrepreneur, you maybe have a little bit more of a mercenary kind of feeling about your work, where you’re like the reason I’m doing this is because it’s going to be an amazing business some day. It’s less driven by a feeling of craftsmanship or really enjoying making things. What I find is that a lot of folks who gravitate more towards services businesses, it’s very important that they actually literally enjoy their work.

It’s not going to be a cakewalk 24/7 to be in business for yourself, but I agree it’s important to enjoy your work. It needs to be fulfilling. That’s one of the first things I look at with people is where’s your interest. Sometimes there are surprises there. People are surprised to find that they might be interested in a market vertical like deep sea freight transport, for example, just pulling a recent example from a guy I’ve been working with. That was an interest to him. He’s got no previous experience there, but it’s interesting enough that it may be worth it to build up some experience in that vertical so he can specialize there. So we look at the interest.

The second thing I like to look at is your credibility. Credibility is not entirely your track record, but that’s a large part of it. What kind of work have you done in the past, and is that going to be credible enough to prospective clients that they start to trust you enough to pay you? Credibility. Your level of interest. Then, the third really big factor is is there going to be demand in the market for what you do? An example might be if I love building websites but I want to specialize in … What would be a good example? Actually, dentists might be a good example. I look around and I see dentists, and I’m like, “Wow, they have so many crappy dentist websites. Maybe I’ll specialize in building awesome, beautiful, custom websites for dentists, and I’m going to do it all from scratch. We’re not going to use Squarespace. We’re not going to use any off-the-shelf WordPress themes. We’re going to do it all from scratch.” I’m not sure, but I predict you would have a hard time selling those services to that target market, because a lot of dentists are like, “Look, many, my ugly website is good enough. I get most of my work through referrals. I don’t need your $15,000 website package.”

That’s the third big thing is does the market actually need what you’re doing? John, that’s the sort of abbreviated answer to your question. I look at those three things first, your interest, your credibility, and does the market need what it is you’re thinking about selling to them in a specialized way?

John Jantsch: So let’s assume we’ve done the soul searching and we’re committed on interest. We’ve done enough work in that industry to credibly put the message out there, and there is demand. What’s the payoff for somebody that kind of nails all three of those?

Philip Morgan: A couple things happen. One of the first things that happens is something that has always been a struggle, which is marketing becomes less of a struggle. The reason that it was always a struggle is you’re doing it at the highest possible difficulty level if you don’t know exactly who you’re trying to reach and exactly what kinds of problems you can solve for them. If you don’t know those two things, then no one is going to be a good marketer. Steve Jobs would not be a good marketer in those circumstances. You know what I mean?

John Jantsch: Yup.

Philip Morgan: Seth Godin would not be a good marketer under those conditions. You remove that uncertainty about who you’re trying to reach and what kinds of problems you can help them solve in a valuable way, and all of a sudden, it just becomes automatically easier to do anything, whether you’re doing inbound marketing and creating content marketing, for example. That becomes easier. If you’re doing outbound marketing and struggling to get people to respond to cold emails, that usually starts working better. All of a sudden, you’ve got this specificity that people resonate with. That’s one of the first things that changes. As you develop experience which is truly unique to you and your focus on that market and truly valuable, you can just start charging more, because you can prove to clients that you’re going to move the needle for their business. Or maybe it’s not so much about moving the needle, but you just become so good at what you do that you can do it in half the time. So maybe you don’t change your rates at all, but you just spend half the time doing what you used to do to make $5,000 or $10,000. Well, that’s a significant increase in profitability.

Those are the two biggest things most people might notice. One thing that’s more subtle is that you become more confident in talking with prospective clients or in managing your active clients. You come from this place where you’re like, A, you want to help them and, B, you know better than they do how to help them, so you can actually start to lead the project. Clients notice this from the first second they’re on a sales call with you. They notice this confidence, and it’s like a magnetic force.

John Jantsch: You didn’t put it in tangible terms, but for me, customer lifetime value increases because, if nothing else, margin goes way down because you’re serving clients. Then, cost to acquire a customer. Just the fact of the matter is if you’re trying to reach a vertical market, you’re advertising cost is going to be lower because it’s smaller than trying to reach the world. There’s a lot of things that, from a metric standpoint, are pretty easy to point to.

