Episode 15:Working With Experts
Another reader question: “It sounds like you both have expertise in the products you’re selling, but feel like any expertise you have in the business side is learned via trial and error. Is that so? If so, why not consult yourselves with a business expert?”
Summary
Nick and Kai answer a listener who wonders whether two coaches ever consult experts themselves. The answer is yes, but mostly through peer masterminds, domain specialists for specific projects, and qualified professionals rather than formal business coaches. They work through what separates an expert from a contractor, why every independent business demands trial and error, and use a $1,000/hour thought experiment to sharpen when delegation makes sense.
Highlights
- Nick’s threshold for hiring an expert: you should already regret not having them. His lawyer (35 years of experience) and accountant clear that bar; most contractors don’t require it.
- Kai defines an expert as someone who arrives with a plan, says ‘here’s what we’re going to do, steps one through four,’ and then monitors and revises. A contractor follows a process but lacks the practiced depth to operate at that level.
- Nick says mastery means you stop learning tactics and start refining. He hasn’t had to think hard about design principles in years, and that depth is why clients pay $15,000 for his research process.
- Nick’s question: assume your rate is $1,000/hour, what do you farm out? Kai adds that many consultants still apply $30/hour cost-cutting habits when billing $100 or $150, and it holds them back.
- Kai nearly coded a webinar landing page in HTML/CSS himself, then realized a $300/year tool (LeadPages) would save 10 hours. The return on delegation doesn’t have to be financial.
- Because every independent business is bespoke, trial and error is unavoidable. Nick: ‘There is no other way you can run a business if it’s not custom tailored to yourself.’
- Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers told Kai she no longer believes in best practices, only better practices. There are no absolutes, only things worth testing and adjusting from there.
Read the transcript
So, so, Nick, in your business, you’re a coach, you’re a consultant, you are an expert. But do you end up hiring experts yourself? How do you continue to educate yourself? Do you hire consultants?
I hire contractors for sure. We have an assistant. You and I both have assistants. We have somebody who produces this podcast episode for us. I’m not so good with sound design that I could even remotely begin considering doing this by myself. We have people that record transcripts of the podcast. I have an editor for my book that’s upcoming. We have a lot of things. But like as far as like hiring an actual capital E expert on a certain thing, it’s rare. It happens. My lawyer is an expert. My accountant is an expert. I’m hopefully going to be buying a house sometime soon, and my realtor and mortgage broker are they’re both experts, you know. And so there’s definitely I’m not averse to surrounding myself with experts, but I’m very picky about it. I recognize experts cost money, right? Like I don’t half ask my experts. So when I go with an expert, I make sure I’m doing it for a very clear reason that has to be obvious and probably missed opportunity already by my not having that expert. I should be regretting not having the expert before I get an expert. But why this person reached out and said, you have expertise in the products you’re selling, but feel like any expertise you have in the business side is learned via trial and error. Is that so? If so, why not consult yourselves with a business expert? So this came in as a customer not customer. Unless you bought an about page and you are our customer, in which case, buy our about page. And And then go back to the next one. And backdraft evidence on Kickstarter and buy all of Kai’s books, etc. Just give us money. There’s lots of it. Just keep giving us money. On the Internet. Anyway, so I think what the bigger question here is like kind of, you know, I run a coaching practice. Kai, you have a coaching practice. Do who coaches the coaches? Who polices the police? You know, and I wonder about this a lot. I do not have, I’m not paying anybody for a professional coach right now to directly answer your