S01 E11 - Kai Davis helping freelancers get more clients with outreach

Jason Resnick: 00:01 And welcome to live in the feast. I’m Jason Resnick, and for the past decade I’ve been helping businesses translate their goals into online success as a freelance web developer. In order for me to accomplish my why as a freelancer, I needed to live in the feast. Now I’m turning the tables around so you as the freelancer can do the same and build a sustainable business to achieve success so that you can ultimately live the kind of life you want. This episode is sponsored by Feast. Feast is an online course and coaching platform built for freelancers like you who are looking to take their freelance business to the next level. Want to get higher quality clients, command higher prices, build recurring revenue so that you can stay out of the famine for good feast will help you focus and remain accountable through coaching calls, community and exclusive mastermind group and tons of resources. Join the VIP list now by going to raise.com/feast and get first crack at some exclusive bonuses. When the next enrollment opens.

Jason Resnick: 01:18 One of my favorite quotes of all time from Gordon Ramsay is business doesn’t just come sit in your lap. You have to go out there and get it or else you’ll fail if you don’t ask. You don’t get. It’s just that simple. Freelancing isn’t like the movies. You don’t just build it and they come. You need to go out and get it. Before outreach, I would land one in 25 projects now with outreach on landing one in seven. I’ve been following Kai Davis of outreach [inaudible] for a number of years and we recently met for the first time at a conference when I think outreach, I think cause he’s the foremost expert on helping freelancers and consultants build better businesses through outreach. Even though he would have said yes, I even used his own outreach methods to get him to come on this show. The takeaway from this show is very simple. Listen to what Chi says. Take one of the suggestions he says to use for an email and then send that to a list of past clients and qualified leads to see if there’s something you can help with to land a new gate.

Jason Resnick: 02:43 welcome. Today. I’m so excited that bring on Kai Davis, who I liken as the outreach guru and we’ll dive deep into why that is and I’m really excited for you guys to hear some of his client. I’m building relationships and all the goodies that come along with it. So welcome [inaudible].

Kai Davis: 03:05 Hey, it’s an honor to be here. Thanks so much for having me on. I’m excited to chat with you and share some wisdom with the guests are not the guests, the listeners.

Kai Davis: 03:15 right? Right. Yeah. Well their guests, I mean they’re, you know, I look at them as guests in a way, you know, a good point. So yeah, I mean I’ve been following you for a real long time. We’ve had several more than several conversations via email and twitter and all those fabulous things that the internet allows us to do. Communicate with. Then we met last October, right? I’m at w freelance comp and you know, honestly, there were two things that shocked me initially how tall you are and the fact how nice of a genuine guy you are. Right? But I mean all that aside, I mean to be able to listen to your insights and your, your thoughts and, and everything that you talk about around business and client relationships made me who I’ve been freelancing for a long time even reflect on my business a bit. So, um, why don’t you just give a little bit about who you are and what you do to listeners that don’t really know about you.

Kai Davis: 04:19 Absolutely. So I’m Kai Davis. I send out a daily email newsletter for freelancers and consultants on actionable marketing advice to help you get more clients. You could subscribe at kaidavis.com. My mission right now is to help teach freelancers and consultants how to get more clients primarily by sending more email and sending better email to prospects, past clients, current clients, friends and acquaintances, and generating more referrals and more projects for your business. So, uh, I’m really focused just like the season on helping freelancers get more clients.

Kai Davis: 04:51 Awesome. Yeah, and you know, I think honestly go get on his email list lists, very thought provoking. I don’t like to read e-mail on a daily basis and there are three of those kinds of emails that I will subscribe to and Kaiser is one of those, enough of all the love fest and all that stuff. Let’s get right down to action here. Right. What you talk about often is outreach and we always hear a lot of things about like cold outreach and warm outreach and all of these kinds of things and I’m a big fan of warm outreach to the respect of not necessarily warm outreach to necessarily leads that may know about you, but warm outreach to colleagues, those that are educated about who you are and what you do. I mean you essentially built your business on outreach itself, right? Can you elaborate a little bit about the difference in some of the nuances with outreach? Because I feel like some people just hear outreach and they go right for the sale.