Philip Morgan: In the best case, you spend literally nothing finding clients or advertising, and they just find you, either word-of-mouth referrals or inbound marketing starts to become super effective.

John Jantsch: Absolutely. Well, Philip, tell people where they can find you and more about your work.

Philip Morgan: I like to point folks to an email crash course that I’ve put together on the subject of positioning and specializing. It’s called positioningcrashcourse.com is the website where you can go sign up for that. That is the best way. Once you’re on my email list, I sort of become your best friend. I’m happy to answer questions that you might have or what have you. I would just say go to positioningcrashcourse.com.

Transcript of Monetize Your Expertise and Thrive written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Dorie Clark. She is a marketing and strategy consultant and frequent contributor to Harvest … not Harvest, Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur and Forbes. She’s also the author of a new book we’re going to talk about today, Entrepreneurial You: Monetize Your Expertise, Create Multiple Income Streams, and Thrive. Welcome back, Dorie.

Dorie Clark: John, it’s great talking with you.

John Jantsch: I never edit out those flobs because I think people enjoy those, so there’s got to be a Harvest Business Review out there, like farmers read it or something, I don’t know.

Dorie Clark: Absolutely. I should write for that too, that would be pretty cool.

John Jantsch: All right. Let me ask you this, I had somebody on the other day, a new book on social media and this is a book on essentially kind of branding and starting a personal business or whatnot. A lot of books on both of those topics. Help me with kind of do you feel like there’s a new central idea you’re presenting here?

Dorie Clark: There is. Essentially, I actually sought to write a book that I had not seen before. I wanted to really write a book that was information that I was after. Entrepreneurial You, fundamentally, is talking honestly about how people make money as coaches and consultants, and providing a framework and a roadmap to help them do it even more effectively. I interviewed 50 + very successful six and seven figure entrepreneurs, yourself included, John, and really broke down their revenue models and helped to explain, okay, here are the options. If you’re a coach, if you’re a consultant, and if you are a small business owner of any kind, what are the things that you’re not doing now, but could to increase your revenue and leverage your time to be able to diversify and get even more bang out of the buck of your customer relationships?

John Jantsch: I think a lot of people have certainly come to realize the corporate way is maybe over, to some extent. Now, is everyone a consultant, author and speaker? It’s kind of the triple thread.

Dorie Clark: A lot of people are, certainly. In fact, of course, there’s a well-publicized study that was done by Intuit that said 40% of Americans would be freelance, or self-employed professionals, so we’re getting very close to one in two.

Even for people who are not I, in fact, argue that one of the safest things that you can do for your career is to develop at least one other income stream so that you’re not so reliant on one source of income. Certainly for anybody that’s an entrepreneur or a small business owner, in some ways, we’re diversified because, of course, we have multiple clients and that’s good, so if there’s some kind of a shock, or a disruption, you lose an account, or what have you, you have other options.

I would argue that really … People misunderstand, they think entrepreneurship is about risk taking, when actually it’s about being smart and risk mitigation. The best way to mitigate it is to offer multiple types of services, or offerings to your existing clients so that you have options and you have more legs under the table.

John Jantsch: It’s funny I, over the years, have applied for a mortgage or to refinance my house or something and the fact that I was an entrepreneur in some banker’s eyes made me more of a risk. I used to sit there and think, “You know, I’ve been doing this for X amount of years, I’ve had the same income, I decide what my income’s going to be and like I think somebody who’s in a job getting paid a salary is the ultimate risk.” I think people are coming around that a little bit, but there’s still that mindset.

Dorie Clark: Absolutely. I learned it early on rather inadvertently because I got my start professionally as a journalist and I ended up … it was my first job and I was just out of college, I did it for a year and then I got laid off and I couldn’t get another job as a journalist because they were really starting to collapse at the time. That was the first taste of understanding that you really can go from being totally fine one minute, to completely not fine the next without any warning. I think the real benefit of entrepreneurship is understanding that you can find ways to really protect yourself a lot more strategically in the ways that are necessary in today’s economy.

