Learn about how you can build your WordPress LMS freelance business transformation with Matt Inglot in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Matt shares his experience building websites for clients, and what it was like to move from brochure and marketing websites to building out specialized sites for memberships, e-commerce, and courses.
Matt is from the podcast Freelance Transformation where he helps freelancers find higher paying clients and projects while removing the stress from the process. If you build websites as a service, Matt’s podcast is one to follow.
Building sites for clients is something Matt has been doing for 15 years now. He started out building websites just because he needed money to put himself through school, and he had been working for a startup that went under as soon as he started to try living on his own. Through talking with everyone he knows and his tenacity, he was able to get some clients to build sites for and to expand that as he got better at site building.
After years of working in the space Matt became very good at building sites, and he was making a lot of money. The area where he was able to deliver the most value and make the most money was working with online business owners rather than the marketing websites. Building up recurring revenue and delivering value to your clients is a great way to get the recurring revenue you need to make a website service business thrive.
Traditional video courses have a huge business model problem, and that is they can’t generate recurring revenue very easily. Once people purchase the program they don’t have a need to purchase again or renew anything. Chris and Matt talk about ways recurring value is key in online course businesses to generate recurring revenue. Progress tracking, coaching, ongoing exercises, along with templates is a great stack you can use to deliver that recurring value.
Many freelancers put themselves in the position of being purely an implementer. Matt explains how this can be a huge mistake because it will likely end up where clients don’t see the results envisioned from an implementation. Putting your business in a position where you are a technology partner rather than an implementer allows you to put yourself on a different playing field than people on Upwork and other freelance platforms where it is a race to the bottom in terms of pricing.
To learn more about Matt Inglot be sure to check out FreelanceTransformation.com where he has a great podcast for freelancers, along with a free email mini course. At TiltedPixel.com you can find Matt’s agency website building practice that he shares his experience from in this LMScast episode.
At LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the cofounder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.
Chris Badgett: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name’s Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by a special guest, Matt Inglot from Freelance Transformation. It’s a podcast if you build LMS or membership sites for clients, you’re going to want to keep an eye on Matt’s podcast. You can find out more about him at freelancetransformation.com. He’s also got a free email mini course to help you level up as a freelancer. Welcome to the show, Matt.
Matt Inglot: Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Chris Badgett: In our pre-chat, we were having a conversation. It actually sounds like we have a lot in common. We’ve built sites for the expert industry or membership sites. Even some of the nuances of what you were talking about in terms of building custom software on top of the membership for various use cases. This is totally in my wheelhouse and what I used to do as a freelancer and as an agency owner. Can you talk a little bit to the builders out there? The people who build websites for the LMS industry. Just share your experience of going from just building websites or any websites or marketing sites, brochure sites to this specialization and memberships, e-commerce courses and all this. How did that transformation happen for you?
Matt Inglot: Yeah, absolutely. To put it in context, I’ve been doing this for 15 years now and I started out with just building websites for people because frankly, I needed money. I was trying to put myself through school. My parents couldn’t pay my tuition and I was working for a startup that went under pretty much as soon as I started trying to live on my own. I desperately needed cash or I wouldn’t be able to get my education. I just started building websites for people because it’s something that I knew how to do and I knew nothing about finding clients about what makes a high value client. You could argue, I didn’t know that much about building websites either, but it’s your sheer tenacity and just talking through every single person that I met and telling them I build websites, I got my first few clients and that started me on a journey of getting increasingly better at building websites, getting increasingly more money for building those websites and eventually hiring a team.
Matt Inglot: And eventually, we at an office for a few years before I realized I hate having an office, and that was a decision I backtracked out of. But basically, I started off just on a very generalist path of if you need a website, we’ll build it for you. And then that later it clicked on me that the people that were willing to pay most to get a website build were people that we’re able to get a very specific business result for the website. It’s not so much that people pay for your website because it’s pretty or that you put a lot of time and effort into it. They’re willing to pay for it if it actually creates results for them, like bringing in more leads, bringing in more sales, doing something valuable for them. I started seeking out more of those types of clients and that started to really revolutionize my business.