question. However, I spend preposterous quantities of my day talking about business with my peers and thinking about business and Writing about business, and you know, even though I’m not necessarily paying a person to get on a call and feel accountable to them or anything like that, I Learn a lot as a mentor for W your freelancing clients. I co-run a mastermind group with Kai. I sit in several different Slack rooms where just people talk about their struggles all day. And honestly, man, that’s the closest thing to coworkers that I’m probably going to get. I mean, I have my assistant. She’s wonderful. I’m not trying to devalue her as a coworker, but there’s a different relationship than, like, you know, when I’m around with other designers, other experts. Right. So, um, I think that is that’s where I fill that gap. We both to answer probably the more interesting aspect of the question Yes, we do learn by trial and error. I think more importantly, you have to realize that when you’re starting an independent business, everything about it is bespoke. I can rip off other people’s strategies, but I still have to custom tailor them to what I’m doing. And there’s nothing that I do that’s not at least run through the Nick D filter. that fits what draft is and how it wants to run. And if likewise, if I share my processes, other people are like, thank you for sharing the processes. Now I’m going to go and fit them into the Kai Davis mold or the Philip Morgan Holt mold or the Amy Hoy mold or whomever, you know? And so it’s you definitely have a situation where not only are you feeling stuff out from trial and error, but like, You are blazing a new path, no matter what you’re doing. And it’s never going to Be something that’s just like, oh, okay, I’ll just follow the Ramit Seti playbook. I’ll like take his drip campaigns and his mailing list and do these things, and then I’ll have that. No, you can’t do that because you’re running a different business. You’re hopefully serving different things. You’re not ripping off what the man is offering, you know? Like, so it’s got to be vastly different just by nature of the fact that you’re a cool, unique snowflake for once. So, yeah, that’s kind of my thoughts around all that. I just kind of fire hosed that, but yeah.
I guess one question I wanted to ask is: where do we draw the line between expert and contractor? Like, what What makes that difference? Like you said, we hired a team to do the production on this episode. You have a copy editor for draft evidence. I just hired a proofreader and a copy editor for my blog and articles I write. Where’s the line between somebody being an expert that we’re consulting with or a contractor we’re hiring? What makes that distinction?
Yeah, what’s the distinction between like an expert and a novice? Right. Like, I don’t we’re making kind of a false distinction here, right? Like I said, you know, maybe my lawyer and my assistant, but like First off, my lawyer got a JD, you know, like, and my lawyer has 35 years of experience doing this. And my assistant is, I believe, recently out of college, and, you know. did not go to assistant school, you know? And so there’s I mean, Kai, I’m willing to call you an expert on at least a few things in life. How did you get to be an expert?
I think it thinking this through, I think it’s partly like what Jay Abraham talks about in his video, Strategy of Preeminence, Becoming That Trusted Advisor to Your client. And it’s when you’ve become that trusted advisor that you are an expert, and you get to that trusted advisor status by being able to show up and say, Hey, I got this. I understand the situation. I understand the problems. I have a plan for us to move forward. Even if you aren’t 100% confident in the plan, you’re at least showing up and saying, no, it’s okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do one, two, three, and four. And when we finish those, we’re going to see how it performed and then revise our strategy. I think an expert is somebody who comes in with a system based on knowledge that they’ve practiced before. And a contractor is somebody who comes in, yeah, with a standard operating procedure, but without that depth of knowledge from practicing that skill year in and year out. That lets them become an expert or lets them become a trusted advisor.
