Five Days of Focus – A Plan for Process Improvement in 2021
This is our final episode of our Five Days of Focus 2021 – highlighting Project Management essentials.
You want to earn more money and make your clients happier. Hell, we all do! But you might have heard recently that the only way to do so is to niche.
Niching has become a hot topic in the digital industry, with proven results. By hyper-focusing on one speciality or a small group of them, you can more effectively and easily target the exact kinds of clients you’re looking for.
So, should you niche?
It’s a good idea—but maybe not right away.
Specializing takes time, and if you want to be recognized as a major player in your niched field, you need to actually be an expert. That means study, practice, and perfection, which are all things that come with time.
Niching is great, but there are other ways to elevate your clients’ experience and make yourself stand out to prospective clients in the meantime. At the end of the day, your clients will be less concerned about whether or not you’re the number one specialist in x or y. They’ll be more likely to notice if you’re staying within budget, communicating effectively, and getting their projects handed in on time.
If you’re not quite at the stage in your agency that you feel ready to niche, you can still take measures to become more specialized in the services you offer. Set yourself apart by asking yourself this: What are you doing for free that you should be getting paid for?
Here are some tasks that are worth much more than you’re probably asking for them. You might even be doing them as complimentary services. Stop that right now!
These tasks include:
- Project management
This is the absolute Achilles heel for some clients. If you can do project management well, lean into it—and get paid.
- Compliance
Are you ensuring that your clients’ sites fit government regulations? Other people are getting paid big bucks to do only that.
- Discovery
Just how much research and planning are you doing for your proposals, when you’re not even sure that you’ll snag the client?
To reduce both your clients’ expenditures and yours, and to stay within deadlines, you have to troubleshoot your current client process. It’s paramount that you go over the processes you’re using and how they’re working out for you to make what you do more efficient.
But where to begin?
You might have started out in your processes with good intentions, but you’re finding out that what you’ve laid out works better in theory than in practice. You might see that a process you thought would be universally applicable really isn’t.
And that’s okay.
It’s time to regroup, refresh and reimagine your process to make them work better for you and your clients.
That’s why I would always suggest my APPII method: Assess, Prioritize, Prepare, Identify, and Implement.
In today’s Can We Talk, we’ll be breaking down each of those steps to see how you can improve your processes, up your project management game, and how the untangling of tricky processes requires time—and patience.
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