Secrets to Finding Higher Value Clients While Working Less – in Just 7 Minutes with Matt Inglot

Related Links and Resources:

If you go to www.freelancetransformation.com/fbs it will take you to a little guide that you can use to help you identify those ideal clients and problems that you solve for them in a bit of a more structured way. So, when you are planning to take that day off and planning to do this, grab that and use that as a starting point to help you work through that.

Summary:

Matt Inglot is the owner of Tilted Pixel, a digital marketing agency that helps membership site owners to grow their websites. Matt has run Tilted Pixel for over 15 years and transformed the business several times to build something that allowed him to live the life he loves and to find the clients that he loves working for. He is also the founder of FreelanceTransformation.com where you can get lots of advice on building a better client-based business including over 170 interviews with successfully agency owners and freelancers.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

1:38 Matt’s ideal Client: As my agency, we focus on membership site owners; specifically, membership site owners that are making at least half a million dollars a year from their business already and they're trying to grow it. And that's the kind of laser-focused that we have after a lot of ___ ( I cannot decrypt what he said). And through having that agency for 15 years, I found that as a second business, I now also help coach other consultants, agencies, and so on on finding ideal clients and growing their sales.

2:24 Problem Matt helps solve: They're trying to find more clients and they're trying to find better clients. And often times, they just get stuck in this terrible position where they simultaneously feel overwork and yet somehow, they're not making enough money. And if run a client-based business and either you can relate to this or you can relate to this at some point in your business journey. And that's because frankly, they're finding the wrong clients, they're not finding the high-valued clients that are actually going to help them grow their business. Meaning, they're going to be able to pay them enough, and they're going to be able to work with them long enough that they're not stuck in a position where they're just trying to get like a hundred clients a year in order to make this thing work.

3:39 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Matt: If you're a solopreneur looking for your own clients, then you're overworked and trying to simultaneously do sales and do client work, and the next thing you know it's 9pm and you're still working. And you mentioned something 'average client value', that's probably a really big symptom. If you're looking at the average size of your client and it's just too small. And then you start doing the math; "if I have a 5,000-dollar client, and I need to make a 100K a year" well then, you need quite a bit of clients, I think 20 clients in order to get that 100K. Not assuming that 100K is profit and everything's perfect. So, imagine all the work you have to do to attract 20 clients. And of course, if it's a 2,000-dollar client, then it's even worse. I say those are the key symptoms. And with membership owners, that's a whole other conversation.

5:06 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Matt and his solution: They try to serve everybody; that will be a big one. And they get it into their head that the way to success is to work harder, spend more time doing sales calls or whatever sales calls really is because if you're a solopreneur, you're probably not picking up the phone and dialing numbers and things like that, there's better ways to get clients. But they think that they have to work harder. And they never kind of stop, step back and say "who is it that I'm actually serving and what is the key problem that I'm trying to solve them?" Is that problem a really valuable problem that's really going to make them say "hey, I am willing to invest lots and lots of money in solving that problem". Usually, it's an issue where they haven't identified that problem in the first place or they're targeting clients that they don't really need to solve that problem or can't afford to solve that problem. If you start fixing those things, if you start looking "Ok, where are my skills most valuable? What can I solve? What business problems where money is tied to them that I can solve?". And then what types of clients are half the big box to solve those problems, then can very quickly reposition your business. That's what let us do membership sites owners for my agency is that we just realized "hey, we're very good at that particular business to help people grow 7-figure membership site even from scratch, so we must know what we're doing". These people, their business is entirely online-based that means they're probably willing to spend a lot of money making this asset grow because that's their business versus let's say we built websites for construction companies. Construction companies needs a website but that's not a major part of their sales funnel.

7:22 Matt’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): What saved me and my business back when 2011 when everything was falling around my ears it's because I was making those same mistakes. I finally just stepped back, and try to answer those questions that we just talked about. "Where can I deliver value? Where can I find those great clients?" actually spend a day just doing that. Then start shifting your business towards targeting them, you can start saying that's whom you're targeting now and start building from there. It's amazing what happens when you put that laser-focus. 

8:14 Matt’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): If you go to freelancetransformation.com/fbs it will take you to a little guide that you can use to help you identify those ideal clients and problems that you solve for them in a bit of a more structured way. So, when you are planning to take that day off and planning to do this, grab that and use that as a starting point to help you work through that.

8:55 What will you do next after you take that day, after you identify those clients, what is the next step that you take? The very simple thing that you can start doing is just talking to people and telling them what you do. And ideally, start identifying people in your network who are connected to the type of businesses that you are targeting or even run the types of businesses that you're targeting. And just set up coffee meetings. Don't approach it from "hey, I want to talk to you I want to sell you stuff". You just changed your positioning or you're thinking about changing your positioning, just try to have a conversation with them. Forget about trying to close a sale, and start talking about the problems that they have. And start trying to see if one: what you think their problems are is in fact, what they are. And start getting their feedback, start trying to understand if you're on the right path right now. And the beautiful thing about these conversations is, either you walk away with information, "hey, you are not on the right track" or you start talking about their problem and suddenly their interests has peak up and they are like "ok yes, please solve this for me!" in which case, even though this was never going to be a sales meeting and then BOOM, you walked away with a client. And this has happened to me with my students over and over again. So, I know it works. It doesn't require building a website, doesn’t require printing new business cards, you just have conversations.