How to Start a Business Using the Skills You Already Have
Terry Rice walks through how to turn what you already know into a business. He covers pricing your skills, setting up consulting or training, and moving clients from one-time projects to retainers that pay month after month.
Foreign.
I'm glad you're all here. Thanks for joining me on this Thursday afternoon, at least afternoon here in New York City. And my goal today is to teach you how you can start your own business, be an entrepreneur using the skills that you already have. So, Carlos, glad to have you here. And I want to democratize access to entrepreneurship because often we think there's some large scale startup costs involved or you have to, you know, build some kind of storefront or product or whatever it is, but it's actually not that challenging and you can do so using the skills you already have. So I want to tell a quick story that leads into that and I'll get into the meat of the presentation, but we got people here from Kenya too.
Cool.
In Miami. Awesome. So for years I was a digital marketing consultant, also an account manager. So helping people use Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads to run their business. And my work was, it was good, but I wasn't making as much money as I wanted to from it. But anyone who's ever done digital marketing knows part of your job is analyzing campaigns and optimizing them to find rooms for improvement. So one thing that came to my mind based on a suggestion from my friend, a friend of mine, is the value of your knowledge is contextual. And if you can apply that to a different context, you can get paid a lot more for it. So here's what I did. This is how I made 10 times more for my work, just by changing the context. What I did is I started working with private equity companies who wanted to acquire a company potentially. And I said, you know what, I'm going to do a digital marketing audit before you buy that company, I'm going to audit their digital marketing to make sure they're not doing anything shady in and you don't waste $40 million. So the same work I used to do that I would charge $600 for, I was now charging 4 or $5,000 for, right? Doing these audits and saying, hey, look, they're shady or they're not shady. So the value of your knowledge is contextual. And right now, if you have a 9 to 5, that context is probably not set up to maximize your revenue potential. So if you want to start a side hustle, this is going to help you. If you currently have your own business and you want to do something else in addition to that, this will help you too. But keep that in mind, the value of your knowledge is contextual. And like I said, I want to easily democratize access to you doing this. So I Put together this formula, this framework called the Action Framework. And by the way, if you ever create a framework, have it spell something because it's easy to remember and it just sounds cool. Like, if I said I have the Catalyst framework or the Star framework, you'd say, oh, it's cool. But if I said I have the cardboard framework, you'd say, it sounds kind of lame. So this one's Action. And what it does is it starts with you taking the knowledge you already have from your job and applying a framework to it so you can do audits for people, just like I did, right? So Rita's here, and I know Rita's really good at email marketing, so we'll use Rita as an example. Reed is a pro and pretend she's working in house for this example. Rita's a pro at email marketing. What she could do is write down her process for how she does this, right? Coming up with good subject lines, good copy, call to action, so and so forth. And then going to other companies that do email marketing and say, you know what? I know you've been doing this for a while. There's probably room for improvement. How about I sell you this audit? And then from there she can make 2, 3, 4, $5,000, depending on the context, by doing these audits. So the easiest way for you to get started is, is to think about a process around something that you do and enjoy and then turn that into an audit. Now, how do you figure out that what that is? Yes or no? In the chat window. Has anyone here read the book the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks? Because I'm going to go deep into that in a moment. The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. He talks about something called your zones of function. And you might want to write notes on this one. Your zones of function. So there's four zones of function. There's a zone of incompetence. These are things you're not good at, you never want to be good at, you don't care. And think about this from the lens of your job, your tasks you've had at various jobs. Then there's a zone of competence. Things you can do well enough, you know you can do it, you don't enjoy it, and pretty much anyone else can do it just as well as you, too. So that's the zone of competence. You don't want to do any work there. The next step up is your zone of excellence. These are things that you're really good at, you're recognized as an expert at, and you can get rewarded for it. Too. But sometimes it doesn't reward you internally as much as it could. It's because maybe you want to be in your zone of genius and write this down, your zone of genius. These are things you do that excite you. You could read a thousand books on it and never get bored, keep on going to conferences, reading blogs, so on, so forth. So your zone of genius in your zone of excellence, that's what you want to offer your services in, in this case, in an audit. Things that you're competent in, eh, don't do it because you won't be passionate about it. You're gonna feel like you're going through the motions and you might as well stick with what you're doing right now. But your zone of genius and your zone of excellence, you can get rewarded for very well, but you also won't feel like it's a soul sucking opportunity, right? So another way to determine this is to almost audit your career, right? So you're gonna just write down every job you've ever had as well