Kai Davis: 05:56 Right. You’re absolutely correct

Kai Davis: 05:58 in that a high level idea outreach as building and maintaining relationships with other people, with other humans, if other lovely people that are out there that we want to connect with and sometimes that comes from emailing somebody we don’t know yet and say, Hey, I love your work. What are you working on now? What’s exciting? Sometimes it’s emailing a past client and saying, hey, it was great to work on that project. I’m curious, do you know two or three people in your industry who I could help achieve a similar outcome, but in every case it’s focused on building and maintaining that relationship. Not emailing and saying, do you have any work for me? But emailing and saying, how can I provide value to you? How can I help you? How can I help your business? I think it was Alan Weiss who said the mark of a great freelancer or consultant is one who focuses on the third or fourth sale first before they even think about that first sale and I applied that same thought process when it comes to outreach and relationship building.

Kai Davis: 06:49 When it comes to talking with a potential client or a prospect or somebody who I wanted to do a partnership with, I, I, I really don’t care about what the terms are of this deal. I wanted to be figuring out is this a solid relationship that could lead to three, four, five projects, three or four or five collaborations down the line and what those would look like. So I really see outreach as being the art of building a relationship with other people and then maintaining that relationship over time and the more effort we put into maintaining it, the more attention, the more value we can attribute, the easier it will be when we show up and say, hey, by the way, it’s been wonderful having, you know, these conversations are seeing what these conferences or thank you so much for that gift basket. Hey, I was wondering are you looking for consultants help with x or do you know some people who need help with y or some other way?

Kai Davis: 07:35 We might be able to work together if you’ve been practicing outreach correctly, if you’ve been focusing on delivering value and building that relationship. When it comes time to make that ask, it doesn’t seem salesy, it doesn’t seem pushy, it doesn’t seem over the top. Instead it feels like a natural continuation of that relationship because you’ve been focused on delivering and providing value for such a period of time either through sharing resources, sharing articles, sharing tips, connecting people, maintaining that relationship. Yeah. You brought up so many awesome points there. I love that quote too, cause I look at any prospect or any lead that comes into my business to be a partner of their business, right? I have some skill set that they need or want and I want to be able to understand their business. I really want to know what it is that drives that business, what their mission is, all that stuff aside from the technical aspects, being a web developer and all that stuff, so that’s why.

Jason Resnick: 08:30 I mean I’ve had the partnering code kind of Tagline for a long time, but that is more than just a tagline for me because I do want to build that relationship. I’ve realized over the years to have that personal relationship with a client goes a lot deeper than just getting that monthly invoice or whatever it is. Right? So you never know, like I’ve had past clients, you know, long time, past clients years ago, still refer me where just because of that relationship and that touchpoint that I have with them on going even after they’ve been a past client. So one of the things I think that, I guess that bugs me a little bit about outreach is that people only outreach when they need the work. Right? So like you know, your head’s down and client work and then all of a sudden you come up and you’re like, oh, it’s the end of the month. I got bills coming up. I need to get that extra, that next project in the door here. Are there any real tactful ways to always continue that outreach so that it’s more predictable, you know, to bring in those referrals, I guess more predictable or stay front of mind with your network of colleagues.

Kai Davis: 09:47 I think that’s the best question to ask and the short answer is yes, there are repeatable tactics and systems you could put in place to make it easier to maintain relationships and so when you show up to say, hey, you know what, I have an opening next week. I wanted to let you know about it. It’s not like who is this person? Why are they emailing me? What’s going on? It’s, Oh hey, yeah, we’ve had this correspondence. Great to know I don’t need it, but I know somebody else who does. So what I advocate is a repeatable system for outreach and I talk about this in my book outreach blueprint. What I really advocate is building time into your schedule just like we would for any other business development activity where we might only be sandboxing off 20 minutes on one day each week. Just the smallest amount of time.

Kai Davis: 10:26 We could start with, we could grow it over time, but we want to start small and then say, Hey, in those 20 minutes I might put us, pull out three past clients or three contacts and send them one email saying like, hey, just wanted to touch base, see how you’re doing a. It was a past client. You might say something like, great working with you on this project. I’m curious, can I help grow your business in any other ways or are there any other exciting things you’re working on that could use some support? If so, just reply back, love to hear how your business is doing, so we might have a client list or a past client list that’s 30, 40, 50 clients log and we look at that and say that’s a lot of emails I have to send, but if we split it up and say, Hey, you know what?

