Panel

Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Summer Camp)
Eric Davis (twitter github blog)
Jeff Schoolcraft (twitter github blog)

Discussion

Get Clients Now! by CJ Hayden
Strategies and Stages
Daily Worksheets
Cookbook-Style Approach
"It made marketing click for me."
See what you're doing/what you're not.
The 28-Day Marketing Plan
Repetition
One Person Marketing Plan
Weely cycles start on Saturday.
No reusable templates.
Not a lot of fluff.
Book Yourself Solid
Success Ingredients
Properly using your human resources.
Quara - Is There A Good Invoicing Plugin for Redmine

Picks

Duct Tape Marketing (Jeff)
Business Model You (Eric)
Speed Dial 2 (Chuck)

 

 

Hey everybody and welcome to episode 22 of the Ruby Freelancers Show. This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis.

Hey.

We also have Jeff Schoolcraft.

What's up.

And I'm Charles Max wood from Devchat.tv. And this week, we are going to do kind of a book review on Get Clients Now. I got some feedback from Eric mainly, he pointed out that when we talk to CJ Hayden, it was kind of an interview style podcast, and we didn’t actually review the book. And I kind of agree with him. And so, I thought we could just talk through the book and what we thought and what we like, and what we don’t like and things like that.

So, what part of the book do you guys think was the most important or the most influential for you?

Yeah, it's kind of hard. I say there's two things to it: one was kind of the breaking up of the different strategies, and then from there, different stages; like you are going to use direct contract, or you are going to use advertising strategies. And then where you are stuck? Are you stuck filling the pipeline, following up or actually closing stuff? That was really big to me, seeing it as different stages.

The other big part is the daily worksheet that you do, where you fill it out and every day you come in and say, “Yes, I did this. No, I didn’t do this.” And I’ve found that was really useful because I was using it every day. I've used it for I think 4-5 months at least. So, something that I had the most experience with most contact with, and doing that kind of helps you get feedback and figure out, “Am I actually doing what I say I'm doing, or am I just lying to myself and saying I'm actually marketing when I'm not?”

What about you, Jeff? What part did you like the best?

The tracking worksheet definitely helps. All the worksheets helped. Like I said on an interview version of this, the cookbook recipe based approach really clicks with me. So the book is broken up into three parts: the first part is basically about marketing and why you need to do it; the second part is about the Get Clients Now system; and the third part I think basically walks you through the 30 days and how someone might do Get Clients Now.

So if you’ve come to the book with any amount marketing knowledge, whether you think you how to market or not, but you’ve probably heard a bunch of people say you need to have a website or do social media or speak or whatever, you some of these ideas rolling around your head. She just lays out in a sort of a simple and easy way mapping all those things that you’ve heard in the system and sort of made marketing click for me. I guess the system part of the book is probably the best part for me.

Yeah, and I think the thing for me, and I'm pretty sure I brought this up during the interview portion was just the follow up. And the follow up is kind of central to the whole system, and that really kind of drilled things home to me. I mean, I'm pretty lazy when it comes to a lot of that stuff, and just to know that I need to proactively go out and touch base with people, and follow up with them and things like that. It really makes it, I don’t know, it made me more aware of what I was doing and what I wasn’t doing, and the parts where my process kind of falls apart. So for me, it updated that, well it informed that in very clear way for me. And I don’t know why I missed that before, but I did.

I think the thing for me, the 28 day marketing plan fits very nicely with all the or most current, I guess, and even some past thought on how to… the fact that this is something I do all the time, and marketing is not a single activity; doing check off and you are done with it. I mean, this is a daily thing and so the tracker helps with that but it's nice to see that laid you too; it's not this giant, nebulous cloud of stuff you need to do. Every day you have to perform a couple of actions, and that will get you closer to your marketing goals -- whatever those are.

And it's not like a check list of, “Here's all the stuff you have to do,” but it's like, “You need to do these things every day or every week,” repetition. And that’s really where marketing works good is when you keep doing the same thing over and over, instead of just going off in different directions all the time.

One other thing for me that really stood out too was for my coding and for things like that, I have systems around how I handle certain things. And this kind of helps you setup a system, and then use it, so that you can figure out what’s working and what isn’t working for you. So it highlights a lot of the things that make it work, and so then as you are working through the worksheet and you are doing it every day, you start to figure out, “Ok, this really works for me, this kind of doesn’t work for me. This is what makes the difference for bringing more prospects in. This is what makes a bigger difference when I'm trying to follow up with people,” or whatever you're focusing on. And you can start to incorporate that into a system that you continue to work with throughout the 28 days. And the, you can either start the cycle over, or maybe you just stick with what you’ve been doing because it is working for you.

