#69: Why Average Outperforms Great (Every Time) with Ed Deason

Great freelancers often build average businesses while average freelancers build great ones. That sounds wrong, but it's what actually happens. The difference? Consistency beats brilliance every time, and knowing the difference between working hard and doing hard work is a big part of success.

In this episode, Treasa sits down with Ed Deason to explore why "perfect" freelancers get stuck polishing every deliverable while consistent freelancers build momentum through imperfect action. They talk about the hard work vs working hard distinction, why willpower will always fail you, and how to remove emotions from business decisions.

WE TALKED ABOUT

• Why "perfect" freelancers build average businesses
• The difference between hard work and working hard
• Why willpower always fails, and how to take it out of the equation completely
• The compounding effect: How 1% better every day leads to exponential growth
• How to shift from doing tasks to solving problems for clients
• Why asking hard questions is the actual hard work

About Ed Deason

Ed Deason is a business coach specializing in working with founders and entrepreneurs ready to scale, pivot, and build their ideal businesses. With over 15 years' experience and an MBA, Ed's coaching has helped clients gain clarity, confidence, and achieve real results.​

Connect with Ed:

• Deason Coaching
• LinkedIn

Mentioned Resources:

Pricing Playbook

Pricing Calculator

Income Security Audit

About Treasa Edmond

Treasa Edmond is a content strategist, business coach, and podcast host who helps freelancers and consultants transition to confident business leaders. She's been referral-based for five years, rarely needing to prospect for new clients, and teaches practical frameworks for pricing strategy, client boundaries, and business systems through her coaching programs and the Boss Responses podcast. Her goal is to help you build the business you need so you can live the life you want.

Connect with Treasa:

• Boss Responses Newsletter - Get frameworks, templates, and strategic guidance delivered weekly
• Coaching Programs - Work with Treasa 1-on-1 or join a mastermind
• LinkedIn - Connect and follow for daily insights

Transcript

Treasa Edmond (00:00)

Ed, thank you so much for being here this week. It's been great so far and I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.

Ed Deason (00:06)
Great, me too.

Treasa Edmond (00:07)
All right, so you did a LinkedIn post about average outperforming great. And I am a very fast reader and a very fast scroller. And that one stopped me in my tracks. I think I read it like three times to make sure I wasn't missing anything. And then I immediately sent you a DM and said, hey, would you come on my podcast? Because this topic, it's just so perfect for everything that we do here.

I know a lot of people who have freelance businesses or business of any kind, they get stuck in their head and they think everything has to be perfect. And I used to be that person. Now I'm a huge fan of imperfect action. But today. I want to talk with you about how we can put in an average amount of effort and end up with a great business rather than trying to put in a great amount of effort.

and ending up with an average business. Seems wrong, but it's what works, right? So you have a few things that you've mentioned to me that you think are really important. And one of them is consistency. Let's talk about that a little bit.

Ed Deason (01:12)
Yeah, definitely. And I think now the post itself, I was talking about how I've seen average freelancers, average in terms of their kind of ability, let's say, right? Average freelancers outperform great freelancers, so freelancers who are fantastic at the thing they do. And it fundamentally is about, like you said, it's about consistency, right? Because

What you tend to find and you called it out a little bit here is that is the great freelancers quite often will get stuck in their heads. Every piece of work I do, every deliverable, every DM I send, every post I put out into the world has to be perfect. So they spend hours, days, months working on perfection and all that time they're working on it. The average freelancer who's maybe doesn't realize that their average or is just cracking on with it is just doing the thing.

Treasa Edmond (01:51)
Mm-hmm.

Ed Deason (02:05)
Yeah, they're posting day after day after day. They're sending DMs day after day after day. They're being consistent in the things that they do. And as a result, they build a better business.

Treasa Edmond (02:15)
Yeah. I will tell you that I didn't start this podcast for the longest time because I thought it had to be perfect. I had to know all of the things. I'm still not entirely consistent, but when I decided I was just going to do the thing, when I decided I was going to go out and be me, because those are the people I want to attract anyway, right? The ones who appreciate me being me. Yep.

That's when I would do well. And what I've found is that even when I'm not consistent, they show up consistently because they want to improve their business. They show up to listen to the people talk about what's working for them. They are always looking for solutions to their problems. They're not just kind of resting on their laurels. And I think that that's really important. So for those of us who struggle with consistency, I'm totally putting myself firmly in that camp.

Ed Deason (03:05)
I think we all do at times, right? it depends on the topic. I think we can be consistent in one area of our lives and deeply, deeply inconsistent in others.

Treasa Edmond (03:13)
That's true. I am remarkably consistent with my client management process. So my onboarding, my offboarding, how I deal with the clients, the fact that I'm consistently giving my best to the clients. Now that's after I give my best to my business. We talked about that yesterday. there are parts of my business I'm very consistent in. This is one of those parts of the business that's very important to me that I'm not consistent in. And I am constantly, I am consistent about beating myself up about it.

Ed Deason (03:42)
Yep.