as the tasks that were associated with it, right? So when I worked at Adobe, I did search engine marketing, I did campaign optimization, I did budgeting, I did ad copywriting. I was only good at one of those things, which is optimization. So that would go into my zone of genius or excellence. Things like ad copywriting, I would say incompetent, to be honest. I can say that now because I don't work there anymore. But that's the whole point here, right? Is to audit your career in the tasks you've done, whether at a real job or a nonprofit, whatever it is, and assign all these things to various categories. But then look at your zone of genius and your zone of excellence and say, okay, I can now offer this as a professional service, right? And again, I'm saying start off with audits, right? Because again, the benefit of audits is, and I remember this in school when I was in, when I was in college, I went to the University at Buffalo with Nikki and a few other people that are here. There is this person, this company that came in to audit the gym that we worked at. We worked at the, the athletic complex. This person's auditing all this stuff, interviewing all these people, and then gave like a list of suggestions for the, for the school to make to improve things. And I was like, are they going to stay to help with this? And like, no, that's their job. They just give their opinion and leave. I was like, yeah, that's a dope job. So ever since then I was like, well, it's amazing. You can have jobs where you don't do anything. You just tell people what to do and get paid for it. And that's why I became a consultant. But what I'm saying is, like, at the very tip of that, you can just do audits where you're not even teaching people how to fix things. You're just saying, that's cool. That's cool. That's kind of messed up. That's messed up. You probably shouldn't work anymore. That's cool, though. That's an audit. But the benefit of an audit is it reveals blind spots and opportunities that this company may not be aware of.
Right.
So how do you put together an audit? Again, you're writing down your X step process for, in Rita's case, email marketing.
Right.
Step one, this, step two, this, step three, that. You know how math goes, so I'm done. But then you're going to look at these other companies and saying, how well are you doing on step 1, 2, 3? And then rate them.
Right.
And you can then say, all right, well, to improve your rating, you have to do X, Y and Z. I'm not going to help you do it because I have to go. But if you want, I'll come back next quarter and do another audit. That's what I did for these private equity companies as well as other organizations. I would do that audit and say, look, right now you're at a 60. If you want to get to 100, here's what you have to do. And you might say, terry, who's judging the 60 and the 100?
Me.
Terry. So the thing is, like, it's your expertise that gives you the ability to do that.
Right?
So it's. Yes. Is it subjective? Yes. But, like, you have to give people a number they're at now and a path to improving. And so long as they see that, like, hey, you're not doing so well here, you are doing well here, then. Then it checks, right? So you might have to overcome that imposter syndrome, or the feeling like you're. You're faking it to do this effectively. You're not faking it. You've created something which are two different things, right? You have the best intentions to help people, but you can't do that if you don't have necessarily a measurable way of saying what is good and what is bad across different layers of this audit. Okay, that check so far, are we all aligned here with what we're doing? We're thinking about what we're really good at and enjoy, and then developing a checklist, more or less about how to go through that activity in a successful way, but also going through you and saying, all right, well how do I rate someone, how well they're doing on this?
Right.
On a scale of 1 to 10, and what's the path look like to getting a 10?
Right.
So the question right now is saying, can you help them with implementing this as a value add? Yeah, that's actually going to be the next step. So A is audit, C is consulting.
Right.
And consulting is saying, okay, based on your audit, let me show you what you should do to fix this.
Right.
So it's more than just like a bullet point, like, you know, write better copy. It's saying, I looked across the industry and here's what, you know, your, your competitors are doing to write better copy. You know, here's some things you should consider. So when you're doing consulting, it's much more of a deep relationship where you can do this audit initially. And that's why the audit is so important, because it's the baseline for everything else you're going to do afterwards. Because you have to have a process. Whenever someone says, hey, hey, how can you help me? You can't say, it depends. It depends on what? Like, are you just making this up as you go along or do you have a process? And the benefit of having a process is, as Nikki said, you can apply it to different companies.
Right.
The benefit of a process is so long as you follow these constraints, you'll reach your desired outcome. But if you're just making things up as you go along, you know, you have no clear path to how to do so.
Right.
And you don't seem confident either. And I always say that clarity is the precursor to confidence. So if you want to seem confident, say, oh, I have this five step process for how you can optimize your email campaigns. Step one, step two, step three, so on, so forth.
Right.
So to your point, yes, the next step is consulting and going deeper on how they can fix these things. And when we think about pricing, right, that's to come to mind. You can charge people by the hour, you can charge them by the project, you can charge them by a retainer as well. And we'll get to that later. But I would steer very clear of hourly for two reasons. One is it might take you an hour to consult someone how to improve their process, but it might have taken you X amount of years to learn that.
Right?