Yeah, and I got, I'm going to call it a follow up book, but it's kind of its own thing. It's called the One Person Marketing Plan that she wrote. So Get Clients Now, it's a four week program. The One Person Marketing Plan is kind of like a 3-6 month program, where you plan out kind of with more depth… that’s almost the same system; you use a lot of the same techniques and strategies, but it's nice because Get Clients Now, you kind of get into repetition over four weeks, but if it's like blogging or like in your case, Chuck, podcasting, if that really works for you, using the longer program, you kind of schedule that stuff out. And you actually have like, this is the core marketing strategy that you do for the next six months to a couple years down the road, as long as it still works.

Yeah, it makes sense. And it can also inform things that you are already doing. Like you said, you can see what's working and things like that, but and you can plan it out. But the nice thing is then you can start to fiddle with what you have been doing and fine tune it to make it better.

One thing I found is part of the program is set a goal of like, “I want x many sales or I want x many leads.” And at first, (this was like when I first started my business) I was like, “Ok, I wanna get x dollars in sales a month.” And the problem with that is I was working on trying to get leads in, and so getting leads in doesn’t actually directly contribute to the dollars. And sometimes in software, it takes a couple of months before you get the first contact to actually get a contract… or when you get the first contact until you have a contract, and then when you get paid. And so, I found pretty quickly that you have to change your goals. And if you have a goal that’s like getting paid, you have to make sure that you're focusing on the last stage, versus my goal would be, “I wanna get 20 people to contact me and send a proposal off for each of them.” That’s kind of earlier stage and it's a better goal. And so that was something interesting that I learned after a few months, because I kept failing on my goals and I was like, “Why is this happening?” and it was because I was setting the wrong goal.

That makes sense. One other thing that I thought was cool on the book was that it has for example, I can’t remember what chapter it was, but it goes through a little thing that you read every day of the 20-step plan. And so it says, “This is what we are going to do this day, and this is what we are going to do this day. And here’s what I need to think about today, and here's how I adjust my goals if they are not working for me,” and things like that. And I really thought that was a nice thing that you could just get into, and use to stick with your plan.

Yeah, because it has like what you said, Chuck like at this point, you should be halfway towards you goal. If you are not, maybe you should adjust your goal or change your goal.

Yeah, and it gives you pointers on how to keep with the program, and how to make the most of it. And so it's like, “Today, this is the plan. Tomorrow, this is the plan.” “If yesterday, you only did this well, then today, you should be trying to do this well.”

I was trying to look for that one, but I was looking for an example… she try to take care of like the negative aspect of the program. So you’ve been going at it for… in the beginning, especially the first few days. So, you've been doing this for 5-6 days, and maybe you haven’t gotten anybody to respond or something. I thought she did that somewhere, but examples are what I was looking for.

Yeah, one other thing that I really liked was that she goes into (in the later chapters) what you need for you to stage, so I was reading through the follow up stuff yesterday, and it's telling you that you need… of course it says like a brochure, a 30-second commercial and things like that, but a lot of that, you just translate that over to the web or whatever you are using. So for me, it really did boil down to, “Hey, do you need a website?” And I do need this, and I do need this other thing. And you know, the 30-second commercial was something that I really was thinking about, “Ok, what am I after? What am I really going to put in here to target the people that I want? And just stuff like that.” And so, it really brought to the forefront some of the things that I've kind of not really been focused on that I need to get done.

Yeah, like you said the 30 second… it's not called a commercial, but it's something. I use that right on my homepage like the tag line or whatever, like the elevator pitch that you hear about. You might have to translate it, because I don’t think there's anything about social media in here. But there's stuff about going to networking meetings, which if you do it right, social media could be a networking meeting if you plan it. And so, you kind of have to adopt things, but it pretty much covers all the different types of things you could do.

I have to admit, I haven’t quite finished the entire book, so there are some sections of it that I haven’t read yet, but I just kind of got through the main part where it talks about why you need to market and how to put the plan together, and how to implement the plan. And I read through about how half of the daily meetings, and then I started reading the follow up stuff. And it was just because I was reading the stuff that was really pertinent to where I was at. And it really is well laidout, and it really gives you all the pieces you need for the plan. And I intend to actually after my 28 days to go back and go through the same process again on some of the other areas. So right now I'm focusing on follow up; I plan to go back and do something like gathering leads, and then do the later stages of the cycles as well.

I tell people a lot of time, “This isn't a book you really read from cover to cover.” You can probably go through about 90 some odd pages of it of, “Read this before you set up the system.” And then you have the daily stuff you can read every day, like the little paragraph or two paragraphs. And then the last half the book is kind of a reference. So like you said, Chuck, you are working on the follow up, so the follow up chapter, you are probably going to wanna read and get some ideas from that, but if you are working on the closing, you just got to read the closing chapter; you don’t have to read the follow up chapter right away. So it's kind of a reference book in the last half.

