This time we talk with software consultant Matthew Lehner about building good relationships with new clients, how he tripled his income in a year, his onboarding process, and so much more.
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Matthew’s website: matthewlehner.net
Follow Matthew on Twitter: @matthewpearse
Matthew’s book: The Freelancer’s Field Guide
The new course for design consultants: Client Onboard
Jane Portman: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the UI Breakfast Podcast! And I’m your host, Jane Portman.
It’s Episode 2 of the podcast, and today we have another great chat about the secrets of client onboarding. This is dedicated to our new product, Client Onboard, which helps consultants interview their clients. You’re welcome to sign up for updates at clientonboard.com.
Today our guest is Matthew Lehner, a great developer who is running a very successful consulting practice and also writing a book teaching others to master their perfect client process.
Jane Portman: Okay, Matthew. Hi!
Matthew Lehner: Hello, Jane. How are you?
Jane: Thank you for coming today. I’m doing great. And you?
Matthew: Good, thanks.
Jane: Awesome. So, Matthew, please share a little bit of your life story. How did your consulting career develop over time and how did you end up in Hong Kong doing such high touch consulting remotely?
Matthew: I’ve always been technical, so my first job was fixing computers, but I wasn’t a developer until we moved a few years ago. And I was working at a place where we hired some consultants, and they charged $120 an hour, and they were building a CRM for the nonprofit I was working at.
And I thought that’s a pretty good rate. I think that would be better than making $20 an hour, which is what I was making there. So I taught myself to program and quit my job and had two really tough years of fighting to find clients.
And then, in my third year as a freelancer or a consultant, I started paying attention to what I was doing and put my past experience together to work for me and listened to some tips from some other pros in the field that I was kind of looking up to, and managed to get my income over six figures, which was really quite an achievement for me coming from the two years before where I was making between like $20,000 and $30,000 a year, just barely scraping by.
Jane: Yeah, that’s a dramatic shift, I imagine.
Matthew: Yeah, it really was, but it kind of, for me, it just highlighted that there’s a few easy things to do, and if you do them correctly that you can work with high quality clients who are really, really happy to pay kind of, I guess I call them, premium rates, but who are happy to pay for work, and they don’t — you don’t — have to worry about if the paycheck is going to come in on time or if you’re going to run out of money or anything like that, and so.
Then, I guess about nine months ago, I moved here to Hong Kong. Sort of on a whim, my girlfriend got a job teaching here and asked if I wanted to come, and I really like her, so I decided sure, yeah, I’ll go.
And one of the real benefits for me about being a freelance consultant is that I could just tell my clients, hey, I’m moving to Hong Kong and, with the time difference, it would be great if we’d have our meetings in your afternoon, and that’s basically been it because I work remotely anyway.
Jane: Yeah, that sounds like awesome trouble to have.
Matthew: Yeah.
Jane: So I hear you’re writing a book, and we actually had a conversation a while ago doing my interview for your book, so it’s nice to exchange. So how’s the book going?
Matthew: It’s going really well. It’s taken longer than I thought, but I think that it’s got a lot of really valuable content. So the book is called The Freelancer’s Field Guide, and what it is it’s a guide to help you if you’re a freelancer that’s either just starting out or wants to quit your job. It’s basically all of the steps that I used during my third year of running my consultancy to go from the $30,000 a year mark to the $100,000 or six figures a year, yeah, mark. And so it’s how to find clients, how to increase your rates, and then how to manage your cash flow are the topics it covers.
Jane: Do you bring a lot of personality in your advice?
Matthew: Yeah, I tried to kind of incorporate in real life stories from myself or that I’ve heard from other people. And I’ve done interviews with, right now, five other freelancers who are doing it successfully and have been bringing their experiences, some of their experiences in at the right moments as well.
Jane: Do you see much in common between their stories?
Matthew: Yeah, there’s definitely like a commonality between the people who are doing this successfully and, I think people who are just really struggling from kind of project-to-project. And I think that two main things that I would say, like, the first is just to increase your rates.
Everyone says to do that, and it takes a lot of confidence or grit, you know, to do that. It’s because all of a sudden I — personally, my first rate was $28 an hour, and then I bumped that to $60, and then up to $120, and then beyond that now. But that first jump where I went from being an employee to understanding — or the jump from being an employee to understanding what it means to be a consultant where you can charge in the $100-plus an hour rate range.