Matt Inglot: And I went from really struggling to actually making pretty darn good money building these things. And then as I progressed and as I realized where we deliver the most value, I realized that as cool as the marketing sites we were building were and as cool as the results we were able to create for clients where we are really, really, really making money and really having clients that stayed with us for years and years, we’re online business owners, or as you said it very nicely, you can even chunk that down further to the expert industry, which is people that have basically built an online business around selling some sort of digital product that basically packages up their information, their knowledge, their tools, whatever. And I realized that some of these people were really being limited in their growth of their business because the tools and the software weren’t all that flexible.
Matt Inglot: They had this great idea of what they wanted to create for their members or for their customers. And then they would go and they try to build it. And basically even today if you’re trying to do more than just build an online course where you just share videos with people, it’s pretty hard to do that. These packages aren’t that flexible. We started building a lot of custom functionality. The types of clients that we work for, they’re heavily custom sites. It’s not just like an online course, it’s a, for example like a stock photo membership site or a site with financial tools or a site that the quizzes students and lets teachers see their results and things like that. As soon as you start getting limited by the technology, that’s where we come in and we open up an entire new world of possibilities and most importantly an entire new world of revenue, of customer retention and a lot of other great things that are very hard to achieve with just video courses.
Chris Badgett: Wow. I love that. I think we are birds of a feather because I have this concept called Course Plus. The most valuable sites I’ve built for clients, it wasn’t just the course, there was this other stuff. It could be plus community, plus live events, plus coaching, group coaching, private coaching, plus other software, plus other resources, plus other products. If you’re in the business of getting results for somebody, they often need more than just information that comes through video. And of course, while that’s valuable to make it super high value your client, you have to surround them with all these resources to help their customer gets success. And some of the biggest sites and most profitable sites we ever built in our agency was when we would take an expert, it was course plus coaching plus community with leaderboards and stuff.
Chris Badgett: And this software, we would add this additional layer of software where members of this particular platform were putting in their metrics and getting really personalized coaching. It was like, this isn’t something you can buy off the shelf and just put together, this is a custom solution for our particular leader in a particular industry that does things a particular way. I’d love to hear more about how your approach and experience with that kind of thing.
Matt Inglot: Yeah. I mean, I’m glad you’re bringing that up because it sounds like we’re kindred spirits here. You bring up online courses, obviously there’s people out there making a lot of money through online courses and that’s awesome. But your traditional video course has a huge business model problem and that it’s very hard to turn that into a membership site of any kind or any sort of recurring revenue. Basically, once people buy your course and get your videos, that’s basically it. And most people that I’ve seen that have tried to turn that into monthly revenue have basically failed and in many cases have actually made less money off that bottle than they did when they just sold the courses at one time, big money thing. You could sell a course for 500 or 1,000 bucks up front or you can try charging like $49 a month for it and the ladder is flawed because once people have the videos, why are they going to keep paying you $49 a month for access?
Chris Badgett: Yeah. If you want recurring revenue, you need to have recurring value.
Matt Inglot: Exactly.
Chris Badgett: That’s a-
Matt Inglot: That’s 100% in. And especially when you realize that if all you’re doing is giving someone videos, the crappy thing is, I would argue most people that get a video course don’t actually take action. And it might not be necessarily the problem with a content. The content’s fantastic, it’s just learning and education are difficult problems. People get excited, they’ll buy a course and they’ll drop off. How can you turn that into a recurring revenue model when in three months they’ve completely lost interest in the course, they’re going to cancel very quickly. What we found works really well instead, and you’ve alluded to that, is that plus part where it’s more than that. In our case, what’s worked really well for our clients is giving people tools. You might not-
Chris Badgett: What kind of tools?
Matt Inglot: You might not be willing to pay $49, let’s talk about that, you might not be willing to pay $49 a month for access to videos that you already, but you’ll certainly pay for ongoing access to tools and functionality. For example, that might be any sort of thing that allows you to make continuous progress towards your education. Let’s say like a tool that helps you implement what’s being taught. And that varies a lot, but it could be pretty simple, it could be pretty complicated. For example, the most complicated thing we ever built was this whole financial portfolio analyzer tool that lets you actually input your investment portfolio and track it. That’s almost like a SAS product. But then there’s much simpler things like [crosstalk 00:10:16]-
Chris Badgett: Like templates or something.
Matt Inglot: Sorry?
Chris Badgett: Like templates, you could provide templates that help people execute on some idea that you taught in the course.