Kai Davis: 11:02 Each week we’re only going to focus on sending five emails. Just use the same email, customize per person, send it out. Just send those five magical things start happening because we’ve reactivated those relationships. We’re able to restart those conversations and in a week, a month, six months, if we show up and say, hey, you know what, I just had a client cancel. I have an opening. Do you want to work together? It’s on the back of a multi-week or multi-month correspondence where we’re delivering value sharing resources, sharing articles, sharing case studies, sharing things that would be of interest to the person we’re in communication with, but because we built this time into our schedule to practice this outreach, when we do show up and make that ask, it feels much less sales-y and much less artificial and much more natural. It’s been great talking with you over these last four weeks.

Kai Davis: 11:47 By the way, you mentioned recently you’re working on a project x, Y, Z. I help companies like with x, Y, Z. would it be good to get on the phone and chat about that and at that point it’s not an email out of the blue. It’s, Oh, we’ve been discussing this project. Yeah, let’s jump on the call and see how we could work together. So by practicing consistency, by practicing, sort of repeating that same process of outreach and starting with the minimum, you can do the smallest amount of time you could get by with 20 or 30 minutes one time a week and then growing it over time to an hour to three hours across the week. You will cultivate those relationships, you will maintain those relationships and you will be practicing better outreach, whether it’s outreach to people you haven’t yet established a relationship with. Typically what’s referred to as cold outreach or people who you already have a relationship with, email subscribers, friends, colleagues, past clients, past leads, warm outreach.

Jason Resnick: 12:38 Yeah, I think that’s, that’s perfect because I mean, it is about the relationship, right? It’s not necessarily about that invoice or the project or the logos that are talking to each other, right? It’s that personal relationship that you do have and relationships take work and they take time. They take effort. You have to put these things in place. And uh, I’m a big advocate of scheduling out weeks, um, now with, with a newborn in the house, the schedule is really turned up on its side. But it is what it is, right? But the thing is, it allows you to set up that predictable, in a way, a predictable intake of referrals. Because of my freelancers, they’re like, when you ask a freelancer, how many of your current clients are by word of mouth, they’ll say 53 quarters, maybe even a hundred percent. Right? And then they’re always chasing that thing right there.

Jason Resnick: 13:33 Always Jason, how do I get the clients from, you know, X. Right? Right. But to have a system in place to be. Because they think that referrals are just happenstance, right? It’s random, you know, it’s like, oh, somebody called me up or sent me an email. But by having this practice of outreach, adding value to your colleagues, your friends, even the warm leads that you have in your business when the time is right, they’ll bring you that work. Right? Entirely. And I, you know, it’s funny too, because people are all about automation and these kinds of things, right? We’re, in some respects you could do that kind of thing, but when you have that personal touch, right? Like, Hey, I noticed on twitter you went away last weekend or on facebook I saw that you threw a party for, you know, your grandparents hundredth birthday or something like that. Like that personal touch goes a long, long way.

Kai Davis: 14:30 Completely agreed. There’s that fine balance, especially as an independent business owner where we want our outreach emails, we want our communication to be personalized, to be specific, not be generic, dear savvy business owner, but be like, Hey Jason, I congratulations on the newborn. I’m sure you’re slammed about x, y, z. maybe you need help, you know, producing your podcast. That’s something I could help with your basically. So here’s a short sheet explaining what I do and let’s book a 10 minute call by recognizing what’s going on in that other person’s life. We make our outreach that much more effective. But as an independent business owner, it’s an area where you could easily go down a rabbit hole of, well, I’ve been researching my client list for the last six hours and I haven’t actually built anything, so what do I do now? So it becomes, I think, a bit of a give and take where we want personalized outreach, we want it to be authentic, we want it to be real, but the rule that I have in places when I’m doing research for an outreach campaign, whether it’s trying to track down somebodies email address or finding personalization details, you know, name, company, interesting, relevant facts, articles they’ve written and recently I’ll set a time limit of somewhere between five and 15 minutes per contact depending on, you know, a number of different attributes, how much I value them and how good of a prospect they seem.

Kai Davis: 15:37 And if I hit that time limit, I haven’t found that relevant information yet. I’ll say, you know what? I’m good with what I have the return of focusing one level deeper on this one prospect to get that personalization information. And it’s probably better for me to spend that time figuring out the second or the third or the fourth person on my list and moving on and just being happy with what I have. I want to jump back to one thing you touched on were a number of freelancers and consultants will say referrals or word of mouth is like the number one channel. The majority of their clients come through it. I recently had a conversation with an independent business owner, a freelancer, and we were emailing back and forth and I said, Hey, I’m just curious like how do you get most of your clients?