Treasa Edmond (03:44)
So for those of us who do struggle with consistency in certain areas, even if they are, and maybe it's even more so the parts that are really important to us. How can we kind of work around that? How can we develop that consistency and what kind of tactics can we use to make them more a part of our daily being?

Ed Deason (04:05)
And here's the thing, I think you pretty much nailed it with that last sentence, right, is making them a part of your daily whatever. that is the place that we fall down is

Humans are remarkably bad at leaving things to willpower. you know, I'll go for a run later. I'm gonna not eat that chocolate that's conveniently in the cupboard. I'm gonna, you know, insert your vice here, right? I'm not going to do that thing anymore because I've decided I'm not going to do that thing. It's not how our brains work. It's not how we do things. It's not how we've evolved. And yet we're convinced that tomorrow is gonna be different and that

we're not gonna do the thing we said we were, you get the point, right? And rather than create a process or a system that stops us from doing the thing or starts us doing the thing, instead we just go, wow, willpower's gonna do it, despite the evidence of 30, 40, 50 years of our lives where it has not done the thing, right? So you kind of said it, like, how do we bring it into our daily?

Treasa Edmond (04:48)
Yeah.

Ed Deason (05:11)
peeing was the term used and we do it by being intentional about bringing it into our daily lives, right?

Treasa Edmond (05:19)
Yeah.

Now you, you brought up another topic that we've touched on a couple of times this week already. Tomorrow is going to be different. I see a lot of people out there who aren't putting in the work to their business because they think tomorrow's going to be different. The world's going to change. The right client's going to drop in my lap. They're going to magically offer me a higher rate than

than what I asked for.

Ed Deason (05:48)
Yep, that's exactly how it works in my experience, yeah.

Treasa Edmond (05:50)
Yeah, so it's that viewpoint that I can't do this, the world's going to do it for me. I see that as a major limit in people's business. And not just a limit, I think it's an active issue. that kind of takes us into that difference between, or just even doing the work for the business.

doing the work and how important that is. And I know that goes right along with consistency as well. But I think it's a little bit different. think so. What do we look at there? So we've we're consistently doing the right things and we're still kind of stuck with the status quo. What extra little thing do we have to do to take us from tomorrow is going to be different to, yeah, tomorrow is going to be different because I'm going to make it different.

Ed Deason (06:38)
And I liked what you said there. You said, ⁓ we're consistently doing the right things. But here's the thing. If you're consistently doing the right things and nothing is changing, you're not doing the right things. Right? It's as simple as that. If you are doing what you think is right and nothing is changing over a prolonged period of time, let's not say you've changed the process and three days later you're expecting miracles, right?

Treasa Edmond (06:49)
You're not doing it.

Ed Deason (07:04)
you've consistently put the work in and nothing has changed, then you're not, you're not focused in the right places. You're not focused in the right areas of your business. And which I think brings me nicely to hard work versus working hard. And this is what I consistently see with people is they mix up hard work and working hard. Yeah. So they think because they're working hard, the business is going to progress, but what they're not doing is the hard work.

And so for a lot of people, this is, let's be honest, right? It's pitching for business. That's probably the one where people that where, most people will find it the most uncomfortable. Is the ones who struggle pitching for business, struggle DMing people, struggle reaching out, struggle kind of putting themselves out there. What I find is people update their website. They'll update their website 20 times in a week.

they'll spend hours on it crafting the perfect bit of wording. They'll agonize over the perfect post on LinkedIn. They'll polish all aspects of their business until it shines. But what they won't do is then go and say, hey, come and take a look at me. And that is probably where I see the biggest difference between successful or freelancers that

Treasa Edmond (08:11)
Mm-hmm.

Ed Deason (08:22)
that really grow and really scale and really make a success of it versus freelancers who are just getting by.

Treasa Edmond (08:29)
Yeah.

Ed Deason (08:30)
The ones that are prepared to get uncomfortable. And I think this is the biggest kind of tip or the biggest thing is if you're prepared to get uncomfortable, you'll probably be more successful. if you can get over yourself and put yourself out there and pitch for things and ask for what you want and tell people what you need, you're going to be more successful than you waiting for people to come to you.

Treasa Edmond (08:52)
I see this a lot with kind of, and like you said, it's pitching, but I do what I call relational marketing and relational marketing is not an immediate result. It's a wooing process is what I call it. You're kind of courting the people that you want to be clients. So let's take LinkedIn, for example, because this is one that I've had my community do. We go out and we do a LinkedIn challenge and the whole thing is the first week,

you find five people who would be really good clients, you think, and you start wooing them. So that first week, you're just commenting on their posts, you're making your name visible to them. The second week, you're encouraging some sort of discussion, then you connect with them. And then after you connect, you drop in their DMs and you say, hey, thanks for connecting, but you don't pitch them. You say, hey, thanks for connecting, I really appreciated your post on, have you seen this thing? So offer value.

consistently offer value. And then that conversation, usually they will say, so, hey, what do you do? Because that's what people do. So you're letting them find you by putting yourself in their face and wooing them. It's just like, a couple courting. One of them has decided this is the person, they do all of the things, but it's a very business. I mean, you're not going to like take them flowers unless maybe they're a florist and it's a special one. But

Every single time I recommend this to someone, they're like, it takes so long. That's so many steps.

