---
title: 'How to Build a Successful Freelance Business Through Specialization'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=1FRJJS1UMYo'
video_id: '1FRJJS1UMYo'
date: 2026-07-14
duration_sec: 0
---

# How to Build a Successful Freelance Business Through Specialization

> Source: [How to Build a Successful Freelance Business Through Specialization](https://youtube.com/watch?v=1FRJJS1UMYo)

## Summary

This video features a conversation with an experienced freelancer who transitioned from a virtual assistant to a specialized email marketing and onboarding expert. She shares her journey, emphasizing the importance of specialization, mindset shifts, and strategic pricing for building a successful service-based business.

### Key Points

- **Introduction and Background** [00:00] — The speaker introduces herself and shares her journey from being fired from a job to starting a virtual assistant business in 2012, initially working with friends on retainer.
- **Lessons from Early Freelancing** [02:30] — She learned the hard way about taxes when self-employed, noting that many freelancers face unexpected tax bills. She emphasizes the importance of charging project-based fees rather than hourly.
- **Transition to Marketing and Email** [05:00] — She moved into marketing by learning CSS/HTML, blogging about productivity tools, and eventually working at ConvertKit as a writer and email marketer, which deepened her email expertise.
- **Specialization as a Game Changer** [08:00] — After leaving ConvertKit, she initially did general marketing consulting but soon specialized in email onboarding for SaaS and e-commerce, following advice from Phillip Morgan. Specialization led to higher perceived value and inbound leads.
- **Steps to Becoming a Specialist** [12:00] — Key steps: say no to non-specialized work, update your website and social media to reflect your niche, create content around your specialty, and embrace the mindset that you are an expert.
- **Pricing and Value-Based Pricing** [15:00] — She charges based on the value she delivers, not time. For example, a 45-minute call costs $325 because of her years of experience. She recommends pricing at a level that feels uncomfortable to ensure full commitment.
- **Client Management and Boundaries** [18:00] — She uses a detailed intake form (31 questions) to pre-qualify leads and a process packet to set expectations. She advises treating clients like toddlers who need boundaries, which makes them feel secure.
- **Productized Service: The Audit** [21:00] — She offers a paid audit (currently $1,525) as an entry point. This productized service provides a video walkthrough and written notes, and it serves as paid discovery for larger projects.
- **Final Advice for New Specialists** [24:00] — Create content consistently around your specialization, even if it's scary. Build a network and let peers know your focus. Offer introductory discounts if needed to build a portfolio.

### Conclusion

The key to a successful freelance career is specialization, which allows you to charge higher prices, attract better clients, and become a recognized expert. Consistent content creation and setting clear boundaries with clients are essential for long-term growth.

## Transcript

amazing well let's get started let's just have a conversation here about one of my favorite topics which is selling now I know you super well I don't know if Adam and Tonya and John do can you give a rundown of your very fun journey to get to this point yeah Adam knows me well in the yoga yeah that was my yoga teacher yeah ah yes amazing when I was pregnant with Eleanor it's hot ash I'm good Adam um it's so rundown of me in the business sense um I've been working for myself for roughly six years but before that I I kind of worked for myself also I'm I majored in theater production in college and in the theater world you go gig to Gig and contract contract a lot like projects in entrepreneurial space so it's kind of something that was like in my blood already and I was not built to work for one company for a very long period of time but I started my business about C it was 2011 no no um 2012 late 2012 I started a business as a virtual assistant I was fired from a job and I was planning travel for a 5k race company and was fired from a job and had no idea what I was going to do but I knew that I had friends who had businesses and and they needed help with their businesses like I knew that some people needed blogs posted and some people needed product added to their Shopify stores and just random things that I was like um I don't want to do that but I can Google how to do that and I'll figure it out and help you if you'll pay me to do it so um so I called my friends that had those needs and piece together when I thought was replacing my salary which I learned after a huge tax bill that you don't just simply replace your salary when you're doing freelance work and continue to have the same life expenses because your company takes all of your taxes in advance for you and you have to do that in your own as business owner so I learned that lesson the hard way and I think that that's something that people don't talk about enough is those kind of expensive hard lessons like like the IRS so and I know so many people who are like oh I had in my first year of business I had like an $8,000 back pay from you know and that's like then everybody goes oh yeah me too nobody talked about that though hmm just let me acknowledge that that's like a real thing that happens and you didn't still I spent a couple of years as what I didn't know I was a virtual assistant until I was doing it and then I somebody said oh you're like a virtual assistant that's like what's that so I learned about this whole online business space and over a couple of years I've moved from virtual assistant project manager and then I really worked in the spaces like customer experience and customer journey helping people better on board there are new customers into their businesses so it's not a business owners how did you market yourself before you were referring to yourself as a virtual assistant like what were you saying that you did I'm like business manager I guess I didn't really market myself because I had these like five clients that were friends and that was really all I needed it was you know they were