Kai Davis: 16:14 And they said referrals. Ninety percent of our business for referrals. And I’m like, that’s amazing. I’m studying referrals right now. I have eight books on referrals on my bookshelf right now. I’m diving deeper into the topic. Tell me, uh, what are you doing to generate these referrals? We have testimonials on our website. Do you ever email clients would ask? No. Do you ever email people and ask for referrals? No. They’re your number one channel. Yes. I’m very confused. It works for us. And so I had this encounter and I came away realizing two things. One, referrals are incredibly powerful. I mean like we all know, have a freelancer or consultant in our network where we are, that freelancer or consultant where clients keep referring more clients and their friends and colleagues to us, and I think that comes down to strong positioning and being able to deliver the outcomes were promising at the outset of a project, but I think we fall down when it comes to that outreach, that follow-up to generate a referral and just doing something as simple as three weeks after a project.

Kai Davis: 17:09 This is one of my favorite tactics and it’s so simple. Anybody listening to this podcast, you’d immediately after the podcast, don’t pause right now, but after the podcast, go out and do this three weeks after your project is complete, send one email to the client and saying, dear client name, it was so wonderful to work on that project with you. I’m so happy we worked together to achieve outcome. I’m curious, do you. I’m booking out my calendar for next month. Do you need any help with similar outcomes or solving similar problems? Just reply back and let me know and we can make sure we get some time on my calendar. Just sending a simple email like that can result in multiple thousands of dollars of additional work each month because when a project is complete, what I’ve seen from of freelancing is the client is like, excellent. The project’s done, we’re done.

Kai Davis: 17:52 We’re leaving now. When the truth is, if you as a consultant proactively reach out and say, here’s the best next step, or do you need additional help with that? I’m available to help. You’re able to generate more projects from that same original client, let alone reaching out and saying, do you know anybody in the industry? Do you know anybody who needs help with a similar problem? Do you have any friends in the industry? And generating those referrals with just again, 30 ish minutes a week and a small referral outreach campaign or a small outreach campaign. You could follow up with your existing clients, build these relationships and take your, a client generation to the next level. And it doesn’t have to be complex. It doesn’t have to require huge automation systems. Uh,

Kai Davis: 18:34 for some of my outreach campaigns, I’m using four or five different software as a service tools all strapped together through Zapier to coordinate the campaign and that’s really like 400 level outreach when it comes to the basics for the freelancer listening to the show who was asking the question, how can I get more clients in my pipeline? It really can be as simple as make a list of the past clients you’ve enjoyed working with, email them and say, hey, I just wanted to update you on what’s been going on in my business and learn what’s new in your business. I don’t feel free to reply back and tell me the exciting new things. We just worked on a cool project where we x, Y, Z and this was the outcome. Hit reply and let me know what’s new in your business. You’re restarting that conversation. You’re building that relationship. You’re showing interest in what they’re working on in their businesses doing, and those conversations will lead to, oh yeah, we’re going to be working on this new project in two months. Which becomes a perfect opportunity to say, that sounds excellent. I have some availability then can I help support you in that new project? So I think just proactive outreach like that and follow up with past clients can generate referrals, new business, repeat projects, build those relationships and give you a solid more stapled pipeline

Kai Davis: 19:37 for your business.

Jason Resnick: 19:39 Hundred percent. And that’s going to be the takeaway for this episode. So what’s great is you could go to the show notes, there’ll be the transcription in there and you could just rip and run and tailor what colleges said as your email. So, um, that’s going to be the takeaway. I couldn’t, I mean, perfect spot on a follow-up is huge. I’m a big proponent of it as well. One thing I wanted to talk a little bit about too, as freelancers, we take on tons and tons of projects or a lot of times we’re a generalist, right? We take on many different kinds of projects in and around what we’re good at. And at the conference you had a presentation and I have my notes right here.

Jason Resnick: 20:29 You mentioned this question and it’s a question that I actually do look at. It’s on my whiteboard and it’s something that is right in my face because at the current time it doesn’t align, so it for me anyway, from my business and I’m in the process of changing that, but the question that you posed out to the audience was, does my marketing reflect my most current understanding of my target market? Now, Can you unpack that a little bit and just g I [inaudible] I think it’s a great thought process that I think everybody should be going through.

