Columbus marketing playbook: Marketer Q&A: Job Market With AI, Getting Leads, Growing Solo, Networking, and More

Kind: captions Language: en Hey there everyone. My name is Andy and I run a business that generates between 10 and 30k per month as a marketing business here in Columbus, Ohio. And lifetime revenue has generated a little over 350,000 since about midway through February 2024. I'm also the founder of the Columbus Marketing Organization and my main horse is my web and SEO studio for healthcare called MM Design. I also have a podcast called Marketing by Design Amidst this tile of images that I have here kind of explaining my story. Um, I was laid off from my first full-time graphic design job and midway through February of 2024, such as this picture illustrates. And I immediately started freelancing, doing outreach, and growing my independent business, doing way too many marketing services, saying yes to everything, really stretching myself. Then I joined a lot of networking groups. I joined Ampsp Spirit, a lot of more local chapters. Finally, got to learn how to speed on stages and eventually scaled the business to where it is today, a little over two years later, recording this midway through summer of 2026. So, in that chapter, um, I've wanted to post on LinkedIn. I'm going to generate weeds and do a lot of different things just through the whole realm of becoming independent, looking for jobs in the marketing space. But I've been in Columbus in and about the whole time. So today I'm going to be recording a little bit of a Q&A such as this episode is called. I have I've kept these questions anonymous, but I'm going to answer, you know, I'm going to go for as long as I can go, as much team as I have here, answering your guys' questions on job search, positioning, lead genen, outreach, freelancing, burnout, tools, scheduling, team hiring, or client relationships, content, and LinkedIn, networking, and yeah, just going to go through and answer all these questions. I will answer all of them and I'll pull up some files and spreadsheets and things like that. They can help me kind of illustrate my points here, but I'm super excited to get into this. I, like I said, they are anonymized for now. Um, but yeah, without further ado, let's dive on in. So, question number one, starting at job search. So, I got laid off in March and I've been applying for marketing manager roles for like four months now with barely any responses. Is it actually AI screening resumes now or is this a bad market? And what if AI and what it is a and if it is AI, what do I even do differently at this point? So yeah, I'm not going to lie to you guys. It is a brutal job market. Um I think a lot of the claims regarding job search, especially when it comes to marketing, is overblown. I think down entry- level jobs are being automated. I, you know, I do see that to be true. But I also think that with growth becomes becomes more hiring like efficiencies expose inefficiencies elsewhere and this has been a lifelong thing. Um but to answer the question more directly when it comes to jobs and getting more jobs and what you can actually control I would focus on fewer more targeted approaches towards perfect fit companies. If you were laid off in March and you've been applying for marketing manager rules for like four months with barely any responses, something that will always work is applying and reaching out to those people directly and doing a public pitch or a work in public for that specific hiring manager or for whoever is hiring that role. I mean, since I was laid off in 2024, I've been offered probably four or five jobs. And, you know, when I the only full-time job I ever had was, like I said, an entry- level graphic design job. It was fully in-house, 40 40 hours a week in an office. And I was probably making around $30,000 a year. I was only there for six months. And I say that because it there is work out there. And while I'm kind of talking more on the aspirational side of getting a perfect fit job, and I fully believe that anyone out there can get any job they want, but you have to be willing to humble yourself and not view yourself as above doing free work or hustling. And it's unfortunate because without knowing exactly who's asking this question, I can't contextualize the answer 100%. But what I can say is I have seen you know marketing leaders or people who have been in their space for a couple decades and they think they are above doing any type of free work or working too hard. And while I believe it can be a brutal market, I also believe that conditions demand the work that you have to put in. So, if it comes down to submitting more resumes, reaching out to hiring managers one-on-one, it's so easy to find people online nowadays, I believe you can do this, then I would do it. Even if it's just in the short term, place a bet on yourself and go above and beyond. Reving the part of it is AI actually screening resumes. I believe they are. Um, but I also believe um Dar Casey, my friend, pointed out something about this and made some content about it. that also Felicia Wagner, make sure you guys follow them on LinkedIn. They post great content regarding the job search market. Uh Fisha, but she posted something that said that you want to make sure that you're formatting your resumes appropriately because there are certain tools and scanners that you know work with uh résumés specifically. But I honestly think a lot of the best practices still apply. So things like treating your resume