Just even without understanding that, changing your rate means that you’ve kind of limited the fact that you won’t be, or you’ve limited the clients that you can work with. And it basically just cuts off the bottom of the barrel clients who will be kind of nickel and diming you for every line item on every invoice and trying to get more for each dollar than you can and creates a sustainable consulting business.
And then the other thing is that you should always — you need to ask for referrals from anybody that you’ve worked with. Referrals and testimonials will get you a long ways.
Jane: That’s right. What you’re saying about clients, not only just increases your bottom line, but also makes you much happier, like bringing you to another different level of work.
Matthew: Yeah, exactly.
Jane: Okay, so today our topic for the podcast is building trust with new clients. So could you please share some interview tips that have helped you to establish that intimate connection right away, or maybe it’s something that’s built over time? So what’s your take on this?
Matthew: For the first three years of run — well, I still don’t really have a client facing website, and I’ve been running a consulting — I’ve been running a successful consulting business, so that means that my leads are not coming — they’re warm leads when they come to me. That means that anybody that wants to work with me, they have to get in touch with me or find out about me somehow other than kind of Googling or looking around, and that usually means that somebody that knows me tells them, oh, yeah, I know this guy who can maybe help you with that.
And that really is like just establishes a huge baseline of trust right off the bat because immediately I’m not having to win trust. I’ve got somebody that that potential client already knows, and they’re giving me that credibility. They’re saying, yeah, this guy can do that for you.
So it really helps to kind of build your network, the network of people that you know. And that doesn’t mean going out and networking like being a crazy sales guy in a suit working the room at some Chamber of Commerce event or something like that. It just means that you’re kind of, either online or in real life, meeting up with people that you like and spending time with them and, I guess, just being nice to them and remembering their names, and eventually that kind of pays off. I mean it’s kind of — it takes a little bit of time, but it’s really the best way to establish a high level of trust right off the bat.
Jane: So you’re saying it should be established before the interview, and that’s just a natural continuation of your relationship is getting down to work with a person.
Matthew: Yeah, I would say so. I mean you can establish it if the person gets a hold of you in a cold way, like I’ve reached out to a couple of people who have been looking for work and they didn’t know who I was previous to. But it’s always been through forums or avenues where it’s a community where we have a kind of shared goal already, so just by me being a part of that community, it kind of adds a little bit of trust to the relationship right off the bat.
Jane: That’s right.
Matthew: But I would say that really that’s, like, a good baseline to set, but there’s still a little bit of work to be done if you’re going to win over anybody else. Like maybe they’ve been recommended to people and the first thing is just respond as quickly as possible if you get a referral. And the second is to take the focus away from what you’re doing and just ask questions about what they want to do and the problem they’re trying to solve.
Don’t even talk about what you want to do. Just, like, try and get as good an understanding about their problem or the issue or product that they want to build and before even making any suggestions about what you can do because this, like, makes the person feel like you know what they’re talking about and that you’re buying their goal if you’re able to kind of keep yourself out of that equation for as long as possible.
And then, at the last possible minute when, you know, well, not the last possible minute, but once you’ve really established a really clear understanding about what they want to do, what they’re like as a person, their motivations behind the project, that then creates — then you can say, well, yeah, I’ve got some ideas, and discuss them then. But I’m a technical person, so I do development mostly and, for me, I try to keep the technology out of it as much as possible because the technology just muddles things down.
A client doesn’t care if I’m going to build their website in the latest with the latest functional programming framework, or with some old thing from 1997 as long as it works and it makes them money or saves them money. That’s really the important thing is that I’m focusing on what it is, like the value that they are seeing from going forward with the project and focusing on maximizing it.
Jane: That’s brilliant. It’s quite simple just to focus on the person and on business goals instead of the implementation details. But it’s so hard to follow it because we are naturally — like being experienced consultants meaning having a set of solutions lying, like, up your sleeve, and you can’t wait to jump in and offer some of them. And you have to just hold that back for a while.
Matthew: Yeah, exactly. The thing is, in the case where you’re referred, they already know that you can do whatever it is that they’re talking to you about, so you don’t even need to establish that you can do that. There’s already the understanding that that’s why you’re there to talk to them. You don’t have to first prove that you can design a great site or build it or write really great copy. You just have to understand the problem.
