A Business Consulting Session with Seth Godin

You’ve most likely heard of Seth Godin; he’s a New York Times best-selling author who is known for his marketing genius. As you might imagine he’s done the interview circuit countless times, so his advice in this episode is gold.

Kristina’s Challenges

Kristina Romero has a successful consulting business she has built from the ground up. She started out as a WordPress specialist helping people design and code their sites.

From there she got involved with WP Elevation and expanded into the consulting side of things and even added maintenance plans to receive a recurring revenue.

Kristina identifies the following as the main challenges in her business:

• Lack of time. She does a full-time job within part time hours as well as being a mother of three.
• She wants strategies to increase profit without having to work more hours
• She is trying to branch out to an online training environment for all businesses
• She has a lot of ideas and doesn’t know how to apply them

Charge More and Work Less

Seth’s first piece of advice is to go beyond being a job and be someone who is unique and doesn’t have a problem charging a premium because you’re the only one who does it. A lot of freelancers feel that in order to be better, you have to do more work. But then you are overextending yourself and your work suffers.

The best thing to do is to work yourself up the ladder so you can charge more and work less.  If you’re getting paid by the hour, you’re probably not doing it right.

Seth gives some golden advice here and says: sell stuff to people who want to buy and can afford to buy it.

The key element is specialisation. Be specific about what you offer, you’ll position yourself ahead of everyone else by doing so.

Getting Through the Lean Period

Troy asks Seth how to get through that lean period when you are becoming a specialist? Seth gives the following advice:

• Cut your costs, don’t go on holiday or eat out and get through the dip. You need to sit there and wait until you break through to the other side and not keep running after the next shiny object
• Earn the right to speak with authority about what you are wanting to be specific at
• Build something that people already want to buy

Kristina says that she never had to pick a speciality because work just seemed to keep coming in but Seth says – “don’t overthink it.” You already have these people that trust you, billing relationship. Your speciality could be “these are my clients”. So instead of finding new stuff to sell to people, work with who you already have.

Productisation

They tackle the subject of moving from the freelancing world to creating products. Seth says it is pretty hard to do, so when you are starting something new ask yourself why you’re doing it. Is it to make more money or is it for the craft of creating something? Focus on doing things for the craft, not to have a bigger impact or more money in your bank accounts.

Ask yourself – what would you have to do in the insight that you deliver, the quality that you deliver, what assets do you need to have to be able to charge triple what you are charging now? Leverage your network to build an asset or a circle of people who are desperate to be in the circle.

Personal Connection

Kristina says she’s great at connecting with clients and explaining to them why they need to buy from her. But lately she’s been trying to reach the masses through email or social media without that personal connection, and she receives no interaction.

Seth’s advice? Don’t do it! He says if you’re not good at reaching the masses, then focus more on the personal connections. Find clients who are worth every bit of care and charisma you can bring them because digital stuff is hard to sell.

Scaling Impact

Stop looking for more people to impact, have a greater impact on the people you already have. Deeper rather than wider is compelling. They then get you the next people because you have changed them so much.

Otherwise, come up with a funnel system that people are eager to participate in to be able to scale your impact.

Wrap Up

How awesome is Seth? There are some great stories and analogies in here so make sure you listen in. Let us know what you think about this podcast in the comments below.