Mm-hmm. They don't want to do the hard work.

Ed Deason (10:31)
would you like a client or would you not like a client? You know, it's as simple as that. And this is the thing, the people that are prepared to be uncomfortable to do the boring stuff, to put the hard work into be average consistently are going to be the ones who are more successful. Right. And I say, when I say be average, I don't mean be average in terms of your outreach or be average in terms of the way you approach things or be generic. What I mean is, okay,

On average, how many DMs does a good salesperson send? On average, how many hours would you spend ideally working on outreach? On average, okay, ideally I'd spend an hour a day on it. Okay, so that's your average, right? So be average. Go and spend a day each day on outreach. Yeah, go and spend a day each day on finding new clients. I know, sorry, day each day, an hour each day on finding new clients. That doesn't make sense, Ed.

if you spend an hour each day working on finding clients, you will have much more success. You will have a much better pipeline than someone who does it in fits and starts and spurts of brilliance.

Treasa Edmond (11:39)
So consistently average output will generate more than average input.

Ed Deason (11:46)
Yes, it's compounding, it's compounding, right? It's just another form of compounding. So if you consistently put the hours in, will get ⁓ significantly, what's the, input.

Treasa Edmond (11:47)
short.

Let's take this back to our day one conversation and the question about asking for referrals. I consistently asked for referrals. I made it part of my process and it took a while for that to snowball to the point where most of my business was referrals. I didn't stop asking for referrals because the first person didn't give me one.

Ed Deason (12:26)
Right? this is the thing, your average now is making it part of my process. Your average process has a request for a referral in it.

Treasa Edmond (12:36)
Yeah. And that average very low effort process that I've created generates 80 % of my income. So definitely average. The scales aren't balanced here. I mean, yes, you can put in a spurt of enormous effort and you might get short-term results. But I think that what really excites me about the

doing things consistently at an average level, it leads to long-term sustainable results. And I'm all about building a sustainable business. So it's not like we have to go out there and pedal to the metal, go as fast as we can every single day to get great results. All we have to do is put in a decent amount of work on a regular basis and make it part of a system. And that's going to give us

great results.

Ed Deason (13:33)
Yes.

Treasa Edmond (13:34)
Okay, I love that. I absolutely love it. Where do you see people struggling?

most when it comes to really dividing in their head the ideas of working hard and hard work. Because I have a person I'm in an ongoing conversation with about this. Can't, I cannot get them to make the distinction.

Ed Deason (13:57)
It's really interesting.

Treasa Edmond (13:59)
Because they think that working hard is the hard work.

Ed Deason (14:04)
Yeah.

So what would I ask a client? I would ask a client, what decision have you avoided making this week? What decision have you put off this week? What thing have you avoided doing? And as long as they can be honest with themselves and honest with you in that, there is probably, that thing is probably the thing that's holding them back. Right? Because typically when someone asks you that question, you've immediately, your brain's going to immediately go, yeah, there's that thing.

you're going to know what it was. And you know, you know what it was because you also know, like deep down that it was a thing that you need to be doing, right?

Treasa Edmond (14:42)
you know, one of the things I tell people with content strategy is that doing a content strategy is probably 80 % asking the right questions just consistently. And I think that translates over to our business too. So that's a really good first question there. What decision have I put off making this week? What have I avoided? What are some of the other questions that we can ask ourselves? I mean, I could see asking myself, when was the last time I raised my rates?

Ed Deason (15:10)
Oh, absolutely. So I've actually got a post on my site, you five signs to look for that tell you it's time to increase your rates, right? and this is the thing, rather than it being a willpower thing. Yes. Right. turning it from a willpower, oh, I should raise my rates. I'll do it next week. I'll do it next month. If you go and find this post on my blog, you will see that there are five tangible signals to look for.

And if one of those signals goes, yes, yes, yes, then you go, okay, well, it's time to raise my rates. A signal is I'm fully booked and turning away clients. But if you're fully booked and turning away clients, that's the signal to raise your rates. Another one is if you're at 60 % or more capacity, but you're struggling to pay your bills. Well, that's the signal that you should be raising your rates. If you haven't raised your rates for a year, that's the signal you should be raising your rates. Each of those is a tangible thing.

so rather than being a, just an emotional decision, should I raise my rates or not? You're looking for a tangible thing that says, yes, this is a time that I should do it. And this is, when you talk, when we talk about kind of average and willpower and all of those things, the best thing you can do is take willpower out of the equation.

Right. So not, I'll send 10, I'll send some DMS tomorrow. I'll send some DMS tomorrow. I'll send some pictures tomorrow. Right. You go, okay, well, I'm going to book 30 minutes at the first thing I do in the morning. I'm going to book 30 minutes to send DMS. and as long as you are a person that follows what is in your calendar, there's no decision to make. You don't have to rely on Willpower. You look at your calendar and you go, I've got 30 minutes of sending DMS.