You know what I’m hearing in that? It’s a willingness to admit that you’re wrong. And a willingness to course correct, right? Like, you know, with my productized consulting services, I’m wrong all the time. If you’ve listened to Any more than five minutes of any episode of Make Money Online, you know that I’m willing to call myself wrong, apologize, and figure out what else is going on. I also, when I talk to people, I talk about hunches. I talk about thoughts that I have about it. And it’s not like I’m riding on instinct and I don’t have a game plan, but I’m just. Like, I know what the trade wins are, and I’m getting a feel for it. And I’m figuring out how to account for all of that in a way that works out and brings results to your business. That does not mean I’m incompetent. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. I’m probably so competent that I don’t even need to think about the tactics or techniques anymore. I can’t tell you. I’ve talked about this a lot on my annual reports and stuff, but like, I can’t remember the last time that I really Stepped back and was like, huh, about design stuff. Like, I just maybe the watch when that came out. When the Apple Watch came out, I started thinking, like, oh, that screen is real small. How are they going to do the interaction model for this? Why aren’t they doing multi-touch? Why do they have forced touch on it? Why if not, why don’t they have force touch on it? And I just thought like those things. And it was maybe like a half-hour conversation. And then I kind of moved on. And I just started doing design. Like, I haven’t. I’m sure this is going to horrify all the designers out there, especially all the neophyte designers out there. But like, I’m not learning a whole lot anymore. I’m just refining what I do know, and I’m learning like. Like more nuances of things. Like, I’ve known how to do an interview for eight years, but I and I can always do a good interview, but I’m figuring out the contours of interviewing, and then I figure out how to do a great interview. I haven’t done anything less than a great interview in a year. And that’s why people spend $15,000 on research process with me. So yeah, I mean, I’m just kind of like polishing the diamond, as it were, you know? Like, it’s it feels weird to say that because I don’t know. Like at some point, you just come really, really good at it. And I’m happy to throw that away and become a novice again at some point. I’m probably going to have to do that. when more sophisticated prototyping techniques come together and I’m able to write about it. But that’s really about it. That’s it.
Hearing you say that, I think that working with an expert, you’re working with somebody who is willing to go deep on a system or a strategy or a procedure and really, really, really learn the ins and outs. Of it. Like your lawyer, if you show up at your lawyer’s office and you’re like, hey, I got a question about incorporating da-da-da-da-da thing, your lawyer will be like, oh, yeah, okay, I understand that. This is what you need to do. You’re buying a house, da-da-da. This is what you need to do. A contractor, I’d say, has how do I want to say it? Has a system and has a process that they’re following, but they don’t have the depth of knowledge that an expert does, the experience that an expert does in fulfilling that. And so. They aren’t able to think about it on the same higher level or meta level. Like you said, you aren’t thinking about learning new design principles as much as you’re thinking about refining what you already know and getting better at What you’re able to do. Practicing, you aren’t to use a gym metaphor, you aren’t learning a new lift. You’re refining your technique on the lifts you already know. You’re getting better at the things you already know. I think you’re right.
I think there’s a certain like craft versus practice thing that you see splitting out in that situation. I think there’s You know, it’s like when I hire a let’s say I hire an editor. There’s kind of I hired Caitlin as an editor for draft evidence that you should be backing on Kickstarter right now. I think it’s the last week of it, actually. It probably expires on Wednesday. So pause this podcast and throw all your money at me. But if Caitlin is there to do editing, and I’m very handsome. I’m like, edit the thing. And I’m pressing the edit button, and then it will be done, and it will be edited. But there’s another kind of aspect to it that I’m like, look at the manuscript and tell me what’s missing from it. And that is highly strategic. And I got back this like five-page email from Caitlin the other day that was like: here’s everything that’s missing. Here are a few things you need to watch out for. Here’s some stuff for your to-do list that you need to do to polish up the manuscript. All of it was super, super, super, super valuable. Like, that’s five supers for the record. She is an amazing editor and a wonderful person to work with, and you should hire her. But it’s also. She’s doing both, right? She’s doing both the expertise thing. You have to learn the practice of it first. Like, it’s not like I can come in not knowing anything about typography and then come in and expect to do interaction design projects. Edit a book, pre-flight an InDesign document. I should know where a comma goes relative to a quotation mark and when to use a quotation mark versus italics as a designer. But then It’s knowing how to follow the rules versus knowing when to break the rules. That’s really what that is to me, I feel.