Kai Davis: 21:05 Absolutely. Thank you so much for bringing that up. I think it’s an excellent question for any freelancer to be asking about their own business. So when we think about is our messaging is our marketing aligning with our most current and recent understanding of who our target market is. There’s a few sub-components that. Let’s unpack those first. So first is the idea of our target market and that connects with the core idea of positioning. You will generate more clients for your business. If you have a specific target market, you’re marketing to Philip Morgan of the positioning manual doc and a positioning crash course. <Unk> is free course on positioning is the guru and authority on positioning in my mind, I highly encourage the listeners to check out his resources, but a one, one aspect of positioning that I think stands out as something that Jay Abraham said in his book, ultimate sales machine where there are fewer best buyers in any market than there are all buyers.

Kai Davis: 21:57 So if we imagine there a thousand potential clients, but there’s 100 clients who really are your ideal client. They are perfect in every single way. If you focus your marketing on just those [inaudible], those dream 100 clients, you’re going to get more positive results. You’re going to get more projects, you’re going to get more ideal projects for them rather than if you focused on all 1000, you’d be spending more money, you’d get more bad clients who get bored, more bad leads. So it wouldn’t make sense to focus on everyone. So with the positioning, we’re narrowing down just to that specific target market. I think it’s important to also for us to continually revisit our marketing assets, our email campaigns, our website, uh, any marketing messaging we’re really doing anything that says, this is who I am, who I help and the outcomes I generate for them.

Kai Davis: 22:39 We need to make sure it’s in line of our understanding of our target market. We learned that through market research, conversations with business owners, prospect calls, attending conferences, reading journals. We might discover that, hey, my target market is let’s pick freelancers and consultants sand like on this, uh, a season of the podcast. The problem or the issue that freelancers have is, well, how do I get more clients into my pipeline so we know what the problem is. We know who the target market is. Then we get to revisit our messaging and say, well, in every instance or a majority of the instances when I’m presenting myself to these prospects, are these clients, am I communicating to them that I help freelancers get more clients? Is My messaging in line with that target market and my understanding of the needs that target market has. So I think that all boils down to understanding your positioning, which is really just another marketing channel for your business, focusing in on one segment of the buyer’s market research well for that segment of the buyers, what pains and problems are keeping them up at night? What can I help them solve in their business? What would get them to the next level, and then making sure your messaging is coherent with that market research. If you’ve learned, oh they need help with a, B and c, are you explicitly saying that on your sales pages and your marketing copy and your website so people will understand, oh, this is who I am and you help people like me solve this problem. Where’s the buy now button?

Jason Resnick: 23:58 Yeah, I think that’s great because I mean for me myself, I know I have a number of email campaigns that don’t align, right? So I’m working through that now and it aligned just six months ago in what I’m really focused in on and and what my clients are asking from me, that sort of thing. I want to get more clients like I have now. Right? But that sort of thing, that six months ago that got me some clients that I still have, I want to rejigger that a little bit and make that better for my business, and so it’s something that I felt was important for everybody to understand that reflection on their business. Just because you say you do one thing right, doesn’t mean six months, 12 months, 18 months from now, you’re still going to be doing that one thing. You can be moving and in flux, so to speak, doesn’t mean you’re locked in stone. And to do that

Kai Davis: 24:55 completely agreed. I think positioning, marketing, messaging your services as a consultant or freelancer, they’re always changing. They’re always adapting because every project you work on, you learn a little more about who your ideal client is. Oh Wow. This client was terrible to work with. How do I eliminate them from my positioning? Or Oh wow, this was an excellent project. It actually took less time than I thought and I made more money. How do I get more of these projects? And so I think it’s very important for freelancers to devote that time to working on their business, to just asking these questions, looking at their business and saying, well, what’s the health of my business right now? What can I work on? What could I improve? A process that I’m just starting to advocate is think about the marketing funnel for your own freelancing business. What’s top of funnel?

Kai Davis: 25:36 How do you get leads? What’s the middle of the funnel? How do you nurture and educate these people? What’s bottom of funnel? How do you convert them into clients and projects and just periodically go through the funnel from top to bottom. Hey, let’s spend a week or a month looking at top of funnel. What could I add there? Let’s spend a week or a month looking middle of funnel. What can I improve their? Let’s look at the bottom of the funnel. Look, could I improve their and then reset back to the top. And I think this iterative process where you’re moving through your funnel and building on it time and time again, it won’t be perfect the first time. It won’t be perfect the 10th time, but you slowly be adding new pieces and new campaigns and new assets that bring it more in line with your messaging, with your target market as that shifts underneath you. So I really think this iterative approach to marketing and positioning is the best way for freelancers to market their business. It’s the only way that really makes sense. It’s never right the first time. Yeah.