John Jantsch: You have developed a self-assessment as part of this book, I guess, to help people decide not only is this for them, but maybe what path. You want to talk about that?

Dorie Clark: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I actually created a free resource. It is the Entrepreneurial You self-assessment and it is 88 questions that actually walks people step-by-step through thinking about what types of additional income streams might be right for them and their business and figuring out how to implement that. Folks who’d to get that for free, they can download it at dorieclark.com/entrepreneur.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and the first test is if you can answer 88 questions [inaudible 00:05:44] you’re probably not going to make it, right?

Dorie Clark: 88 is good too. This is my global self-assessment, John because 88 is a super lucky number in China.

John Jantsch: Oh, nice.

Dorie Clark: Particularly if you want to crack the international market, answer these 88 questions, you’ll be good to go.

John Jantsch: Especially in the millennials, the term portfolio career is … as opposed to my dad or even me, to some extent, I’ve been doing the same thing for 30 years, essentially. This idea of a portfolio career, I think is where you … almost each move is maybe gaining you towards another move, or that that’s inevitable. Is that the reality, you think?

Dorie Clark: I think increasingly it is. Partly there’s always been a subset of the population that has wished for such a thing. I think you and I probably both know folks where some folks are so focused, all they want to do is one thing, but then there’s another kind of person that they’re sort of renaissance people, they’re into lots of things. They enjoy the variety, they enjoy the different challenges. Up until pretty recently, those sorts of folks have been at a disadvantage because society just wasn’t really structured in a way that accommodated it.

Now, we have a lot more possibilities. Also, just in terms of overall workplace trends, because we are entering a world that is much more freelance-based and much more focused on that, I think that the concept of a portfolio career is increasingly becoming the norm. I think about even my own career, one of the reasons that I wanted to immerse myself in this and learn even more about it is that, over the past number of years as a marketing strategy consultant, which is the core of my business, I was originally probably like a lot of your listeners, making all my money from consulting work. People would hire me to do marketing plan or social media strategy or whatever. That was it, that was the only tool in my toolkit.

I now make money in seven different ways. I have worked to build out seven different income streams. I still do consulting, but I also do executive coaching, I write books, I give paid keynote speeches, I do part-time business school teaching, I’ve developed online courses and I also do some affiliate marketing. Those are ways to really create stability and optionality in my business.

John Jantsch: Do members of your family wonder when you’re going to get a real job?

Dorie Clark: I’m on year 11, so I haven’t-

John Jantsch: They’ve stopped asking you now.

Dorie Clark: They have, yeah-

John Jantsch: Whatever, I don’t get what you do, but you seems to be putting food on the table-

Dorie Clark: … marketing, but it’s getting there.

John Jantsch: One of the big pieces of advice that come from a lot of books, or just even point of view from this type of thing is that you have to become this trusted resource on X. I see definitely a lot of people doing that, but I also see a lot of people seeing that as the invitation to jump in and be like the new crazy leader in whatever new social platform comes along. How do you balance that sort of advice of you have to be the trusted resource on something with a lot of people feeling they end up just jumping from thing to thing, trying to be that?

Dorie Clark: Yeah, I think you raise an important point. Certainly, to be fair, there are sometimes first mover advantages. If people hop onto a platform and it turns out that that platform has staying power, fantastic. If you are joining Twitter, let’s say today, it’s almost impossible, unless you are already a celebrity to get a million followers. Building that from the ground up now is virtually nil. Whereas, if you happened to join in 2006 or 2007 and even if you were a regular person, you could become the Twitter celebrity and gain a lot of traction as a result of that.

I think the bigger point, the more overarching one is that regardless of the platform, the concept of becoming a trusted authority is a useful and valuable one. What’s the alternative, right? We all want to be trusted. Regardless of which way you choose to do it, sometimes people will say, “Oh, but I’m not a writer,” or whatever. It’s fine. It’s about the ideas. You could blog, you could podcast, you could use certain social channels, you could do videos, whatever it is, but you want to be communicating your ideas in such a way that people can look at them, see them and say, “Oh, he makes sense, I want to hear from him more.”