Yeah, makes sense. And that’s really the case. It was hard for me especially with the daily things since I wasn’t into the program yet to read it all. And so reading it cover to cover, just really didn’t make sense for me. But yeah, exactly what you said: you read the parts that makes sense to what you are doing and then you just figure out where you wanna go, and go. So were there any other things that in the book that kind of left out at you? Are you guys doing the 28 days cycle again? I know you’ve done this before.

I'm currently not doing anything, and I need to do it again.

I actually kind of adopted it for Chirk, so more product marketing. I got about halfway through it and then just with the newborn around, I couldn’t stay up on it. I'm all set up and planned for her other book, the One Person Marketing Plan, because that’s more of a monthly one. I have everything set up for that. I started working on that, and I'm doing it actually twice; once for Chirk and for the product side and then also for the consulting services side.

Consulting services?

Yeah, like custom software, that kind of stuff.

All right, I just wanted to make sure that we understood where you were headed. Were there anything else that you guys didn’t like about the book?

Besides the cover on the older edition?

[Chuckles] Yes.

One thing I didn’t like (and this is more I keep forgetting about it), the 28 days cycle… I have to check, I think it starts on a Saturday and on a weekend, you don’t do anything; they are rest days, so it's more of just like reflection and stuff. It always confuses me and I’m always Monday morning like, “Ok, I'm ready to start.” And then I look at it and I'm like, “Oh, crap, I actually should be on Day 3 now.” And so that part, I don’t like about it.

The other thing, it might be on there, and I haven’t found it is a lot of the work sheets you can print out, but a lot of the stuff, especially for developers like you are working with numbers, you are probably going to wanna put it on Excel or Google Docs, and so, not having templates that you can reuse each time is kind of a bummer for me. And so I actually think I ended up creating them all from scratch. And it's something you can do, and I might be able to share if I still have them somewhere, but that’s kind of like I wish there was like a CD or you go to the site or you download the forms or whatever.

I was thinking the same thing; it would be nice to have some kind of software or something which just handles that for you -- even if it is just Excel.

Yeah, I've actually looked into a software. I mean, I think it comes with the book; you just get the book. And I think on her website, you can download the worksheets, but they are all PDF I believe.

I don’t think there are any other thing.

I think she had another; it was like Word doc or something.

She has a tracking worksheet in Excel now. I don’t know how long it's been there.

Yeah, but the PDF isn’t editable. It doesn’t have little fields or whatever to fill in, so it isn’t exactly what you need. So it's Word and Excel for the tracking worksheet. And then you can get them in PDF as well, but the PDFs you have to print and fill up by hand. And I've also been thinking that it will be nice to get maybe something a little bit bigger than just a standard sheet size, so I can pin it to my wall and have it big enough to where I can actually sit back and look at it and think about it.

Yeah, and actually if you do that right and print it out and then laminate it, you could just reuse it, especially for the 28 day part of the program. The problem with me is I can’t read my own hand writing, so I can’t do that.

You should be able to get it printed. I mean, there's got to be enough online print places you can get that pretty quickly, I would imagine.

Yeah, probably. I've thought about actually finding some way of getting it on to my whiteboard, but I don’t wanna draw it up there by hand. I think that’s way too much work. I'll figure it out one way or the other, but yeah, I want it right in front of me. And I want it right in front of me, like not necessarily on my computer either. I mean, what will ideally work for me is something where I just have it on my iPad or something, so I just go in to marketing mode and I just pull it up. I guess I can do the same thing in my computer, but I don’t know.

Yes. Yeah, I have all kinds of goodies and distractions on my computer. But other than that, the starting on Saturday thing threw me off, but it doesn’t bother me yet. So I don’t know, maybe if I

start the cycle a couple of times, maybe it will get to me.

I was trying to look for that. Maybe I just blew it off. It never occurred to me that you're supposed to start on Saturday, just 28 days. Yeah, it says, “Saturday is a great day to begin.”

Right. But like Saturday, it's basically telling you to pull everything together and be ready just to really get going on Monday. So I guess you could just start it on Monday; you just have to do Saturday and Sunday stuff.

Yeah, the problem for me is because I would use these templates in the computer as you would put in the date for each day, and it does actually show the weekdays, so I would spend like 15 - 20 minutes putting the date and skipping weekends, and then you would get started and like, “All my dates are wrong. I have to change it.” So I've done that 3-4 times, that’s why it's an annoyance.

Really, you can get by. It's not a big deal.

It's probably only a penalty. You have to pay the first cycle too.

Unless you forget -- like me.

Right. [Chuckles]

So anything else you didn’t like about the book?