pretty study clients so I worked purely on retainers month to month and it was a set project fee I never worked out early I've never made that shift from hourly to projects so I don't know a whole lot about how to make that shift other than you should just do it and it stopped working hourly but I I always quoted them like okay well it'll be this much per month to do that or however long it takes me or doesn't take me but yeah that was I really worked in retainer and kept my clients around for a long time when I figured out I was a virtual assistant I started networking with other virtual assistants and that was how I got a couple of other clients when they like were full or I'm just thought maybe I had a skill set or a personality go to see their doesn't mind so I did end up with a couple of clients that I didn't know originally but for the most part they were all friends or referrals from those friends super interesting that you went to retainers immediately just like out of intuition was that kind of like just out of your own math of like I want to be making this much per month so I'm just going to like break that down into how I charge my clients yeah basically it was also like I knew how much my my friends were willing to pay for this thing and so I just kind of like met them where they were and said okay yeah if you want me to you know collect blogs from your writers and and post them to your WordPress site twice a week like and I told I'm vastly under charge for what I did but I think I did myself a big service in charging a monthly retainer fee versus an hourly rate because I was then able to go back and I raised my monthly rate over time just by doing what I did really well and and I think it was easier to raise a monthly retainer wreath and it was to either add hours or to act to raise them even an hourly rate because um I found that none of my clients ever were like nickel and diming me they weren't ever saying like well how many more hours is that going to take or on I don't know last month you worth this money and why are you working so many more this month it didn't matter it was just a matter of if I got the job done or not and that's kind of why I did it was one like knowing how much they could afford and and to like I really hate bosses including my own like being my own boss the idea of like a tracking my time and especially for across five different clients and tracking five different clients time and toggling in and out of projects and having like harvest or whatever be my boss did not sit well with me and I had worked retail previously and I knew I hated the like caulking and clocking out thing so I just didn't want to do that and I was like well [ __ ] I'm gonna start my own thing so I'm gonna do it the way I want to do it love that okay it's City Star doing project work and eventually you found your way into more of the marketing realm yeah talk about that switch in how that looked a lot of it was in starting to market my own business so like my very first web site was a Wix website and I built it myself but then I like didn't love how extent it's looked and I so I just like constantly googled CSS and kind of taught myself CSS and HTML through Google and and like change the backend of my Wix website enough until somebody was like you know if you just use like a wordpress you don't have to do all that and Squarespace didn't exist at that time so or I would have probably I would probably still have as far as these website at how I started there but and there's so many more options now but yeah that was like my choice the time and market business and like building relationships and Facebook groups with other virtual assistants and project managers and building relationships in with my clients and getting referrals from them I learned a lot about marketing and how relationships are the center of that I did a fair amount of blogging in that time as well around productivity and I got kind of known as the system's girl like that was very much which is like hilarious to me now cuz I just feel like all my systems are a dumpster fire but at the time I coming to me to help them systemize their businesses and and to know like I I was the one who had to like I knew everything about every tool on I kind of got known for writing five things you didn't know about asana or like how to use buffer to save X amount of time per day those kinds of blog posts were very popular on my blog and so that was really how people started to share my stuff and get and it's also how I kind of found my writing voice was just like if you can't find any of them because they're all unpublished now but if you were to read stuff I wrote in like 2013 2014 it's just funny to me yeah what I what I thought past is a good blog post and and I'm sure I'll feel that way in another seven years so yeah okay so then you spent a little bit of time at convertkit and then you went back out doing I think straight like helping people set up their own email systems for a while right yeah so um I was one of convert kids early customers so I joined them I was customer like seven hundred and something and I was I was moving from MailChimp I wanted something more robust that did more like tagging and things like that because time I was working on not just thought I was the systems girl but I was also doing like customer experience and working with brands on that and so I wanted to be able to tag my email list a bit more my grown a little email list like a little over a thousand subscribers at that point email list and through my blog and and so I wanted to be able to segment them more and my friend had told me about this new tool called convertkit and so I checked it out I became a new customer and instantly I because I was living in that like customer experience world I was like oh there's no onboarding here like I'm flailing I'm just trying to figure it out on my own and I went talk to miss Dan who was customer support like that was he was it the time and and he was like well there's this webinar this weekly webinar tomorrow at 1 p.m. and I was like weekly webinar like why did I know about that this is I one week for here and so I just was getting frustrated with the onboarding thing and so I was talking to Dan and I said you know this is actually what I do for come I've never done it for a