E136 | Badass Your Brand & Show Your Business Who’s Boss with Pia Silva
- If you’re tired of being overworked and underpaid,
- If you lack the ideal clients, or you don’t know how to find, attract and close clients,
- If you keep experiencing project creep,
- If you’re an expert in what you do, but you’re constantly overlooked and having to explain the value of what you do,
Then you need to listen to Pia Silva on this week’s episode of The Melting Pot.
Pia is a partner and brand strategist at Worstofall Design where they build entire brands in 1-3 day intensives. But these days she is just as focused on helping other small branding and marketing companies build profitable, lifestyle businesses using her No-BS model.
She’s a TEDx speaker, a Forbes contributor, author of Badass Your Brand and host of the podcast Show Your Business Who’s Boss.
And on today’s episode, she talks about how she went from being $40,000 in debt, working 100 hours a week for clients she didn’t want to work for, delivering work she wasn’t happy with, to 12 months later, making $500k, being profitable and working with a client she wants to work with.
Pia does the work she wants, her way, and she charges proper money for it. This is a fascinating story about the benefits of niching, adopting a no-BS approach and creating authority to drive business in.
We hope you enjoy this conversation with Pia as much as we did.
On today’s podcast:
- How she built her own brand
- From debt to success with Worstofall Design
- Niche down
- Definition of badass branding
- Create authority building content
- Charge proper prices
Links:
- TedX talk – When You Bank True Confidence, Anything Is Possible
- Podcast – Show Your Business Who’s Boss
- Worstofall Design
- Book – Badass Your Brand
Cut The BS, Deliver Value, Charge Proper Prices with Pia Silva
If you’re tired of being overworked and underpaid. If you lack the ideal clients. If you’re constantly having to explain the value of what you do, then you need Pia Silva, TEDx speaker, Forbes contributor, author of Badass Your Brand and host of the podcast Show Your Business Who’s Boss.
Pia went from being $40,000 in debt, working 100 hours a week for clients she didn’t want to work for, delivering work she wasn’t happy with, to 12 months later, making $500k, being profitable, and working with a client she wants to work with.
She wrote the book Badass Your Brand because she wanted people to respect what she had to say, and she knew if she had a book, people would listen to her more.
“In this business of building brands, the more authority you have when you’re working with a client, the better the work is, the more they follow you, the more you can get your creative ideas to the finish line.”
Why self publish the book?
“I wanted to experience the process of self publishing. And then it makes me that much better for my clients, [because] a lot of my clients are in a position where they might want to publish a book. And so I know a lot about that. I know a lot about writing a book, publishing it, marketing it. It just makes me better at my job.”
Worstofall Designs
She started on this journey to drive business towards her now husband’s graphic design business. She saw agencies doing shiny, beautiful work and wanted to emulate them. But it was a horrible disaster (her words). They made money, but they made more debt. Backed into a corner, with $40,000 of debt, they had to pivot.
They created a no-BS model that changed who they were, how they charged and created incentives that saw them achieve incredible financial success in just a year.
“As soon as that happened, I was like, great. This is working. What’s next. So that’s about like, almost to the day a year later, we were like, great, let’s build an online course.”
So they created an online course to teach other people how to do what they did, because they realised they’d priced themselves out of these clients, but they still needed something to sell to them.
Then came the book.
“The turnaround was just so extreme, and it was so magical. I felt like I’d really keyed in on something. So that’s what the book is about. It’s like all these changes that we made that had such a huge, fast impact on our business. That’s what I wanted to share.”
The book is abou execution. About niching down. About knowing who to say no to. Knowing what to say no to. About understanding pricing. About creating custom work but packaging it in an accessible way.
“The work is custom, but the way you sell it isn’t custom.”
Pia’s niche
Pia and Steve went to the market they knew – small business owners. And now they only work with 1-3 person service businesses, teaching them how to close $10k-$50k projects that take less than a week to deliver, with their no-BS approach.
“It’s so powerful to clarify who you’re for. It turns on the light bulbs in people’s brains, they think of people to send to you that they wouldn’t think of if you’re not specific.”
How does she deliver value in such a short time period?
“In order to be profitable, you have to be systematised, you’ve got to be streamlined, you’ve got to be really aware of the fact that there’s only so many hours in a day, and the hours you spend working for a client should all be of the highest level.”
If you’re wasting time doing low value BS, you’re not making money and you’re not delivering client’s value.
Definition of Badass branding
According to Pia, branding is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.
“I sell badass branding as magnetically attracting ideal clients and repelling everyone else. So it’s got to have this push/pull. Which means it’s got to really stand in its voice. And whatever it is, it has to really own it, in order to repel certain people and attract others. And it’s got to be premium priced. So you have to be able to charge more than the competition and still win the business.”
Authority building content
So how did Pia turn branding into her business? How did she make her no BS approach work for her? By becoming a key person of influence in her industry, and putting out content to support that.
When somebody is thinking of hiring you, says Pia, they have to trust you, and they have to have a reason to hire you. But how do they trust you?
If you don’t have information online, she says, if you have no content, then they have no way to trust you. So you have to spend time with them. You have to do free work, or you do free consultations, or you do pitches because you’re trying to build that trust.
“And that’s why I’m such a fan of authority building content. Because if you put the energy into the authority building content, then that does the work for you.”
If you do free work for people, the minute it’s done, it’s gone, she says. If you do the free work by creating content, it does the heavy lifting time and time again for everyone who comes through your funnel. It’s a better use of your time and energy.
Charging proper prices
So many people are scared to charge proper prices, says Pia, because they aren’t used to paying that amount of money for themselves.
“I’ve written a lot, and I’ve tried to unpack this idea that the more that I’ve spent on my business, the easier it’s been for me to charge, you know, once I spent $20K in a day, I no longer had any apprehension about charging that.”
But if you’ve never spent more than $1k on your business before, Pia adds, it can be difficult to believe that clients would pay you $10k, $20k, $30k for your services, because you would never pay that.
And that’s the mindset you need to overcome.
“You have to have the experience of investing money because you wanted to and because you saw results, and then you understand why somebody else would pay you, in turn, for a similar experience.”