I don’t think so. There wasn’t a lot of marketing fluff and feel-good speak in here. So like I said the 3 parts of the book: the first two parts are the why and the how; and then the last part is a bunch of extra reading you can do to fill in the gaps if you need help, with whichever the six areas of focus you are looking at. I didn’t think there was a ton of, “This is an elite culture, and only certain people can do marketing.” I mean, I thought it was pretty down to earth written, plain speak type book. And that was one of my most recommended marketing books, I think.

Yeah, it's written in a way where it's like, teaching you marketing, but it knows that you you're not going to be a marketing expert. It's just enough that you need to get going, and get it going and get your business up and running.

Right. Because you don’t have to be a marketing expert; you just have to do enough to get clients coming in.

Yeah.

So I'm a little curious, Eric, how are you adopting it to product sales then?

She says in her book a couple of times, “The system isn’t made for products.” I mean, unless you are doing enterprise product sales, you don’t really have a lot of the high touch, like the process for buying one of my books. They don’t contact me saying they would like to buy my book. I follow up with them, I just give them proposal to buy the book, and then I close the sale. It's a one click, ‘add to cart’ buy thing. So you have to adapt the strategies there. And then some of the way the tactics are like figuring out what you, as a consultant rather than as a developer, what services are you providing? You kind of have to adapt, “Ok, this product solves this problem, but what does that really do? How does that help the customer?” So some of it is really like far and you can’t use it and some of it is really close and you just kind of have to productize it a little bit.

Realistically, it wasn’t that hard. I think the biggest thing was trying to come up with a goal metric of like, “How do I know how I'm doing?” And I think when I did it for one of my books; I actually did it for like how many people were visiting, because like I said earlier, you can’t really control how people buy. Like even with something simple like book, you can’t really say like, “I'm going to do these marketing things and it’s going to make these many sales.” You can say, I can do these marketing things, and they will have these many people come to the site. And who knows how many are going to buy?” So that’s the adjustments I've made. It's not perfect, but I like it just because it's a 28-day routine that you get in.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, the parts where you are actually interacting in person with the client or potential client, you just move that into your online system, where they interact with the marketing you’ve set up online.

I'm assuming most of the marketing activities are online to give you some way to, “I'm doing this and I can track the result because I'm getting so many more hits to the landing page,” or something like that?

Yeah, for me. Even in my services side, almost all of my stuff is online type marketing. That’s where I work good. And even if there wasn’t metrics, that’s where I'm comfortable and familiar. That’s where a lot of my customers are, because one of my books is for programmers; one of my books for IT people or technical people using software. And so, it's people who are online or comfortable online and all that.

Yeah, and they are buying your book online, so it's not like they are ordering a physical copy of your book. All of the interaction happens online including the sale.

So let’s talk a little bit about the One Person Marketing Plan for a minute. I'm a little curious about that. I haven’t actually looked at it. I probably should. Should you go through Get Clients Now first?

Yeah. One Person Marketing Plan builds up on it. Kind of like what I said, Get Clients Now is a four week, (basically a month) program. One Person Marketing Plan is like a six month. You are basically figuring out six Get Clients Now in a row, but it also has a lot of highly technical budgeting; like “You have these many hours available and these many dollars available for marketing each month, you need to get x number of prospects, which would be x numbers of proposals.” So it's a lot more analysis. And I think if you try to just jump into it without knowing Get Clients Now, you'd get overwhelmed or you would make a lot of really bad assumptions about how the marketing system works.

Yeah, Get Clients Now, you just pick what you wanna do or you think you'd be interested in doing for a month, just to get you to start marketing and get through the cycle. I mean, you have a monthly goal. It's sort of a pie in the sky, ‘pull this out of the air’ type goals, not metric-driven. And the One Person Marketing Plan, you basically look at the whole year, you got 3-6 months. Whatever you look at, you break it down into monthly goals. And then based on how much time different marketing activities take and how long, and how effective those marketing activities are. So that’s part of it. And then part of it is how much time you have to market.

So, if you work ten hours a day, just on client work and you are trying to add an hour a day in marketing, then you have to be able to affectively imply that one hour a day. And if its… whatever, I don’t have a good example off the top of my head, but if you’ve got that one hour, and you’ve got 67 different marketing activities, the One Person Marketing Plan basically let you figure out how effective each of those are to support your goals. So it's sort of after you understand how to do the marketing and to actually make this a permanent system for like yearlong, half year activity, based on how much time you have and how much revenue goals you wanna support. It's definitely mathdriven.