software company but I would love to help you walk through onboarding new customers and and he was like hey write it up and I'll send it over to Nathan who's the CEO and founder and and so I pitched convertkit a like six-week project on working on customer onboarding and and I never done SAS before in that capacity but I figured why the hell not and dancing it over to Nathan and a couple of days later I had a call with Nathan and he said hey I do think we need help with onboarding we also need help with customer support tickets and more than anything I told myself when we hit this certain revenue point that I would start writing on the blog again on a consistent basis and we've hit that revenue point I just don't want to do the writing and I've read your blog and I liked your writing style and will you come right for us full time and at the time I was a little bit like lost in what I was doing in my business my clients were kind of frustrating there were just a lot of things that were aligning my husband and I were talking about having a second kid and then just a lot of things were kind of saying hey being in house for a little while is gonna be a good thing and so I took that leap I negotiated the hell out of my contract because there I mean it was like a and still is it bootstrapped fly by seeing your pants start up and so I negotiated that contract and took a big cut to myself Clarie or my job what I was doing freelance but a lot of the other benefits outweighed that and so I did I worked remotely with them for a year half and I wrote the blog and meanwhile I I also did answer support tickets worked on the customer onboarding I was the in-house email marketer for an email marketing company so I learned like everything you could possibly know about email really fell in love with it at that point and and then when I was ready to leave I knew that that's what I wanted to focus on was email and in and doing those projects but that's not where I started when I left where'd you start it just sounds like a cliffhanger [Music] so where I started was general like marketing consulting I was you know I was the first marketing hire I convertkit and so people were hiring me to consult with them on basically being that like being their first advisor on marketing and so I worked with a couple of different companies on just helping them and figure out like what the heck is our message here how are we conveying that to the public what kind of content are we putting out you know what is our what even like copy on our pricing page that kind of thing so I did a lot of very generalized marketing stuff it's just funny to me because you are like in my mind you are the biggest champion of specializing of anybody that I know and it sounds like as soon as you left convertkit you're like I want to specialize in this thing but I'm gonna be kind of a marketing generalist or you know just general marketing consulting to start what were you afraid of related to specializing at the time or why didn't you specialize in the beginning um I I wasn't actually a champion of specialization when I left um I was a champion of email and I loved email and when I was working as a generalist I found myself constantly like advising on email projects and and wanting to like up their email marketing and and like support them in their email game but what I found was they wanted to do all these other things too and email email is really important but if you're like struggling on in marketing and and top a funnel then email sits farther down the funnel and it's hard to to focus on email when you really need to be focused more on top of funnel so it was when I was doing that generalist stuff that I was talking to a friend of mine who recommended I follow up Phillip Morgan and Phillip has a podcast called productized characterized consulting broadcast and he has a daily email on his friends email list he also has just like a great little email course on specialization so Phillip teaches specialization to developers to web developers but I knew I can replace the word developer with marketer and get the same lesson and yeah like one out of ten lessons from him I was like well that doesn't apply at all but I still learned a lot and I owe everything I have today to Phillip 100% and I mmm that's not true I have paid Phillip for like an hour of his time to consult but before any of that I I didn't pay him a dime so you can actually learn a lot about specialization just by joining Philips email list awesome cool so I feel like we're up to speed here now so talk to me about your journey in terms of mindset and how you've priced yourself getting to this point okay so specialization changed everything for me um I actually recently gave a talk on on this topic and I won't give you like the full talk but the the biggest takeaway is that you know there's like commoditization is the exact opposite of specialization and if your commodity your prep your value goes down because kind of anyone can do what you do and you might like no of course not anyone can do what I do and that may very well be true but until you're a specialist and your clients and potential leads see that like well I can hire anyone at a lower price point to get similar results and specialization for me has changed like I mean my market position I'm happy well in the same way that I was kind of the systems girl as the VA I think I was kind of specialized in that world and and got this name for myself as the systems girl now I'm the email girl and and actually the the onboarding expert in the room and that's where people have really started to come to me and say say like you're the onboarding expert I have clients come to me who say you know we want to work with you on this project because you're the expert um I met with a really massive client potential client yesterday and and they said they've been reading my blog and my email onboarding teardowns for six months and they said working with you is like working with a superstar and I was like what like you're a huge brand and that was you know very flattering but it also just spoke to the ability to specialize in a particular area and become known for that thing and to be able to leverage that and into your career so specializing has helped me not only get known in a particular industry which I've done