Cybersecurity Freelancer: Become A Free Agent In 2025

1. Course Introduction: And no terprenurs makes around 60% of the adult workforce in the United States. In the case of cybersecurity, the number is tiny little better. It's around 25%. If you look at closely, however, you'll find that approximately 55% of the adults in the United States have tried to start their own business at some point, which means that everyone, including cybersecurity professional wanted to become entrepreneur. Yet, only a tiny percentage of those dams are able to turn their business into reality. That is why I created this master class. I wanted to provide IT and the cybersecurity professionals with the tools and the knowledge. I would like to I like to have that before I went to become build $1,000,000 cybersecurity businesses. If you are a cybersecurity professional, looking for a blueprint help you to build your very own consulting agency, this is the master class is precisely where you should start. My name is Nandi. It is my pleasure to be with your mentor today. 2. Becoming A Cybersecurity Entrepreneur: Before we begin, I want to make it clear that become a cybersecurity entrepreneur is no easy task. Building and growing and running a successful cybersecurity consulting agency is hard work. It is much harder to sell high end export services to clients than sell a high end premium product. That is because cybersecurity services it's what's known at credit goods, where the seller of the services that is used by that's us, by the way, is expected to be provided a service to the client while is determined what clients needs are. It's in other words, because you are both the expert and the vendor, while the client obtain has no real expertise in what you're doing. The clients need to be able to trust you. They need to trust that you will be able to diagonize the problem correctly. They need to trust that you will come up with an effective solutions, and they need to know you will work effectively to achieve overcome that align with their interest. And that you will price your services fairly according to the services you have provided. Trust is everything. In cybersecurity entrepreneurial business, businesses, your livelihood will be built on TR. The relationship, a referral and reputations sound like hard work. Why do it? Well, it is because few things compared to the thrill of identifying and evaluating servers good problems and implementing solution to fix those problems. All the whole being total control of business side of things. It is hard work, but what in the life that's all doing, isn't it? The best things in life is the challenge that we take on, and this is definitely a challenge you will feel more adequately preferred to take on with the right resources and tools. In this master class, we'll touch on most important things I believe you should know, providing you the specific cybersecurity examples along the way, hopefully setting the stage for all the great things that your professional career holds for you in the future. 3. Establishing Product Market Fit: Start by talking about the most important things when you start your agency. Let's talk about your unique selling point, UPS has got to be one of the most important popular term used in the business. Everyone talks about it, and everyone will tell you that you need to have a unique selling point. But do you really need to have a unique selling point? If your plan is striking out on your own as a cybersecurity professional? Personally, I didn't think so. Allow me to explain it. Unique selling point is a term that refer to your company, services, products and brand names, brands, unique character itis that help it stand out from other competitors. It is basically a summary of different reasons that your clients might hire you for your cyber security services over another consultant or another agency. Now, the fact is that Matter is the only true unique business around our government monopolies. All other private business will almost always have close competitors, surrogates or cheap knockouts emitters. Competitors will always exist. They will always study what you're doing, try to undercut your business and takeaway your clients. They can do this by offering a better service, a cheaper service or coming up with a better business model that more fit for the purpose. When I'm trying to say what I'm trying to say is that we are living in a post USP world. The cybersecurity agency you are building doesn't need to be unique. Anyone who tells you that is giving you rubbish, advised that they probably only service to hold you back only serve to hold you back in your journey. You shouldn't try to build unique cybersecurity agency, but should aim for agency to be fit in the market so that adequately able to meet the needs of your clients. We call this product market fit. Product market fees is when your product or the services you're providing is able to meet the needs of intended market. In other words, a successful cybersecurity consultant is the one who able to satisfy the need of their clients. A lot of people will wrongly equate having the per product market fee with being able to make a lot of money from the services you offer, from your clients right from the get go. Pdot Market feed goes beyond than that. Podoc Market feed is all about sustainability, which means you shouldn't just be focusing on winning over new clients or contracts, but should work on keeping those clients engaged and retaining them. The worst things you can do is a cybersecurity professional is to run your business whereby you have a revolving door for clients, winning over new clients, building relationship with those clients require tons of time and effort. So it makes no sense to just constantly go and put all of those resources into securing new client when you can work on tending to the relationship you already have. So to retain client, focus on value creation by maximizing both your and your client profitability. Aligning your goal with those of your clients is the best way to retain clients. To ascertain your product market fit, I recommend you calculate and analyze your business conversion rate, the customer's lifetime value to acquision cost and the agency's churn rate and the predicted monthly recording revenue in six months time. A cybersecurity professional you should initially aim for a 10% conversion rate, meaning that 10% of your client approach with a proposal should take you on your proposal. That said your conversion rate will vary because on the cybersecurity services you'll sell. One example of high conversion rate cybersecurity services that you may offer to your clients is implementing multifactor authentication paired with a personal training. This kind of service is incredibly popular with a high demand for all types of businesses. Naturally, you will have much easier time converting prospective client into the playing client. Compare this to a low conversion cybersecurity services like um, custom security implementations, event management, like SIM, this kind of services that record heavily customizations on your part due to the needing to the inkt of SEM with the client's existing system. There is also limited market arenes. Which can make those sales more difficult. The sales cycle of for custom SIM will be much longer require you to invest more resources and while also reducing the overall cell conversions. With all of that in mind, I typically recommend that you aim for 15% conversion rate if you're selling MFA implementation and 5% conversion rate if you're selling a custom SIM. Something there is a less variable. On the other hand, is your customer's lifetime value to acquision