You went to school, you took some courses, you learned the hard way, whatever it is. And the classic example is, you know, a plumber comes to your home and you know, he or she fixes a leak, it takes them five minutes and they charge you like a thousand bucks. It's like, yeah, sure, the screw to fix this was a dollar. But you know, my knowledge is really what you're paying for. And be very careful with this because especially if you're currently a 9 to 5 employee, you might feel weird charging 100 bucks an hour. Because if you look at your salary like I only make like, you know, 50 bucks an hour. And I'm not saying only is like a bad number, but the thing is, when you're a professional service provider, in this case a consultant, you're not a full time employee, right? You go there, you solve problems, you go home, you're not there for 40 hours. So you can't charge 200, 300, 500, $600 an hour because the value that you're, you're doing in that period of time, there's an exponential impact to it, right? You're helping them going forward, whoever they're doing. So don't sell yourself short. And another thing with pricing is people often, they won't say buzz off. They'll say, we can't pay you that, but we can't pay you this. So if they really believe in you and they want your help, they're more likely to try to negotiate and you have to have a floor rate, meaning the lowest amount you would pay, as opposed to saying buzz off. But I wanted to tell a quick story within the story because it will reveal the challenges and opportunities that come when you get over self limiting beliefs in regards to how much you're worth. I was talking to this woman, Elizabeth, and she sent out a proposal to a client late at night, super late at night. She's a mother, she was tired and instead of saying she charges $50 an hour, she said she charges $500 an hour for her work. So the company gets back to her the next morning, they're like, oh gosh, you know, we really want to work with you, but we cannot pay you $500 an hour, but we can't pay you 300. So she 6x her revenue because of a typo and now that is her rate and it's going up. But what I'm saying is like, imagine how much revenue you're leaving on the table by having this self limiting belief that you're only worth 50 bucks an hour, when in fact the market will pay you $300 or more. So you want to be bold with this, right? Because you want to hear some no's. If you keep on hearing yes, something's wrong with your pricing. Way too low. And I had that mistake before because when I first started my business, everyone was saying yes to me and I'm like, oh, wow, I'm crushing it. I was cheating myself, right? So be bold with this. And if you already have a 9 to 5 right now, you can be even bolder because you're like, hey, dude, either way I'm good, right? You know, making money so you can say no. And I was testing this out. But the way that you come up with your pricing, if this is beneficial, is a few ways. One is just look at your competition because they might have their pricing. Write this down, please. Look at your competition like this. Google someone who does something similar. They might have their pricing on their website. And then from there you can get an idea of how much you can charge because you'll know what the market rate is for your services. Another is if you know someone who's ever paid for a similar service, you can ask them, hey, Nikki, how much did you pay when you hired that? You know, that email marketing expert to help your company, right? And the last one is just look around your network. If you have other people that are professional service providers, consultants, coaches, so and so forth, ask them how much they charge as well, right? So that's a good way to get around your pricing. But going back to the next step in the model, the T stands for training. And training is much more in depth than consulting because consulting is saying, hey, you know, you have to start using these kind of subject lines. Here's what I'm seeing in the industry, you know, here's some, you know, other things you should consider. But training is sitting down saying, okay, I'm going to teach you how to do this stuff. And that can be one on one. That can be through workshops, that can even be through. What I like to do is a combination of online, like prerecorded content and live content. So I have a program that helps you do kind of what I'm talking about right now. And when I had a group coaching program, which I don't have anymore, I had it asynchronous. So people would watch these training videos that I put together and I would be there once a week to answer their questions. So if you really want to crush this and not spend too much time with people, live, what you can do is just record some of your training and Then hand that to someone and say, okay, watch this video first and I'll be here Thursday to answer any questions, that's the best way to scale your time. But you're also still providing value, just getting some of the basic questions answered first in a recorded format like this. And that way your conversations are much more impactful. And this is even more important if you have a 9 to 5, because again, they're watching this asynchronously. That's a tough word to say. And then when they have real questions, you're there live for them. So it's less time going into it, right? So we talked about audits, we talked about consulting, we talked about training. The cool thing about training is this. And I learned this when I was consulting agencies here in New York City. So, like ad agencies, if you can find a company that needs a lot of individuals trained, so you're doing cohorts 10 at a time or they have high turnover. One yes from one of those companies can have you keep, can have you keep on coming back over and over again, every quarter, every new class, so and so forth. So my goal always is, whenever I get a yes from a company or partner, how can I increase the lifetime value of it? So again, if you can find an organization who needs your training, but they have a large staff or they have a high turnover for whatever reason, then that's great, because one yes is going to make you a lot of money. The next I in the model is implementation. So again, going back to this, this example of an email marketer helping them implement new tools, processes, whatever it may be, to improve their, their, their, their, their email content. So maybe right now they're on one email platform, you're going to help them source and implement another. And that might involve talking to their tech team, their creative team, cfo, whoever it is, but just really bringing in new tools and processes that will help them meet their goal. Now, this can be more time consuming, which is good for you, because there's a vetting period between one product or service versus another. But you're there as that trusted expert, that third party who's not selling this tool. You're helping them select it and then teaching their team again how to use it as well.