relatively quickly I left convertkit in July of 2017 so it's March of 2019 so it's not even been two years litmus is one of the biggest brands in the email world and they have a conference in three locations every year and they asked me to teach a workshop at two of their locations this year which is like it's that's a huge deal in the world of email and I'm not saying any of this to brag but to say like those are the opportunities that come when you do specialize and you find an industry and I've seen it happen across the board you know people in not just an email but like I my friend promise does webs templates for Squarespace websites and and she's become so known in the Squarespace world for like customizable templates so she and her team create templates but they also build custom websites in Squarespace but only in Squarespace they don't touch anything else and she's become really known in the Squarespace world for that you think about photographers and portrait work or you know there's all kinds of different specialization and one of the things that I think is really important in in specialization is that you specialize in an industry and not in a tool I have friends that run that are Facebook Ads experts and that's very specialized and the people come to them because like Facebook ads are impossible to do and so they they know how to do it and they do it well and they're constantly frustrated because the tools change the rules change you know Facebook Ads like what they started as my friend Claire does them and what her job was really easy three years ago and now it's really complicated yeah so I highly recommend like I don't specialize in a particular like I'm not a drip email marketer or convertkit email marketer I am an email marketer who knows all the different tools as much as I need to but I know the strategy and the the copy and all of that behind it for me and then I also work specifically in SAS and e-commerce so I don't work with bloggers and online business owners and launches and all that that's my friend Tarzan who does that since you've started specializing what percentage roughly you know what proportion of the work and the clients that you work with come from inbound leads at this point it's probably half I'm half inbound lanes and a half referrals and a lot of that is because of my network and referrals that are being made that I don't even know so I actually just recently put on my like work with me form how did you hear about me and most of the time it's Twitter or another company has referred me so sometimes it's my own clients that refer me to other people I've had a prospect calls where that prospect didn't convert but then I get a referral and they they would say that they got referred from that prospect I'm like you didn't hire me but you referred me to someone else that's crazy yeah but I would it's that's amazing that now your business is coming from referrals and inbound like sounds like there's not a lot of actual prospecting that you have to do personally I really don't and I in fact I I would have been totally fine to not do this but late last week I tweeted once hey I'm currently booking for May and I only did I felt like I needed to get leads for me but because I needed to tell a lot of people you cannot book me for tomorrow but I said I'm currently booking form a so if you want to work with me in before the nq2 you need to contact me now and I got four leads from that alone and they're all you know projects starting in May now but um yeah I really don't do a lot of prospecting and I think that that's again a testimony to the specialization piece and the other element of that is that I don't get a lot of inbound leads that aren't a good fit because my website is so specific about what I do I even go so far as to list starting points of prices on my website so I know there's like a whole argument in the mic marketing world of do you list of prices do you not rate sheet on your website I don't I don't list exact prices for anything other than my productize service but I do say you know projects start at $8,500 so there's like a qualifier there on the other qualifiers are here's how it costs you know well I'm going to raise it but right now it costs 300 twenty-five dollars for a nap forty five minutes of my time and it costs thirteen hundred dollars for half a day with me and twenty eight hundred dollars for a full or no $1,800 for happening twenty eight hundred dollars for a full day um so those are like benchmarks to say if somebody kind of goes okay well if I cost twenty eight hundred dollars for a day of her time then a long long term project is going to be more than that and if they know that then they kind of prequalify themselves in or out just for my website so most leads that I get I convert into projects and and they do that because they're already pre-qualified let's say that I'm bought in on the idea of specialization I'm saying yeah I want to specialize what are the steps to legitimately being seen as a specialist mm-hmm the first one is to start saying no a lot you have to see yourself as a specialist before anyone else can do it um so I my only experience in what I do now was at convertkit and it was barely even there because I there Matt Raglan runs onboarding for convertkit and he owned that that was his title when I was there I never had the title like onboarding or retention or anything like that but I touched it here and there and I worked in marketing and and I knew about email and so I just knew that this was the direction I wanted to go and so I said I'm an email marketing expert and I'm an onboarding like I'm a pro at onboarding um I did some of the onboarding work for my generalist clients like I I convinced them to do some of these projects because it's what I wanted to do and I was on retainer with them so I felt like I could but a lot of it is truly a specialization is a hundred percent about mindset it's knowing that it's totally safe to say no to things that are not in that area I had to let those generalist clients go in order to make space for onboarding projects to happen and I had to like force those generalist clients into onboarding projects and and then I didn't you know let I didn't fire everyone and then just sit there with my open calendar and wait for people to come in I like pared back