Another thing is if you haven’t done marketing before, you might think it's not that hard, or it's not going to be much harder than development. And from personal experience, I can sit down and on a good day, do 6-8 hours of coding -- solid, end to end. Marketing, I can barely do 3 or 4 hours in a stretch. And it's a different skill; takes different amounts of energy. And I get tired; like I wanna go pass on the couch. And so if you haven’t done a lot of marketing and didn’t go through Get Clients Now a couple times, you might think like, “Oh yeah, I can put in three hours of marketing a day. That’s nothing.” And when you actually start doing it, you are like, “Wow, this is too much. I can maybe do an hour.” And so the One Person Marketing Plan, like Jeff said, uses a lot of metrics. And so, if you build this plan based on the assumption that you are going to put in 3 hours a day, it's going to fall apart if you’ve realized you can actually physically wanna do it an hour a day.

So we were talking on the interview show, in fact, I just listened to it not very long ago, and Evan mentioned that you guys recommended it to him. How did you guys find the book?

I found it from Eric. He's the genesis in our group.

[Chuckles] Let me look at my dates here. I started business June 2007. Basically we moved up to Oregon. And right around that time, I was like, “I have a budget and I can get like $200 budget to get my business.” And I was trying to figure out like, “Ok, I need to learn marketing. I have enough business sense to know that marketing is how I would start making sales.” And so having that to our budget I actually went to the library, went through the marketing sections, picked out actually Get Clients Now and Book Yourself Solid, brought those home, read those, and Book Yourself Solid is a really great book, but it's a lot more planning in longer term, whereas Get Clients Now is, you do the work and basically in three days, you start marketing. And so, I jumped in to it, got Get Clients Now, got the system going. Actually renewed that book from the library for I think 3 months before I give it back.

Got that going, got a couple of clients. And then I think after a couple of months, my business took off to the point where it's like, “Ok, this could be a full time thing for me.” And then around that time, I actually bought the book, and I’ve recommended it to Jeff and Evan. And I actually bought it for two or three other people who are struggling with marketing, and were, “Oh, I don’t know if that book is going to help me, because I've read other books.” And so I actually bought it for them, gave it to them, and they are like, “Wow, this actually works.” And you know, just basically talk about it whenever people ask about, “I'm starting a business. How do I do marketing?” even outside of software because it's basically anyone who does service businesses can benefit from this.

So I'm starting to wonder too then, what kind of results have you seen from it? How quickly do you usually see clients coming in due to you following the process? Because I'm still in the first few days in my cycle, so.

I'll have to look back. I actually posted a lot of these on my blog. I was actually posting like a month of review of like, “This is how the Get Clients Now program worked. Here's my goal, here's how I did towards my goal, here's how much I made,” and all that. I think it took a month of kind of just figuring out what I was doing in business, but then I think the next month, I started making sales. And these were smaller contracts; these were maybe like a week or two part time level. But that’s enough to kind of get the ball rolling. And I think one of the clients I got from doing the Get Clients Now system is actually still a current client. So we're looking at 5 years now.

Oh wow. What about you, Jeff?

Honestly, I can’t remember. I wanna say it was 2-3 weeks into it. But I've been through it a few times. And depending on what you are doing through the cycle, like there's a point where I’d spent like a half hour looking through Twitter for people that were looking for Rails Freelancers or Ruby Freelancers, and that’s a desperate enough medium, that you can find and close a deal fairly quickly, like in a few days if everything works out on both sides. But I mean, that’s a fairly easy medium to do. I've gotten a bunch of clients off of Twitter pretty quickly in the beginning. So to do the more traditional stuff, they’d probably start rolling in around week two or week three. But again, it depends on what your marketing activities are going to be. I mean, it's not a silver bullet or anything. I mean, you have to have other parts of the system worked out too. I'm not saying that you don’t. If lead generation, filling your pipeline is your focus, then you have to be able to close the deal eventually. But I mean, you can stuff your pipeline and if you are not doing a good job on follow up or just getting back to people or just follow up, I guess. But if you are not doing a good job with that, you are not going to be very successful.

And that’s actually kind of a problem I ran into off and on is like, almost all the time when I do this, I do it when I see my pipeline is drying up, and so it's almost always filling the pipeline lead gen stuff. And I started, do a bunch of it, and over the next few months, I get the results coming in. And I'm good enough at following up and giving proposals and closing sales that I really do those stages. And so I end up having this huge swamp of people that want my work, and then I have to decline a lot of people. And it's nice. I mean, it's a good problem to have, but at the same time, I think if I was actually putting more time into the other stages of it, then it might be a more regular business. Because I think Jeff’s written about this, it's like the feast and famine cycle of all these work, working 10-12 hours a day and the next one feels like no work at all. And then it goes back to a

whole bunch of work.

Yeah, I've seen that. I've seen ebb and flow, based on how diligent about how finding clients and things like that, and following up and that kind of stuff.

Yeah, that’s just part of it. I mean, it has to be an everyday thing, because if you let it slip because you are so focused on doing client work so you can get paid, then it's easy to find yourself with the empty pipeline, or looking bored because you have nothing to do for a week or a month, or whatever it is.