Right?
And the benefit of this is you can often form a relationship with this other company and they might put you on stages, podcasts, so and so forth, because you're almost like a brand ambassador for them at this point. That builds your profile.
Right?
The O in this whole model stands for ongoing retainers and an ongoing retainer is great because you're tasked with delivering services to this company. But there's no like project due every month. It's just them saying, hey, Terry, we have this new email campaign going out. Can we talk about the subject line, you know, can we talk about ways to improve this? What are you seeing in the industry? And this happens a lot with, with lawyers and accountants or CPAs. They're on a retainer. They're not necessarily doing something all the time, but if you have trouble, they're there for you to answer your questions and they already have a working knowledge of your business. So what I love to do in any situation, whether it's audits, consulting, training, whatever, is bake in an ongoing retainer to the contract as well. So I'll say, hey, look, I'm going to do this audit of your company. That's step one. Based on the results of the audit, I will train your company on how to do these new things that we came up with, right? Help you implement this stuff, train you how to do it, so and so forth. If you have any questions going forward, you can always reach out to me by us having this ongoing retainer. And let's pretend the first batch of services costs all $10,000 for a number. Your retainer might be $2,000 a month just to be available if they have questions. And if you can stack enough of those retainers, you have this recurring revenue that feels pretty good because you don't feel like you're hunting something all the time. And they know you, they know your schedule. And like I said before, if you do have a full time job, so you're doing this as a side hustle, they know your constraints, okay, I'm only available during these times. Or you might wait a little bit longer. So on the front end, for the first part of this, this, this model, just do your best to over deliver on expectations because you want to be a business partner, not a vendor, A vendor, they'll use you and they're like, peace out afterwards. But a business partner, you now become a trusted ally, right?
A thought partner.
And one way to do that is yes, over delivering, but also just thinking from their perspective, more like, hey, I know you hired me for this, but here's this other thing you should be aware of if you can do that, and that's a function more or less of second order thinking. And second order thinking is just looking at what happened and then thinking about the downstream implications from it, right? So, okay, they hired me for email marketing Cool. I know that. Well, clearly they need help growing their business and communicating with their audience.
Wow.
I found this new tool, this new service that helps you, like, spruce up your social media content. I'm just going to let make them aware of that, even though it has nothing to do with me. So they show that I'm a partner and so they see that I'm a partner and I'm thinking from their perspective. So if you could just do that. And again, it's called second order thinking. So jot that down too. You improve the quality of all your relationships because you're thinking beyond the problem, beyond the obvious, and putting in that extra effort, right? So do that. The last one, the N in the model is new opportunities. What's that mean? What's new? So you have to come up with it. It's you expanding the scope of your original agreement, your original arrangement. And I'll give you a really good example of that too. So some of you might know that I teach at a school called General assembly where they teach skills that today's workforce needs, whether it be coding, design, business, data science, stuff like that. I've been teaching there since 2015, so a while. And recently I said, you know what, I think it would be great if we had like another platform for us to express the message of General assembly through some kind of audio content or ongoing video series. And they said yes. So that's me finding new opportunities within this organization that I've worked with for years that didn't exist before, right? And as a result of that, I now have a deeper partnership. But that is a result of exponential thinking, right? Exponential mindset. So if you have a linear mindset, and we're separating this from a growth mindset right now, if we're looking for a linear gain, you might say, how can I improve my revenue from this company by 10%, 20, whatever, right? That's linear. Exponential is saying, how can I blow up this whole revenue model and create something new? And for me, that's what I think about. It's almost like, like you want to break the wheel, right? You're coggin the wheel, you know, it goes around. Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down, sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down, right? How do you just break the wheel, right? And create this new outcome, this new reality based on your, your value, you know, your creativity and how you can partner with people deeper. And maybe they weren't even thinking about it before, but it just makes so much sense. You're like look, we should do this, we should do that, whatever it may be. So in my case, it's creating more content, right? In your case, maybe it's you speaking on behalf of them at some kind of conference, maybe you have a monthly blog on their website, whatever it is. But if you can find those opportunities within the opportunity and leverage this exponential mindset, not every idea is going to land, but they'll see like, wow, this person's really thinking, you know, they really are trying to help us. And again, that helps you further entrench yourself as a business partner, not just a