the work I was doing with them did more onboarding focus I rewrote my website with the help of David cherry who I highly recommend talking to for messaging if you need that kind of help he's great with that and I really like just sat down with a friend and talked about what you want to be doing basically what David and I did was talk about what I wanted to be doing and he helped me put it into words for my website that's anything yeah it was it was invaluable to me to be able to say like this is how I see myself this is how other people see me and this is how I want to be seen and we put all that into some messaging for my website and and and then like all that impostor syndrome stuff that comes along with that of saying like I this is what I do and this is it alone I got asked to do to write blog posts for people and I had to say no to offers to write a blog post for 500 bucks because it just wasn't in my wheelhouse anymore so like first deciding what you want to specialize in mm-hmm how a lot of people will say like yep I'm going to specialize in blank and blank and they'll have like two things there yeah how do you know that you're like truly specializing and finding something that's specific enough yeah you have to pick one thing to start you can the thing is that you don't have to specialize in one thing forever so I specialized initially in email onboarding and that was all I focused on in my blog I wrote onboarding tear downs for six months I only talked about onboarding on Twitter which was my main social platform because that's where the software world lives and a lot of e-commerce and but I chose my social media even kind of specialized like my social media platforms like I'm not going to everywhere I'm just gonna pick one focus on it but I I knew that what I wanted to do was retention long-term and the way I thought about it was and I feel like I've talked to you about this before J was like Trojan horse theory you know you and the Trojan horse things like I showed them what they think they want and then give them what they need or in the case of the original short parts it was what they wanted but anyways so you you know I would talk to people about onboarding because that was what they thought they wanted was like let's on board all of our all these new leads better but what they actually needed was for tension they needed to retain the customers that they had longer and then they didn't need to go worry about all these new leads but that that's where their mind was so I had to meet them where they were with my specialty and then once I did that project then I was in to be able to do what I really wanted to do which was her tension and now a year and a half into it I'm able to talk about retention more I'm able to take on retention projects on morning is really just like the Gateway to everything else that I do it's no longer the the main focus but I do think that you need to choose a focus so that you can branch out further I didn't have e-commerce listed anywhere on my web site prior to like six months ago because I was focused entirely on sass and then a couple of ecommerce clients hired me because they recognize the value of onboarding and monthly recurrent because a lot of you commerce are months of recurring revenue their subscription services and things like that so if their ecommerce focused on m RR then I want to talk to them but I didn't even list ecommerce on my website until six months ago but yeah I mean you don't have to stick with one thing forever but definitely pick one that feels like okay this is the thing that the customers actually want and then I can give them what they need once I have them in the door awesome well I'm gonna move into some more sales specific questions but I want to give a chance to Tonya John Alexis or Adam to ask any questions that have come up to this point or that guy or that guy in the back cool well I'm just gonna oh sorry go ahead all right I mean I see I in case how you went about raising prices with existing customers so did any of people have any interpretations about that I'm I'm wondering how you guided them through you rising raising prices yeah very much the same way that I would do any kind of pricing structure for any of my clients now I sent them an email with a heads up um and I actually used a template that I think was like were meets I'll try and find it and post it in slack but it's an email template that basically says um hey at the end of this month my price is going to go up from here to here I've loved working with you I've done this and this and this and this for you I you know I here are the opportunities that I see for us moving forward and and I would love to do this you know moving into this next phase of our work together so I'm really positioned as I'm raising my price and and made them feel like they were actually gonna be getting more but what I did was I said here are all the things I have done for you to date and some of those things maybe had already changed hands right so like maybe they hired or they have an intern now who's doing the actual publishing to WordPress and so I wasn't doing that anymore but here's the future of our work together and I would list like the things that I was doing leave out a couple of things that I didn't really want to be doing anymore or someone else who was now handling and then add in some things that were like taking my work to the next level things that I really wanted to be doing and that would help them so I shifted what the work itself look like made them see like an immense value in that new work together raise the price in that process and I know I'm with one client I did that four times over the course of two years and it was only on that first time that she like balked at it was like I love you and I want to I want to do this but I just can't afford that and that was fine because that was actually what I wanted her to say at that point I was like in and so there were some clients that I raised the price to the point that I knew they had to say no because I wanted them to say no but then other ones I just did it very incremental II and swapped out things that I didn't want to be doing anymore for things I wanted to be doing I'm in the new agreement I'm curious did you did you keep those clients that said that they can't afford