Matt Inglot: Yeah. Templates, quizzes, ongoing exercises, progress tracking. In one client’s case, it’s actually allowing the teachers of the students to see their progress, which is huge. There’s a lot of things that you can do to provide interactivity and people are way more willing to pay for that. And along with some of the other things that you mentioned, like coaching, ongoing help, access to community, anything that allows them to get ongoing value and not just passive lessons.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I just want to share just like a, so for example here, this is my favorite word and teaching, so for example, and if your doubt that you can sell a client website a really high ticket thing, let me just explain to you this. I have a software company, LifterLMS. I just paid for a $30,000 program that includes courses, but it includes a lot of other stuff and there so much recurring value that, I mean, if you don’t think you can sell, let’s say a $30,000 website. I’m telling you right here, I’m a customer on the other end of all that where I bought a program and there’s a lot of other people in the program, you can create incredible value for your clients by helping them put together, sometimes they need help figuring out how to create the most value too.
Chris Badgett: That thing where as a consultant or a platform builder, you start getting all these questions outside the scope of like, Hey, we’re going to put a website together. I’d love to hear how you as a freelancer, help your clients maximize the revenue they could potentially generate because a lot of the best platforms are, there’s like this magical co-creation that happens between the expert in their field and you as the expert and online and putting tools together and envisioning the project. How do you maximize the value creation between you and the client?
Matt Inglot: Yeah. That’s a great point because a huge mistake freelancers and agency owners and so on make is they position themselves and treat themselves as the people that just do the work.
Chris Badgett: Tell me what to do, what do you want? Just tell me-
Matt Inglot: Yeah, exactly. I’m an employee, you tell me what to do. And so let’s step away from websites and LMS for a second. Last year we bought a house and I wanted to turn our garage into a proper, [inaudible] shop, because that’s one of my hobbies. I had to start looking for contractors and one of the hardest things I found was finding an electrician that could do more than just quote me on what I asked for and actually advise me on what the best way to do my lighting setup was, the best way to do my electrical, how many outlets I needed. To be honest, they all suck at that and it took a while to find someone that could really work with me because they didn’t see themselves as in the business of giving advice. They saw themselves as being in the business of, if you want an outlet here, I will put an outlet here.
Chris Badgett: There are literally [crosstalk 00:13:36]-
Matt Inglot: If you want these many lights on the ceiling, I’ll put them there. Though it’s the same problem with web development for sure. You tell me what to build and I’ll build it for you, but you pointed out, most clients have no idea. Even if they’re already doing well selling information, they probably have no idea what’s possible. They probably have no idea where you can create leverage. I’ve been doing this for 15 years. I’ve worked with a lot of clients. I know what’s worked for people, I know it’s worked for multiple people. I know the common mistakes, how crappy of me would it be to withhold all of that for my client? Instead, we take a very advisory role. It’s really the strategy that we help them with and building the platforms almost just ancillary to that.
Matt Inglot: We help them figure out what to build, what’s actually going to drive their business forward. And that’s always the end goals, how can we make you more money? And if you can reframe your thinking from telling me what to do and I’ll do it. And if you’re thinking like that you’re competing with every guy and girl on Upwork and all the other sites too, I can help you figure out what to do. Then suddenly, you’re one of a handful of people in the world that can answer that question. And that’s a very important question that people are willing to pay a lot of money to solve.
Matt Inglot: In our case we do a lot to continuously meet with our clients, do strategy calls of them and help them figure out how we can actually help them grow their business forward. And we focus a lot on numbers, what are the key metrics of your site and how are those metrics doing? Sometimes it is building new features and functionality for members, but there’s a lot of other ways to build value for clients. With one client we actually helped them fix their pricing because their pricing was really complicated. They had a huge array of products and they’re basically tripping over their own feet as a result of that. And we basically help them narrow it down to three levels of course that you can purchase.
Matt Inglot: We helped them figure out the different segments of people that would actually buy these three levels and what the key leverage points are that would cause someone to, for example, upgrade from like basic to premium to then ultimate. And as a result, the client is basically selling the exact same information as before, but making way more money at it because they’re delivering the right value to each segment. Sometimes it’s not even a programming challenge, sometimes it’s a matter of building in the features and functionality that get people to upgrade their memberships. That’s a whole game in itself. What can we do to convince you you do want to become a member or you do want to go up to the next here. Sometimes it has nothing to do with members at all. And how can you automate your business? It’s fascinating how many manual things business owners do because they’re not programmers and they have no idea that the computer can basically automagically do that for them.