Treasa Edmond (16:20)
Yeah.

Ed Deason (16:44)
So you go and you send your DMs. Yeah. If you're a person that, struggles with snacking. you've got two options, right? You don't buy the snacks first of all. So there's no willpower involved whatsoever. You don't have to decide not to eat the snack right now. You just don't have a snack to eat. Or you put the snacks out of reach or you give them to your significant other who will enjoy torturing you with it.

Treasa Edmond (16:46)
And that works.

Ed Deason (17:05)
You do something that takes willpower out of the equation. because we are really bad at relying on willpower.

Treasa Edmond (17:13)
Yeah. So let's, let's talk about kind of an adjacent issue here because I see a lot of people that I just need to do it. I just need to do it. And the root cause isn't actually a willpower issue. It's a fear issue. another question that I encourage people to ask is how is fear holding me back right now? How is fear or my fear of doing a thing damaging my business and

That's a difficult question to ask because nobody wants to admit that it's their problem that's causing the problem in their business. But fear, willpower, you can mitigate that a little bit. So you can not buy the snack. But what if it's a fear issue? What if it's ⁓ a, need to do this thing and I'm just, afraid to do it. I'm afraid of what will happen. I'm afraid to put myself out there. And this kind of goes back to the pitching too. A lot of those people,

They don't consistently pitch. They don't consistently reach out to clients. They do all of that busy work because they're afraid of the rejection that comes if they reach out to someone and they say, no, I'm not interested in right now.

Ed Deason (18:22)
Okay, so what if I, okay, if I had a client in front of me who is kind of saying that was the situation, we'd probably spend a bit of time exploring what exactly it is. What is it that you're scared of? What is the outcome that you're worried about happening here? You know, play it through to the end. And this is quite a good tactic for people, you know, grab a pen, grab a bit of paper, go speak to someone, get them to ask you these questions, right? What is it you're, you know, okay, I'm scared of pitching. Okay, what is it about pitching that you're scared of? Okay, well, I'm scared that I'll

be rejected. Okay, so what does it mean if a person rejects you? Well, okay, probably not that much. Okay, so what you know, and you can sort of you can you can sort of work it through. Right. And you kind of go, well, what's the worst that's going to happen? Well, they're to ignore you, or they're going to say no. Okay, how's that going to impact you in the long term? Well, it's probably not, if I'm honest. Okay. And, and I get it, because as a freelancer,

you are your business. Yeah. Whereas if you work for a company, so let's say you work for a company and you're doing tele sales, right? You're doing outbound calling. The customer says, no, you just put down the phone, pick up the phone, call the next person on the list. Right. As a freelancer, you are the business and it feels a bit more personal. And, and this is, this is kind of the point you've got to be okay at being uncomfortable.

You've got to find a way that works for you that you can live with the discomfort. And you have to be the best proponent of your business because no one else is going to be.

Treasa Edmond (19:59)
Yeah. And I know there's someone listening to this right now that is saying, that's, that's not my issue. I don't need to worry about things like that. And then there's someone else going, yeah, I'm not doing that. I'm not, I'm not dealing with that. I'm just going to do my daily status quo people. This is the hard work asking yourself these difficult questions and maybe working with someone like Ed to work through the issue and figure out what the root causes you might think it's a willpower issue.

And in fact, it's an I'm terrified of this person saying no issue. that's two completely different issues. And if you misdiagnose yourself, so to speak, and we're not diagnosing anyone here, we're business people. if you are solving the wrong problem, then you're working hard. You're not doing hard work. And I think that's really important.

Another question I ask, and do you ever have people ask a question like this, what one change can you make today that will grow your business? Baby steps. I'm big on baby steps.

Ed Deason (21:11)
Yeah, and I posted, I actually posted something about this a couple of days ago, you know, anyone who's read Atomic Habits will be familiar with this, right, is the 1 % difference, right, what can I do today to be 1 % better than I was yesterday? Yeah, and it's compounding, right, James Clear is certainly not the first person in world to be aware of compounding, but he articulated it very nicely in Atomic Habits,

what can I do today to be 1 % better than I was yesterday? Right. So I keep coming back to DMing or sending emails because they're useful. And because a lot of people, the challenge is finding clients, right? So it's an easy topic to talk about. Okay. So what does 1 % better look like today? Well, if you sent 10 DMs yesterday, it's 11 DMs today. Right. Or I don't know if you spent 30 minutes on

outreach yesterday, it's 31 minutes on outreach today. obviously not to the point where the only thing you ever do in your day is outreach. But the point is that these these are snowballing, you talked about snowballing, right? Compounding snowballing, whatever you want to call it, exponential growth. Trying to be a little bit better today, understanding what are the things that move your business forward, and focusing on them and being 1 % better at those things than you were yesterday, doing it and again and again is going to get you

fantastic growth. Yeah, it's gonna get you to where you want to get to.

Treasa Edmond (22:35)
and faster than you'd think because let's talk about this compound. Let's talk about compounding.

Ed Deason (22:39)
Okay.