vendor. Right, so to recap here, then I'll grab questions. The first step is audits. And you have to have this down path because that's the baseline for everything you're going to do, right? Step one, step two, step three, step four, how do I do this? Next up, consulting. And the benefit of consulting is you don't really have to do much. You just kind of tell people what they should do. And consulting, we can also say coaching, but those are two different things because consulting is you more or less giving people the answers to their questions after assessing them, whereas coaching is you teaching them how to pull the answers out of themselves by the questions that you ask. However, in my opinion, most good consultants know when it's time to coach and most good coaches know when it's time to consult. So there is some overlap there in my experience. Right, Next up, training, saying, here's how you actually do this xyz in order to do your job better. After that implementation, how do you find the tools and resources to make this happen? Then ongoing retainers, how do you keep on getting paid month after month after month for providing valuable services? And then the N is new opportunities. And again, that's leveraging that exponential mindset in finding the opportunity within the opportunity to generate more revenue for you and provide more value for this business. So that's the model. And in my opinion, again, like I said before, it's a great way to democratize access to the entrepreneurship because if you just make like another thousand dollars a month, that can be life changing, right? You know, that's you going on vacation or not going on vacation, right? That's, you know, you ordering seamless or not. I mean, whatever you want to do, a thousand bucks, it's on you, right? But it's not that hard to make another thousand dollars a month is what I'm saying. And you can do so in your spare time. That said, it's going to involve some kind of sacrifice, right? And I think that's the problem that people have is because it requires some form of self discipline in time management. But the thing is, time management is actually pain management, in my opinion, because it's painful to be disciplined.
Right.
You know, you want to watch Netflix. I get it. There's some good shows on there. I watched Bad Vegan, that was really good. So if you want to watch something, watch that. But yeah, it's painful to be self disciplined and people want to be comfortable. Right. So I realize that. But if you want to avoid that pain. Sorry, if you want to achieve that goal more than you want to avoid that pain, you can generate more revenue as a side hustle. But the thing is, that's why we go back to the beginning. We're saying, well, what do you actually enjoy doing? Because then, yes, it's still work, but it won't feel like work. It's you expressing your zone of genius to an audience who appreciates it and rewards you for it. And it's something that you have more control over. Because when you're at a 9 to 5, it's like some things in your zone of genius, some things are not, but you don't have control of time when you get to use them. With this, you have the ultimate freedom, including saying who you want to work with, because even as the seller of your services, you should always be the buyer of the relationship. And if you don't want to work with someone for whatever reason, just say no. And that's something I learned a bit later in my career as an independent consultant, is you don't have to say yes to everyone who works with you.
Right.
If you want to watch Netflix, instead of talking to Kim, go talk to Kim. You know, like, just do your thing. Yeah. That is what I want to talk about today. And I want to grab some questions here. We got Ryan here. I used to work with Ryan in Buffalo company called Ingram Micro, where I was, I would say, okay, at my job. I was like, I was like in my zone of competence back then, but I was good at socializing. So Aaron Ryan was a good guy to know back then. But let me grab some questions, some feedback, like, does this work for you? Does it make sense? What are the questions? Can I answer? Do you feel empowered? Do you feel bored? There's all sorts of options here. But I just feel that strongly that with work and workplace being decoupled, like no time in history, you have so much more time to do this stuff if you want to.
Right.
Because hopefully, you know, you're not commuting as much, so you have more time to yourself. First of all, take care of your health, mental and physical. But if you want to do anything else on the side like this, you have the time because you have those moments between moments that before were taken up by some co worker asking you random questions or, you know, just like you. You have your nose down at your desk, but now you have that freedom to do so, and I think you should definitely take advantage of it. So my goal is to help people do so. So Ryan's chiming in here. Oh, you're a Great Lake. Oh, yeah. I should be a debt collector. When I was younger, and I. Ryan worked with me there, too. That was not my zone of genius either, because I was in debt. So I'm like a hypocrite, calling people, trying to tell them to pay their bills when my credit score was like a 500.
So that wasn't cool.
But that's enough.
All right.
I'm feeling that feeling like when you're making popcorn and it kind of slows down. I think the more people who know about your situation, the better. And you can judge your network for yourself, like, who do you trust with this information? Who do you not trust? So on and so forth. But the more people out there, I would say, the better. You had a question. Cool. So could you speak more to what you included a digital marketing audit? Yeah, first of all, I'll explain it, but Megan, just reach out to me or if anyone else wants to see the audit, I have a template that I have for this audit.
Oh.
