Latest / The Daily Writer / Audio Journal: Are You McDonald's or Red Robin?

Transcript

Audio Journal: Are You McDonald's or Red Robin? · The Daily Writer

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: I live in a town called St.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Peter's, Missouri, which is about 30 minutes west of St.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Louis.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I love St.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Peter's.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great town to live in.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the busiest roads in St.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Peter's, in fact, it's probably the busiest road, it's a road called Midriver's Mall Drive.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: It connects two major highways.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I live just off of Mid River's Mall Drive.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: And on Mid River's Mall Drive, as you can imagine, there's a ton of restaurants.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting because two of the restaurants that are pretty close to my house are McDonald's and Red Robin.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And those are two burger places, but they have two very different approaches to how they approach food and the kind of clientele that they're appealing to.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: McDonald's appeals to definitely the low end.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And they're appealing to the people who want food that's fast and cheap and don't really care about nutritional value or really even the taste of it, let's be honest.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I eat McDonald's like everybody else probably does.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: But let's face it, McDonald's is not really high up on the food chain of like quality eating establishments.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Red Robin, on the other hand, is completely the opposite.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: They take a totally different approach to how they market themselves and the kind of clientele that they try to reach.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Red Robin is a gourmet burger place, and they have amazing steak fries, they have all kinds of really unique burgers, and uh my personal favorite is the Whiskey River Barbecue Burger.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the best things I've ever eaten.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And man, it's just a really fun experience to go into Red Robin.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: What I find interesting is both of them are selling burgers, but they're appealing to two very different types of people.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there's an important lesson there for all of us who do any kind of client work, whether it's freelance writing, ghostwriting, like I do, copywriting, or even if you don't do writing-based work, maybe you do graphic design or videography or something else.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: But there's an important lesson there in terms of how we approach the work that we do and how we present ourselves to prospective clients.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the lesson here is what kind of clients are you trying to attract?
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of person are you trying to present yourself as to clients?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I see a lot of writers who are kind of presenting themselves as like the McDonald's of writers.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, they're they're trying to appeal to the people who want to pay the absolute lowest for their service.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem with that is that if you're always appealing to people who want to get the most writing for the absolute cheapest amount of money, you're going to typically be dealing with frustrating people who want more and more and more of you for less and less and less.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And what I have found is that people who typically people who pay the least are the most hassle to deal with.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if you feel like you're you're stuck in that place as a freelancer, then I want to challenge you to start thinking of yourself differently and to start presenting yourself as a gourmet freelancer or a gourmet videographer or ghostwriter or whatever.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, we're not going to use the word gourmet in our advertising because that would be kind of weird.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: But you get what I'm saying.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: We want to present ourselves as someone who does a very high level of service for people.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the problem that we run into a lot of times is that we're afraid to charge the kind of prices that those people charge.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I just I really want to challenge your mindset on that.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you present yourself as a person who offers premium, really high-end, um, really great service to people, then prospective clients respond accordingly.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, people give back to us what we present to them.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's part of a broader principle of the world gives back to us what we give to the world.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: If we carry ourselves like we're the we're the El Chepo freelancer writer or ghostwriter, then the world's gonna give that back to us.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna give that energy back to us.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but if we present ourselves like, hey, I I do high quality service and I charge appropriately, um, I want to serve people at a deep level, so you know, I charge people what I need to charge them so I can, which allows me to serve them at a very high, high level or deep level, however you want to frame it, then I think people give that back to us and they reflect that back to us.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: So if you find yourself constantly dealing with people who are kind of a headache, they're high maintenance, they're a hassle to deal with, um, maybe just take a look at how how are you presenting yourself to the world as a as a business person, as a freelancer, as a graphic designer or whatever it is that you do.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: I know these are tough words for some people to hear because it's challenging how you view yourself, but but I I'm just gonna be like totally um I'm gonna be totally transparent with you.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: This summer when I got my first ghostwriting client, um, that contract was for more money than I had ever made total working for other clients.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't like it was for a hundred grand or anything like anything close to that, but it it something changed in my mind whenever I got that signed contract back.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And what changed was that I went from feeling like I had to constantly scrape to get these little jobs, to now I I was someone who could serve people at a deep level because I was being paid appropriately for it, and because I didn't have to search for all these little kind of jobs, that now I could really focus on this one client for for two, three months and really do an amazing job for them.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it really, really changed my mindset.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I know that if I can make that mindset shift, if I can begin thinking of myself as a writer who does higher service work for people and I get paid appropriately, I know that you can do that too.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to want to tell you that I come from uh kind of the two worlds that I come from is uh pastoral ministry and also the world of education.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: And those are two of the lowest paid professions out there.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I have come into this with um honestly with some real mindset issues.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna be totally transparent with you.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's taken a long time for me to get over that kind of poverty mindset when it comes to what I do for clients.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I feel like this year I've really turned a corner and I've started to think of myself in a very different way, and I think the world has started to give that back to me in some ways.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: So if you feel like you have a poverty mindset, you know, just know that you can change it.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what it takes is just getting around people who think bigger, people who um serve clients in a deeper way, people who are just operating and living and they're working at a higher level.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, that's probably more than I more than I intended to say on this audio journal.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: But some of you really need to hear that.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to encourage you, you can do this at a deeper level.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, that's it for this episode, and I will talk to you in the next one.