A letter to my brother

Hey little bro,

So I heard you want to start selling your short-form content creation services. Smart idea. You’ve got a skill and something you really like to do and you want to get businesses to pay you for it. I was there too.

So how are you gonna go about doing it? I’m sure you have a ton of ideas but take a quick listen to the story of my 2021 spring semester.

This was just a year after Covid started and I knew a ton of local businesses (think bakeries, clothing, wellness/beauty, etc.) were struggling with their online presence and marketing efforts. And guess what? I was a Computer Science and Marketing major, there could be no better combination of passions for this idea.

So I started honing my website creation skills and taking online courses on social media marketing. I slowly built up a portfolio of sample websites and marketing plans and material. It took about a month but I was feeling confident, I knew what I was doing and I knew I could make a difference for these small businesses.

And so began the sales calls. I was on the Better Business Bureau website for days on end reaching out to every business within a 50 mile radius. I probably made over 200 calls and sent even more emails in a two week period. And what did I have to show for it? Zilch.

I got a few leads and people interested but they had reservations about my experience (or the lack thereof) and budgets were tight, obviously. What are you gonna, right? Well what I did… is call up a friend.

“Yo, so you were talking about building a social media platform…?”

Yup, I gave up on the idea and moved on. But since then, I’ve co-founded two startups and worked with a bunch of entrepreneurs. So here’s how I think you should go about starting for the best chance at success.

Ask for payment, not permission

Alright so what’s the first thing you’re thinking of doing? It’s probably building up a portfolio or something of the like to show your competency. Awesome, you definitely need a reputation if you’re going to get people to pay you.

But don’t go about it the same way I did. All the learning in the world pales in comparison to a single real-world experience. I don’t want you to build all these castles in the sky without ever taking a step on the ground.

So go find a real business that you like and just do your service for them. In my case, that would’ve been building a great website and making sure it had amazing SEO. Then I would’ve put down $50 or so in a Google Ads account and actually created marketing material for the company and seen how real people reacted to it. Once I had this hard data about how much traffic I was able to drive to the company, I can then go present it and ask if they’d like to hire me to continue growing their business.

And I know what you’re thinking: “you want me to put in my own money and a bunch of my time for free to help out a business??”

Well ya, pretty much. Cause think of this like you’re stuck in a forest. The only way you’re going to survive the night is if someone lends you lighter fluid and a match (cause you quit cub scouts after a year when everyone but you had a sleeve full of badges).

So how do you get them to help you out?

Easy. You go help them out. Start chopping some trees, scrape together fallen leaves, snap off some branches, and make such a perfect little pyre that they just can’t say no. And bam, you’ve got a fire going for the two of you and they even let you go hunt some food for them in exchange for their plates and cutlery.

Ok ok tying this back to selling your services: the idea is that you’ve got to actually prove that your skills are effective before even thinking of asking someone to pay you for them.

Hence, ask for payment for the great job you did, not for permission to do it in the first place.

“That… doesn’t sound half bad”

I know! This is why you gotta listen to me every once in a while.

But I know there’s also a voice in the back of your head going “But what if it doesn’t work? What if they don’t want to hire me?”

Fair enough. That’s definitely a possibility but there’s two silver linings here. One, remember how this was supposed to be a way to build your portfolio? Well now you have a legitimate, real-world project for it. What do you think more business owners are going to be interested in: you building a website and marketing plan for an imaginary company or creating and implementing those in a demography that actually applies to them?

Second, even if they don’t want to hire you for future services, they might still pay you for the right to the work you’ve already done. And let me throw in a third: they’ll probably refer you to other businesses they know, because of your tenacity.

Alright, get out there and make some cool shit!

You’ve just read an abridged version of…

a talk I had with my brother. But I think it applies to really anyone that’s planning on starting this kind of a business, so I wanted to publish and share it. I’m pretty confident that if I had used this framework in the past, that failed idea could’ve become something so I hope you give it a shot.

If you found this educating, or at least entertaining, share it with that friend or family member that’s always talking about starting a business. Don’t be shy, I’m sure they’ll thank you for it.