Matt Inglot: They end up hiring real staff, paying real wages, basically moving data around between systems. And then it’s very easy to say, for five, 10 grand, we’ll make these two systems talk to each other and you’ll never have to pay someone to work with that system again. And we’re very good at doing that. And they liked the idea of not paying all that staff, it’s a win-win.
Chris Badgett: Well, I mean, that’s a gold mine there. Thank you for sharing all that. I’m just representing the audience of the platform builder out there, what are some tips you have around creating that recurring value for your web clients? You mentioned that the, do you make suggestions or do you get them on some kind of retainer that include some kind of thing or do you just keep blowing their mind with ideas and how you can save them money if they keep investing? What are some simple rules or process or tactics that people could try to get outside of we’re going to build a project and walk away to we’re going to build a project and create a longterm relationship as a technology partner?
Matt Inglot: Absolutely. I mean that completely changed my business was finding clients that I could keep working with because I think most people listening to the show don’t really like finding new clients, don’t really like selling. I find freelancers aren’t exactly, you’re out there trying to practice your craft and the more time you have to spend selling, the last time you get to do that. That completely changed my life is getting to a point where once we started working with the client, year one would be the least amount of money they ever paid us instead of the most because after we proved ourselves and did amazing things for them, they would want to keep working with us and keep having amazing things done.
Matt Inglot: In our case, there is a couple of things we do. Yeah, absolutely, there is a year at least support and maintenance retainer where they pay us a certain amount of money and we basically make sure everything runs perfectly for them. But that that retainer is not really a ton of money. It’s a few thousand dollars a year per client, but it’s the wedge in the door to be able to maintain that relationship to make sure that we’re constantly communicating because if you don’t have any sort of maintenance agreement or anything, I find clients are afraid to talk to you because they’re afraid of getting a bill. It’s one of those things where like, you talk to a lawyer and next thing you know a bill shows up in a couple of weeks and you’re like, I just asked you how your day was, what’s happening here?
Matt Inglot: That allows them to communicate freely with us. But then I make a very active effort to set up regular calls of my clients. I even have an article on my website talking about what I call, Strategy Calls. The point of it is to get on the phone with them-
Chris Badgett: Do you charge for those?
Matt Inglot: Let’s say, once a quarter. Sorry?
Chris Badgett: Do charge for those strategy calls?
Matt Inglot: No. I make a point not to do that. And remember they are paying us yearly, they’re our client, they’re not tire kickers. I will happily meet with a client all day long, anytime, anywhere because we get to have really important conversations about their business and that’s a way where I can provide value to them because again, they don’t understand what the KPIs are in their business. They don’t understand what’s holding them back. We have a virtual coffee for an hour and suddenly they walk away with a lot of value, a lot of ideas. But more often than not, those calls also turn into opportunities. For example, I once sat down with a client because they have questions about their analytics and a week later I was doing a $40,000 website rebuild for them. That would have never happened if we hadn’t sat down to look at those analytics.
Chris Badgett: That coffee and that hour of your time, I mean it always comes back around. I heard of something, one of my clients who is actually teaching sales stuff taught me this. He said, “Your clients are not in the witness protection program. You should talk to them.” Like a lot-
Matt Inglot: Yeah. And it’s weird because it’s probably the most important part of our relationship. But it’s so easy to get into a mind frame or somehow they’re wasting your time or you want to focus, hunkered down over your keyboard and focus on your work, but have those conversations and make sure to have those conversations strategically. Again, they’re not useful conversations if you have that employee mindset or you sit down with them and expect them to give you directions and tell you what they want done the data, they don’t know. These conversations are opportunity to explore that and figure out how they can make improvements in their business. What challenges are they having? There is a mindset shift, but once you have a mindset shift, those calls are absolutely gold.
Chris Badgett: I see some people, I know when you’re advising a client, it takes a degree of confidence. It takes some just time in your industry so you can see trends and be able to offer. You can see value that you could offer because of your experience and the patterns you’ve seen before. But any other tips to helping someone make the transition from contractor to confident advisor?