Jason Resnick: 26:26 Yeah. Not as perfect and I’m going to take your advice there to go from the top, middle and bottom of the funnel and keep iterating over that because that’s something that I. I’ve only really just started to understand that part of my business even though I’ve been in business for so that sometimes it’s just like, OK, I never really was like, oh, I’m a big marketing guy kind of thing, or I don’t really have that well of a defined sales process because most of my clients are long-term clients. I have clients that have been with me for multiple years. I don’t necessarily have to define that process down to like the letter in an email because I don’t need to go get clients that often, but when I do need those clients it would be nice if they were there. So yeah, I think that’s great. So I have to ask, what was your why, like what made you strike out on your own? The first place?

Kai Davis: 27:23 Combination of three things. My Dad, both, both sides of my family had been entrepreneurs for generations. Uh, both of my grandfathers owned their own businesses. My Dad owns his own business, my Mama’s owned multiple businesses, so I was home schooled growing up and it was wonderful. I spent my childhood growing up and playing with my parents and, but they both work from home and it was really a, like a blessed childhood and it also curves to be with entrepreneurship since I grew up in printed with like, oh the way you adult is you have your own business. And so I graduated college. It had like started my own side hustles and side projects and then I got the day jobs and I worked the day jobs for a few years and I was like, this is not for me. This does not work for me at all. I show up at 8:00 AM.

Kai Davis: 28:06 I know that the meetings every day, no, sorry, I love you. But now and uh, in two-thousand and I think 2012 I quit and struck off full time. I’d been doing wordpress development and consulting on the side for three years just to figure out like how do I do this effectively? Let’s get the income up to where I quit. So I’m not broken eating ramen. And I made that leap. So the why for me it has partly been I feel like I’m unemployable in a sense. I just so deep into the love of entrepreneurship and bootstrapping and freelancing. I don’t see another way to move forward. Like I just love building business. I love the craft and art of business. It’s, I just can’t imagine separating myself from it. Another big why and part of the transition had been going through recently where I’ve been focused from outreach for a broad spectrum of an audience to more outreach for freelancers and consultants and coaching them on how to get more clients, creating products around getting more clients has been an internal love of teaching.

Kai Davis: 29:06 I like helping people learn how to improve their business or improve their systems. If I’m able to show somebody a tactic or a system or a methodology that takes an hour or 10 minutes to explain, but saves them a day or makes them an extra thousand or 2000 or $10,000, that’s a huge emotional victory for me. I’m like, holy crap, this person improve their business. They won. They got to the next level. So it’s that combination of feeling like, well, I love the entrepreneurship, the day job not quite for me and I love teaching and educating people. So that combined together into me enjoying being an independent business owner.

Jason Resnick: 29:40 Yeah, that’s a story that I feel like is my own toA. Like first I’m the entrepreneur in my family tree, but just the way that I was thinking and all these other things like you mentioned like meetings every day coming in at such and such time like warming somebody else’s seat just so that they think that I’m doing work for them, you know, like that kind of stuff. It’s like it doesn’t align with my thinking and productivity and stuff like that. And for me, I look at myself as unemployable. I mean, not that I’m looking in any sort of direction of going back full time, but I don’t even think I could, but it’s just one of those things at this point. I mean for me it was family life, right? Like obviously I’ve got my son on the podcast, but he’s, you know, like to be able to spend time with friends and family. For me, was it like being the age that we are in history right now to be able to think that if it’s a gorgeous sunny day that I can’t go outside for a couple hours and enjoy it because I need to be locked in a cube somewhere so we can wait what? So you know, if that’s, that’s my why and that’s it. It’s, it’s funny to hear that word unemployable because I mean a lot of people throw that around, but I think that there is something to that. You know, there’s

Kai Davis: 31:06 A phrase that’s often entered my mind is I’d rather be the captain of my own about it doesn’t matter what size the boat is, but so many times like I’ve, I’ve had a close friend on the east coast who runs a very successful business, reach out like I want you to be the director of marketing for my company. And I’m like, that’s excellent to get me to give up the ability to work without pants in my home office in Eugene, we started half a million dollars. I might not be worth half a million, but like that is where the conversation starts because they value, it’s a sunny day. I’m going to go for a bike ride. Oh, a friend got off work early and wants to get a beer. Oh, I want to go hang out on campus with some friends. I value that so highly that the amount of money that would need to be put on the table, it’s just dumb and ridiculous and like nobody should realistically do that.