Yeah, I just was thinking about the personal trainer I see and sort of like that distinction between novice and expert. And I’ve been seeing this personal trainer for six months and The level of insight, similar to your copy editor, proofreader, the level of insight he has, like we’re working on hanging cleans and I was trying to hit a new personal record in the gym, and I tried and I failed. And I’m like, what did I do wrong? And he lists off six things he saw on a single attempt on the lift. He’s like, you were pulling it too far forward. You didn’t have your butt stuck up and out. You weren’t able to stick it. You weren’t exploding enough fast enough. And your back was weak. So, based on that, like, and this was 30 seconds of me attempting to lift something that weighs 175 pounds and then dropping it. He was able to identify these exact specific problems and then say, based on this, this is our workout plan for the next week to fill those holes, to solve these problems that I see in your form and your textbook.
When we were putting together the independent consulting manual, Jeremy flew in and came over to our place. And he was in my living room and we were just talking. And I came in actually late. Like Kai and Jeremy were already there and I showed up late. And I sit down and immediately I’m just like, okay, here are some things that can be improved on this document. Here are some things you might want to edit in your the software that you’ve put together to build this called Remark. And I just went through it. I was like, do this, do this, do this. I didn’t think. I didn’t even, it was all just like. I’ve done this so many times before that I just develop a language around it. And I’m not trying to rip your work apart or make you feel terrible or anything like that. This is part of critique. And I just. Went through it and I did it, and it’s just it would I felt as comfortable doing that as I would going out with an old friend and catching up. Because it’s water to me. It’s around me all the time. It’s just there. I know it. I’ve cultivated an awareness for it. I think that there’s something about expertise that suffuses your perspective on the rest of the way you see the world, for lack of a better term. And I know that sounds very highfalutin, but like I can barely watch movies anymore because they all fuck up the fonts in them. Like you have you have a 1950s movie using typefaces from 1985 Like that happens all the time. And I’m just looking at it like, why you could have done 15 minutes of research on this? Like, or they have the wrong technology in their office or something like that. Mad Men was shockingly period appropriate. But I’ve seen other movies that come out of the 60s that aren’t, you know. Selma wasn’t Selma fucked up a lot. But yeah.
When we talk about expertise, and I want to jump to the second part of the listener’s question in a second, but when you talk about expertise, it reminds me of a story that Merlin Mann tells about the butcher. And the butcher’s asked what trick he uses to know that he picked up exactly a pound of meat when he’s slicing the meat on the meat cutter. And the butcher responds, be a butcher for 20 years. And you just know at that point, the butcher has that intuitive skill, just like you’re able to look at the document and say, well, hey, these are the 15 things you need to change. You just know that on such a level because you’ve been practicing it for so long that it’s like second nature to you. You’re able to look at it and say, oh, these are the issues. This is what you need to fix. You’ve done it for so long, you know how to do it. You’ve been looking at it. It’s a small independent burger restaurant.
About a mile north of my house, called Kumas Corner. And I’ve gotten a few times where I’ve gotten a seat like right next to the kitchen, and I can watch them cook. And they figure out doneness just by pinching the burger. They’re not sticking a thermopen in it. They’re not timing it. They’re not doing anything. They’re pinching the burger and getting a feel for it. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about, Kai. You know, this guy had to be the sous chef at Kuma’s Corner for however long, probably a decade or two. And then do that. And it’s, you know, that’s something that you just need practice for. But you can be a very good craftsperson and make something to a T. But that’s still not the strategy. I don’t think the Sioux of Kumas is Thinking at a high level about the strategy of burger creation. Maybe he is. Maybe that’s why the burgers there are so good. But most of the time, he’s just banging out burgers because there’s a four and a half hour wait for a table on a Friday night. He’s not thinking about. I wouldn’t be thinking with you. Dear listener, be thinking about anything?
No, I think you’re absolutely right. You just you practice the skill long enough and then you just do it. I mean, I could think of I mean, I’m just gonna talk about magic for a second, but I can think about times when playing magic where you see the line of play, and the line of play is just so crystal clear to you because you’ve played long enough that you Just intuitively know, like, okay, this is what I need to do. I do this, they’ll do that, I’ll do this, and great, I’ll be able to get in for damage or win the game, or I’ll do this, and they’ll make this misplay. And you get there just by Practicing it, by getting good at it, by, I mean, to reiterate the thing we seem to say on every episode, by putting in the work, and you become the expert by putting in the work. But I wanted to jump to the second part of the question. Why don’t we consult ourselves with business experts to hit that next level in our business?