Roger said that when you have your audit, create a template that you can share with people because then they'll see the outcome of what they can get. So you're going to have fake data like, how well are you doing on XYZ? But it's hard to sell a 5,000, $10,000 audit when it's just like words that you're delivering without them saying, oh, get more sleep.
Right.
Because during. During COVID it was very clear that teachers weren't getting as much sleep because, you know, they're in front of a blue screen all day. They have parents like me bugging them all night saying, how's my daughter doing? And like, math, even though she's in pre K. And so she made a program to help teachers get more sleep.
Right.
But then again, if you want to solve. Make more money, solve more expensive problems, so she then started delivering that solution to schools at a school level to go help all your teachers get more sleep. So now that thousand dollar product is now like a $20,000 product. So what's bigger than a school? A school district, right? So now she reaches out to school districts and says, I will teach all your teachers how to get more sleep so they can be more productive. Best version of themselves, better outcomes for kids. So the genius here is you can take the same approach and apply that to an organization. And that's what I call a profit multiplier. Right? So on my website you'll see what I'm talking about there. But the value of your knowledge is contextual. This example, the value to a teacher is a thousand dollars. The value to a district is $100,000. But it goes back to that same process that we talked about earlier, right? So I'd rather get a no from a teacher saying no thanks, sorry. From a district saying no thanks than a teacher.
Right?
If I'm going to lose, I'm going to lose on $100,000 deal. Not on a thousand dollar one. So just expand the scope of what you can do with this. And how do you get rid of that imposter syndrome? Right. How do you get the courage? The worst that's going to happen is they're going to say no or ignore you. No one's going to write back. Ha ha. If they do, they're a horrible person and they got their own problems, right? It has nothing to do with you. So I think just being bolder with things and just trying it and launching and seeing what happens and learning to see failure as data and even learning to see these approaches as experiments. Because the goal of an experiment is to learn. And so long as you learn from it, you didn't feel anything, right? You just, you find new ways of going forward. But that's one thing that held me back earlier in my career is like fear of rejection. It's like, okay, someone says no or they don't reply. It's like, all right, next, you know, it's not gonna, it's not gonna affect me. It doesn't affect my, my self esteem or anything.
Right.
It's just they weren't feeling it. It is what it is. But there's a question here from Michelle. I am currently unemployed and have lots of skills in many areas. I would like feedback from people I know on what my most valuable skills are. How do I start asking people what they consider my best work without coming out and saying, I'm thinking of changing careers? I would, I would probably say I think I'm changing careers. That's me. But if you don't want to do that, I would just say, hey, this guy talked about the zones of genius, competence, incompetence, so on and so forth. And I just want to do a self inventory. So what would you say are my zones of genius in and excellence? You can just say it that way. I'm doing a solid inventory of myself. That would be my approach. But I. I would say, Michelle, if it's possible to be more direct, just be more direct. Because if you do say it's because I want to change careers, they might say, well, here are your skills that I think are great and here's someone I know who can probably help you, or here's someone who probably knows your help. So again, early in my career like this, this whole thing's about me screwing up and figuring things out. I didn't reach out to people and say, I started this new business. Do you know someone who could use my help?
Right.
But I know if I did that earlier on, I would have launched a lot faster, a lot better, made money a lot quicker, and been less stressed out because at the time I had a newborn, my daughter Lena was just a few months. Few months old. And I was always worried, I was always concerned because her future was tied to the future of my business. And. And I had no clue what I was doing, even though I went to business school. Right. So I probably should have paid more attention in the business plan part. But. But yeah, I think the more people who know about your situation, the better. And you can judge your network for yourself. Like, who do you trust with this information? Who do you not trust? So and so forth. But the more people out there, I would say, the better. You had a question. Cool. So could you speak more to what you included a digital marketing audit? Yeah, first of all, I'll explain it, but Megan, just reach out to me or if anyone else wants to see the audit, I have a template that I have for this audit. Oh, Roger said that when you have your audit, create a template that you can share with people because then they'll see the outcome of what they can get. So you're going to have fake data like, how well are you doing on XYZ? But it's hard to sell a 5,000, $10,000 audit when it's just like words that you're delivering without them saying, oh, gosh, if we had this information for our company, we'd do so much better. So if you want to see my audit back when I was doing digital marketing, just message me, DM me or whatever, and I'll send it to you. But for all of you, you have to have an example of your work, even if you've never done it before, for a real person to say, here's what you can expect, right? Because what you'll do unintentionally is talk about your process. First I do this and I do that, then I do that. People don't care about process. They care about the outcome. So if you only talk about the process, it's like, okay, cool. Like, what's the outcome?