like a design project, making it easy to skim, being able to stand out. I also saw a piece of content the other day that said having personality injected in your resume is going to be super helpful. So saying that you and I also talked to recently, I just interviewed for the podcast, a manager of a $20 million a year SEO agency. And this is a lady that's hiring like weekly cuz they're growing so fast. And they always look for hiring nerds, which is a lovingly way to put it, but something that makes them different and stand out. Um, I think one of them really liked doing hacky sacks. One of them was deep into like this Japanese puzzle game. One of them, you know, had like a special rock collection and it was something they could nerd out about. So, show that you have some personality and obviously don't lie. and also talk about the results that you've gotten for other companies. You know, some people are more focused on inputs whereas companies will always be able to make job budget available for their for a role that will make them money. So to kind of illustrate this point, all companies grow because of revenue. Picture like this circle right here as where the revenue lies. Just like add a dollar sign here to contextualize it. roles can be closer or further away from revenue just where they tangentially rock lie. Um, picture all these other little circles as you know revenue or as jobs. You what you want to do is you want to position yourself as close to the revenue as you possibly can. And some roles do accommodate for this more than other. For example, like performance marketing manager might be really close to the revenue more so than a creative job or a designer. But you can contextualize your past work in a way that has made company money. So dollar signs will always speak to a manager because their job and what they're presenting to leadership is to make the company money. So do your best to contextualize your results in a way that is value additive and revenue is always going to be a moat to anchor that on. So hope that was helpful. Next, I am a mid-level marketing I'm a I am a mid-level marketer at a healthcare company in Columbus. And honestly, I'm scared my job gets automated in the next year or two. Is that realistic or am I just spiraling? Odds are you're spiraling a little bit. lovingly I say that but without having the contextual knowledge of knowing what your job actually is. I think the parts of marketing that will be automated the quickest is data collection and entry. So if you if you have a role where you're responsible for collecting social media stats and presenting reports I think that will be aggregated more so towards a generalist especially in the near future. If you have a job where you aren't very people facing, if you're remote, those jobs are always more likely to be cut sooner. If you are something, like I said, far away from the revenue, scheduling social media posts, like the manual work, you're not creating social media posts, you're just scheduling them, you know, that's going to be, you know, very moved away. And I also see companies starting to cut, you know, creative jobs. I'm not saying that's justified because I think the creative roles are so important, but if you think about like what a social media manager job actually looks like, a lot of their time is doing wrote manual work sometimes like picture the parts of your job that could never be done by AI and really get really good at those things. make those the bulk of your portfolio and show those show how those have gotten results. One thing that has never failed me is asking what you call the high performer question. So if you're in this if you're this mid-level marketer at health company and you're scared your job gets automated, what you want to do right now is go to your superior, the person that you're reporting to and say, "What does the best what does the perfect employee in this role look like?" I know it sounds like a kiss ass question and none of us want to be a kiss ass, trust me. But ask them that question and they literally spell out the role for you. They show up on time. They make me look good in front of my boss. You know, everyone wants to look good for their superior. Have the person that you're reporting to spell out what the role looks like. And if you're on a close, it also helps you build a better relationship with them, too. So, for this person, find the parts of your job that you cannot automate. the parts that are creative, the parts that you put your own spin on, and really make that part of it the most value additive part of your role. Next up, positioning. Question number three, I do basically everything right now. Social, email, some light web stuff, a little paid, and I know I'm supposed to pick the lane, but every time I try to niche down, I feel like I'm turning away money I need. How do you actually make that jump without hurting the short term? Yeah. So, I love this question. It's very near and dear to my heart, actually, too, because I took me way too long to niche down. I did it at the start to the end of last year of 202. And to speak to my personal experience, we started getting a lot of healthcare web related work. So, we got on a very good referral string for one was a a Medicare company close by who introduced us to their clients who were a pharmacy tech platform. At that time they got funded and they launched a pharmacy brand, a compounding supplements brand and a technology company that was all in this healthcare ring. So they