you anymore did you meet them where they were at in one case yes but in the other case I was like definitely done with them and I was fine with that yeah and how do you think about pricing um I hate the term value-based pricing because it just feel like it's thrown around so much but um I think about it doesn't take me an hour to write an email because I'm really fast at typing it takes me an hour to write an email because I've spent seven years studying human behavior and I've gone to a ton of different training and researched a lot and attended conferences about customers and you know so I've done a large amount of both time in money education in this field and so so the hour it takes me to write an email is worth a lot of money not just that hour of my time so you like a 45 minute call with me is $325 and I get wandered I get about one a week booked on my calendar and I I'm actually about to raise that price because the when I show up for people if I show up for someone and and I charge them 50 bucks an hour for that time I am NOT going to show up in my folk I tend to charge where I'm a little bit uncomfortable charging that amount so that I have to show up a hundred and ten percent and and give my all to that that time that I have with them if I'm charging somebody fifty bucks for a 45-minute call or you've been giving forty-five minutes away for free which I know a lot of people do I am NOT going to be showing up in my best potential because I'm gonna be thinking like I have better [ __ ] to do but if you're paying me 500 bucks for 45 minutes and then I don't really have better [ __ ] to do like I'm gonna show up and I'm gonna give you everything that I can in that time what allows you to get that place of a little bit of discomfort it's a lot of a lot of freelancers I talk to even myself a lot of times I know I should be charging more time not doing it so what has allowed you to break through that mental block that a lot of people have I just do it I still have those mental blocks all the time like I do I talk to my friends like I have a couple of people that I know who are like no that's [ __ ] [ __ ] you should charge more and stop doing that and I want to see it on your website today like I who hold me accountable to that and and sometimes I actually call them sometimes I listen to podcast episodes that they've been on where I can just like listen to them on you know I'm driving and and get them like in my brain and in my body but uh you know it really is like it's that I tend to think like I literally work in my basement like I'm working like I I write emails for people in my in like sweats in my basement why should I be paid ten thousand dollars per contract for that but I should because my clients go out and make a ton of money off of me and not just initially but long-term and if you make videos for clients and they go off and land new new clients or big speaking gigs or look out they're Pro because of the videos that you did for them if they make $150,000 and you charge them a thousand bucks like that sucks for you so you can either charge on like royalties or you can just charge what you what feels really good to you upfront and actually like not what feels good to you about what feels uncomfortable because I don't ever feel comfortable telling their project is $18,000 you know to me that just feels like an insane amount of money as a theater kid like I never I've never thought about making that kind of money but I also know that overhead of my my work and and I think getting really in touch with my finances has helped a lot too so I have a really great bookkeeper because I am a theater major and don't do the maths but I you know I she sends me a PL every month and we have a lot of conversations about expenses and she'll send me like a what is this expense why is this here I'm like oh yeah you're right and so I'm way more in touch with my money now than I ever was when I was just trying to do it all on my own and there's all kinds of ways you can go about that you can hire someone you can use budgeting service you can you can use plain old spreadsheet I think getting really in touch with your money how much it cost you to run your business how much you're making and and knowing those numbers can really help you see you like okay yeah I'm charging you 18 grand for this project but I'm also gonna spend like four of that on doing the project you know like software costs you know all those like things that add up and then and then here's all my time and and then here's all these other projects that I have to say no I can't work on that until this other time because I'm working with you so you know you when you're in touch with your money that helps you make better decisions on how much you can charge and then you also just have to like yeah just do it like charge more and and see see what happens I'm gonna raise the price on my our call to $500 from 325 nobody minds you know I might have no signups and then right now I have one a week or every other week which so I could be turning away you know six to twelve hundred bucks a month by doing that but I'm gonna do it and see what happens how often when you have a large client that you're going to charge one of these value-based deals - how often do you need to walk them through the understanding of why that investment is worth it versus there at a scale that they understand why you're charging that much that's a really good question I feel like that is a lot of times in the prospecting phase I have a very in-depth questionnaire you have to fill out to have a call with me in the first place so if somebody reaches out via my website there's a and you can find it or I can post it in slack but there's a link to a type form that has like 25 or I think it's 31 questions on it so you have to like really want to talk to me and I and and they're like questions that make you go get data and think about things I've had people write like wow you're really making me think here like yeah you you got to tell me something in order to to talk to me about your project so um I can usually tell in the prospecting if I'm going to have to do a lot of convincing and in which case I typically down sell them to like a my productized service or like just let's just do this and then take it from there and then I can have like a