Kai Davis: 31:46 I just love the freedom that being a freelancer affords me and that ability to work on interesting projects and reinvent my business is my business grows and focus on building relationships with interesting people in and outside of the community. That to think about getting that up and getting a job. There’s been points where I’ve attempted, but each time I’ve been tempted or encountered a struggle and I said, hey, maybe the easier path is get that day job. Know what I need to do. Eliminate a lot of the big questions of data inside. Yeah, I couldn’t do that and that’s always going to be a backup plan. There is never going to be a point in my life where they’re like, I’m so sorry, Mr Davis. We reviewed your podcasts and you talked about being unemployed. We can’t hire you. I’m so sorry. If so, I’m going to regret this podcast immensely, but it’s always going to be a backup plan, and so whenever I encounter those resistance, I’ve been like, yeah, OK, that is plan b.

Kai Davis: 32:36 let me take out a plan a, what do I want to do instead could get me around or over or just eliminate this obstacle or let me invent my business to not have this obstacle anymore. And that’s always been the more exciting path for me. I’ve shut down a few a different businesses outside of consulting that I started and grew to six figures because they hit a point where I was like so interesting, but it’s really starting to feel more like a job than something that gives me the freedom to express myself or create the things I want to and I don’t want that type of limitation in my life. So I’ve stepped away from those types of projects, shut them down and said I want to focus on building a business and this sounds lifestyle design, but I think it really gets to the core of what we want as freelancers. How do I create a business that supports the lifestyle I want to live the lifestyle I currently want to live as I enjoy Eugene, Oregon. I enjoy hanging out with friends. I enjoy not working 40 hours a week. I enjoy working with three to four days a week. OK. That’s my lifestyle design. That’s the outcome I’m shooting for and I think freelancing gives me that ability in a way that I just adore and love.

Jason Resnick: 33:40 Now that’s. I couldn’t, I couldn’t have said it any better. Although I enjoy New York City. Not on Eugene Oregon but this is, this has been awesome. Uh, one final question I do have to ask is who is an amazing freelancer that I should have on the show and why?

Kai Davis: 34:01 Let me think. I. The challenge for this question is limiting it to one. I would say Nick Disabato, would be an amazing guest for the show. Uh, he runs a research driven ab testing. I am design consultancy called draft draft out in you and he’s immensely focused on research driven ab testing and gets staggering amazing results, but beyond that, he was one of the progenitors of this current version of productized consulting, having fixed scope, fixed rate service offerings available that eliminate the proposal. He is one of, I think, the most for thinking and most innovative freelancers out there when it comes to marketing systems and attracting clients and building powerful relationships. So on top of his deep, deep knowledge of how to optimize software as a service and e-commerce sites to get more conversions. I think he’s one of the most talented freelancers and writers out there are consultants and writers out there. So I’d highly recommend him as a guest on the show.

Jason Resnick: 34:59 Great. All right, so nick, I’m coming after you, but this has been fantastic. Kai and I know that you have freeoutreachcourse.com, where anybody can go in and learn all about these kinds of things that we spoke about, have tons of informative, insightful points as well as templates inside of it. I’ve taken the course myself. I used, oddly enough, I use Kai’s own template on himself. He’s here so it works, right, so definitely check that out. And Kai, where can people reach out to say thanks.

Kai Davis: 35:42 Best spot would be if they sign up for my daily email newsletter at Kai Davis [inaudible] or free outreach course stock. All the emails come from me and my main primary only inbox, and so as soon as you get an email from me, I invite everybody. Hit reply, tell me how you’re doing, tell me what you’re working on and tell me the challenge in your business or just say, hey, I heard you on a Jason show and I wanted to say thank you. It was a good episode. Please feel free to reach out to be, but the best entrance point is either signing up at Kaidavis.com for my daily newsletter or free outreach course. <Unk> for my five day course on effective outreach campaigns they had. You’ll be a part of the system and be able to stay in touch with me.

Jason Resnick: 36:17 Great. And everybody else? Actionable takeaway right there below this, below this audio file. Tie spelled it out for you. I don’t have to. So go ahead, do it. And until next time, it’s your time to live in the feast.

Speaker 2: 36:35 No. OK.