Right. As opposed to having a system that continually brings people in.

Yeah.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So do you guys have a system in place now that you follow, or is this something that you pick up when you kind of have some down time?

[Chuckles] I'm not. I'm the first to admit; I'm not very rigorous in my application of the system or of any business system or marketing plan. And I'm probably not going to get any more clients, but no, I don’t. This is something that comes and goes. I mean, I'm sort of taking a break. I hit it pretty hard for a while, and I've got a long term contract that comes and goes; in three months it gets renewed in three months cycle. And for now, I'm just taking a break and doing the work and I mean, it might bite me in the end if I don’t get something, but right now, I'm just taking a break.

Yeah, I can see that. I mean, marketing is a lot of work, so it makes sense.

Yeah, I'm kind of the same. I did it consistently for a while, got a lot of work, and then kind of cut it down. Like I said, it got so many leads, like I couldn’t even reply to email for a couple of days… or not days, a couple of weeks. I was like, “Oh, this is a lead. Put it in this box. I can even figure out what they want right now.” And I kind of scaled it down a little bit. And I guess most of this year, I've had two decent sized contracts, and so they are long term six month, full month contracts. Don’t really need many new leads. I mean, I have it where my business needs it. I've been doing it for product stuff, but like I said, it's a little different and I haven’t been hitting that as hard as I want. I'm doing more now, like I got the One Person Marketing Plan and I'll set it for that, and I'm hoping to kind of figure out the balance of ‘two months marketing, no marketing,’ get that just right area. And I think once I can figure that out for me and my business, then I can stay on it. Some of the stuff stuck. It's habit. It’s writing and doing open source is kind of the habits I have now, but the system as a whole, I changed it so much because I was experimenting, that it didn’t really stick.

Right. So it will be interesting I think for me to just see how much of this really stays with me. I have started using a CRM, and I've been working on some of the other things that she says were like success ingredients, is that what they were?

Mh-hm.

So having a webpage and having the 30 second pitch or whatever it is, and just making sure that I have that down and know how I'm going to target folks. And I think I'm probably going to, like I said, work on the follow up here for the next 28 days and then switch over and probably work on bringing in more leads and building my business that way.

Yeah. I mean, realistically once you program, you could probably start picking from every bucket, so you don’t have the problem I had or like you talk about Chuck, you have to follow up stuff, like you can do a couple things for filling the pipeline, a couple of things for follow up, a couple of things for closing, kind of more variety. And that’s kind of the balance, but it's like, especially as freelancers, like it's hard to get to a balanced state with any system just because everything is up in the air at all times.

Yeah, the other thing that I've been looking at with this system is how much of it can I push off onto my VA. And it's kind of hard, because the things like the follow up and stuff I really want to have that connection with my clients or with the potential clients, and so I don’t feel like I can really handle a lot of that off to my VA. And so the follow up stuff at least has been pretty hands-on for me, stuff that I have to do. And I wonder about things like, getting leads, how much of that can push to my VA, versus how much of that do I have to do myself. So for example, if I'm going to write a blog post about something that’s technical or whatever, I really can’t have my VA do that, but maybe, I can have him do some of the syndication and things like that on social networks and stuff. I don’t know. I'm still figuring that out too.

Jeff, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the One Person Marketing Plan kind of touches on that a bit, in that it says like what kind of resources do you have? If it's just you, obviously if you are going to make a blog post, you’ve got to come up with ideas, write it and do all the promotion. But if you have a staff of 1-2 people, you might still have to do the writing you and your voice, but you can have someone else research the ideas, you can have someone else do all the promotion and all that. And so, it's kind of like the One Person Marketing Plan; you have like the time budgets and you have to figure out like, “Ok, you have this much budgeted of your time, and this budget of different staff people’s time.”

I mean, keeping it with like Get Clients Now though, what I've found is like I do a lot of writing, and so the writing stuff, yeah, it takes a couple of hours to get a blog post, like a good one out, but that could pay back later and later. And in my case, doing open source, give or take 10, 20, maybe 30 hours to write an open sourced plugin for RedMine or Chili Project, but at the same time, I wrote one I think four years ago, and I'm still getting people talking to me about it and saying, “Hey, we wanna pay you to add on to it.” And so some of the things, especially if you don’t have time, there are higher leverage, and you can do it once and get your results for the next few months or years.

And if you can kind of get in a cycle doing that, that can really build up stuff.

There's another thing. I just saw on Quora, I was just reading a question: “Is there a good invoicing plugin for RedMine?” and yes, Eric wrote it. So I mean, that sort of reinforces what he just said, but also Chuck, it's something you and I are not in the plugin game yet, but it's something that a VA could be doing for Eric, is just watching Stack Overflow or watching Quora or any of the question and answer sites for stuff that's relevant to your topic. And so you are not doing a lot of the searching; you are just doing the writing or something that you don’t even have to answer. Somebody could just point to, ‘Here's the plugin on Eric’s site,” and that’s something your VA could do.