Why haven’t I paid for coaching? Great question. I don’t know. I don’t know. I think the main reason is that I’m satisfied with the amount of coaching that I get informally from my mastermind group. My colleagues and from the rest of the industry. I think about business and talk about it enough, and I’m not really hurting for an additional coach. I feel like Frankly, I feel like people like you, Kai, and many of the other people in our mastermind, they’re. They’re guiding me in a lot of ways. And I don’t necessarily need somebody to keep me accountable because I would feel horrible if I disappointed Kurt Elster ever, you know? He’s another one in the group. And, you know, making them feel proud. Like, I’m honored to make my friends and my colleagues feel proud of what I’m doing. Most of the time, they’re just confused and disappointed, but so am I. Right.
In my case, there are a few times where I do hire other experts, specifically when it’s a project where I don’t have And this relates more to client work than my development as a business owner. But I’ll hire an expert when it’s an area that I don’t have a deep knowledge of, that I don’t necessarily want to cultivate a deep knowledge of. and would rather bring in a third party to advise on this. I recently worked on a project with two colleagues of ours, Travis and Michael from MemberUp. because they’re the experts at membership sites. And I had a client with a membership site where we needed to do some work. And I didn’t want to do the heavy lifting myself. It was so much easier to be like, hey, you guys are like, you have literally written the book on improving membership sites. Great, we would love to hire you to help us improve our membership site. Thank you so much. Same thing with a call I recently had with Naomi of Gravity Plus, who consults on Gravity Forms. Same thing with Moishka Marsh with Super Spicy Media. I’ve worked with all of these people because They have such a domain-specific knowledge that it’s worth me investing in their expertise. So I don’t have to go out and learn it myself. So I’ve worked with coaches before. I think one type of expertise that we both avail ourselves of that we didn’t Touch on before is therapists or psychologists that we work with. Yep.
Yeah.
But that’s getting real, man. But yeah, finding these people, I think as a business owner, I seek out experts who Understand aspects of the business that I don’t understand well myself, but so I could begin to better understand it. And avail myself of their knowledge. If they’ve spent a thousand hours learning this thing, there’s no way I could match that by reading an e-book. Like, I’d much rather spend a couple hundred dollars and be like, great, let’s have an hour call. Wonderful, you answered all of my questions. Thank you so much, and that’s a huge benefit. So, I work with experts in that capacity just because. It’s easier and it’s better leveraged than doing it myself. Similarly, I’ve worked with specific coaches, life coaches, and business coaches in the past. And they’ve provided specific actionable advice for me. I’m just not at a point in my life where that’s something I seek out and need, though I do offer coaching services for freelancers and consultants who are looking for an outsider, an outsider’s opinion on how to. Grow their business. So I think there’s a cadence to it. It goes back and forth. There’s times when I seek it out, and there’s times when it’s not something I necessarily need.
I don’t know. I think it’s a matter of identifying your weaknesses, right? Like, and/or even recognizing ways that you can work more efficiently. Some of that involves contractors. Sometimes it involves experts. Sometimes I recognize it requires like a qualified professional. Like I’m not negotiating my house purchase by myself because I’m not a real estate lawyer. I think even if I were a lawyer and I were doing something like patent law, I would still hire a different lawyer because they have expertise in a different subject area. Yeah.
Oh, gosh. Yeah. My dad’s an attorney, and so often I’ll talk with him about a project, and he’ll be like, oh, yeah, like I hired a lawyer to consult with me on this because I don’t understand the specifics of AV users.
