Episode #189 - Dominate Your Niche and Become an Authority with Matt Johnson - a podcast by WordPress business specialist Troy Dean featuring Seth Godin, Michael Gerber, Guy Kawasaki, Joe Pulizzi, Andrew Warner, James Schramko, Brian Clark, Ed Dale, Dan Norris and many more.
from 2018-11-04T23:32:25
So many of us take pride in offering high-touch, customized service experiences for our clients, where everything is tailored to each client’s specific needs—so why is this week’s guest finding so much success doing the opposite with his product?
Matt Johnson, of Pursuing Results, is a former WordPress developer who pivoted his business into a podcast production company, and he offers his production services as a full-package, standardized product. He sat down to talk with us about what that means, why it works, how other professionals can implement and scale the product model in their own businesses, and where the future of podcasting is headed.
The Beginning
Matt got his start in WordPress development building a website for a piano studio, and then later built another for his first consulting client, which led him into the world of real estate. From there, he learned the benefits of optimizing teams and processes well enough to able to step back from the day-to-day.
It was also where he first learned about turning something well-known as a service offering, like real estate sales, into a packaged product. The company made real estate transactions into a neat little product that anybody could sell.
He got into podcasting from there, starting out doing webinars for the real estate company—then a coworker pitched him on doing an actual podcast. It was B2B, and they built a lot of strong industry relationships that way—but not much of a business model.
“Initially we had no idea how to monetize it, which we would not recommend, by the way, but that's what we did and it all worked out in the end. But it did take us a longer path to figure out how to monetize. I jumped in without a plan.”
They knew they wanted to be successful influencers, and that his partner wanted to work his way into coaching, so things snowballed from there—and Matt got very good at running podcasts.
Monetizing
Matt and his partner started monetizing by selling online courses and live events, which worked for awhile but burnt them out pretty quickly. His partner moved into a virtual real estate firm, where agents could actually switch their real estate licences over to him and, in exchange for a commission percentage, gain access to all his coaching and training materials for free. This was a highly successful model for him, but it didn’t translate well into industries other than real estate.
Pursuing Results
When Matt ventured into podcasting on his own, he was doing Facebook Live shows fairly regularly, and found that in order to keep up and keep the quality high, he needed help. He assembled a team that would let him focus on the content and the conversation, while handling day-to-day stuff like bookings, backend work and social media. And, well, the team got very good.
When word spread through his podcasting audience about how he was managing to churn out such a high volume of high-quality work, people started asking to effectively rent out his production team. This worked for awhile, but customizing the approach for every single client generated a lot of mixed results, and so Matt and his team got down to standardizing their offering into a clear, defined product that would meet client needs and deliver, well, results.
Podcasts As a product
For Matt and PursuingResults, specializing their service down into a packaged-up product offering—that is, a clearly-defined service designed to meet a particular need, with minimal customization—has been hugely successful. Matt stresses that, while less customization might seem limiting at first, the reality is anything but.
“We're not saying hey, go ahead and fit your round peg into my square hole, because it's easier for me to deliver, because I want to take more time off on Friday afternoons. It's not about that. It's about starting with the ideal client and what gets them the best results. It's starting with a methodology and finding an ideal result, and then going out and finding as many of those ideal clients as possible, and giving them that exact methodology. To me, that's actually serving them at a higher level.”
Matt’s tips for moving from product to service:
- Let go of the ego. Your clients think their problems are completely unique; you think your services are completely unique, but it most cases, neither of those things are really true.
- Find your ideal client. Who are you best equipped to serve? What kind of client are you very good at delivering to—and, for that matter, very excited to deliver to?
- Find the process for that client. Once you know what kind of client you want to work for, nail down the exact, specific processes that will meet these clients’ particular needs best and deliver the very best results.
- Find and market to those specific clients. Find your niche, and own your niche. When your work is highly specialized, you gain access to tight-knit networks of similar clients, and their testimonials about your product will connect well with others in the niche.
Process
As he gets more and more hands-off with his production company, turning more day-to-day responsibilities over to his team, Matt has a defined approach for making sure everyone is still turning out great results. He calls it “I do it, we do it, you do it.” It’s pretty simple: Initially, he goes through all the processes himself, documenting as he goes. Then, he goes through them together with his team, tweaking where necessary and making things as clear as possible so that everyone can understand the system. Only when the processes are optimized and clear to everyone does he move to the handoff, a.k.a. the “you do it” stage, where team members can follow the process themselves with no trouble.
The other part of assuring quality, for him, is continuously applying and revisiting processes. He and his team make heavy use of checklists in Trello, and if any deviation from the standard procedure needs to happen, they update the list to account for it. When mistakes happen, his first step is always to refer back to the process. If it was followed correctly and a mistake still happened, the process needs fixing. If it wasn’t followed correctly, then it was human error—and the process still needs fixing. Matt really believes in using systems and processes to account for natural human behaviour, rather than leaning on the unreasonable assumption that everyone on his team will be giving it 100%, forty hours a week, every single week.
What’s Next For Podcasts?
Matt says he’s seen podcasting go through a few different phases. First, the agency phase, where lots and lots of podcast production agencies popped up to do customized, end-to-end, hands-off production delivery, or as he calls it, the Done-For-You model. Next came the DIY wave, where podcast producers went the route of selling courses and tutorials to teach clients how they could make their own podcasts from scratch, with their own people and their own equipment—the Do It Yourself model.
So what comes after DIY? Matt thinks it’s a bit of a blend: the Done-With-You model, as he calls it, where companies seeking to leverage podcasts for their businesses will want to train one person on their teams to manage podcasts as part of their overall branding and social media. He thinks the podcast production company’s role will be to bring in training, tools and systems to these businesses so that they can bring their podcasting in-house, with a promise of producer support along the way.
You can check out what Matt does at Pursuing Results, or find him on Twitter @PursingResults.
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