Treasa Edmond (22:43)
And I know you've seen this, you have the client who you're like, just take a step, one step, do one tiny thing and then do it again the next day. And they're like, well, that's not going to get me anywhere. So explain how compounding, how doing those baby steps does kind of create that snowball effect so that before you know it, your returns vastly outweigh the effort that you're putting into them.

Ed Deason (23:07)
Yeah, well, we talked about referrals at the start of this week, right? And we talked a little bit about referrals at the start of this conversation, I think. And it is, you know, one referral out in the world. So you send one referral and you never hear anything back. Okay, fine. Okay. What happens if you send 10 referrals, a hundred referrals, a thousand referral requests? You only need three or four or five of those to come back to turn, to give you a kind of a sustainable.

And if you ask every client at the end of every engagement for a referral, please, you are doing that thing. You're taking that little step and it soon adds up. mean, compounding itself, right? So let's the 1 % better every day. If you were to invest $10,000 today and you were able to compound that $10,000 by 1 %

Treasa Edmond (23:43)
Yeah.

Every day.

Ed Deason (23:59)
every day. So $10,000 by 1 % every day. Within 365 days, you would have something like $377,000 in the bank.

Treasa Edmond (24:11)
Numbers. Numbers drive home every single time.

Ed Deason (24:13)
Yeah, you know, you would have 37 times the amount you started with. Compounding is what makes people very, very wealthy. Whether that's compounding knowledge, whether that's compounding money.

Treasa Edmond (24:24)
Yeah.

But it was little effort. That's the thing. It's just a tiny, infinitesimal increase in effort, that average. Raise your average by a tiny, tiny bit and then do it consistently and it works. Now, one of the things I think is really interesting and I want to kind of switch this and talk about how we can...

do the hard work for our clients instead of working hard for our clients and how that can change our business. working hard, doing all of the tasks. And I equate this when I'm teaching about it to the difference between doing a task and solving a problem. Because when we're doing the hard work for us, we're solving a problem. When we're doing the task, that's busy work, right? So that's the working hard versus hard work. We can do the same thing in our business

for our clients. one of the things I'm really recommending now, anyone can do the task. If you want to set yourself apart, you have to do the hard work and you have to solve the problem. So how can people kind of, and that's a major mindset shift and that's a difficult mindset shift for people because we've been trained. Usually very few people start freelancing without being in the workforce.

And in the workforce, you're trained to do the busy work. You're not trained to do the strategic thinking. You're not trained to think about the solutions to the problems. So when we start running our business, we do the busy work. We don't think about the hard things. We don't do the hard work because it doesn't come natural unless someone tells us to, or unless we find a resource that makes it happen. I think this is something that we can then, once we've mastered it in our business, so everyone out there, do this in your business first, and then...

look at how you can apply that to the services you offer your clients to up level what you're offering them so that you're doing the hard work for their business. You're solving a problem for them. How much, let's talk about compounding interest in dollar amount here. How much of a jump do you think it is from doing the task to, and let's say, let's do a blog post. Let's just do a blog post. So let's say I get,

$500 for a blog post. That takes me five hours. making $100 an hour. And I'm just using round numbers here because it's easier and I don't do math. And then let's say I do a strategic consulting gig where their blog posts aren't converting. They're not getting the traffic that they want. They're not meeting the metrics they want. And I'm looking at their posts holistically to figure out what the problem is. Do they not have good calls to action? Are they poorly structured?

Are they not using things that make it easy to read? And for that, for that two hours of work, I'm charging $5,000.

Ed Deason (27:21)
I was going to say that was probably how I would price it 10 times as much. Yep. this is, so I spent most of my career in corporate roles, right? And the people that were able to think strategically were typically the ones who would be promoted most frequently, would be most capable, most able, not always, right? You've met the managers who can't as well, but generally, generally speaking, you know, the people who could think strategically would be the ones that would be promoted.

and because they're the ones that have the most useful skills. Yeah. So to reframe it kind of to your point, guess, right. I'm not going to say everyone could write a blog post because that kind of demeans the idea of like writing, but there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of freelance writers who could write a blog post. Yeah.

There are far fewer writers who can strategically build a of a strategic plan for a set of blog posts or identify a strategy, a content strategy, and you can charge accordingly. So yeah, doing the hard work for your clients

That's the goal.

Do you think you are more valuable to a client churning out a piece of content that any one of a thousand writers could churn out for them? Or do you think you're more valuable solving a problem that is preventing them from growing, preventing them from being successful? Yeah, there are two problems and you can solve both of them. There is a problem that is we need a blog post. There is also a problem that goes actually the blog post

isn't the issue here. It's the way that they approach their content. It's the strategy they've got for that.