Matt Inglot: Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost decide to make that transition, that’s step number one because as soon as you decide to make that transition, you’re hopefully analyzing everything that you’re doing just in the back of your head as you’re doing it and asking yourself, am I being strategic about this or am I being an employee? Just having that voice in the back of your head, that second set of eyes in the back of your head looking at your actions is going to change a lot about what you do. Second thing is practice, now go out and do it. You’re not going to get it right the first time, that’s life. You might get it right the 10th time, the 50th time, but every time you get to sit down with someone, whether they’re a new client or an existing client, that is an opportunity to practice building that mindset.
Matt Inglot: Third thing, educate yourself. That’s the hardest thing when you’re starting out as you alluded to is you don’t have that experience. But there’s ways of getting that experience other than just working on a lot of client projects that will come, but spend the time educating yourself. Figure out what it is that first of all businesses want and I’ll give you the shortcut answer, they want money. But take a bit of time to actually learn how businesses think, how they function, what basic accounting terms mean, like what is revenue, what is profits? That’s all stuff that business owners care a lot about and most of it’s very simple, but that’s their language. You want to learn how to speak their language. Then you want to learn how your industry helps impact the things that these business owners care about. Stop thinking in terms of how can we make things more usable, or how can we make things more pretty, or how can we make things more efficient?
Matt Inglot: Programmers in particular are terrible at this. They’ll spend weeks and weeks learning how to optimize my SQL databases. Clients don’t know what my SQL is and they don’t care. They care how can we generate more revenue if somehow maybe optimizing the database will do that? Great. It probably won’t. Probably the right answer there is to just buy a bigger server. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. Spend the time figuring out how your industry can actually create movement in those numbers. Start reading the resources, the case studies, the industry journals where people have accomplished these things and figure out how they’ve done it. The nice thing about the internet is there’s a wealth, wealth, wealth of information about how to do this stuff. We didn’t really have that starting out, there was some information online, but nothing like today.
Matt Inglot: Educate yourself and then take the education and start applying it to clients. You’ll notice that you’ll start speaking differently to them, but the solutions that you recommend to them will be different. Again, make the conscious effort to make that transition. Start practicing every opportunity to speak with someone is a chance to practice and then do everything to educate yourself about how businesses work and how you can actually create value for them.
Chris Badgett: Yeah, I love that. And that is a mistake I see a lot of builders make is they get into the technobabble. The client is there an expert there thinking about ROI, return on their investment. They’re thinking, they want automation. If you can take a job that they were getting ready to hire somebody for and you just automate it, I mean that adds incredible value to their business and it’s always like, I always try to think when I’m working with a client, how can what we do, how can they get a 10X return? I’ve seen a project that we built and over time invoiced around six figure, 100K for just over a year or two. But that client made several million dollars in the year. There was a big ROI. Yeah, it was expensive but they got a ton of value out of it. The business owner often thinks in terms of return on investment and if you communicate in those ways it’s helpful.
Chris Badgett: I wanted to ask you about getting these types of clients. Everything changed for me when I started focusing on the LMS and the membership site and e-commerce industry in terms of like, okay people are like, “Oh, that’s what you do.” But I had a lot of clients doing recurring value as well, adding new things, advising, I actually didn’t need that many. And for us our engine of growth was, it was really just word of mouth. And in some ways it didn’t even work that well because the clients kind of, if you’re really good, they want to keep you all to themselves and they’re not going to tell their friends because they’re worried that you may get fractured focus. But I mean, that’s just something in my story. But what do you recommend for people to get leads? More clients like this for the LMS and the membership industry. Should they get to conferences? Should they do content marketing? Should they do paid advertising? What do you do? What do you recommend?
Matt Inglot: Yeah. Again, I teach a whole course on this. I love that you’re bringing all this stuff up because the same realizations that you had, are the same realization set not only I have had, but from running my podcast, I realized that a lot of these realizations are the common difference between freelancers that consistently struggle and the ones that are able to close $10,000 deals, $50,000 deals, 100,000 plus deals and do so without breaking a sweat, it’s all the same transformation. You basically asked, well, how can I find these amazing clients that are willing to spend $100,000, let’s say on an LMS system.
Matt Inglot: First thing you got to do is figure out who they are, which most people miss this step, skip this step, don’t think it’s important, whatever. If you can’t define your client, I cannot tell you anything that will help you find those clients. I don’t have that answer because if you don’t know who you’re looking for, you will never ever find them. That’s just fact. For example, if you’re thinking about LMS systems, there’s a ton of different ways where you can define clients, but probably one of them is actually revenue. If you’re trying to sell your services to someone that’s just starting a membership site and they have no money coming in, they’re not going to be have $100,000 to give you to build this thing unless they somehow secured a lot of funding.