That’s true.

The other thing I've been thinking about is just more from a follow up stand point, and not follow up in terms of Get Clients Now and what you do with your customers, but have my VA follow up with me to make sure I'm sticking to the plan. If I have somebody else hold me accountable to it and say, “Did you do, this, this?” or whatever. If it's every day, then that’s money well-spent in my opinion, because it's easier for me to just blow it off if it's just me watching my back.

Yeah, absolutely.

Another thing, I don’t see freelancers doing it that much, mostly because it's just one person, a lot of them don’t have personal systems or whatever, but like Evan… it's bad that Evan is not here because I could tie it in with his stuff, but I know he does a lot of startup type of work. So if he have an assistant, you could have the assistant go out to Y Combinator, like who do they funded and all the new angels, like what new business are coming up, collect data on these companies and these products, and Evan can actually do a cold call email or whatever and say, “Hey, I'm here if you guys need help.” And a VA can do 90% of that for him. And then it's just along the lines of like, “Ok, every week, I need to email two people or whatever.” And I mean, that’s marketing, but you can outsource the non-personal aspects of it.

Right. That’s a good point. There are a bunch of those state of startup type blogs, and there's angel list or something, and all that crunch based stuff, who just got funded, who’s looking for funding, whatever.

Yeah, that can be for anything. Like if people are looking like say you are a designer and you are just doing local business stuff, you can get access to the government list of new business registries. So if you make logos, I mean, this happened to us when we had the baby; we got a whole bunch of email about baby stuff, because we've registered a new person being born. So if a new company gets formed, they might need a logo, they might need a branding package, they might need a website, you can contact them. And you know, that’s a marketing activity that someone else can do and you can just put the final touch on there.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, the local chamber of commerce. I mean, mine they put out a directory every year, but then every month, you get like one or two sheets that are updated with new businesses that joined the chamber. So you could see, you can have someone go and see if they are an established business, like a Lockheed Martin, and they are just trying to increase their presence everywhere or if they are a new business and trying to expand their reach and get involved in the game or whatever. This is the place to look.

All right, well I think we're just about out of time. Do we wanna get to the picks? Jeff, what are your picks?

What episode is this?

22.

This is the first time in 22 episodes, that I've been first on a pick.

Sorry.

Yeah, it's always been me, I think.

And I don’t have a pick. No, I'm just kidding. So this sort of relates to what you were talking about, Chuck, with the brochure. Some of the follow up materials that she says you need to have the success ingredients. The one book that I have to put this together really well is Duct Tape Marketing. And he's got follow-ons the Duct Tape Marketing kit or whatever, but it talks about all these different assets that you need, and you either have them on paper or have them on a website for like your clients and testimonials and case studies, and how you work and who would you be right for, and who would you be wrong for.

And then he goes through and says, “Based on who you are trying to talk to, you basically have these things to choose from and you just combine them together and give them… so you customize it a little bit for whoever you are trying to follow up on.” And at one point, I've tried to do that on my website and I’m ready to get back to it, but just filling out all these different pieces of if someone is trying to contact you and you’ve worked in a system similar to the system that they want built, or solves a similar problem, then you can include that in your marketing. Check out how I work and this case I did is something that’s very close to you. It's one of the better books in figuring out on what your “marketing kit” should include.

Yeah, sounds good. Eric, what are your picks?

Yeah, I wanna second Jeff’s there. I mean, Get Clients Now, Book Yourself Solid, and Duct Tape Marketing; those three books are my marketing books. If I have a question, I go to those things first now. But my pick this week, it's a book I got called Business Model You. If you’ve read business model generation, Business Model You is kind of the same thing, but instead of looking at it as like a business, it looks at You -- your personal life, your work life, your career, hobbies, all that stuff. It's basically a book that tells you and helps you figure out like, what you wanna be when you grow up.

So it's interesting. The exercises in it are extremely hard, because they are all like, “What is your core essence?” And really, really deep thinking stuff. Like if you do one, you're like, “Ok, I'm done. I don’t wanna look at this anymore.” I've read it but I've worked through a little bit of the things, and actually found some kind of glaring holes that I wanna work on. And especially if you are freelancing; your freelance life is a lot like your personal life, and some business life -- it's hard to separate them. So even if your business is really almost perfect, if you are having a problems in your personal life, that’s going to leak through like crazy. So I think this would going to be a great book for freelancers to kind of take a look at and maybe think about. Like, “Ok, maybe I can my business a little bit better to make my personal life more of how I feel, and what I want.”

