Do Clients See You as Just 'The Talent'?

Hello and welcome to another episode of Freelance 2 Founder where we help you start freelancing, grow your agency, and live the work life you've always wanted. You can send in your questions at Freelance2Founder.com/ask. I'm Preston, I started freelancing in college, from there I've built, grown, or sold multiple successful businesses, and together with my guest co-hosts, I'm ready to help you do the same if you're ready to grow your service based business. Into something bigger than yourself, if you're ready to become a founder, this show is for you, we're here answering your questions every single weekday, and today I'm joined again by Jason Fishman, he's the CEO and co-founder of Digital Niche Agency, with 10+ years of experience building and scaling digital marketing strategies, and he's also the host of the podcast, Test Optimize Scale, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts. Jason, welcome back. Thanks Preston, glad to be back. Yes, why don't you quickly, just really quickly tell people where they can connect with you, we'll do that at the top of the show this time so they can be sure to connect. To find me on LinkedIn, I'm based in Marine in Del Rey, Los Angeles, California, digitalneeshagency.com, is our website, as well as @digilneeshagency on YouTube, and you can see my weekly podcast, Test Optimize Scale, our monthly webinar series, list of guest appearances in person and digital as well. I love it. You got a lot going on, adding a lot of value to the conversation. Let's continue that with today's question. It comes from Natalie Chen, Natalie says, "I'm transitioning from freelancer to agency owner and my clients still see me as, quote, "the talent." How do you reposition yourself as a company, not just a person? So I know you started years ago, Jason, freelancing, doing digital marketing. You know, run an agency, so you've gone through this process. I've gone through this process. What can we share with Natalie here to help her clients not just see her as, you know, a one-off person or just, quote, unquote, "the talent," as she puts it, what do you think? It's conveying the value to the client, meaning the clients focused on their initiatives. They're bought in to you as the talent, and I don't think that's going to necessarily go away, marketing tactics for agency owners, as positioning up her management as thought leaders in the space, even very large agencies have prospects reach out, saying how they loved what a CEO said on a panel or on a guest podcast, article, whatever it may be. So it's still positioning you as the talent, but I then explain why they're going to have a better experience working with my team. The response time with an account manager and account strategist is going to be much quicker than mine. You're going to be one of their sole focuses, I thought. And they've worked on some of the top campaigns of the year. We work on capital raises, investor acquisition campaigns. I can say, hey, they worked on this investor acquisition campaign. They worked on three of the top five at the top 10 last year. They helped raise the one at the top. This much money. They were critical in raising this much money for this particular. Absolutely. Yeah. And let's say they saw one of those case studies in my proposal document. Oh, wow. They're the ones who worked on that. This is common from speaking to them verbally. It gets even easier as I'm talking about our creative director. I can do some graphic design, I can write copy, actually very analytical about it and have served as a creative director, but they're able to do things with design tools that would take me months to adopt. I mean, they're far more qualified to put together your visuals than me before even talking about video and editing. If I'm looking at our editor or content, I'll go first name for each of these people. They're excited about them. I have bios for them in the proposal document so that they can read up on also that monthly webinar series I was talking about each month is with a different internal guest. So I can send them an episode and say, Hey, take a look at what Nikki is able to do with media buying and I'll send it over and then here, you know, very positive feedback around it. So it's all about the client. So about their initiatives, you want to explain why it's better for them to be working with a team versus just you. I love that and, you know, I was going to say something very similar as you the same thing with my team, which, which is like not only, I think response time, like you said, is critical. I think expertise, like you said, is critical, but, but just having, having the full backing of a group of talented people who are passionate and who work together, like that alone is way more valuable than a single point of failure, right, with a solo pranour or a freelancer. That single point of failure is you're basically, it's the difference between like hiring a partner or building a partnership and hiring an employee with, when you just hire a freelancer, when your client sees it that way, I do think there's a lot of baggage that come with that where it's like, I'm hiring another employee or a contractor and it just feels like I have to do a lot of the managing of it. If you pitch it like, no, we're going to take this off your plate. We're going to handle it. We're going to handle it way better than you could have and of course you say it politically correct or however you want to say that, but we're going to handle this for you. We're just going to take it off your plate and the results by the way are going to be off the charts better than you've ever had before and here's the proof of that. I think when I've done that well, and I've done it poorly, but when I've done that well, you almost just see like the burden lifted off your client's shoulders and that feeling, you like, as a client, you can't beat that feeling of like, oh, these guys are just going to take care of me and I don't care if it's Jason or if it's Jason's whole team, I just, they're going to take care of me, right? That's all the client really cares about being taken care of and getting the results that they want. Are you constantly chasing late payments, wrestling with clunky spreadsheets and trying to figure out which invoices have been paid? Well there's a way to simplify all of your finances this year and that's called FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the accounting and invoicing software that makes the hard parts of running your business easy. Whether you're a freelancer or a small business with employees or contractors, FreshBooks gives you all the tools you need to manage your finances in one place. 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I don't know, how do you help them see you as the CEO or the business partner as opposed to just the talent? Is there anything we've left out? Is that a different question? Is that the same? Do you think the same kind of solution? There's different things you could do with marketing. I mentioned, you know, the webinar and how I'm on there as the CEO and introducing a team member as an account strategist or content marketing director or whomever it may be. There are other content channels we use, so go out and record every other week and have different team members contribute. Each time have them in different YouTube shorts and on different social posts. They create selfie videos up to the webinar. You want to be able to show some personality, be able to build around the team, whether it's individuals, the team as a whole website proposal deck, I even know agency owners that will bring their team to calls and business development representatives that will bring their team to calls. I usually hold off till the kickoff call unless requested, but it is a good strategy. And if you're on the call, you get to define the narrative, I am the CEO. This