Evan Carmichael advises a cash-strapped architect to talk to potential customers, listen for unmet needs, and overdeliver on every job. He shares how turning a 300-word blog request into 1,500 words plus a video tripled traffic and landed a bigger contract. Hustle and reputation beat capital.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my newsletter subscribers, Thuan, who is an architect. He's got no money and he's trying to get to the survival point with his business. And I know that's a really tough place to be. You've just started the business and you're not making enough money to pay your bills and put food on the table, and there's only so long you can last. So getting to survival point is a super important step for your company. You may have really big vision for where you wanna go and huge dreams for what you wanna accomplish, but you gotta start at being able to support yourself at the kind of bare minimum. So what I thought I would do is use the whiteboard and explain what I would do if I was starting up in this position with Ron. So the first thing I'm seeing here, obviously We've got no money, right? And I'm sure a lot of you guys can appreciate that even as you get your business to a bigger point, money is always an issue and you have to make sure that you are using it correctly, stretching as far as you can go. The good news is we're in a service type of business here, so we don't need a lot of money to get it going. And I don't advise spending a lot of money for entrepreneurs. What we need is a lot of hustle. And I know you guys can hustle. And I hustled a lot to get my business going, so I hope you guys can do the same. The first thing I would do is go start talking to customers. And what I want to do here is I'm not trying to sell them. I'm not going in saying, "Hey, I'm the greatest new architect on the block, please hire me." What I'm doing is going in and listening to the challenges that they have, understand their market a little bit better, think about who they are currently working with, and ask them if there's anything that they're missing from their current suppliers. So you might not be able to displace a current supplier that they're using, but there might be additional services that they're not happy with from their current supplier, or they're not getting from their current supplier. So that could be you coming in to seize the day. So I'm going in, listening, getting feedback, trying to be helpful, trying to be a resource, and not selling, okay? Nobody wants to be sold to, especially by, you know, startup entrepreneurs. So go in, be a resource. What's not gonna get me is a small job. And this is your goal starting off. Okay, you're not gonna go in and get huge contracts. If you can go in and get huge contracts, that's a bonus. But most scenarios, if you're a new guy coming in, you're gonna be getting the little contracts. And it's a great opportunity because what it is, is a foot in the door and an opportunity for you to prove yourself. So what you wanna do, even if it's a really low-paying entry-level type of assignment, what you wanna do is overdeliver like crazy. Overdeliver. You wanna be seen as a guy who delivers results, and that's gonna get you from there bigger jobs which is what we want, and more referrals. Referrals from either within the business or to colleagues. Okay, you have to overdeliver, and I'll give you a quick example from my business that might help you guys out, and especially you, Thuan. So I was recently hired to create some blog posts for a company, and they said, we'd like to hire you to write 300 to 500 words for our blog and provide some value for entrepreneurs. No problem, I can do that. Instead of just writing 300 to 500 words, I wrote 1,500 words. I went way beyond, I went 3 times longer than what they asked for. And then not only did I just create a blog post, which is what most of the people did when they got hired, I created a video to go along with it, I promoted it on my newsletter, and I got 3 times the amount of traffic to our post compared to everybody else that was on the site. So what happens, the company wants to hire me back, and they want hire me for bigger jobs, right? So we've just signed a new agreement, tripled the budget for the post, and I've been able to deliver. Overdelivering. So you have the requirements, but you have to go way, way, way above. But you can find somebody to help you out, and it doesn't have to cost you any money. Find somebody who, you know, friend, family, owes you a favor, do barter services, whatever it is, get a website up. Hopefully people will then find me through different search engines and get me some business. So again, you don't have to worry about not having a lot of money. It's not really how much resources you have to start up a business. It's more