Chris Badgett: I think that’s a really important point. I just want to park on it a second. If I was going to do it, I would in my qualifying the lead or the type of marketing idea, I would say something like, already making at least 100K from your expertise, which means maybe they’re a professional speaker, a book author, a professor at a university or something. But if they have 100K, they will invest 10K if you can help them scale and grow and maybe not live on planes and hotels. I mean there’s all kinds of things that happen to experts that are already making money with their knowledge. But if somebody said at the very beginning and they’re like, that’s not bad, but if somebody hasn’t made money with their expertise before, that’s a totally different type of client.
Matt Inglot: Yeah, absolutely. That’s so important. And it goes beyond qualifying them, but also figuring out where we can find them. That’s one thing and is revenue. Next thing is hopefully you can bring it down to beyond just people that have a lot of revenue and want a membership site. You actually qualified at further. You said for example, speakers and authors.
Chris Badgett: And there’s another, I just want to share this old story, but I used to do a lot in the Infusionsoft community, which means they’re already paying $2,000 a year for a very expensive marketing automation and software course. If they’re already doing that and we did a lot of integration with Infusionsoft back at that time, they’re already getting more qualified.
Matt Inglot: Wonderful. Let’s add that in. We’ve got revenue, we’ve qualified more what they do for example, speakers and authors and now we have a signal on top of that, they’re Infusionsoft users and Infusionsoft costs and ungodly amount of money to use. First of, we can have a clear picture in our mind of who these people are. Two, we have a good idea that they’re serious. And three we probably have a good idea that we can actually help them solve real problems. Like you said, there’s limitations speakers run into if you know so many hotels, so many planes, so many speeches that they can give. Now what we have an is a high value client, high value because we can create a lot of high value for them and they’re able to pay for that value.
Matt Inglot: And two, they’re identifiable, which means that we can actually figure out where they heck they are, where can we find congregations of these people? And if you don’t have this information, you can spend the rest of your life looking for these supposedly high value clients and never find them or be looking in the wrong places. I’ll tell you right now that people that spend their lives sharing their expertise and they’re in hotels and planes and whatever, they’re super busy, they don’t hang around on free Facebook groups. The people that hang around on free Facebook groups are people getting started. If you go on free Facebook groups and try to help those and promote your services and stuff, your chances of finding these clients aren’t so great.
Matt Inglot: If instead you figure out where these people do hang out, your chances go up astronomically. That might be paid groups, that might be even an Infusionsoft group. Quite frankly, that’s probably conferences. That’s networking, I like conferences because what they do is for a few thousand dollars I can go into a room with full of people that are likely to need my services. And think about this, if I get one client from that, that’s maybe a $40,000 deal to start and that’s going to increase every single year. Why wouldn’t I go there? Why wouldn’t I pound the pavement? Someone’s done all the hard work of basically roping all these people together for me, marketing that conference to them spending, who knows how many dollars, putting it all together and all I have to do is buy a plane ticket, conference ticket and show up.
Chris Badgett: I’ll add one more to that.
Matt Inglot: That’s ridiculous.
Chris Badgett: I’ll add one more, which is if you sponsor it, and oftentimes, it’s not cheap, but there’s like, you don’t have to be the title sponsor on the lanyard or whatever. But if you can sponsor, there’s often a speaker sponsor dinner. You can actually be at a table and then you’re going to get the question at some point, “Oh, who are you? What do you do?” And if this is like, Oh, I help people just like you, get scale and 10X of revenue and automate and reduce whatever, you’re in the right room with the right people at the right time that are qualified. Conferences are good, but you got to put in the work to get the most out of them.
Matt Inglot: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s maybe another really good point is, I mean, unfortunately a lot of people just don’t want to put into work. And I think it’s not really that they don’t want to put into work, they don’t have the confidence in themselves that they’re able to go do that. There’s that little voice in your head that says, “Oh, Chris can do it, Matt can do it, but I can’t do it.” And I got to say, I am an introvert and I grew up basically being a super introvert, focused on my computer, focused on programming video games. At 20 years old when I was first trying to find clients, I was awkward as hell. It was so hard to just walk up to a person and strike up a conversation. I would rather jump off a bridge than do that but I forced myself to do it and now it’s not so bad.