since have had stumbled upon harder times and they're no longer in business. But we really built a mode around a work and you almost have to do it before you're ready. So I'm I really feel qualified to answer this question because when it comes to declaring a niche, you have there's this here's a few criteria you can base it on. You can base it on past work and past outcomes. If you have a home run testimonial that would be just great social proof. Like if you look at our site, we got a really good testimonial from the company that I just mentioned and they were huge fans of the work that we did and we used that front and center in our marketing. We have a really home run testimonial here. And I would say too, if you have had a past job and you're freelancing for the first time, whatever that role was, whatever that employer was, there's a a like a high likelihood that that's going to be your niche. And one thing I do want to portray with the niching conversation is you want to niche around outcomes and not passion. That might be hard to hear because when you are freelancing, you really need to make the value prop of your business the service of your customers and not your own personal fulfillment. I am not particularly passionate about healthcare. I am passionate about community and marketing and that's why like these Q&A and things like this that I do are off the clock because I'm passionate about it. I do believe there's a lot of value here still too and I do hope to make it a business someday. But the newsletter, the networking events, the community that I'm building right now is free because it's a passion project and it's not yet at the scale to where I can make it a full-time business. When it comes to also when it comes to positioning, so you can niche by there's two different avenues that you can take. There's kind of levels to this. So you can niche by let me make two road blocks here to kind of illustrate this. When it comes to positioning, there's a few different approaches you can take. So you can niche by tool or service. Also niche by industry. Can also niche and go outcome. or outcome slash buyer buyer specs. So, I'm going to go in and explain this a little bit further. I really love this font here. So, I'm going to switch over to the handwritten one and hopefully this actually helps illustrate my point here a little bit better. Okay, so ideally you want to go as many rungs down the niche as you can. So I'll kind of illustrate this with some examples here. If you were to have number one tool service, an example would be um say web flow which is our tool that we use uh for building websites. The next one of that would be an industry. So B2B manufacturing It's another example. Third one would be outcome or buyer specs. So you only work with B2B manufacturing companies who are say private equity backed 50 plus. The more rungs you can check on this ladder right here, the deeper you can go, the bigger the more obvious of a choice you are to the person that's in search of your services. And the good news is that while it feels like you're turning away work when you are niching down further and further, you will still get work. I can speak to this from experience, especially very near-term. This is something that we've done is you will still get weeds and work from your existing referrals, whatever those sources are, your network that are outside of this. But if you plant the flag under only doing these things and you fitting this very specific buyer type, private equity backed 50 plus employee B2B manufacturing companies, we only do web flow for them. You will start to get inbound, you will start to get more inbound weeds just from positioning from colder audiences. Let me say that again. You will continue to get referrals from colder audiences. So to example to exemplify this, this will be a good one. Before you're only getting referrals from a very small network, people that trust you dearly and you're only getting referrals because you're top of mind. Now, and this is this is a warm hot network. So picture orange as being like a hot hot warm network. When you are more deeply positioned, what you will see is that you will begin to get referrals from people in a colder network. Let me send this to back. uh you will start to get referrals from people who are outside your existing network because you are known for the one thing they are actively seeking out B2B manufacturing web flow companies who only work with private equity 50 plus employees. If you position yourself this way, you're actually going to get more work counterintuitively because you're not going to start turning down the people who already know, like, and trust you, who already go for you, go to you for the one thing. They're not going to stop doing that. And behind the scenes, you can take on any work that you want. You know, we have taken on two projects in this year that weren't directly healthcare related, and that's totally fine, but we what we don't do is we don't put those on our website, and it's not ideal to do. So if you want to get the most out of the niche, you have to really commit to it. So I can't speak highly enough of committing to a niche in marketing. Again, doesn't have to be web. This particular example, just it's a really elegant thing to look at your past job history, look at your past employers and say I and you can also use them as a, you know, a logo on your website or your portfolio. So can't speak high enough of niching. Do it before you're ready. And if it comes