I haven’t read it yet. I've looked through the pages Eric told me, that are the exercise I should do. It also feels like it's a way to focus your business. And that’s one of the things I didn’t talk about with the Get Clients Now system, but it's really hard to apply the system if you're focusing on too many things. If all you wanna be is a freelance Rails consultant or iOS developer or whatever it is, then it's fairly easy to focus the system. But if you wanna do that and create a podcast network that may or may not become self-sustaining, may or may not replace some portion of your freelance business, I mean, that becomes you are trying to market two different things, you are just putting your focus. And so I'm hoping Business Model You is going to try to help me figure out exactly like I've said, what I wanna do when I grow up, so I can focus on the one thing, instead of trying to split my focus across 4 or 5 things.

Yeah. All right, my first pick is a plugin for Chrome called Speed Dial 2.

Love it.

Oh, do you have it?

Yes.

Yeah, it's amazing. I'm trying to figure out the best way to describe it.

If you have Safari, and you’ve ever opened up Safari new, and it shows you thumbnails of all the pages you’ve either visited or if you’ve never gone anywhere, that Apple suggests, it's like that but you customize it.

Right. And the nice thing is that it has, I think they call them ‘dials’ I think of it more as tabs, but I think you can create multiple contacts for the different pages that you put in there. So for example, mine has clients, mine has clients, dev sites which is just the development versions of the websites that I'm working on, I've got a section for podcasts, and then I have the home dial which is just the things that I kind of hit the most. So when I open it up, I just want it to show the things that I'm kind of going after the most frequently. But yeah, it's so nice. It's just really handy. It works off of a screenshot, but you can put in custom images if you want.

So a friend of mine, he actually goes and like if he’s doing Gmail, then he'll go and he'll do a screen capture of just the Gmail logo, and then he'll use that image as the image in the little box that it puts the website in. But otherwise, what it does is will actually use screen grab of the website. And it works pretty good. I really like it just because it's so convenient; you just open a new tab and they are all right there. So if I need to go to the bank website, I just click on the bank logo and there we go.

Yeah. I downgraded from Canary, which is like as bleeding edge as you can get without jumping over, to just normal Chrome because I was tired of the white screens of death for JavaScript sites that would never load. And doing that, my profile was synced to a version of Chrome that was greater than normal Chromes, so I couldn’t get all that stuff back, so I lost everything. And that was devastating. But I had a tab for every client. So I have a client that has a wiki and a couple build servers and different sites. I had a tab for a client and all their junk which is under one tab.

I like that idea. I might change the way that I'm attacking it, but it's yeah, it's really convenient. I'm using Chrome Canary and it works fine. And you can actually get it to sync between multiple computers. I think you have to pay like a one-time $5 fee or something and then it will work forever for your or something.

I've done something like that. It's a lot more low-key in web developers, because I'm running Apache on my laptop for sites, and I have a homepage set to my laptop, which is just an HTML file and I just edit these other link, like I now have links to different Rails docs, the Twitter Bootstrap API, then I have links to different VMs and servers and all that. It's an HTML file, so I just go and edit it like if I get a new client, I just edit the links like normal. I've done this for 9-10 years.

If you wanna do all the work yourself, do it Eric’s way. If you don’t, then get Speed Dial 2.

Or if you wanna switch browsers or Speed Dial doesn’t work on Firefox or whatever, HTML works on almost every browser – the last time I check.

Almost every browser? Except for IE. I get it.

Yeah, IE6 you have problems rendering HTML. It just doesn’t like links, I guess.

[Chuckles] All right, well I think that’s it. We'll go ahead and wrap this up. Thanks for coming again, guys. I really enjoy doing the show every week, talking to you guys. I feel like I get a lot out of it. And I get a lot of positive feedbacks from our listeners too, so I know I'm not the only one.

Anyway, we'll wrap this up. We'll be talking next week about Time Allotment. We might have to push this one off. Somebody wanted us to keep track of all of the time that we spend on the things that we work on, so not just the billable time, but the other time, like the admin time; how much time you spend doing administrative stuff, blogging, working on open source, sending invoices, all that kind of stuff.

I’d love to. Eric probably already does…

[Chuckles] Yeah. I have about 5 years of data for this.

Yeah, he said in the comment on this one, that said that he has a whole bunch of data. But yeah, I'm going to try and set things up, so I can do a whole lot more detailed tracking of this, and then we can talk about it.

Rescue time, which is close, but I still have to go back through and try to figure out what I was doing on the browser. I guess it captures pages, so I know if I'm goofing off or doing something real.

Yeah, so it should be interesting. We'll try and do that next week, but we might have to push it off if we want more data or need a little bit of time to set things up. Anyway, we'll wrap this up. We'll catch you all next week. Thanks for listening!