Do I really need to specialize?

Show Notes

Q&A from TheJonathanStarkShow.com on YouTube

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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!

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Jonathan Stark

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

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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've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a question from Osvaldo B. who asks, You talk about specialization and to go after them, a.k.a. clients or audience. What about designers that are full stack and not specialized in any particular market niche? My career opportunities never forced me to choose a niche. I had to adapt to whatever the client need is. Having said that, my niche is everywhere, so I cannot really track them. Any advice for this broad market client search? Thanks. Okay, so this is a totally fair question. Let me start by saying you don't have to specialize at all if you're happy with the number of leads you're getting, the quality of clients that you're getting, and the fees that you're charging. So if you're doing great work for clients you love at high prices, then don't specialize. You don't need to. Some of the big firms that have been around forever, if you look at their websites, they're not specialized at all. They're completely just famous at this point because they've put in 20 years of hard work doing good stuff for huge clients, eventually huge clients, and then it kind of speaks for itself. So over time, you can broaden your focus to include more industries and more whatever, like over time. But if you're talking about starting out, I usually refer to it as like starting, you don't start a campfire with like a giant log and a match. You start a campfire with some sparks and a little tinder, maybe a magnifying glass to focus the energy to spark some tinder that can then light bigger logs and bigger logs and bigger logs and bigger logs and bigger logs. And then you've got this roaring fire going like someone like IDEO or RGA, and they can just throw another, they throw a Nike on the pile and it catches on fire. Maybe that was a lame metaphor, but the idea is if you're not happy with the number, quality of clients that you're getting or the fees that you're able to charge, a great way to change that is by specializing. And there are lots of different ways to specialize. So what the question asker says here is, there's sort of two dimensions that are in this question, and there are two obvious dimensions to specialize in, two different ways to specialize. Osvaldo says that he's a full stack designer. I'm guessing it's a he. He's a full stack designer, and he's talking about his specialization there, sorry, his horizontal there. He's talking about his discipline or his area of expertise. When he says full stack, I take that to mean that he does branding and UX and logos and typography and, you know, anybody that needs design, I can do any kind of design for you. And then he also talks about specializing in a niche, which is a different kind of specialization. That's a vertical specialization where you do potentially branding and typography and logo and all the things, but you do it specifically for a vertical market like bootstrap, SaaS founders or chain restaurants or, you know, some specific vertical. It could be a vertical or it could be some other visible characteristic of an organization like nonprofits or companies or between 100 and 500 employees or companies that have an outside sales force, some kind of visible external characteristic. You can specialize on any of those. Okay, so there's two different, so he's kind of talking, he's conflating, not conflating, but he's including two kinds of specialization at the same time. So I would say if you wanted to experiment with specialization, because I know it's threatening people, it's threatening to people's identities to imagine going from being a full stack designer down to just UX or just typography. It's scary and it's potentially identity threatening. It feels like you're boxing yourself in because you are, but that's good. Okay, so there's that concept of specialization and there's another, and there's also a different kind of fear with the vertical specialization, which is that right now I'm not getting enough clients. So how possibly could focusing on a smaller group of people get me more clients? It'll definitely get me less. And again, that's just not the way it works. A tighter focus actually gives you more leads, but I won't try to prove that to you right this second. So here's some things that you can actually do to experiment with specialization across either one of these axes. You probably don't need to do both. You probably don't need to just do, I don't know, typography for bootstrap SaaS founders. You probably don't need to go that hyper-focused. You probably could, but you don't have to start there. So imagine this. Look at