That’s really all it’s about, because otherwise, if you raise your hand and you say, “Oh yeah, I’m a consultant,” well, no one knows if you’re any good. You have to give them a way to look at your ideas and validate them for themselves so that they could say, “Yes, give me more of that.”

John Jantsch: The thing that’s really tough, I think, for a lot of people is that you really do need to lock into, I think, a unique point of view, or at least something that’s different and then you have to repeat it a billion times for five years, I think, in many cases for it to ring true. I think that’s the real challenge for a lot of people. I’m not just saying it takes work, it takes commitment and consistency.

Dorie Clark: Yeah, that’s very true. Certainly for me, it took between two and three years for me to start seeing literally any results from the blogging that I was doing when I first got started. During that time, that initial period, there is a real question that legitimately arises in people’s minds, which is, “Is this working at all?” It could be that it’s not working yet, but it also could be that it’s just not working and you don’t know and you have to have that leap of faith.

The key thing … and this actually a study that I cite in Entrepreneurial You, there was a study, there was done a longitudinal study of podcasts between 2005 and 2015. The stunning thing, John … Now, of course, we all know, there’s a huge number of podcasts, including this excellent one. Many people say, “Oh gosh, how can you ever stand out? How can you ever compete with so many?” The truth is, over a 10 year period, the average podcast duration, the average amount of time that a person was able to keep up a podcast was for 12 episodes and then they quit. The truth is if you just don’t quit, if you keep going, you’re not competing with 300,000 people, you’re competing with 3,000 or 300 and that can make a huge difference in your ability to succeed.

John Jantsch: Yeah, there’s no question. Speaking of podcast, one big component of this approach and what you talk about in the book is this idea of building your own brand. One of the things that I’ve seen you do, because I watched your … I don’t know if rise is the right, but you talked about you blogged for a couple of years, nobody was paying attention. Now, certainly people are paying attention, is that in addition to writing all of those words that you did on your own, you hassled. You got yourself on podcasts, you got yourself guest blogging things. You ultimately got yourself publications that would allow you to contribute. It happens to be that you’re really smart and you have good things to say, but you hassled.

Dorie Clark: Yeah, thank you. It’s absolutely true. Of course, you have to make sure that you’re applying yourself with these areas. Yeah, when it comes to really building your brand in a marketplace, I developed a framework around my most recent book that came out in 2015, Stand Out, about how to become a recognized expert in your field.

Fundamentally what I discovered after interviewing 50 + thought leaders across a spectrum of different industries is it’s really three things. One is content creation, which we talked about. You have to show people your ideas somehow. Number two is social proof, which is basically a term from psychology that means your credibility. What is it about you that is indicating to other people that they should actually listen to you? One of the best ways to do it is to have affiliations that other people have already heard of so that they can say, “Oh, well, you know, she’s okay, she must be okay, she’s been pre-vetted.”

Things like blogging for publications like Forbes, or The Harvard Business Review that people have heard of, that makes a big difference in terms of your perceived credibility, being on podcasts, like the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, that makes a big difference, so those things matter. Being involved even in your local civic association, your local professional association, that matters. Then third and finally, what really makes a difference in terms of becoming a recognizes expert is your network and building up a group of colleagues and allies, people that you respect and can turn to in your industry and outside that help you raise your game and get smarter and get better.

John Jantsch:  I’m going to point out another thing that you did that I think people need to understand. When you got the deal with Forbes, and correct me if I’m wrong here, you appeared to use that beautifully to open doors to build some of those relationships. Everybody heard of Forbes, maybe I haven’t heard of Dorie Clark, but Forbes? Yeah, I’ve heard of that, so sure, I’ll take her call, or I’ll take her email, or I’ll be interviewed by her because that’ll be put me in Forbes. Again, I think there are probably people that have used some of that kind of thing, but I think you used it beautifully as a door-opener.