with a short-term loss, which it may, you can still take on other work behind the scenes because I guarantee you if you're good at what you do and you have an existing network, you will still get weeds for that type of work. So yeah, positioning. Next question on positioning. I've been telling people that I'm a marketing consultant for like two years, and I think that's part of why nobody remembers what I do. How specific is too specific when you're picking what to call yourself? You can't get too specific. I will say that you there are cases where you can I will say and and you I a lot of people think that they're in a dying industry or they worry about they're going into an industry that may be going out of business, but unless you're literally, you know, in say like newspapers or something like that that's clearly no longer a modality, you you're not going to run out of clients in reality. If you're if you say you're a marketing consultant, what does booked out look like for you as a consultant? It's probably most solo marketers, more solo consultant consultants can't realistically manage more than say six clients at one time. Are there more than six people in the world that do that do the niche that you're declaring? Um, it's wild to me that people think that they will saturate the market that their their niche is just too small. When in actuality, it is these people there's the majority of this market hasn't ever even heard of you. So, go as specific as you comfortably can to where it can still fulfill a marketing strategy for yourself. It has conferences. Uh, there's, you know, it deletes you from competition. You can separate from that. Um, but yeah, go a more niche than you feel comfortable doing. And I can't speak highway enough of doing that. I'm going take a quick sip of water here. Hang with me. Next question on lead genen. [snorts] Let's go. How many do we got here? We got a good amount more to get through here. Someone told me you're sending 30 LinkedIn connections a day through some automation thing. I tried similar with the tool and got a warning email from LinkedIn. Is that normal or did I mess up the setup? So, interesting question here. I think I know who got this question, but what you can do is you can use AI tools to send LinkedIn connections and use open source their API. So, there's a few tools that I have used and I'm again I'm not the ethical source of truth here. Um, I post a lot about this a lot on the YouTube channel. By the way, if you guys aren't subscribed to the YouTube channel, that's where I'll be uploading this. Andy the marketer, uh, right here, this channel, I share like unfiltered outreach and things that I'm doing to grow as a marketer in my agency and just some other tangential stuff like social proof, video outreach, podcasting, you know, live walkthroughs and sending emails, quote email, things like that. So, if you want to um some, you know, in-depth insights on how to make get more weeds and things like that, definitely subscribe to this channel. But in terms of using AI tools for LinkedIn, by the way, I do not advocate for sending using AI tools to send uh messages directly. AI just talking to people on your behalf is not the way to go. I promise you this. But there's a few different methods that you can take. Um, I have downloaded some quad skills that basically talk to the open source LinkedIn MCP. And this is probably a bit more complex beyond the scope of this video. I can make a full one kind of walking through the way that I use it, but basically I have it set up in quad now to where um my laptop's running incredibly slow right now, but I have it set up within a quad code instance on my desktop here. to where I every morning I can essentially just prompt it. Jesus Christ. I can essentially just prompt it to um just say, "Hey, send 30 LinkedIn account." then send 30 LinkedIn requests to my ICP and it uses the Voyager MCP and it will just open a com or a um a Chrome browser and kind of do it within the native browser here. So I can just say send 30 more connection requests to our ICP. I haven't sent any in a few days. Shout out to Whisperflow. By the way, if you guys aren't on the WhisperFlow train, I'll link that in the description. Whisp Whisper Flow is amazing. And basically what it'll do is it'll pull some local files on my system to reference ICPS and it'll open my Chrome browser and begin to send outreach. So, um I'm okay with using uh AI tools to Jeez, my nothing's loading here, but I am okay with using AI tools to do manual work. Again, from my perception and people that I have talked to, um LinkedIn is it says that you've gotten an email, which I is unfortunate. I doubt that they'll ban your account, but I've seen people get their LinkedIn account back if things like this happen. Um, what I would do is I would download the open source Voyager API skills from GitHub and then I'll drop the cloud skills and the um the the the GitHub repo in my description. And again, if you want want me to do a full video setting that up, I can. But yeah, my advice would be to use it to send connections and nothing else. Don't use it to talk to people. It can do that. I've tried and I don't want to do it anymore because it's just it's not worth the the headache and the stress. It'll send something wrong and also also there's a bit of an ethical problem there in my opinion. But in terms of LinkedIn coming out to people using their API, I think they will more and more in the future. But from the people that I've talked