small one-off and gauge me with them see how it goes if it's a pain in the ass I'm just not going to move forward with them but you know I also have clients like the the kind of potential client I talked to yesterday um you know they wrote in there in their intake form this is the this is the most important project we could be working on right now and they were talking about onboarding I was like hell yes it is and we're gonna be best friends and we're gonna do lots of work together so you know it's a lot of it is in the questions you ask in your onboarding and I really encourage people to have in-depth questionnaires and like please stop doing all this like filling your name your email address and then message on the collect contact page on your website make them answer more questions and really find out how committed they are to working with you and I think it actually establishes you as a professional upfront when you do that um if you're if you just have like name email message it's kind of like anybody come on I want to work with anybody here like come into my inbox and bother me but if you have this long intake form they have to do some work and they have to earn the time in your inbox for you to review that and understand and then when you do have a call with them you have to come prepared you have to have read that type form and gone to their website review things so um so you have to show up like the professional you pretend you are by having your big long type form can you talk about the product I service you you keep mentioning when that came into play and and why you built in the first place yeah so initially it's called a conversion enter an audit and I it's an audit of existing emails in my case I think audits some people call them like road mapping sessions or discovery session it's but it's basically like taking a deep dive into what you are already doing I work with established businesses so and this is also a qualifier right so if you have no emails written at all whatsoever well the starting point to working with me is this product has service and is an audit there's no entry point before that and there's very little I can do and and I rarely take on clients that haven't been doing email for a while and have data points to pull and it's very hard to know what will work otherwise other people feel differently and depends on the field again that's where the specialization comes into play because I know that in SAS it's really difficult to know what works until you are collecting data on it but I start with this this product or service of an audit where you give me access to your email service and you know some other like data points and voice of customer research and tone and voice documents and all those kinds of things I look over everything I do it dive into who your customers are and then I look at all of your emails and I do a email by email video walkthrough along with my written notes of here's what should change here's what you can keep here's what we can use somewhere else and then at the end of that audit I have a page on the the spreadsheet and in the video where I say okay based on what I see here here's what we can do together and I give them options of what they can tackle in-house on their own knowing what I know about their team because of the audit and what my team and I can do for them because I'm now I now have a team I used to be to be just me so I'm learning this new language of my team and I but I teach them you know I show them what my team and I can do for them and then I also work in phases like iterative phases so here's what phase wanna look like phase 2 phase 3 so I outlined the whole project that's going to come after the audit and it's basically it's it's paid discovery work like I know a lot of people who write project proposals and they do all of this unpaid and I'm just I'm just not interested in doing that so I I teach people who tell me they spend like 3 to 6 hours researching to write a proposal and I just find that to be like insane so I priced it at you know like it's 1525 right now I'm exploring options and ways to change it and make the price higher um but that's what you you get a set result you know maximum 15 emails you get this err table document and video walkthrough and then you get a follow up call so it's very straightforward of what they're getting and then it also gives me a chance to properly pitch a project after that because then I get to say like based on what I see here's the project we need to do together it used to be that you could just have an audit and an or I might start a project with you like without doing an audit but now that that service is the only way that you can start working with me I will not do a project without having done a lot at first awesome well we only have like five to seven minutes of your time left so what I'd like to do here is kind of a rapid-fire you have your incubator now and so you're working with a lot of early-stage copywriters would love to hear in your perspective where you're seeing people miss in terms of mindset or mechanics that's costing them number of clients or like total earnings that they could be making I think the biggest thing is the one that I have just been covering this last week with them and that's um well we've been talking about it all along but right now we're talking about client management client management is a huge piece of what separates you from a test taker to a valued team member and that's the biggest element is as freelancers and small business owners we often end up in this role of like task taker and sure I'll do that for you I'll get that done I'll turn around I'll I'll work in Trello for one client and the sauna for another client and via email for another client and and I'll make myself crazy to get the money in um and that makes you a real task taker and basically like an employee I'll just do whatever you need me to do and I didn't start my business to be an employee so I I think the most important thing you can do is beyond specialization is own that you are a valuable contributor to the team and that they when they come to you as a specialist they come to you for your expertise and you have to deliver on that expertise bite by acting like an expert by saying here's my process here's how I work this is how you