Treasa Edmond (29:04)
Yeah. Now a few minutes ago I said, do the hard work in your business first and then figure out how to offer that to clients. And I said that for a very specific reason.

whenever we are pricing, especially doing value-based pricing, so for things like consulting and strategic work, it is value-based and it's not based on your value, it's based on the value of the solution to the client. Let's get that out there because that's a common stepping stone issue. What I see on the regular is people who have not done the hard work in their business, who have not seen

how thinking more strategically, how doing things more strategically, how putting in minimal effort to get maximum results. People who have not done that have a really hard time understanding why clients will pay big money for what to them is something they can do in their sleep. The thing is your client cannot do it in their sleep. For them, it's a struggle. For them, it's a hundred person hours trying to solve this problem.

you can go in and do it in five hours. That's fine. That does not decrease the value to the client. So this is one of the reasons this topic, we could take it in so many different directions. This I think is one, I see how it can grow a freelancer's business and build a sustainable business. So hard work, not working hard across the board. But this right here is I think the magic point.

It's where science and art come together and you've learned the value of doing this in your business. So how then can you apply it to what you're offering to your clients? That turns you from a freelancer into a superstar expert.

Ed Deason (31:01)
Okay, so yeah, you reposition yourself from an order taker to a specialist, to an expert, to a subject matter expert, right? And this is the challenge that I see with a lot of freelancers, of particularly in the start of their careers, they are order takers. Yeah. So I've worked in corporate roles. I've hired people. I've hired lots of people over the years, right? And the ones that were most valuable to me were always the ones that said, yes, I can do that thing for you.

And here's a few ways I can do it better. Or here's a few ways that I can suggest that will make it better for you. They're the ones that I went back to. They're the ones that I kept. Not the ones that delivered the work as it was on time. Yeah, great. Nice. But I expect everyone to deliver on time. Yeah. The ones that made a difference for me were the ones that went, cool, I can do that. I've also got some suggestions for you.

Treasa Edmond (31:51)
Yeah.

Ed Deason (31:52)
The other ones I went back to time and time and time again.

Treasa Edmond (31:55)
and it's kind of ⁓ the whole concept of servant leader. We are serving them, we're offering a service, but we're leading them through that service. You really have to step up and take that position of expert. When I started doing the hard work for my clients, that's when my business really changed, just across the board. I had that business coach who told me, you're not charging enough.

You just aren't. And I'd be like, well, I don't feel like I'm ready to charge more. I don't feel like my work has more value. he's the one that told me this dude, he was not a nice person. He just wasn't. But he was exactly the kick in the pants I needed. He just told me, it's not about you. Your business is not about you. And you need to get over that. You need to get over yourself and you need to focus on what's best for the business. If you had an employee

And this is something I ask people all the time. If you had an employee and they said that to you, what would you say to them? Would you allow that to govern the way your business goes? If an employee says, no, no, I don't think I can charge that. So let's lower your rates to meet where I feel like I am. Would you go with that? So, yeah, this hard work thing, some of it is actual work, but

Ed Deason (33:12)
Yeah.

Treasa Edmond (33:20)
The majority of it is mental. It's getting over yourself.

Ed Deason (33:24)
over

yourself. was about to say, the majority of hard work is not actually hard in any meaningful sense. It's not that it's backbreaking labor. It's not that it takes hours and hours to do. The hard bit is getting over yourself. Because inevitably it's increasing your rates. It's saying goodbye to a crappy client.

Treasa Edmond (33:48)
it's saying goodbye to a good client who doesn't meet the standards

Ed Deason (33:51)
Or is no longer a good fit. It's getting rid of a product that you know that customers love. Those are all things that are hard, they're not physically hard, they're emotionally hard. And it almost always comes down to how you feel and that's the hard bit.

Treasa Edmond (34:09)
never going to tell someone to take your emotions completely out of your business because we're, most of us are sole proprietors and we're doing our business for a reason. And that reason is usually emotionally based. But if you want to think like a CEO, you have to learn when to take the emotions out. And sometimes that's saying no to a client. Sometimes that's saying no to a specific subcontractor. Like if you need to bring someone in on a project and you're like, Ooh, I could bring my friend Bob in. I love Bob.

He's great. And then you're like, Bob is not a good fit for this project. I really need to bring in Sally. I don't like Sally. Sally is so difficult to work with, but she's the best person for this job. So sometimes we have to take emotions out. To me, this was the thought that I had whenever I read your LinkedIn post. I'm gonna go back to that again. My first thought was he gets it. It's not about,

hours. It's not about effort. It's about being very strategic in where you put the little effort you put in.

Ed Deason (35:19)
So when I'll tell a quick story here, cause I think it's relevant, right? One of my first ever coaching clients, I was working with them and they had big plans for what they wanted to do. And one of the things they wanted to do is go from working five days a week to two days a week because they had kind of specific plans in mind. And obviously when we started working together, I was like, well, that is, that is ambitious, but okay. Right. And.

we got to a place where they were, they'd gone from five days a week to two days a week, and they were actually making more money than they had been when they were working five days a week. Because they had taken out all of the working hard, right? And the only thing they were doing was the hard work. Yeah. They were only doing the stuff that moved their business on, that found them more clients, that generated them more money. Now, don't get me wrong. worked, those two days they were working were

difficult and they were probably kind of emotionally difficult, emotionally taxing, but they weren't working any harder than they had been when they were working five days a week, right? But they were doing the hard work and that they were making more money as a result of it. Yeah. And it just shows how like how much time we spend doing kind of stuff that we don't need to be doing and how much also putting off those hard decisions holds us back.

