What do you do?

Show Notes

How to answer the world's most common cocktail party question

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Do you have questions about how to improve your business?

Things like:

• Value pricing your work instead of billing for your time?
• Positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space?
• Productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal?

Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes to get ready for work in the morning.

Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call, you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word, and I'll refund your purchase in full.

To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to:

https://jonathanstark.com/call

I hope to see you there!

Creators and Guests

Host

Jonathan Stark

The Ditching Hourly Guy • For freelancers, consultants, and other experts who want to make more and work less w/o hiring

What is Ditching Hourly?

For solo professionals who want to make more and work less without hiring.

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I'm going to talk about what you do. When people ask you what you do, what do you say? If you're like most people I work with, you stumble and have trouble answering, or you say something dismissive like computer stuff, or you answer differently every time depending on who's asking. Now folks come to me for helping increasing their profits, but before we can work on that, we have to figure out what it is they actually do. This is a lot harder than it sounds. You probably define what you do in terms of your expertise or deliverables that you provide or the activities that you engage in on behalf of your clients. But that's very me-focused, and it's usually not that effective. It's much more effective to be you-focused by defining what you do in terms of client outcomes. So I'll give you an example using something outside of software. We're going to talk about therapeutic massage. So imagine you meet somebody at a cocktail party and you ask them what they do. Now which of these answers do you find more powerful? First, I stretch and manipulate deep layers of muscle and connective tissue to the max. Or I help professional athletes get back in the game after being sidelined by an injury. See the difference? The first one focuses on an activity that the massage therapist engages in. It's me-focused. It's focused on the speaker. So the massage therapist is talking about themselves, basically. It forces any potential client to connect the dots between the activities that the therapist engages in and the outcome that they desire. So there's a huge gap there. Now the second one focuses on an outcome that the client desires. It's you-focused. It focuses on, in this case, professional athletes who want to get back in the game. And it uses language from the client's world. Back in the game, sidelined. These are words that athletes are familiar with or probably use. So if you want to escape the hamster wheel of trading time for money, you need to start thinking about the outcomes you provide to your clients. Once you identify these, you can price them instead of the activities you engage in to reach said outcomes. That is the path to working less and making more, which is another way to say increasing your profits. That's it for today. I'm Jonathan Stark, and this is Ditching Hourly. Thanks for listening. Hey, folks. Just want to let you know that I recently upgraded my mentoring program to include six months of unlimited 24-7 access to my private Slack community. So in addition to unlimited email and phone calls, you can now ping me in Slack at your leisure. You can find out more at expensiveproblem.com slash mentoring. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.