I know how to operate a letter press. I know how to do everything inside of a letter press shop, photo set, make my own business cards, do everything I need. But I also recognize I don’t have the time for that. So I go to Eagle Printing around the corner in Avondale and I ask them to do it. And I’m able to communicate with them very effectively. Do this stock, do this amount of bite, do this amount of pantone shade, do this, this, this, and make this many copies of it, and I’ll be by to pick it up on this date. And they’re like Great, that’ll be X dollars. I’m like, great. And I’ve just pressed the button on a printer. Like, I could go through the letterpress shop and get a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction from doing that, but then it would take a week. No! No, let somebody else do it. I’m it’s not in my pay grade anymore, man.
Yeah, yeah. Now, and I think that’s something that’s important to realize as consultants or as listeners as you grow your business. There are points where It makes more sense for you to do it yourself than spending money, but there’s also a level up you experience where you realize, oh, it makes more sense for me to pay money for this than to do it myself. A great example is: I was setting up a landing page for a webinar. And I was like, okay, I’ve got it wireframed. I’ll code it up in HTML. I really hate doing design, but okay, this will take a couple hours. Then I was like, whoa, wait. There’s a thing called lead pages. Oh, for $300 a year I could have a drag and drop lead page builder for a webinar registration page. Done on that one project alone. Just by, you know, drawing on the expertise and knowledge of this company, I was able to save myself so much time and accomplish a project objective and not have to mess around with HTML and CSS and try to get it working. And just know it was done. And like, it’s that transition point of saying, oh, well, there’s a cost here, but the return might not be financial. It might be by spending $300, I’m able to save myself 10 hours of time. Hey, if you’re earning $40 or $50 an hour and you could afford the upfront investment, is that worth it? It’s not a strict yes or no answer, but. I think it’s a good question to be asking as you proceed forward in your business. Can I spend money to reclaim my time? Because you do only have 24 hours in the day. If you spend four of that working on a project that you could have spent 200 bucks to turn into a 30-minute project. Well, is that a positive trade-off that you need to make? Similarly, with working with anything.
Assume your hourly rate is $1,000 an hour. What do you farm out?
What’s beneath our family? Oh my gosh, that is, I think, the best question I’ve been asked this year. And I think that puts everything in context. And I think that’s an exercise every single listener should do. If you are earning $1,000 an hour, what things are you doing right now that you would no longer do?
What’s the shape of your business when you’ve leveled up to the point where you are making $1,000 an hour? What does it look like? I’m not making $1,000 an hour, just to be abundantly clear. So I wouldn’t mind hate you know, I wouldn’t mind making $1,000 an hour. I wouldn’t hate that idea. However, I’m not going to get there if I continue structuring my business and my logistics of my daily routine in the same way as I’m doing right now.
Right. Or the same way as if you were making $50 an hour or $30 an hour. I have colleagues and friends who still do the same cost-cutting measures. As if they were making 30 an hour when they’re making 100 or 150 an hour. And I think it holds you back at a point where you’re What’s the phrase? Pen wise, pound foolish?
And it’s not, and oh, because I like doing it. No, no. $1,000 an hour. You look at that. Well, I love vacuuming my house. Yeah, but you just wasted $800 vacuuming your house, man.
Yeah, yeah, there’s an example I brought up before. My dad, an attorney, super intelligent guy. I love him dearly, but he loves building his own computers. And every single time he decides to upgrade, It in the past has turned into like a rude 10-day-long project where client work is suddenly pushed to the side because the computer no longer works. And I’m like, dad. Dad, you make wonderful money. Just buy something off the shelf, pay somebody to do this for you. And in his case, it’s like, oh, I really love doing this. It’s more entertainment than not. But there’s that fine balance there. Like, yeah, you might enjoy doing it, but Is there something you’d enjoy doing more if you didn’t have to do this? Like, there’s a whole hierarchy there that I think is personalized on a really deep level.