Dorie Clark:  Yeah, thank you, John, that’s exactly right. I had a very specific strategy around it, which I think was a win-win because it’s resulted in a lot of good pieces for Forbes and good coverage of different people in Forbes. When I first started, I didn’t really have any connections in the field at all. I wanted to meet people, I wanted to get to know folks that I had read about and had admired.

With the Forbes and Promoter, you’re exactly right. Not necessarily the most famous people. You won’t necessarily get to talk to Elon Musk or whatever, but most people who are not mega billionaires would like to be interviewed in Forbes, and so if you reach out and you ask, almost always you’ll get a yes. It gives you an opportunity to start the relationship from a very positive place, from a giving place. Sometimes you will hit it off with that person and be able to develop a deeper relationship.

John Jantsch: That’s right. The reason I pointed that out and I’m not trying to put you on the spot, or embarrass you, but I think people need to realize that there are many, many ways that you can apply that and it’s kind of like you’re just trying to evolve in that strategy. I think that’s another thing, I think people underestimate is they read a book like this, or they see this concept and they want to go straight for, “I’m the expert. I’m the leader in this field and I think there is an evolutionary process to like where you start and maybe where you try to get to.”

Dorie Clark: Yes, that’s right. It definitely almost always takes longer than you want, or than you expect, but it really … One of the stories that I tell on Entrepreneurial You, which I think is the most impactful is about a woman named Stefanie O’Connell who’s working to establish herself as a millennial personal finance expert. Like a lot of us, it was slow-going, she didn’t see a lot of progress, but one of the mantras that she had was that she had to celebrate the small wins along the way and she looked for them.

Even if it’s something like you’re blogging for free and then suddenly someone offers you $25 to do it, or maybe you write a piece and someone you admire retweets it, or maybe you go from having to pitch yourself all the time to the first time that someone says, “Oh, will you write for us?” Those are all sings. A lot of people are just looking for having Made it with a capital M, and instead, we need to look for the small wins to say, “Okay, it’s going to take a while, but I am headed in the right direction.”

John Jantsch: I think sometimes we underestimate it. We see the people that have “made it” and we don’t remember, or we hadn’t witnessed the 15 years they put in to get there. I think that’s what society seems to sort of reward the made it stage and not so much the making it stage.

Dorie Clark: Yeah, that’s exactly right. In fact, that’s why I wrote Stand Out, was I really wanted to puncture that myth, because you only see the finished product. I wanted to really understand what it took to build toward it, what was that middle phase that so often gets elated in the popular discourse.

John Jantsch: Let’s talk about money, making money more specifically. Once you’ve built this expertise. You see a lot of people that some of the most successes, biggest successes financially that I’ve seen are people that built a community, built an expertise because they probably had a revenue stream somewhere else and then all of sudden they thought, “I’ve got 100,000 followers, I think I’ll monetize that.” That’s a beautiful way to build a business, but for a person that is trying to put food on the table, that might not work.

What do you typically run up against when people start saying, “Okay, I’m going to start freelancing here,” or, “Start coaching on the side here,” when it comes to actually asking somebody to pay for their expertise, where do people get tripped up?

Dorie Clark: Yeah, I think you’re putting your finger on something important, which is that those earliest days, those earliest customers can be incredibly nerve-wracking. One of the stories that I tell in Entrepreneurial You is about a guy named Andrew Warner who runs a business called Mixergy, which is a subscription service where he’s done more than 1,200 interviews of startup entrepreneurs and people can pay a subscription and they can access them sort of Netflix style on an unlimited basis.

Originally, he was doing these videos and sharing them completely for free. Eventually, he had amped up the production quality, he had producers and editors and he was paying out-of-pocket and he realized it just wasn’t sustainable and so he decided to start charging. He was really terrified that people would rebel, that they’d call him a sellout and they’d get angry that he was somehow taking away something that they had grown accustomed to getting for free.

I think that that can be the case with a lot of us that we are nervous sometimes about being willing to charge at all, or maybe like the next step down the road is being willing to charge what we’re worth, as opposed to a steeply discounted fee. In many cases, we do have to just plunge forward. Another person that I profile in Entrepreneurial You is a consultant who, I think, you probably know, Michael Bungay Stanier.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative), sure.