Jane: That’s right. One of my biggest personal discoveries was that questioning or tweaking the actual task is something that’s highly valued. Meaning when a person comes to you with a problem, you’re not just jumping in solving it right away, but questioning whether exactly this is the right way or right tool or the right subject to work on. Have you discovered something like that in your consulting work?
Matthew: Yeah. I think that that is a valuable thing to do, but I think it really — that comes kind of after you’ve established that trust that I was talking about, that really understanding the problem because, if I were to show up at a meeting and say, “Hey, this is how you should do things. I’ve got it all figured out,” they’re going to say — and then they say, “Well, we’ve got these ideas.” And you say, “No, no, no, no, that’s the wrong way to do it.” That just comes off as arrogant. Whereas if you get that chance to really dig in and then you can speak back to them in the language that they’re using about what it is that they’re trying to do, and you can offer really helpful suggestions about how they might do it a little bit differently or a little bit more effectively. Yeah, I think that’s definitely a really good tool to win them over.
If you’re offering suggestions, it just shows that you’ve gotten an understanding of what it is that they’re talking about and how they can better go about solving that problem. It kind of creates a collaborative environment right off the bat, which is great because then you’re two allies that are striving together to solve this common problem rather than somebody who wants to engage, like rather than the client wanting to engage you as a person who they are just going to pay money to to do this thing that they want them to. It becomes less of a client/vendor relationship and more of a collaborative thing, which I think that’s really powerful.
Jane: That’s right. One of the helpful tips was once you’re selling something, it’s always about you and your needs. But once you get to work together as a consultant, it’s a great tip to be using us and we instead of you and me, so that we kind of share the same goals and work towards them instead of like going back and forth with suggestions, you know.
Matthew: Mm-hmm, exactly. Yeah, it’s kind of like you’ve got to climb this — well, there’s like a process of going from having no trust to having their trust. And then once you have the trust, then the us and we relationship, that’s where it takes off. And that’s where it really, really can be an effective technique to closing the deal or, you know, continuing the relationship or building the strength of it.
Jane: That’s totally right. But it also can be hard to find that balance between being a shy freelancer, a mere tool, which we obviously want to avoid, and being arrogant, like you mentioned. Do you have any suggestions how to overcome that initial shyness that occurs in the conversation, how to break the ice?
Matthew: Like, I’m naturally very introverted.
Jane: Like most of us are, I guess.
Matthew: I like to stay in my solo Internet cave and hang out and work in there. So I think that I would probably tend to err more on the side of not being strong enough with my opinions to clients, and I guess that I really try to pose everything as a — rather than posing it as a hard and fast opinion, I try to present my opinions more as options or as ideas that are available. And I think that really helps to — well, it gets the person knowing that I’m onboard with what they want to do and I’m thinking about it and solving, trying to solve problems within that or provide solutions that come from my expertise.
But I never — if at a certain point the client will say something really strongly like no, then that happens. But there have also been occasions where I’ve said, like, I’ve been very straightforward and there are certain things I don’t do. Like I won’t negotiate my rate, and sometimes it’ll come down to a decision between doing something one way or another way. And if I feel exceptionally strong about the outcome from one of those options, I’ll voice that opinion. But I think it comes down to that having a strong opinion is a good thing, but you need to really, really know when to pick your battles, and only really choose the ones that are important.
Jane: That’s right. It’s nice to see that over your experience you have already gained that personal consulting style that many people yet have to master. I am totally with you on the delicate side of things. I also like to be patient and silent rather than opinionated, but I imagine there are some people who are on the aggressive side, and that also can work.
Matthew: Yeah. I think that the thing about being a consultant is that we are going to work with people who suit our personalities. Maybe I should word it this way. For me, I work with people that suit my personality, and I think that that’s one of the signs of being successful as a consultant is that you’re working with people that you like. So if your personalities match, then if you’re a strongly opinionated person, you’re probably working with — and you like working with strongly opinionated people, you’re probably in a relationship like that.
The dynamics of the relationship, any professional relationship, can change. But we’ve all had bad clients and good clients, and bad coworkers and good coworkers. And the goal for me, well, one of the things that’s great about being a consultant is that I don’t have to work with the people that I don’t like working with. So usually being on the side that’s less opinionated, for me it’s okay because it ends up there’s more of a collaboration or middle path. Also, I’m Canadian, and it’s just kind of in our nature to be a little bit more passive.
Jane: Oh, really? And that’s right. When you go out in the field, it seems that there is such fierce competition. But once you get further down the road, actually you become aware that there’s such a field of work that can only be done by hand, and there’s just a handful who are capable of doing that. And there is no such thing as fierce competition, but rather a very limited supply of that work that you can provide. So it’s all about picking the right … to make it comfortable, and that’s just fantastic to be a good consultant like that.
Matthew: Oh, yeah. I can talk for hours about how many — well, I can complain about the bar that is set by fellow consultants on average and how low it is for a long time. But really I mean that just means that if we are working and we’re doing good work in this field that it will rise to the top as good consultants, and it’s not hard to get referrals and stuff that way.
Jane: Absolutely. I have found it comes naturally and, of course, marketing helps, but referrals make much stronger impact, just as you mentioned.
Okay, so thank you so much for giving away such awesome professional secrets. And now I have a few final questions for you. Now what’s the most valuable bulletproof advice you can give to consultants who are listening to us?
Matthew: Oh, man. Get referrals! That is bar none the most important thing for the success of being a — just if you’re working by yourself, you don’t have time for cold calling or sales. You need referrals. That’s it. That’s the main thing.
Jane: Okay, but I have to question that. Yourself just in referrals, but it looks like you’re pursuing an active path writing a book and doing public promotion blogging, so is that something, a different take on the referral side?
Matthew: Well, so for me this is a different business. This is a different target audience and everything, and it’s kind of to supplement. Yeah, it’s to supplement the consulting business. The consulting business is client based. I do development and a little bit of project management stuff. But this is me trying to help people find the freedom that I found by becoming a freelancer and consultant.
Jane: So it’s just for building a little bit authority and building products, and not directly related to the stream of client work.
Matthew: Yeah, exactly. The way I think about the product or this is that this is the third product that I’ve started, and it will be the first one that I finish. The first two were technical books. And for the same reason I stopped writing both of them because I got burnt out. But really what it is is that with being a successful consultant, I have the time to work on a product, whereas if I was working at a full-time job, that’s my entire week used up. And then if I have extracurricular activities or want to have a work/life balance, I have to sacrifice something to make sure that I have to make the time to work on a product that I would be building.
Jane: Oh, absolutely. I heard a very interesting fact about Germany lately. It’s about illustrators, not directly related to consultants, but still they have a regulation that allows creative people only to work like 15 hours per week and not more. And I think that’s so true, and you actually end up working that many productive hours at all.
Matthew: Yeah, that’s my goal is to work 16 billable hours a week for my clients.
Jane: Oh, so it’s very close to Germany.
Matthew: Yeah.
Jane: Mm-hmm, so besides the book, what’s Matthew Lehner’s next big thing?
Matthew: Besides the book? The book is still on the horizon. I can’t think beyond that yet. I mean I have ideas about what might come after that, but I mean first the book has to be finished and launched. And once that happens, we’ll see what happens. We’ll see how it’s accepted and if it’s successful. Well, yeah, how successful it is, I guess should be the way I talk about it, not if it’s successful.
Jane: Oh, I’m sure it’s going to be a hit with all your experience and insight that you can share. It’s going to be amazing. I can’t wait to get that sample chapter from you.
Matthew: Yeah, well, the sample chapter is available from the website. It’s freelancersfieldguide.com, the sample chapter Jane is talking about, and you can sign up for the email list, and you get that, the sample chapter, which is about strategies for finding clients.
Jane: That’s right. And where else can people find you online?
Matthew: I’m also on Twitter @matthewpearse and that’s my middle name. It’s spelled a bit weird. It’s P-e-a-r-s-e.
Jane: We’ll make sure to include that in the show notes.
Matthew: Cool.
Jane: And your website?
Matthew: Oh, yes, well, that too: matthewlehner.net.
Jane: Okay, so, Matthew, thanks so much for coming today. I think this conversation totally brings so much value to our listeners. I hope you have success with the book, and have a fantastic day.
Matthew: Thanks. You too, Jane.
Jane: I think this episode is packed with advice. Here are the actionable takeaways you can apply to your consulting business right now.
Once again, many thanks to Matthew for being with us today. Stay tuned for more interviews like this. Please search iTunes for UI Breakfast, or go to uibreakfast.com/podcast. Or you can sign up for updates at clientonboard.com.
This was your host Jane Portman. You can find me on Twitter @uibreakfast. Thanks for being with us, and have a lovely day!
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