to, LinkedIn's mostly concerned with the companies that are building tools that are using the the the API and coming after them. So, I think you'll be okay if you try it. And again, I haven't had any issues and I've been probably using it almost every day for several months. So, I think you'll be okay. But again, if you don't want to poke the bear or if you have an ethical problem with that, then don't do it. Next question. I've been getting connections accepted, but then I don't know what to say after that. So, I just kind of don't say anything. And I know that's wasting the connection. What's a message that doesn't sound like a bot or sales pitch? So, talk to them like a person. Um, I know this is increasingly important, especially in the LinkedIn DMs. I'll even go through my LinkedIn DMs here to show you some examples, but just talk to them like a person, man. Like, use laid-back language. Say, "Hey man, loved your post." Or just, "Hey," the ultimate one that I use after Claude or my assistant sends the connection request, I'll just say, "Hey, man." Or, "Hey there, so glad we connected." You know, how's your week been? you want to be a little bit more personalized than that. But if you want to be depending on what your personality is, just be yourself. So say, "Hey, I'm so glad we connected." Um, joke around a little bit talking about golf. Uh, this guy was coming into Columbus for a startup event. Um, that guy, uh, foul language there. Um, this lady reached out. Hey, talking about the newsletter. Paula sending a job post. Other agency owners. Hey, Andy. I have to get back to Addison here. Check out. Yep. Definely have to respond to her. Um, Ryan, it just it's like texting, guys. Like, I'm not sure if you guys obviously there's some people who are more professional. post for people who are poor more and we wade back. But for the first message, what I would say what I would say is pick apart something from their recent post if they posted recently, something personal, something that you might comment and say it in the DMs to them and then that breaks the ice and what I've done also in the past, I've been more or less consistent about this is sending video DMs. Again, if that's not your flavor, don't have to do that. But talk to the if you guys are on the job search too. Talk to marketing managers or talk to the hiring managers and send them a DM like, "Hey, you know, just applied for this job, you know, I think I'm a really good fit and I would really advocate for myself." What you guys need to do is really really advocate for yourself and do it in a way not that salesy, but it should feel a little bit uncomfortable. If you have strong conviction that you want to talk to somebody, don't let anyone tell you that you're not worth their time to talk to you because we're all humans at the end of the day. And this is something that I see so often is that people get very people feel like they don't have that they're not worth other people's time that just because they're looking for a job that they are somehow morally lower than other people around them. This is not true and you likely already know this. But if you need to hear it, I'm glad I can be the one to say it to you. You are worthy to talk to anybody and you are not on any moral low any lower standard just because you know they make more money than you or they have a higher job title or they've been in a business longer than you have. The further that you can overcome that limiting self-belief, the more successful that you're going to be faster. So, when it comes to LinkedIn DMs, just text, talk like humans, and share relevant advice with each other. Become friends. Um, when you become friends with someone, it never feels like sales. And that's really what sales is. Whether you're looking for a job or whether you're looking for clients, sales is just making friends. So, I hope that helps. Hope that answers your question. Outreach, uh, kind of ting what we just talked about. I run a small agency, three of us, and I've been told I need to be a bit more aggressive in the DMs, but every time it feels gross and salesy, even when I don't mean to. Is there a way to sell that doesn't feel like selling? Um, that's basically what I just said. So, I kind of go back to my last question that answers that. Sorry if it wasn't dedicated to you, but kind of just answered that. Next one. I have like four proposals out right now and just sitting with no response and I don't want to be the annoying person following up every week. What's something you actually do while you're waiting that isn't just checking in? So, this is actually a great question. Um, I am a fan of persistent follow-ups because I have had many experiences to where the project the only reason the project wasn't started is because they didn't follow up. I'm telling you guys right now, people are just busy. people are just busy and they sometimes they are just putting it off because they don't want to open another thread. But marketing is just especially if they're marketers if you guys are market their inboxes are always full. So I'm a fan of the Fibonacci follow-up. Um, there's probably a way I can illustrate this that's a little bit more intuitive, but basically the Fibonacci followup is this idea to where every followup in a sequence, the timing between each is double as long as the time before it. So for example, I have a resource I can link to you guys about this, but this would be say this is initial message. A lot of the when it comes to sending proposals