The other day, I mentioned how the long tail of execution work is a commodity… and that the real value was in knowing how to execute to get business results—not necessarily doing the execution yourself.
That doesn’t mean if you’re freelancing you should suddenly stop everything and outsource your projects. It just means your hands are the least valuable thing you could offer.
Let’s say you could outsource (or even refer) the hands work and still get the same outcomes. People would gladly pay for it as long as you gave it your strategic input and stamp of approval on the final product.
And thus you would begin your path to greater leverage…
A big part of why people hire you specifically is because they like your taste, worldview, experience, and ability to get the outcomes they desire.
It doesn’t need to be you doing the hands work. It could be, but it doesn’t need to be.
Let’s say you write content for a living.
What’s stopping you from figuring out how to teach someone else how to do what you do so you can delegate that part to them, freeing you up to learn, market yourself, and get more clients?
As long as you achieve the desired outcomes in the process, that’s all clients really care about.
Of course, how you do that without using your hands is another question. That comes through refining your process, documenting it, and making it easy for someone else to replicate.
When you eventually do get to a place where you no longer need to be hands-on-keyboard, you can then take your methods, templates, and processes and teach, advise, or give them away as marketing.
Now you’re creating even more leverage around your expertise.
The key thing to remember here…
If you can get the same results without using your hands—and either mark it up, do the strategy, or teach the process—you get to capture 80% of the value with 20% (or less) of the labour.
Every minute you spend with your hands on the keyboard—in a way that isn’t documenting, advising, or teaching your expertise—is a minute of unleveraged time.
It’s fine to do that for as long as you need to so you can learn and master your craft.
But eventually, it will hold you back from earning more and helping more people.
Have a great weekend,
—kevin
P.S. If you want to sell and scale your marketing expertise, then the membership is for you.
I’ll be closing the doors to the membership soon, then I might make some changes to the pricing/model again.
This is a good time to join if you’re at all interested!