Right?
So. So do that. Yeah, everyone, if you want to see it, just DM me because I'm not gonna remember this. So what's the. What's it look like at the very top? I gave him a score. How well they're doing overall for their business in regards to their digital marketing in this case. But it can be anything, right? It can be compliance, can be dni, it can be psychological safety in your workplace, whatever you want to call it. So I'm like, you guys got a 70 out of 100. It was never like a 95 because they would have no reason to work with me again. You got a 70 out of 100. But then I would say it's based off these five categories, right? So the five categories for digital marketing. And I don't want to get too far in the weeds because I might lose people. One category might be email marketing, another might be organic social, then paid social, and then paid search, and then think of something else, right? And I would say, okay, well, here's how you're doing here. Here's a strength, here's a weakness, here's an area of opportunity, and here's your overall score. How do you get to 100? Do these three. These things. So that's pretty much it. But I'm glad you brought this up, because I see this happen so many times. Even with people that are doing this as their real job job, they don't have an example of success. And I don't mean testimonials. I mean just literally saying, here's what it looks like, here's your deliverable. Because I recently worked with this person, Tori Lazar, in regards to helping with my branding, getting a new brand kit, and she showed me exactly what I would get. It was someone else's information, but I was like, holy cow. If I had this information to present myself to brands, that would be amazing. And I had to beg her to. To work with me because she's now with another company called Norvi that I'm Partnering with. And she's amazing. But I was like, I got to talk to this person. Because after I saw that, I was like, I need this. So I'm like bugging, begging her, please take my money. You know, like, when can I send the. The payment or whatever? So that's the benefit of having an example.
Right.
Question is any advice on aligning the zone of genius to the zone of competency if they're entirely different? Um, I would say this. You know, if. If they're entirely different, maybe you. So let's say your zone of genius is I'll make this up.
Right.
Email marketing. Your zone of competence is, I'll say, like copywriting.
Right.
So those. Those can actually exist.
Right.
Maybe you don't. Maybe you outsource the copywriting part. The part that's in your zone of competence, you just outsourced because it would drain you and you wouldn't do it that well. And it's like, it feels like work.
Right?
So maybe you find someone on fiverr or you partner with someone so and so forth. But I normally recommend outsourcing things in your zone of competence or incompetence, at least down the road early on. Maybe you have to kind of suck it up a little bit. But if you're choosing your own schedule in the work that you're doing, you should be happy.
Right?
And I'm not like, walking around giggling all day all the time. There are things I do that feel like work, work, but overall I enjoy it and there's a purpose behind it. And I'll say this as well. This is one of the biggest myths I hear about about entrepreneurship. Oh, you should chase your passion. You should be passionate about passion, passion, passion. I strongly disagree because you might be passionate about Pokemon cards. Like, oh, man, I love Pokemon cards. You know what I'm going to do? Start selling those. And all of a sudden, you know, you're finding out about the cost of drop shipping. People are complaining they didn't get poke. Get good Pokemon cards, and now you hate them because it feels like work. So what I say is you should pursue purpose. What's the purpose of this work? Well, if I offer this email marketing service, I can make more money and then, you know, my kids can go to a better school or we can go on vacation or we can move or I wouldn't have to. I wouldn't worry so much about, you know, money, and I would go work out more, whatever it is. So go for purpose first. If you're passionate about it, cool. But you can explore your passions and your, and your free time. Right, so that's what I would say. So to reiterate again, stick with your zone of genius or excellence and then if you can outsource, outsource your zone of competency or incompetence, especially don't do it or don't offer it because there are some people who offer very specific things within their, their industry. Like maybe you, you're a photographer, you're like, I only do photos of flowers, making this up. Everyone else, sorry, you know, I can't help you. But for people who want flowers photographed, I'm the go to person. So don't be afraid to lose people. And that's another good story. When I, when I, again, when I first started doing this, I was offering help with Facebook ads and Google Ads, but then one day someone's like, oh, can you also help with Google Analytics? And I knew how to, so I said yes, but I was miserable.
Right?