specifically to your question, um you probably didn't prevet them well enough. If you sent a proposal and they're not getting back to you, that comes down to qualification, doing the best practices on the sales call, like saying mentioning pricing, telling them exactly when they can hear for you, and spelling out next steps, and getting another call on the calendar. So, what you want to do initially, let me just kind of spell this one out. What you want to make sure that you do is on the initial call, schedule a call while you're on that call. So, um, say this time span right here is one day. So, here would be two days. Then this would be four days and then this would be eight days. That's usually a pretty good cadence. And then eventually after that they still haven't responded or if they keep saying, "Hey, still doing due diligence, still waiting to hear back from someone else, I'll get back to you." Tell them in that email that you respond to, "Okay, sounds good. You'll hear from me on this date." But the biggest thing you want to do is on the initial proposal, you should already have a call scheduled between the sales call and the time that they will get that proposal or and the time that they will receive the proposal. And next, so say this is the initial sales call right here, SC sales call. What you want to say on this call is, "Hey, this all sounds great. After we get off this call, you will get a proposal from me on this date, two days, 3 days. While we're here, do you want to schedule another date and for a week from now to answer any questions face to face, etc. And then while you're on the sales call, you schedule that meeting. So that way they know immediately when the proposal is coming and they have a date on the calendar to where they can answer any questions and then that having that date on the calendar is a deadline to when they have to get back to you either way. Because once that date is on the calendar, they're either going to cancel the call and then ghost you and then they get and if they do ghost you, then you get entered in this follow-up Fibonacci follow-up. Um, but if you've gone several follow-ups and you haven't heard anything, this is the best script that I can tell you to say. Say, "Hey, X sent you a few messages regarding XYZ over the past few weeks and haven't heard back. key right here. What should we do from here? That's it. This is the last one that you send. And if you don't hear back from that, then you say, "Okay, sounds good. I'll follow up." And then tell them the next time you follow up. This message right here works better than a lot of messages that I have gotten. And the reason why is because it's open-ended. It demands a response and it takes the question away from the proposal and it asks them what actually what's happening. So it asks them to point out next steps and it allows them to take control of the situation. People don't feel forced to talk about something like you're back in a corner. They're much more likely to proactively engage. So I love that message. And again, when it comes to the follow-ups, it's more important to focus on what you're doing in the initial meeting and the initial proposals um rather than again a perfect or magic follow-up message. This is the closest you can get to a magic message that will warrant a response. Um next up, freelancing. So, finished off that, moving on to a new chapter here. Freelancing. I've got two clients right now paying me for LinkedIn management and I want to turn it into an actual repeatable service instead of just winging it every time. Where do people usually start when they're trying to productize something like that? Great question. Um, so productizing a service, what the biggest thing that comes with productization is public publicizing your pricing. So, a lot of people get emotional about this. Um, I don't see why. When you want to productize your service, by definition, a product always has a price. So once you define a price that you're going to charge for, that allows you to extrapolate what the inputs of that are and really working backwards from what how much you want to make to how much you price. So, like for example, if LinkedIn management, if you have two clients paying you for LinkedIn management, you want to turn it into a repeatable service, you have to, it always helps to get a project manager tool, a project management tool, and really just working backwards. AI is great for helping you calculate this, saying, "How much is my hourly rate?" Um, if you don't like pricing by hourly rate, this isn't what you're going to charge clients for. This is just for you using your own imprint purposes. Again, I have a whole video talking about hourly hourly rate. I am not a fan of it. Um, but the only time you use it is either in a proposal when you're talking to a non-industry client to give them an anchor or you're using it to calculate your own internal hours to make a project profitable. Never bill clients based on ours. Um, but again, productization is coming down to putting a price on it and publicizing that price and coming up with clear metrics why you charge what you do. So for example um I publicize pricing on our website just put pricing and that's what it starts at 20k per websites and 3k per month for regen. When people ask you about this you have to have reasons why it costs as much. So 20k for us we have this is profitable because that's our industry standard. If you look at industry standard rates for specific healthcare websites also if you're