Treasa Edmond (36:37)
Yeah, that's, that's, I had one of my first coaching clients still. Do you ever get one of those ideal clients and you're like this, this right here, this person embodies everyone that I want to work with moving forward.

Ed Deason (36:51)
Yeah, they just do the work.

Treasa Edmond (36:53)
Yeah, she ended up being that person. And but she came to me and she said, I want to learn how to offer this new skill set. And it's one that I specialize in. And so we're talking, we do the thing. I'm finding out about her business. And I'm like, why? Well, because it's a high value service. Why would you want to spend all of this effort and learn to do this thing and do it for clients when as an

aside, she told me that she has published books that are actually making money. She has a growing community that is actually making money. And so I asked her one question. said, why would you want to spend your effort building a client's business when you could put it into your business and grow it even more? And she didn't know, but when she came back the next week, she completely changed her priorities and

She made back her coaching fee in the first month. She made it back three times by the end of the 90 days because she switched her perspective and she started focusing on her business and what was right for her business instead of what was right for her clients or what she thought would be the right choice for her clients. That's hard work. She had to completely

rethink the conclusion she had come to and decide to do something that was way uncomfortable for her. And I think that that's just kind of important. I love those. That's what I love about coaching is seeing those breakthrough moments, think. But every single one of my clients, what we work on is hard work. It's not busy work. I will tell you this.

Ed Deason (38:40)
If

it was the easy stuff, they'd have done it themselves. Right? This is where it comes down to. You speak to a coach because you've tried the easy stuff and it's not working.

Treasa Edmond (38:49)
If you could busy work yourself into success, every person in the world would be successful.

Ed Deason (38:53)
Basically, all of my clients, yeah, yeah, 100%.

Treasa Edmond (39:00)
And I guess that depends the way you define success as well. If you could busy work your way into the type of success you're looking for, then you'd already be there. It's changing your thought processes and changing your focus just across the board. What is the spectacular failure you've seen in this area where someone just refused to do the hard work and they kept on doing the working hard and I mean,

Failure obviously is just stagnancy in that case. Or it could mean an implosion.

Ed Deason (39:36)
Yeah, I think the biggest one for me was not actually not a client of mine, but someone I was speaking to and they had, they just kind of bumbled along a little bit and they'd kind of fallen into what they were doing and they were making really good money from it. They had one client who was about 70 % of their revenue, 80 % of the, you know exactly where this going, Yes. 80 % of the revenue. And

he never even considered that that client might stop working with him. You obviously know where this is going, right? Because thinking about that client not working with him anymore was hard work because it emotionally meant made him not feel good. And what happened? That client disappeared and overnight 80 % of his revenue disappeared. And if it done the hard work,

Treasa Edmond (40:14)
That's pain.

Ed Deason (40:33)
And if he'd been prepared to sit there and go, what happens? What would happen if this client left me? He would have done the things that he needed to do. And instead he was left scribbling around trying to trying to alternatives, right? Trying to fill that space, but it was a significant amount of money.

Treasa Edmond (40:51)
Once again, the hard work is asking yourself the hard questions and then actually answering them. It's not enough just to say, what if, what if, and then what type of contingency plan do I need to put in place now to prevent that from happening? So hard work, strategic business. That's what it is. Hard work is strategic business. And if you are not being strategic about your business, you are not doing the hard work.

I'm sorry for anyone who doesn't want to hear that.

So Ed, you have a lot of resources for people. We've already talked about the blog post you have that gives people five tangible ways to figure out if they're to raise their rates. Every single person listening should go find that blog post and read it. So I'm going to make sure it's linked in the show notes across the board, but you also have a tool that they can use that will help them do what we've talked about today.

Ed Deason (41:47)
I've just remembered, I've got a couple that are probably useful here. So one of them, if you go to my website and if you have a look at my blogs, there is a project pricing calculator, So for anyone who is struggling with their pricing, take the emotion out of it. Put the figures into the calculator and it will work out what you should be charging for a project, You put in some simple things like how much you're aiming to make this year, how much you kind of work on billable client hours each week, how many weeks you aim to work each year, et cetera, et cetera. Fill it in, press the button.

it'll tell you how much you should be charging for that project, And it takes the emotion out of it. And there's no gender bias in it as well. So men and women will get exactly the same answers.

Treasa Edmond (42:26)
and that's a base rate. Now, if you're going to do value based pricing, slightly different, but that's a really good you need to make this.