Matt Inglot: I’ll never be like the life of a party, but I can do these critical things that will get me the business that I need and I’ll take that trade all day long versus hunting around Facebook groups, trying to find somebody, anybody that is willing to pay me something for my services or hunting around job sites. The high value clients aren’t doing that. And even if they are, if you’re on a job site, you’re competing with so many other people that are basically all pitching the same thing. Versus if you can position yourself as the only expert in the room on a painful problem, then they all want to talk to you. And as far as they’re concerned, you’re the only person in the world that can solve this for them.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I totally resonate with what you’re saying. I’m actually an extreme introvert as well. Sometimes people think I’m extroverted because I’m on all these videos and podcasts and everything, but if I’m in a conference, I’m likely not going to be speaking on a stage, if I’m at the some kind of social event, that conference, I’m not going to be in the center of the room, but I’ll be networking in the crowd. And sometimes when you’re working with the expert industry, you’re going to make a connection, not even with the expert themselves, but with their assistant or their marketing person or somebody else on their team. It’s just a conversation. It’s all about just having conversations. You don’t have to be super extroverted to do that.
Matt Inglot: Yeah. And they lead to amazing things. We’re talking before the show started about how you and I connected and it was a mutual friend and I met this person at a conference a few years ago and he’s made a number of amazing introductions for me, but I literally wouldn’t be on this show if I hadn’t met him.
Chris Badgett: And I’ll tell you how I met this person, I met somebody else at a very small intimate six person mastermind that later introduced me to this person. And that was for me getting outside of the building and going and investing in my business with a little mastermind thing. But it’s all about getting outside of the building and people make recommendations and I recommend you do that as well. If you see how you can add value and make an introduction, that’s helpful. I mean you can be annoying with introductions and be doing all over the place. But when you see a really key one that’s like, “Oh, so-and-so needs to meet so-and-so.” Make it happen. You never know what can come from that.
Matt Inglot: Yeah. Built those relationships. And actually when you say go out there, go into the outside world, you could literally do that. I mean, we just talked about a lot of ways that you can get really good results from that. But if you just decide to end this podcast, learn nothing from it and just simply go out and talk to people, just talk to people, you will get business. If you do nothing else, you will still get business. That is how I started. You will not get the highest paying clients. You will not magically make a fortune overnight, but just simply as soon as you start talking to people, things happen, they always do. And now, instead of ignoring everything we talked about, now you start layering it on. Instead of just talking to anyone, I’m actually going to identify who my high value clients are. I’m going to put myself in positions where I can be speaking to them. How can you not get business? How can you not build an amazing business doing that? I mean you will get clients. It is a fact.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s a rare scale, just like you mentioned in the beginning with the modifying your garage. If you embody the advisory role, not just the implementer of whatever they say and you do a little work to identify who you serve and when you meet and you go to where those people are and people are like, “Who are you? What are you doing?” You have a short non cheesy elevator pitch ready. That’s like, Oh I help financial experts. Let’s say you’re at FinCon, which is a financial expert conference. Oh, I help financial experts grow and scale through training platforms or something like that. And then you just stop right there. You don’t have to give your whole story. And they’re like, “Oh tell me more.” If they’re interested, they’ll ask you to elaborate and it’ll just keep going. And if somebody is a good fit, it’s going to turn into business.
Matt Inglot: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Badgett: Matt, I want to thank you for coming on the show. If you want to check out Matt’s agency website, that’s Tilted Pixel, what’s the URL?
Matt Inglot: tiltedpixel.com.
Chris Badgett: And then you are @freelancetransformation.com, if you build websites for clients or do any kind of freelancing, go check out Matt’s podcast, Freelance Transformation and also head on over to freelancetransformation.com and sign up for his free email course. What can people expect inside of that?
Matt Inglot: It’s a highly condensed version of how to start finding clients more intelligently. Basically, stripped it down to what are the most essential steps that you can be taking to get started today. And if you just follow along, I mean, quite frankly you’re going to get clients. I’ve had people get some really cool results and also really cool insights just by following along with the free stuff. You don’t have to pay a dime for it. You just have to do the work and it’s basically going to take a lot of what we talked about today and put it into a step-by-step context for you that you can follow daily.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. We’ll have to do it again some time.
Matt Inglot: Thanks so much Chris.
Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS, the number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to lifterlms.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging, results getting courses on the internet.