I’m actually going to rep for your dad there for a brief moment because I wanted to go a little bit more nuanced, and you just gave me a good setup for it. If it’s a hobby for yourself, it can be as esoteric or weird as humanly possible. If you believe literally cleaning your kitchen and vacuuming your house is a great hobby and it gives You have a sense of tremendous personal satisfaction, do it. Just don’t do it during business hours and set the boundary around it. If you really like building a computer, Lord knows I did from the ages of eight to 20. Um, build computers. Mozeltov, have all the computers you want. But also, like, recognize that if you’re You know, taking a computer and using it for a highly load-bearing operation like running a business and it fucks up, and it’s not Steve Jobs’s fault. Like, you’re You’re in a bad position from a business standpoint. Again, $1,000 an hour. What’s the opportunity cost of your computer breaking at 2 p. m. while you’re in the middle of an email thread? Now you got to tap that negotiation out on an iPhone. I would not put myself in that scenario, man. I have a basically my laptop acts as a backup computer for myself, and I own a Mac Mini. Like, it’s not even a real built computer. But like, you know, I I’m not going to go and judge anybody for wanting to do mundane quotidian tasks as uh for their routine. I built my bike myself and maintain it myself. And yes, I could probably hire someone to fill my tires for me and clean my chain, but like I’m not doing that. You know, I just like maintaining my bike. I spent three hours getting my hands dirty swapping the brake pads the other day, and it was amazing. I like cooking. I don’t have a chef. Can you imagine? Kai, you’ve been over my house enough times. I’ve cooked meals for you before. Could you imagine me having a personal chef? I could not.
I could not. Oh, gosh. Right. Blood everywhere. They are blood. So there’s one other point of the listener’s question that I want to tackle before we end this episode. In the middle of the question, the listener said, it feels like any expertise you have on the business side is learned via trial and error. Is that so? And my immediate answer is like, yes, because that’s really the only way to know. Like, we could read every single business book out there. We could take every single course out there. But what works for you, or what works for Nick, or what works for Amy or Brennan or Michael or Travis or anybody out there might not work for our business because every single person’s business Is targeting a slightly different target market and built in a slightly different way. And the systems that work for me might not work right for you. So there is a trial and error component where we could say These are better practices. Great. I’m going to apply these better practices to my business and monitor some metric to know if it’s succeeding or not. If it is succeeding, wonderful. Success. If it is not succeeding, great. We’re monitoring this metric. What most influences this metric? What can we test next? I have an outreach campaign I’m working on with a client where We monitor a number of different metrics: email response rate, whether the person is interested in working on the project together. And every single metric is just like sky high. But none of the people we’re contacting are interested in the product we’re pitching. And so we’re, I mean, it’s really a trial and error process. We took the better practices I’ve developed over the last two years doing outreach. We applied them here. We’re seeing great results. We’re tracking different metrics. And we figured out the one point where it’s failing. And because we’re adopting this trial and error mindset, we’re able to say, okay, we tested this, we figured out the weak point. This is what we need to improve. And once we improve it, great, let’s see whether that, whether that hypothesis is correct.
Yeah. We danced around this earlier, but I’m going to stab it dead right now. You know, because your business process is bespoke to yourself, and there is no other way. Period. There’s no other way you can run a business if it’s not custom tailored to yourself and your needs. Yes, it’s absolutely via trial and error because there’s no one else doing what you’re doing. You can learn as much as you can about the rest of your industry, and it’ll probably help inform your perspective, but it’s not the actual thing. The actual thing is done by trial and error. You try on a new positioning statement. You launch a new offering. Is it not working? You retool the offering. You do something. And there’s no other way towards that promised land. I’ve never found it. I don’t think you’re going to find it.