niche you will be able to charge more. Um, but when people ask you, ash man, 20K for a website, uh, it seems like kind of a lot. Can you do it for less? Whenever someone asks you, can you do it for less? Say, no, but we can do it for more. I've said that before. It's gone over very well. Um, but the reason we charge what we do is because of the team that we have, the outcomes that we drive, and the fact that websites that we build actually pay for themselves. So, we have a guarantee. It's always good to have a guarantee if you are in a services business to something to the tune of um if you don't see results greater than what you've invested in us then you don't owe us anything. So kind of having that rule reversal in the prospect's mind that working for you is a guaranteed thing that they'll say yes to especially when you have to sell and high ticket services it's very helpful to say that. Um also in healthcare it's a very high leverage industry. So two enterprise companies I guarantee you if you guys are working with a enterprise company if they have more than 10 to 50 between 10 and 50 employees or up they have money guys and you need to remove yourself from the framing when it comes to money. Removing yourself from your own mindset around money because companies always have more of it than you do. And that's something that took me way too long to learn. Um, don't make the frame of reference your own bank account. Make it the company's goals and what makes sense for them to invest in you. Um, so yeah, productization first step, establishing pricing and then working back from your hourly rate to justify that price and how much you're going to make. Next question on freelancing. I keep hearing people mention folk and hunter.io IO and stuff like that. And I don't really know what half these tools do or if I even need them yet at my size, like one to two clients. Is it too early for that stuff? Probably. Um, some this person probably watched my video um when I did outreach for uh like cold email. But essentially, these tools that they're referencing specific specifically are folk is a CRM. You can use very cheap CRM. you can use. I'm not a big fan of HubSpot. I literally just made a video tearing them down. Um, there are smaller CRM. My my CRM is 30 bucks a month. It's not that much, guys. You can afford that. But some you can even use Notion, which is this tool right here. And just creating client records and having some kind of status that you can assign to each. Um, I'm a big fan of having marketing qualified, sales qualified, proposed, close one, close loss. That would be a good thing to illustrate here. So just some something where you can assign statuses to contacts. It can be Trello or something really simple like that. But you just need to be able to assign contacts and information to different stages in a pipeline. So you can have MQL marketing qualified weed. Actually you can use you can have like a colder contact. So it can be cold just someone who information that you have heat pql. Let me move all these over here. We had post. So let me lightly define each of these. Cold is meaning is basically uncontacted. So you have their contact information but you just haven't reached out to them. These are basically unassigned cold weeds. Marketing qualified weeds. These are people who have raised their hand or taken expressed interest in working with you. They have mentioned that they are in need of what you offer. So again, just taking this extrapolating backwards from the tool staff, any tool that can allow you to sign statuses like this. Again, they don't have to be these exact ones. This is a good place to start. U marketing qualified, right? A marketing qualified weed could be a email newsletter response. It can be an engagement on a sales salesy LinkedIn post. the LinkedIn post it can be they fit your ICPU deeply those are the three that I would start with SQL means they have ex they are qualified so kind of kind of the the line of these is depend the line between marketing qualified and sales qualified is dependent on your business and industry But sales qualified, obviously you've been on a call with them would be factor number one. They've expressed they've expressed that they need so they made a LinkedIn post something like that saying that they need LinkedIn help. They need a new website. They need marketing help. That's when a sales qualified lead. That's when they're ready for an offer. Proposed. So, next one. Pretty self-explanatory. You have proposed your services to them and they are considering it. Close one. And close lost. Obviously, they have responded. This means they've responded to your proposal. And close lost means they have rejected it. And don't delete people after they've gotten into close lost. Always keep these people in the pipeline for nurture. Reach out to them every 3, six, 12 months, whatever. Um, but your goal, this creates a jobs to be done for you if you're trying to get leads to just push people down this funnel. And again, this seems like idealized and kind of pie in the sky, but this is this is the entire job right here. When people are you it gives you a better sense of where people are stalling and where the flaws in your current own marketing is. So if you have a lot of marketing qualified weeds that aren't converting to salesqualified weeds, you know you have a issue in how you're presenting your offer. People don't know about your offer. It's not clear enough for them to want to take action on it. If you have a