Explore every episode of the podcast

This was a delightful conversation, and one that made me laugh more than any in recent memory. Rob Fitzpatrick shares the journey from showering under a 5-gallon bucket in a warehouse scheduled for demolition to running a satisficing lifestyle business with $20k/mo in book revenue and a growing community.

This was a delightful conversation with emerging expert Denis Oakley. I especially loved how Denis "got his reps in" by selling business models on Upwork.

Jonathan suggested a followup conversation; I enjoyed hearing from him about his transition from surfing a once-in-a-generation tech wave to a very different kind of advisory business, his inventory of every nasty email he's ever received from his list, how he runs inexpensive experiments, and the relationship between death and mission.

Kyle and I discuss entering a new market, inventing new terminology, and pursuing a transformative agenda.

Did you know Jim Thornton built something like a private version of Google.com's search engine using a combination of serverless code, Screaming Frog, and Neo4j? In this conversation that touches on, among other things, the marketing caste system, Jim explains why he did this and how this played into his self-made expertise journey.

John Jantsch talks about his new book on marketing, The Ultimate Marketing Engine: 5 Steps to Ridiculously Consistent Growth.

A wide-ranging conversation where Guillaume explains how he remains positive while building a novel framework for strategic narrative.

David C. Baker and I had a wide-ranging conversation about how his expertise-powered business grew to over $1MM in annual revenue.

Blair and I had a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation about how he became a self-made expert on selling creative services.

Seth and I discuss becoming a storyteller, neuroscience, and how to tell a good story. https://www.storifyagency.com/selfmade

About the rename of this podcast.

Josh and I spoke about his approach to cultivating valuable expertise.

Chris Ferdinandi helps people learn vanilla JavaScript. He believes there’s a simpler, more resilient way to make things for the web. His developer tips newsletter is read by thousands of developers each weekday. Learn more at GoMakeThings.com.

I had a delightful conversation with Jonathan about his cultivation of self-made expertise.

Some time after we recorded this interview, Mike merged his business endeavors with those of his colleage Cory Quinn to form Duckbill Group, but any chance to share Mike's insight -- whether it reflects his current focus or not -- is worth doing, so I am publishing this interview despite it not reflecting Mike's latest trajectory.

Gini Dietrich created a piece of intellectual property -- her PESO framework -- that has become very popular and trusted (and imitated). In this conversation, she describes the process of developing this IP.

I speak with David C. Baker about his upcoming book on selling advisory services. The COVID pandemic totally borked his release schedule, so as of the pub date of this podcast this book isn't available yet; consider this a teaser of an upcoming release.

This letter might be for you. I can’t know, because the response to an email sent to a list is always a probability distribution, never a certainty. I reckon this email lands in a meaningful way for 4% of you. It is audacious that I should want anything specific for you, other than a nice, warm, up-and-to-the-right curve for your happiness and achievement; a general and sincere well-wishing for your life. You should plot your own course. And yet I persist in wanting specific things for you. Unreasonable things.

It

It's rare to encounter someone in the advice-to-freelancers game with such a refreshingly simple approach to cultivating new opportunity. Listen for more details.

It really is harder for us to sell advisory services. But we can learn and adapt and grow. There are 4 reasons why it's harder to sell advisory services.

With my clients, marketing is this extra burden. It's this other business function that requires work, learning, investment, and discipline.

I believe a useful form of order can emerge from chaos. You can purposefully use focused chaos to *create* order.

I assume you will, at some point, write a book.

Jim Thornton is on fire right now.

The pH level of any business decision is probably lower than you think.

What the world needs now is more spicy hot-takes, amiright? Well, here's one anyway.

Do experts have to be right? Some of them should be.

A brief, fascinating conversation with Graham Binks about whether he's specialized or not, and if he is, how to think about his specialization approach.

Understand how improving bottom-line results can benefit your business.

Does anything change for the better if you view your clients as an investment portfolio?

Robert explains, step by step, how to implement a market research process

Sometimes specialization isn't simple

Hear about the ups and downs of bootstrapping a services business

I analyze a Howard Stern interview

Andrew is a partner at Krit

How I help my clients and workshop participants decide how to specialize

Mike sells DevOps services

Matt sells DevOps services

Corey sells DevOps services

A fascinating conversation about creating opportunity

Josh is the author of Fearless Salary Negotiation

Cheryl specialized in the past; how did that work out?