communicate with me this is how you do not communicate with me and just you know and and that does a couple of things it reminds them that they hired you for a certain thing and that's the thing you're going to deliver on and then it also just like it tells them you're legit you know like very they feel better about spending lots of money with you when you tell them exactly what to do clients are just like toddlers and they just need boundaries and they need to be told what to do and they like it they really do they love when you say here's what we're gonna do I'm gonna you know this is how I communicate this is how I don't and for me that's been having that all written down in a packet so I send like a process packet to all of my prospects where all those details are and I actually in my process packet then the email that I send them is like okay here's what we talked about here's the process packet the in order to move forward there's a button on the last page of the process packet that will take you to a form to fill out to say like yes I definitely want to move forward with this and so that makes them read the process packet so I get them to go into the process packet click through at least click through the pages like if you didn't read it and you click through the pages that's your problem but it tells them everything they need to say that I need to say is like I'm pretty introverted and I don't love to talk about money and and I don't love to tell people what to do and how to do it but if I can have a packet tell them and then I can just reinforce that it's so much easier and then it's the packets of all mine how do you recommend these people that you're working with how do you recommend they go about getting clients into their funnel as a specialist if they're not known as the specialist yet yeah I'm going back to that like no yourself as a specialist so a lot of the copywriters I'm working with right now are have been like kind of generalist copywriters and they want to be email strategists and so they're they're changing their title on their website they're updating their social media BIOS and all those little things add up to them like every time they check their Facebook page it says that they're an email strategist and and then letting people know like going into those groups of your peers and of your call potential clients and saying hey here's what I'm doing I've loved working on this particular thing so much that I'm focusing on that 100% and it's gonna get you better results and that's what I told people at the beginning like I can give you better results because I'm doing stuff that I love all the time versus giving you mediocre results because I don't love the thing that I'm working on and so when you go into conversations with that in mind it really helps set the stage for that's the work that you're going to be doing and to me it's just about building a network and in connecting with that network on an ongoing basis letting them know what you're doing and and peers are a huge part of that like groups like this and I'm in a couple of other groups especially for women to join groups where there's only women in them or like if there's a women's channel and a slack team you're a part of joining that community so that you know women love to support other women but also just like within a community everybody loves to support each other so being an active participant in a community sharing what you're doing what you're working on and how you can help people and yes and I mean I know like I talked about value-based pricing and all of that but you can also say like hey for my first five clients I'm offering a 20% discount or you know you have the authority to do that or not do that as as you want but I do think it's important to build a little bit of a portfolio and to to offer people a chance it helps you build your like I am and it also helps them you know take a risk on someone who might kind of be a particular expertise yeah I love the idea of like having a specialization that you go tell other people like this is what I'm doing now because now they're empowered to be your advocates to everybody else yeah so some some takeaways specialization keeping that simple being actually specific not hourly pricing but retainer and project-based pricing pricing higher it's most people generally need to charge more don't do free discovery work productize an intro call or an intro sort of offer yes and done has a lot out there on Road mapping sessions and I learned a lot from him on that and so kind of that idea like there's nothing nothing I'm talking about is new or nothing on the era is new so you know go learn from other people the other thing I would say is like create content around your specialization like your trip what you choose is your specialization I chose onboarding and I started I was scared to death the first time I had published on onboarding tear down I thought everyone was gonna hate me especially because tear downs aren't exactly nice but creating content around your specialization and sharing it even if it gets like one like or one tweet you know it's it's worth it because over time and then doing that consistently I consistently for every week for six months published a new onboarding tear down and those that six months of tear downs is still informing people's work today so it's really worthwhile to publish content you don't have to write if you're not a writer don't write heat create videos marketed like 30 days of videos including the day his daughter was born so like create what do you need to create and it doesn't have to be huge it can be a 30 second thing but but do it and do it consistently love it well I want to be super sensitive to your time you've given us a lot here late on a Tuesday any last questions hear from those of you who are with us live and I'm happy to answer questions in slack anytime people can attend me and um hit me up for I love talking about this stuff cool well I will host this on YouTube and share it in the slack I'll probably even just pull down the audio and Sharon gets people want to listen to it on podcast but bow thank you so much this is awesome I'm constantly learning from you and inspired by you so thank you so much for taking the time I love this community for that reason thank you so much probably