lot of salesqualified weeds that don't turn to proposed, then there's some issue with the offer itself. Meaning it's too high priced. It doesn't match their service directly and they're not responding to it. And same issue if you have proposed and you're getting too many to close lost there's something is there's something wrong with your offer and you need to tweak it so that it better matches them it's a better price fit it's a better audience fit and keep refining from there but if you're also to the very front of this wrong if you're not getting enough marketing qualified leads means nobody knows what you are and what you do so I made this analogy earlier and I made it several times in past videos here but kind of this whole pipeline analogy if that's the problem and you don't have any marketing qualified leads, that's where you always have to start. This is what a metaphorical [snorts] like solo business looks like. It always starts with marketing and you need to make this part of the pipeline as wide as possible so that leads can flow through it. So you always start with marketing. You always focus on getting people as many people as possible into the pipeline. So that way many people more there's a higher likelihood that people make their way all the way through. So, I hope that answers your question about tools. Hunter.io is just an enrichment tool and I do recommend it because it's very good at letting you find emails and information which is big for getting leads. Um, I've used instantly and tools like that as well. But if you're sending one to one emails and you know the company name and the prospect name, Hunter.io is a great tool to use to help you find it. And it has a generous free plan as well. So, even if you just have one or two clients, you can afford a few bucks on Ween. Um, okay, I've been going for about 45 minutes here. Wow, that went really fast. So, I'll save these for an episode two. So, I'll answer the last question regarding tool stack one more and then we'll get into schedule timing, team hiring and delegation, client management, content, networking, money, and pricing in a part two. Okay, so last question here. I feel like I'm paying for six different tools that do all kind of do the same thing and I don't know what to cut. How do you decide when something's actually earning a spot versus something you just got talked into trying? So, as a general rule here, I always prioritize kind of like earlier when I was talking about prioritize the tools that make you money. Plain and simple. Um, if a CRM is a high lever tool, LinkedIn premium if you pay for that is a high leverage tool because it allows you to grow connect and it increases the circle serial that you'll get a job that you'll get the clients. So, always start there. And also, I'm a big fan of UI and UX. So, if you find yourself more drawn to a specific rapper or version of a tool, guys, there are thousands of tools out there. If you are a creative, stick with the tool that you are most likely to stick to and use because that reinforces the groove. I use Excal here because I like it's illustrating these concepts. Stick to the tools that make you excited to work. That's why I'm a big fan of investing in tech. I just paid 300 bucks for this microphone because it encourages me to record videos like this. So, obviously, you want to cut back bloat. Make sure that you're tracking your finances and you're allocating a specific budget each month towards software and tools. But if anything is client-basing as well, that has a big moat. So we use several tools like we pay for hosting for our clients. We pay for uh a website feedback tool to where they can submit tickets. Google paying for emails for cold email things like that that are client-f facing and attached to outreach and revenue are both very high leverage tools and there incurs a a high friction cost in terms of switching. So I wouldn't try as a general principle you can always go up in the amount that you make. That's an uncap ceiling but you can only go down so far. So, I would really encourage you guys. I spent so much time in the beginning. I made an entire YouTube video on the main channel talking about my entire expense stack and I was freaking out about my monthly expenses. But as a general principle, don't worry about expenses. Focus on making more money. And the tools that help you make more money are going to be the easiest tools to justify. And it, you know, you're uncomfortable paying for a lot. You know, you can try vibe coding one. Again, you got to be paying for that with your time, which is not the best, especially if you're trying to get weeds in the beginning and meet more people, expand your growth. So, use that general framework when approaching this. Um, yeah, we've been going on for about 45 48 minutes now. That's probably where I'll cut a part one here. I appreciate you guys submitting the questions. Like, that was really helpful. And we ended up getting a lot more than I expected. So, if you have any other questions you want featured here in part two, um, please drop them in the comments. I'd love to answer them. If you're a marketer here in Columbus or if you're a marketer trying to make more money, get more jobs, and get better at what you do, that's exactly what I help with. I'd encourage you to check out the community in the link below where I do stuff like this all the time and share my wins and losses. And yeah, drop any other questions in the comments as well. And I'll see you guys next time. Cheers.