Ed Deason (42:32)
Yeah, and, it does work in terms of, it does work in terms of value-based pricing, because it gives you a nice project price, right? So it says that, if I want to be making this amount of money and this is the number of hours I think I'm going to be spending on this client, right? So it's not for sharing with the client and it's not for, it's not to give you an hourly rate, but it's to tell you, okay, here's your starting price for this project, right? To help you achieve the amount of money that you want to make this year. The other thing I'm going to mention is, I was just talking about that,

person I was speaking to that kind of buried their head in the sand and wasn't prepared to think about how much of their revenue that particular client made up. So I have created an audit sheet and you fill in the audit sheet, it's a client audit sheet and you fill it in with, you know, the different channels you have for making money. So maybe that's clients, maybe that's subscriptions, maybe that's services you pay and you put in how much you're making each month from that particular channel. You put it and then you will

of calculate you work out, okay, what percentage of my revenue does that make up? because it's one thing to kind of know that a client is worth a reasonable chunk of your revenue. It's another thing to have on the page in front of you that this client is worth 60 % of your revenue. Should you make you think about it? As an added bonus, there are two extra fields. One of them is a kind of a risk field, which says, okay, how good is my agreement with this client? So score it from one to five.

Treasa Edmond (43:42)
Which should make you step back and think.

Ed Deason (43:56)
One is I have absolutely no contract with this client and they could walk away tomorrow. And a five is I have, I don't know, a 12 month contract that is signed in blood. Yeah. And the other field is the growth field. And again, it's a score of one to five. And a one is there is no way of growing this client past the engagement that I'm currently doing for them. And a five is there are about a hundred different ways I can see that I could grow this engagement with this client.

So once you put in your risk and your growth, can say, okay, well, look, I've got a client who's worth 60 % of my revenue. Their risk factor is a three, so probably a bit higher than I'd like it to be, but the growth factor is a five. So actually there are a whole bunch of ways I can work with them. Yeah. So if they're making up 60 % of your revenue, what can you do there to grow out your opportunities with them and how can you make it a more secure contract? Yeah.

Treasa Edmond (44:44)
It's

an amazing tool.

Ed Deason (44:46)
And then you go to the next page and you can even plot it graphically as well. So you can see, you can put them into quadrants and see, okay, so where are they, where do they fit? Are they, know, visually, is this someone that I need to be thinking about?

Treasa Edmond (44:58)
I love that. I may go use that just to see what it looks like because that sounds like something that would be incredibly helpful. All right. So how else can people find you? Obviously LinkedIn, because I've talked about LinkedIn. Ed is one of the people that if his post pops up on my LinkedIn feed, I stop and read it. So highly recommend that you follow him on LinkedIn and read everything he writes. Where else can people find you?

Ed Deason (45:21)
I would say check out my website, which is deasoncoaching.com. And I'm sure you're to provide a link in there.

Treasa Edmond (45:28)
I absolutely will. right, last question. This is the question that I asked every guest on the podcast and someday fair warning I'm going to create a book that has all of these in it because they are always amazing. No pressure. advice would you give to service providers looking to create lasting successful partnerships with their client?

Ed Deason (45:55)
Yeah.

man, ask for feedback. Constantly ask for feedback. Like, my corporate experience I was head of customer experience for billion dollar brands. Right. So I spent my life asking customers what they thought about our service and how I could improve it. The number of freelancers that never asked their clients, Hey, is there anything we could be doing differently? How would you find working with me? Is there anything you'd like me to think about for you? It blows my mind.

Blows my mind. You're speaking to these clients, you're delivering work for them day in, day out, and you never stop and ask, is there anything I could do better? Or is there anything I could do differently? Or is there anything that would help?

Treasa Edmond (46:32)
That's the very definition of hard work, isn't it?

Ed Deason (46:34)
Right. Like just ask the question. It's such an easy thing to do. Ping him an email, send them a Slack message. Right. Next time you're on a call, Hey, how's this engagement going for you? Is there anything that I could do to improve? What's one thing I could do that would make your life easier? Yes. It can be as simple as that. Right.

Treasa Edmond (46:49)
question will get you work every time.

Yeah, that's perfect. And that is hard work. That is definitely hard work because you're setting yourself up, right? You're setting yourself up for hurt feelings. You're setting yourself up for, if you're someone who doesn't take, I hate the term constructive criticism, just gonna throw that out there, because I don't think there's anything constructive about criticism, but I think that you can ask this question and keep an open mind and figure out at least how you can apply it to that client's relationship.

Do not ask this question and then make no changes.

Ed Deason (47:26)
Yeah, yes. Okay. 100%. So for anyone, I'm going to repeat that, right? Don't ask this question and not do anything with it because there is nothing that will destroy a relationship with a client more than asking them what you can do differently and then totally ignoring them.

Treasa Edmond (47:40)
Yes. Yeah. If you ask your client a question, always listen to the answer and always either apply it or very quickly explain why that's not going to happen. Because sometimes there's unreasonable asks, but you need to respond. Communication, proactive communication. This is proactive communication across the board. You are proactively asking them what you could do different. You're proactively asking them how you can serve them better. And then you are proactively communicating to them

That's a great idea. Let's look at how we can do that. Or that's not something I can actually do, but how about? So yeah, see? Gold. Every single one of these answers ends up being just what people need to hear. All right, Ed, thank you so much for being here with us this week. I know it was a lot of heavy topics, but I think you handled it well and it was really great advice across the board.

Ed Deason (48:34)
Thank you very much. been a pleasure being here.

Treasa Edmond (48:35)
All right, thank you.