All the things that you do, and I know you do a million things, you need different things for everybody. One way to do this is to come up with a particular service or something that I would call a productized service, where it's a piece of your job, it's a process that you go through on a regular basis, maybe it's an ideation session or some sort of branding workshop or something that you do probably at the beginning of a normal client engagement that sets the tone for the engagement or it sets the plan or you're designing the design or you're like conceiving the design and then you'll execute it after that. But it's usually a fairly fixed scope thing at the beginning. It could be a website teardown, something like that. I don't know what, I mean, you're a full stack designer, I don't know specifically what kind of designer. So imagine that you've got this sort of envision that you can create basically a product or productized service, and then imagine doing a campaign to try to even just get, not even sell it, just get feedback from particular groups of people on that particular thing. So let's say, let's just say it's a website teardown. That's a thing that a designer could do, and there probably is a series of questions that you would ask the client before doing the teardown, like how are you driving traffic to the site? What's the objective for the website? What's the strategy? What are the numbers now? What kind of traffic do you have? What are you trying to, what are you trying to achieve with this website? So on and so forth. And then you could think of the specialization exercise as a temporary marketing campaign to try to sell this particular product or service. So you could say, well, this thing that I'm doing, this website teardown service might be interesting to coaches who aren't technical. They're maybe doing a pretty good business, but they've got, maybe they've got a WordPress website and just some externally identifiable characteristics. So maybe you go after coaches who have WordPress websites, and I'm sure you could figure out how to find that, just search for coaches, look about source, oh look, it's all WordPress people, and I'm gonna offer a couple of suggestions to them in this productized service, and it'll cost 800 bucks or whatever. So then you could reach out to them on LinkedIn, you could do direct mail to them, you could call them up, you could say, hey, what would you say if I told you that I could increase your conversions on your website almost overnight, or I could tell you what's wrong with your website, or however you wanna reach out to these people, whether it's, it could be direct mail, it could be direct phone calls, it could be DMs on LinkedIn, it could be answer bombing in forms that they are hanging out in. But if you pick coaches or coaches who have WordPress websites, immediately all of your marketing gets way easier because now you know who to talk to. Now you could reach out to your circle of friends and family and say, hey, does anybody know a coach who's got a website or a WordPress website? And I'd love to talk to them about this product that I'm putting together, or I'd like to talk to them about some research that I'm doing. I'd like to talk to them about the challenges that they face in their business from a digital perspective or something like that. So you immediately can get introductions because you know who you're trying to talk to. When you just say everybody, it's too big, and no one who you talk to or who comes across your offerings is gonna have what I call a Rolodex moment. They're not gonna come across your website or receive an email from you and think, oh, I should really introduce him to this coach that I know. If it's just everyone, it makes your marketing really hard because if you specialize in a vertical, it makes it easy for people to introduce you, to have a good word of mouth and all that stuff. And then after that campaign is over, you can decide to stay going after coaches or you can find something adjacent like lawyers. Now I'm gonna do lawyers, and I'm gonna reach out to a bunch of lawyers and I'm gonna do the same thing. And then after that, that maybe goes well, it doesn't go well. However it goes, after that, I'm gonna do yoga studios. And you could just pick a campaign and try out the niche, see if it works. It might, it might not. I mean, if there was a silver bullet, I wish there was a silver bullet. I'd be selling silver bullets. But that's the difference, when you're focused on a vertical or something visible like that, then you know who to look for. You know where they hang out. You know what conferences they go to. You know how to ask for introductions to them. If instead you pick the horizontal focus and you go down to like, say, I just do typography. I'll do typography for anybody. Then you need to go out and promote yourself as like the world's greatest typographer. You need to be really, really good if you want to command premium rates. So I would look around and say, well, who pays for expensive typography? You know, what kind of businesses, what sizes are they? And then you do like a campaign around that. But it's a lot more work because you don't know who you're trying to talk to. You don't know who to ask for introductions to. You don't know who to connect with on LinkedIn. You're just hoping.

Somebody somewhere is searching for amazing typography, or they're scrolling through Instagram looking for amazing typography. If you do that, it's just a lot, I mean, you can do it, plenty of people do it, but it's just a longer road. I think it's a lot harder, it's more out of your control, you're more prone to competition, because if I'm looking for an amazing typographer, I don't know hardly anything about typography, so I can't tell the difference between someone who's good and someone who's great. So if I'm scrolling through a list, and this all looks good to me, I'm just going to pick the cheapest one. So basically, if you take a horizontal position, you need to kind of become famous. You need to become really, really well known before you're going to attract big clients, and you're going to attract higher fees. It works, it's a different kind of path. But I think to wrap this up, the big thing to consider is that you don't have to do both. You could, but I don't think you need to do both. You don't have to do a horizontal specialization, like going from full stack designer down to typography, and pick a vertical focus like coaches. So like I do typography for coaches, that sounds a little overly specific to me. So hopefully this helps. If you have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube, and we will add it to the queue, and I'll answer it as soon as I can. See ya. Hey, Jonathan again. The next time someone asks for your hourly rate, I want you to stop what you're doing and go to valuepricingbootcamp.com to sign up for my free value pricing email course. That URL again is valuepricingbootcamp.com. 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.