I didn't like it. Cause it's kind of boring to me. No offense to anyone who likes it, but. So that's why I'm, I don't wanna say warning you, I'm cautioning you, which is a nice way of saying warning that maybe, you know, if you don't like these things, just find a way not to do it because it's gonna feel way too much like work. And Michelle's asking about the audit. So yeah, you need a rubric to score each category of your audit. So there's step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and back to the example. Let's say one, one thing is social media. How well are you doing on social media? Organic? You want to say you're doing like, you know, a one out of ten. Well, what are you looking for for that one out of ten? Is it how often they post on social media? Is it how often they engage with their followers? Is it, you know, are they doing a mix of videos? Do they have Instagram stories? Do they have highlights? You, you notice you're the expert in your, your zone. But yeah, you need to have a rubric because again, that, that competence or that clarity is the precursor to competence. And when someone says, hey, can you explain this stuff? You want to be able to. And if you can explain yourself, the best thing to do is admit it readily. And what I like to do is say, oh, I need to educate myself around that. Because it's like, oh, who's going to educate himself? Like I'm just literally saying I don't know, but it just sounds Better than that. Or I'll say, you know, I've reached the tip of my knowledge as it applies to this, but I'll do some research. And people are cool with you not knowing the answer, that what they're not cool with is you lying or trying to BS them, which is the same as lying.
Right?
So just get used to saying, I don't know. And I think that's one of the most confident things that you can do at times because you're saying, I don't know. But I don't feel less than for saying this because, you know, there's a lot of stuff I do know and this is not one of them. So, yeah, that's what I would do. All right, I'm gonna give a little countdown here to see if there's any more questions. But again, this has been really fun. And then next week we're going to do another one of these, but I'm going to bring on a guest who this woman, Cynthia Sandoval, who went from working in corporate to starting her own agency, where she's now doing extremely well. And I'm so proud of her because she actually just got engaged. She bought a new Lexus or something. And she's able to take care of her grandparents as well, who took care of her a lot when she was younger, so she can reward them later on in their years. And she's a great transformational story, but just applying a lot of what we talked about today. So looking forward to bringing her on and you can learn more from her as well. So thanks for everybody. It's fun chatting with you because I don't get out much, so this is me socializing, so I appreciate it. There's a question. I'll grab it, though. How do you know when to stop researching and planning and start doing or transitioning to consulting or coaching? So there's a few ways to answer this. How do you know when to stop planning? Well, first I would say you start with your intention, and your intention is not to rip anybody off. We can all align on that. First, we can move on to the next step, which is honesty. And that honesty is reaching out to someone, maybe it's a friend of the family or whatever it is, and saying, I want to start this new thing. Do you know someone who might need my help? And with that first person being radically honest, this is my first time doing this before and I just want to see if it works. And, you know, in exchange for your feedback, I'll give you a huge discount if you are Skilled in this. Or I won't even charge you if you've never done it before, because that way you can. You can learn on a job without the pressure of trying to pretend like you know what you're talking about. Right. So that's what I would say is, like, start with your intention and to be really honest. And I would also say if you can find three of these opportunities, three. Where you're working for free or at a discounted rate, and people are gonna tell you, never work for free. I'm like, hey, cool, don't. If that works great.
Right?
But. But everyone I know who's successful at one point or another works for free. So whenever I hear these absolutes, I'm like, you're just trying to, you know, be more polarizing on social media. And I get it. That's a tactic. But people are listening to you, and your words have power. So I think it's wrong when someone says, never work for free. Like, if I'm a landscaper and the rock's like, hey, Terry, if you come cut my yard, I'll take a picture and put on my Instagram. I'm not gonna say, well, this guy I saw online said, never work for free, so no rock. I'm gonna say, yeah, dude, I'm there. And can you sign this for me? Right. So back to the. The story. Yeah, I would do this for free. Like, I would try to find three people, because sometimes if people get stuff for free, they don't follow through.
Right.
So you have a better chance of one of those people actually staying on this path with you. So you learn how to, you know, get your process down, your communication down, so and so forth, and you get a testimonial on the other side, and then you feel more confidently going forward. So, again, Michelle, to answer your question, once you have a good process down that you think will work, that's easy to reach out to someone and say, like, hey, do you know someone who could use my help? And just be radically honest about the fact that you're brand new. Therefore, you don't have that imposter syndrome. Because you can't be an imposter if you're brand new and you admit it.
Right?
That's what I would do.
Cool.
All right, well, the third time I'm saying goodbye, but that was a really good question, so I'm glad it came up. But again, everyone, thanks for this, and I'll be around next week. But again, any questions, go ahead and message me. And then if you want that template again, that so that template that shows you how to how to do an audit, do that. And if you go to my website, there's also this course that teaches you how to get your clients as a professional service provider. So it's a free course. There's other stuff you can pay for. So look at that too. This is a free course. It should take you about an hour to get through. But we start by going through that zone of competence, genius, so on and so forth to develop your services. So, Michelle, I would definitely get it, go to my website, it's TerryRice Co, and you can grab that should take you about an hour or so to get through it, but it'll give you a really good foundation for how you present your services and how you get clients as well. So do check that out. But hopefully I'll see you next week. And thanks again.
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