Oh gosh, no. There’s a wonderful blog post by Amy Hoy where she talks about what if your product launch fails, and she breaks down I’ll try to find it for the show notes. She breaks down how she did a launch and nobody bought anything. And she was like, oh, I see the issues. I see the problems. I see how I did not do the right things here. And so she launched again, and nobody noticed, and nobody complained. And she sold out on the second launch because she adopted that same mindset of trial and error. She knew her business well enough to know what the problems could be. And how to go back, fix those problems, and have a successful launch the second time.
I mean, can you imagine if Amy had like looked at that unsuccessful launch and just torched it? And walked away. Don’t be that.
Right. Right. Yeah, failure, or rather, not hitting your goal you initially set. Doesn’t mean burn it to the ground. It means, okay, what can I learn here? One thing a group of friends and I used to do in college on projects was talk, we always used to have a retrospective when we finished a project, and we talked about pluses and deltas. Pluses were things that went well. These are things we want to do again. These are things we want to make standard in these types of projects. Deltas were things that didn’t go as we expected. That we need to change. And instead of thinking it as like this went well and this sucked, it was this went well and this is something we need to change for the future.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s exactly what a design critique looks like, too, right? It’s not. You screwed up. It’s this should be changed to fulfill this goal. Yes. And you’re working for the design. You’re not working for the other person. You’re not working for anybody’s ego. You’re. Serving a third party that’s in the room and that doesn’t necessarily speak out loud, but it’s there, right? And there’s life to it.
So, yeah, that I agree. So, I guess, yeah, why don’t we work with experts? I guess, like, We do. The short answer is we do. It might not be working with a business coach, but it’s working with people who Understand something better than we do and drawing on their expertise and figuring out where we can delegate a process or a procedure. Like Podcast Motor does the editing for these podcasts, and I love them so much. I get to see Craig, the founder of Podcast Motor at Microcomm Next week, and I’m going to hug him for 10 minutes straight. It’s going to be uncomfortable. And, like, his expertise as a consultant here, as a contractor here, is what lets us produce this episode and not. Fuck around in GarageBand, or I don’t even know what tool to use to make this sound good. But it’s his expertise that lets something like this happen. So it might not be we’ve hired a Alan Weiss-ASC business coach to tell us how to hit the next level. But it’s we’re reading and we’re talking with peers and we’re hiring people who have knowledge one or two levels above us. to teach us what we could test. And then it is that trial and error process. Somebody says, hey, try A to get more podcast reviews. We try A. Hey, it’s a success. Woohoo! Or, oh, it’s not a success. Okay, let’s try B, let’s try C, let’s try D, and let’s iterate down a l List of potential ideas defined. What works for our business in our podcast And what might work for somebody else’s business. I had an interview with Joanna Webby, I’m butchering her last name, I’m so sorry, of copy hackers a couple weeks ago. And we were talking about better best practices, and she said, well, I no longer believe in best practices. I think there’s only better practices. There’s concepts and there’s better things to test. And there’s no absolutes. Like, you’re never going to know, like, oh, 100% of the time, this type of button will beat that type of button. All you could do is say, like, well, this is a better practice. Let’s test it. Let’s see if it works. And if it does, wonderful. If it doesn’t, okay. On to the next thing.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly it. Like, identify the weaknesses, figure out the deficiencies, figure out what’s going to allow you to grow and your business to grow in a way that you think is reasonable, and then do that. That’s it. It took us 36 minutes to get to that, but I think we’re done now.
In today's episode we discuss:
- Draft: Evidence, nickd's amazing project on Kickstarter.
- nickd's Coaching Practice
- Kai's Coaching Practice
- Double Your Freelancing Clients
- Jeremy Green of Remarq.io, a fabulous tool to turn your text into beautiful documents, content upgrades, books, and client reports.
- Kuma's Corner, please mail burgers to Kai Davis, PO Box 7631, Springfield, OR, 97475, USA. Thank you.
- Sleep, Kuma's Corner's Burger of the Month for November.
- MemberUp, a wonderful consultancy focusing on growing your membership site's revenue.
- Amy Hoy of 30x500