A99 - How do you set the boundary of work you do and work you don't do? - a podcast by Jason Resnick

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Setting boundaries around the type of work you do is at the core of what niching down is.

It very much is a mindset that you need to get yourself into.

The best way to force yourself into the mindset is tracking your time with everything.

Even when you think you are just doing that “one-thing” for a client that takes 10 mins, I’d be willing to bet that task took 15 or 20. Which directly eats into the overall profits of the business because that’s not what the client hired you to do.

Specializing your business means to not just focusing on a particular client, but it also means to focus on the type of work you do.

I ran a Twitter poll a few months ago and asked “Who would you rather be? Larry Bird or Danny Ainge?”

It was a landslide victory for Larry Bird at 92%.

I ran this on Instagram as well and Larry won with 100%.

Respect to Danny Ainge, who honed his craft in 2 sports and reach both the NBA and MLB. He played pretty well in both places, but was never the best.

But Larry Bird on the other hand, concentrated all his effort on basketball and became the Hall of Fame legend.

It’s hard for most to set these boundaries. To be profitable and be able to optimize the business processes and be better at pricing, you have to reduce the number of variables in the work.

You do that by setting these boundaries, which really is reducing the scope of work that you do.

Here’s a hint, anytime I heard that a client wants me to go off and use a different technology that they went ahead and signed up for or that they want me to do design or social media work, I picture in my head a stack of money on fire.

As a business owner, I’m sure that you’ve heard the expression “Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean that you should.”

Owners hear especially when they start delegating tasks to other folks.

But it applies very much to this as well.

Sure I can develop in Rails, Java, and work in Infusionsoft and MailChimp. I have in the past, but I decided to stop taking on those projects.

Why?

I’ve found that for the clients I serve, and the solutions they need, WordPress, Drip and ConvertKit has worked better.

Overtime I’ve learned the ins and outs of these platforms and been able to solve problems for clients in ways that even the companies didn’t even know could be done.

Had I not focused on these platforms, chances are good that I wouldn’t have gotten this deep with them.

Let me give you an example, when I was a generalist developer I would spend 3-6 months working on Rails projects, then bounce from those to a custom PHP project for the next 6 months. Then back to a Rails project.

By the time the PHP project was done, often there were new versions of Rails, so I’d have to learn those. Rails was a fast pace technology so there were tons of new gems and bits of software and tools to catch up on.

I would constantly be chasing my tail in this cat and mouse technology race just to keep up. I wouldn’t give myself a chance to dive deep into the inner workings of the technology.

But most importantly to the business, I wasn’t becoming an expert and learning ways of how best to optimize the project builds, the deployments, the project support, and most of all the business itself.

With the constant re-learning of new things, rarely ever did 2 projects go the same way.

Project estimates were not as confident and I was almost forced to charge hourly rates.

Value based pricing always seemed like a far fetched pipe dream that I’d never reach.

Setting the boundaries is easy, but keeping them and not falling back into old habits is hard. 

If you keep falling back, the business won’t move forward, you won’t move forward and your profits will just go up in flames.

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