is the account manager who would be working with you. This is our media buyer. This is creative director. You guys like to give your background that way they can impress them as well as, you know, connect, build the rapport. I've brought team members to calls, whether it's a kickoff or a business development call or the new client, the prospect tells me they like them even more than me. They put it in a little gentler terms, but basically express how excited they are to be working with them and for these reasons. And this is someone who had doubts going in at times. So it's all a matter of how you tell that story. You could, you know, look to do a layer of separation and, like you said, really positioned as the CEO and not involved in accounts and there's different ways to put it out there, but I think it's how you tell that story across your content and discussions. I love that. So the idea of, like, you have this sort of micro content ecosystem within your company where it's not just you as the CEO producing and sharing content, but the experts from your team, you know, you could go so far as to, and I don't know what you do, Jason. You can share what you do for your particular agency, but you could go so far as to, you know, having each employee go guest on podcasts in their specific, you know, specialty area. Because there are some podcasts like you said, you know, you, you maybe have, you maybe have the ability to be creative director, but, but you've hired, you know, a creative director that's, that's superior in many ways. And so they could go guest on, you know, create a podcast, design podcasts, advertising podcast, stuff like that. I love the idea of, like, sort of making each person their own, I guess like influencer in their own space, whether that's even just in your own company produced media, but also could, could branch out and they could have their own personas online, which many people do anyway, and, and they just, it all, but it all ties back to the agency. I love that idea. Yeah. And our account director, Abby, she'll be speaking at a conference later this month, three eight conference. He knows a different day, but she'll be on a panel, my partner, our COO guest on podcasts regularly and speaks at different conferences. Actually, met him speaking at a conference back in 2009. It's definitely important to be able to position your higher team members over time as thought leaders. And again, could you so write in your own content channels? So they don't need to be getting them placed as much as, hey, they're going to be stars of the show in our ecosystem. And remember, you have guard rails anytime a client has a concern about, does it say it's a perspective client, hey, my team's working off the process I built. Yep. You have my ideas. You look at me as the talent that this is my, my signature system. This is the exact way I'd approach your account, except they're going to put more time into it. I'm in the background. You could say you're going to be part of different pieces of the puzzle, you know, we do a weekly call. I'll be on those every other week. I'll be on a monthly CEO call with you. You can set up the right components so that you feel comfortable in the quality of the product that you're putting out. And emergency switch, if you ever feel off about the process, I will be calling you. You have my booking link. You could schedule if me any time, if it's a large scale enough client and needed, you could even look to transition yourself as the account manager in an emergency type situation. I'll warn you, you want to be careful about that. But if it's a crawl walk run scenario to be able to get you to remove the hats and have your team taking this on, because I believe your team's going to be more effective than you. If the right SOPs, right standing operating procedures are put in place over time, at least with the large, large majority of the accounts, but you always have that option in the background if you're really concerned about handing off a relationship. That's so smart. And I was going to add the same thing early on in my agency. We, it was always like you, yeah, if there's ever any concern, please know that I'm available. You can email me and I'll respond, right? And again, depending on the size of the client, the caliber of the client, things like that. But most clients, I would say early on, I would say to them, I'm not going away. I'm not disappearing. You're not going to never hear from me again, right? I'm still here. I'm very much in the process. But so and so is going to be able to take care of, you know, the partnership way better than I'm going to because I'm working with, you know, the entire company where we're getting this thing running smoothly for you to get you the best results. And so I want to make sure you have someone who you can reach out to. But if that's ever an issue, you can always reach out to me. I'm always here and I'll respond. So yeah, I think, I think setting up a few guardrails or a few, like, I love how you put it kind of like a, a failsafe or a backup or an adjusting case or an emergency protocol, right? Just adds a little bit of comfort there if the client is really worried about it. I think also what you'll find Natalie is maybe you've had a few clients who still see you as the talent, but I think, I think as you start to position yourself otherwise, you'll find that fewer and fewer clients have issue with it. They'll realize that they're hiring an agency, not a freelancer, not a contractor. And I think as your clientele, as your client base kind of shifts, then you'll see that fewer and fewer people are concerned about that. Most, I mean, most business interactions happen, you know, business to business. And so there's usually more than one person in a business to business relationship. So I think you'll, I think you'll find Natalie becomes less and less of an issue the more important that you grow. Jason, anything else you'd have before we wrap up? Stopped to my scale, but something I say a lot, it's not just the name of my podcast, it's how I approach marketing campaigns and how you could approach this. So test it out, you know, with a few accounts, optimize, figure out what's working best and then scale it. And as you're saying, Preston, I think you're going to be more satisfied with the process and the volume that you're able to take on as a result. Excellent. I love it. Jason Fisherman really quickly remind people where they can connect with you and then we'll wrap up digital niche agency.com. Find me as Jason Fisherman on LinkedIn and at digital niche agency on YouTube. Imagine you could type and test off to my scale or my name, but you'll be able to find our monthly webinar series, different topic, different guests internally every month and different external guests on our weekly podcast. I love it. We'll be sure to link to a lot of that in our show notes of this episode so you can just click right through. Thank you Jason for joining me again. Thank you. And to you listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of Freelance to Founder. Remember, you can submit your questions at FreelanceToFounder.com/ask. We've got a voicemail feature. We've got an email feature there. You can also catch up on past episodes there right there on the website FreelanceToFounder.com. I've been Preston Lee. We've been here with Jason Fisherman and we will catch you on the next episode of Freelance to Founder. We'll see you. Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast. For the past ten years, I've been talking to novelists, biographers, and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world, and the men and women who wrote them. Like our recent episodes on Dante and Love, a starter pack of ten Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath and a talk with scientist and novelist Ellen Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts.