3 Steps to Turn Your Expertise Into a Service
📅 Date: Tuesday 20th October
🕛 Time: 10am - 11am BST
Followed by 30 minutes of free live coaching
📍Where: Live on Zoom
Join me live for a free workshop for charity freelancers who want to do good work, on their own terms.
The recording will be available for 48 hours, but if you can, join live. The live coaching and Q&A at the end won't be included in the recording.
By registering for this free workshop, you will also be added to my mailing list. I will keep your email address safe, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Does this feel familiar?
You have spent years building expertise that charities genuinely value, and you know your area of work well enough that you can usually see the shape of an organisation's problem before they have finished describing it to you.
Lately though, you have started noticing a pattern. The same problems keep landing in your inbox from different charities, the same conversation happens on every time you chat with a prospective client, and somewhere in the middle of the 4th version of a piece of work you have delivered before, you find yourself thinking there has to be a better way to offer this.
Maybe you have an idea you’ve been thinking about for a while: project-based, strategy work, training, a mentoring package, something more structured than a client buying a certain about of your days. Maybe you have simply had enough of your income being decided by how many hours you can physically sit at your desk in a month.
The difficult part is everything that comes after the idea.
How do you turn something you are good at into something a charity can picture buying?
How do you know whether it solves a problem they will actually put money behind?
How do you talk about what your experience is worth without your voice wobbling?
How do you find the right people and start those conversations when your existing client work already takes up most of the week?
And how do you build something new without it joining the long list of things you keep meaning to get around to?
If you have found yourself there, I would love you to join me on Tuesday 20th October.
Creating a new service is a decision about how you want to spend your working week for the next few years, which is why it takes so much longer than adding another page to your website. For a lot of charity freelancers there comes a point where responding to whatever arrives in their inbox or LinkedIn DMs, stops being a sustainable business model.
You built a good career on referrals, recommendations and doing excellent work for people who kept coming back, and then the question changed, from "how do I get more work" to "how do I get the right work". That change asks something different of you. It asks you to know which problems you are best placed to solve, to be clear about who you want to help, and to be able to say what your experience is worth in words a burnout head of fundraising can repeat to a trustee board.
By registering for this free workshop, you will also be added to my mailing list. I will keep your email address safe, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
You have already done the hard part
You already have the expertise, built over years of sitting in rooms with limited budgets, competing priorities, ambitious plans and a team trying to do considerably more than their capacity allows. That judgement only comes from doing the work in real organisations, and it is worth a great deal.
What freelancing asks of you on top of all that is the ability to say, in one sentence, which problem you take off a charity's hands. That is a completely different skill from delivering the work brilliantly, and most of us are left to learn this as we go along.
During this free workshop…
Step 1. Find the problem you are already solving.
Most new services start with the freelancer asking what they could offer, which makes complete sense, because your expertise is where the idea comes from. The services that sell, though, start one step back, with a problem that was already keeping somebody awake before you reached out.
Charities rarely wake up wanting to buy a service. They wake up needing to raise more money by March, fix the communications that keep going out late and a bit crap, sort out a system that has been held together with goodwill since 2017, or get a team through a change nobody has explained to them properly.
So we will work out which problem your service solves, how to tell the difference between a real need and a nice idea, and how to check that before you spend the next three months building it.
Step 2. Shape it into something a charity can buy.
Plenty of freelancers get to this point knowing they could help and struggling to say precisely how. Years of experience across dozens of projects is absolutely a strength, and it also makes a clear offer harder to write down in a compelling way, because everything feels relevant and you so badly want to help solve all the problems, for such a good cause!
Your potential client cannot see any of what you know. They can only see what you put in front of them.
So we will shape your expertise into a service someone can understand at a first glance: who it is for, what happens, what it costs, and what they need to believe before they say yes.
The point is to make it quick for the right person to see which of their problems you take away, without them having to work it out from a list of everything you have ever done, for every organisation you’ve ever worked with.
Step 3. Start the conversations before it is finished.
A service almost never arrives fully formed. It gets better through conversations, through people telling you which bit confused them, through you saying the idea out loud to somebody who might buy it and watching their face.
Most freelancers squirrel away their good ideas, because the website needs updating, the wording needs perfecting, the offer needs refining, and the timing needs to be right.
Meanwhile the useful information is sitting with the six people who would tell you the truth if you asked them this week. So we will look at who those people are for you, what you say to them while the wording is still rough, and how to keep the idea moving without it turning into a full time marketing job.
Save your spot
By registering for this free workshop, you will also be added to my mailing list. I will keep your email address safe, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
This workshop is for you if...
You have built real expertise through your work with charities and you are ready to turn it into a service, so the work you take on stops being decided by whoever emails you first.
You have an idea that has been sitting at the back of your mind for months, waiting for the week when you have the headspace to shape it, and that week keeps not arriving.
You keep noticing the same challenges coming to you from different organisations and you have started wondering whether there is a focused offer hiding in the pattern.
You would like to stop selling your days one at a time and find a way of working that reflects what you know rather than how many hours you can stay awake for.
You are confident about delivering the work and much less confident about describing what it is worth, marketing it, or knowing where on earth to start with something new.
You want a freelance business where the work that comes in is the work you chose, and where the organisations who need you most already know what you do.
This workshop probably isn't for you if...
You are looking for help winning your very first freelance client, in which case this is aimed a few years ahead of where you are.
You want productivity tips so you can fit even more work into a week that is already full to the edges.
Your ambition is to grow as fast as humanly possible and worry about the consequences later.
Your plan involves earning millions from a laptop on a beach in Bali.
Hi, I’m Bethany
Hi, I’m Bethany, a coach, business mentor and consultant, and I work with charity freelancers to build businesses that hold steady. I've been in the charity sector since 2010, going freelance in 2020, and these days I work with freelancers and consultants who are fed up with their income being decided by how many days they can physically sell.
I run Freelancers for Good™, a programme that helps charity freelancers redesign their business model, their services and their workload, so the work stops sprawling into every corner of the week and starts feeling like something they can actually keep doing.
The thing I've become properly fascinated by, after five years of coaching charity professionals and freelancers, is what happens when experienced charity people go freelance. We leave the job, the manager and the organisation, and we take every single one of our old working habits with us in the bag. The urgency. The over-responsibility. The instinct to be helpful before anyone has even asked. The physical difficulty of disappointing somebody who is doing important work on not enough money, and the reflex to give a bit more of yourself because the cause makes a real difference to real people.
Those habits are a large part of why we're so bloody good at this. They're also why so many of us are exhausted by November.
So you can stop selling your days and start selling the solution to problem you solve.
📅 Tuesday 20th October
🕛 10am - 11am BST
💬 Followed by 30 minutes of live coaching and Q&A
📍 Online
🎟️ Register here for free
Bring a notebook, and if you can, bring one service idea you have been thinking about for a while. We will keep the last 30 minutes for live coaching, which is not recorded, so you can put your own situation on the table and discuss your actual business.
3 Steps to Turn Your Expertise Into a Service
By registering for this free workshop, you will also be added to my mailing list. I will keep your email address safe, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
One final thought...
For years you have been rewarded for being the person who steps in, works it out and makes it happen, and that reputation is why the work keeps arriving. The trouble is that being the person who can always absorb one more thing is a job description, and after a while it starts to feel like the job you left.
What I hear from experienced freelancers is that they want something they chose on purpose. Work that fits what they are best at, prices they can say out loud, and a service that solves a problem they find genuinely interesting for organisations they would recommend to a friend.
You have something worth selling. What takes the work is turning everything you have learned into something clear, useful and easy for the right client to say yes to, and that is exactly what we will do together on the 20th.