Dorie Clark: His line, which I quote in the book and I love is that, “When you ask for your fee, it should be fear plus 10%.”

John Jantsch: I do work with a lot of consultants and one of the things I see quite often is, again, especially if they’re new, getting started, it’s that fear, “I’m going to be rejected.” I think, in some cases, what’s worse is this fear that, “I actually deserve this much,” or that, “I’m worth this much.” I really try to … especially after people start working with folks, if you can get a handle on the results you’re producing and the value you’re delivering in very tangible ways, that can sure help your posture, I think, when it comes to asking for a fee.

Dorie Clark: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Early on, being able to quantify the ROI and helping people really see that and visualize that is so important. I also want to go back and hammer something we were talking about earlier, which is the social proof element, the credibility element. When we think about premium pricing, or not even premium pricing, just fair pricing, but certainly premium pricing, something that helps justify that.

Partly it’s justifying it to the client, but also sometimes it’s justifying it to ourselves, is having that social proof, having those affiliations that say, “Well, you know, okay, there’s a lot of consultants out there, but if this one is blogging for Forbes, or if this one has keynoted in event at such and such corporation, then they’re worth more.” Are they better? I put in air quotes, maybe, maybe not, but the social proof helps be a factor that convinces people that you are.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I often laugh with people that, when my first book came out and then hit the list and was a popular book, I actually tripled my speaking fee and nobody cared if I was any good anymore, they just assumed I was.

Dorie Clark: That is right. That’s right. Absolutely.

John Jantsch: This is really hard and this is [inaudible 00:23:45] hindsight, me saying this, but sometimes when I talk to a consultant and then they say, “Well, I’ll do this for this amount of money,” I feel like saying, “Who would believe you could actually do it for that cost? It’s so cheap that there’s no way I could get a good product, or a good result from that little of a fee.” I think sometimes people underestimate that that goes on in people’s heads as much as anything.

Dorie Clark: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I actually tell a story in Entrepreneurial You, I thought this was so stunning. There’s an author friend that I have who you might also know named Kevin Kruse. Kevin told me a story about a time he was actually on the other side of the equation. At one point in his career he was the executive director of a large professional association and they were having a conference and they wanted to have a particular speaker. They’d had a committee meeting and people had suggested this guy. He had great credentials. He was an Ivy League professor, he had a bestselling book, everybody had heard of him.

They thought, “Okay, well, we don’t know if we can afford him, but let’s try to get him.” They emailed him and they asked if he was available on that date and he said yes he was. They said, “Well, what’s your fee?” He said $3,000. Kevin’s group had budgeted $30,000 for the talk because they assumed that that was the appropriate range. When they heard that, they were actually alarmed because they thought, “Oh no, what’s wrong with this guy?” It really can happen that way.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I remember that story from the book. Tell people, Dorie, where they can get ahold of you. You talked about the assessment. We’ll have, of course, these links in the show notes, but anywhere you want to send people?

Dorie Clark: Yeah. John, thank you so much. The best place for people to get in touch to get more than 400 free articles that I’ve written, speaking of social proof alert for Forbes and The Harvard Business Review, they can get it all at dorieclark.com, plus of course, we mentioned earlier the Entrepreneurial You self-assessment at dorieclark.com/entrepreneur. Even more to the point, if you’re a fan of John Jantsch, he is one of the stars of Entrepreneurial You, so that is reason alone to check it out.

John Jantsch: Oh, very, very little star. Tiny star, but-

Dorie Clark: Oh, but shining so brightly.

John Jantsch: Well, I’m going to take the assessment, see if I’m cut out for this thing or not.

Dorie Clark: All right.

John Jantsch:  [crosstalk 00:26:19]

Dorie Clark: Keep me posted.

John Jantsch: I will. All right. Dorie, thanks so much and hopefully we’ll run into you soon [inaudible 00:26:24].

Dorie Clark: John, thank you.

John Jantsch: Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. I wonder if you could do me a favor. Could you leave an honest review on iTunes? Your ratings and your reviews really help and I promise, I read each and every one. Thanks.