cost? You should do something you can to ensure that greater than three to one. The customer lifetime value to acquision cost is a measure of your business overall profitability and how much effort you foot in to acquire each clients versus return you get from them. A healthy business is the one that gets at least three times return from each dollar you spend acquiring each client. This partly the reason why so important to build a business where you rely on more long term rather than revolving door of clients. You should also seek to have multi churn rate that leaves at 2%. You calculate the multi churn rate by dividing the number of clients you lost in each month by number of clients you started with at the beginning of the month. A monthly churN rate, two person might seem like a ridiculous low amount to aim for, but it is most important to remember that a 2% monthly churN rate equal to roughly a 22 person annual charN rate. So if one in five of your clients in given year are no longer doing business with you or using your service, you need to revisit your business strategy. It doesn't mean that you have failed, but it does mean that your product market feet requires some work. So you keep engaging and retaining your existing clients. Obviously, you need to be a little flexible and remember that the kind of cybersecurity services you provide will play a large role determining your monthly churn rate. If your primary cell one time vulnerability scan or penetration testing services, you should expect a high churn rate as a business will only be requiring and therefore, purchasing those services from you occasionally, right? And to get more constantly consistent revenue, I would recommend you consider providing low churn rate services instead of something like managed detection and the response services ensure their long term customers client engagement and therefore more consistent revenue stream. As this is only hour long master class, we only we don't really have so much time to discuss the various ways you can keep engaging your clients. That said, you should find a link underneath this video with a few strategies that you can start using today. You should also find a link that provides you with a contract winning template. I prepare that you can use that whenever you send a prospective client a proposal of your services. Finally, it is important that you have a goal in mind that you aim for. That is why your monthly reoccurring evenue comes in. Not only should you be working to retain and keep your existing client base engaged, but also you should also ensure that you keep growing either by taking a new client or expanding your service offers or once you're doing all that exploring new ventures. So using the monthly reoccurring revenue to set yourself a target for where you plan to be in six to 12 months in time. For example, if you are just starting out right now, you might want to set yourself a $18,000 per monthly reoccurring revenue in a year time. Once you establish that goal, it is become easier to figure out what you need to do to get there. 4. Pricing Your Freelancing Services: Now, something that I keep on getting us now, Nandi, how much should I charge my clients? And I always say that same thing. Don't let your client dictate your prices. First, it is important to understand that prices are not set in stone. The market today is hyper competitive, which is mean that is the prices, your charge, your services should be dynamic. You should be willing to change either up or down to hopefully to get a point after a lot of fine tuning, where you hit a sweet spot. The sweet spot will be where you will be maximize your sales and revenue. If you are relying solely on a client's feedback to inform you how much you should be charging, you almost always end up undercharging your client. That is because there is no such thing right or wrong price to charge. Prices are subject and depends on the service you're offering, it is develop over don for your clients, along with what market your clients in there are buying power and attitude toward your service. For example, you will probably find a business that had recently suffered a cybersecurity attack and to be able to more willing to pay for the service that guarantee they won't be facing the breach in the future. In fact, I can tell the tell that according to my data, 29% of those businesses that suffered a cybersecurity breach responded by hiring a cybersecurity firm or consultant. Form experience, I can tell you that the client willing to pay highs premium for cybersecurity services tend to be in the healthcare organizations that require a HIPAA compliance security protections. This is really due to them being motivated by the high cost non compliance. Similarly, financial institute will often be willing to invest on advanced encryptions and for prevention system to avoid breaches and protect their that you use a pricing strategy matrix to help you to decide where you want to position yourself in the market. At the end of the day, when you charge needs to reflect the service you provide. In the top left quadrn of the pricing strategy metrics, you'll find skimming pricing. This pricing tact is set for high price for a service that doesn't quite match up for the price. That may seem like ridiculous things to do, but skimming process is something uses when you are one of the few people offering a very specific or niche service in the market. It doesn't mean that your service is a bad per se, but it means that the client is paying substantially more for more customized and specialized service. Most of your favorite brands will use this type of pricing to price was some of their products, and you should, too. The service you're using scheme and pricing for will be your most profitable, carrying the highest margin. You might not have a lot of paying customer for those prices, but they will help improve your bottom line. Advanced Trade Intelligence Solutions is one of the such services that will for enterprise clients looking for unique solutions with high reserve value. Because this service has a high barrier of entry for cyber security agencies and consultant. As it require many years of training and expertise, it's become much easier to charge a premium a custom endpoint protection tellers to unique clients ecosystem with a proprietary configuration is also suitable for scheming pricing, as they are the services that would often come with a high switching costs for our clients due to being adapted to the client environment. Is that you get to enjoy the good margin and get a built a robust business reputation that's respect by clients. On the other hand, you might find that your market size is a little limited, especially when you are just starting up because while large businesses may willing to pay for premium services, they may not be willing to work with someone that feel untested. This can leave you in a position where your market at least to begin with is comprised of small businesses requiring service security solution who you will be able to convince the importance and the value of the services you are providing. It is not easiest way to start your cybersecurity consulting agency, but it is definitely most viable in the long run. Two examples of premier cybersecurity services you can offer, including 24 slash seven manage cybersecurity services with a guaranteed response time and the custom cloud assessment and ero task architecture design for large scale organizations. Both these services of round the clock security monitoring and the rapid content. A well implemented zero trust model and robust cloud security postures can fundamentally change how the organization manage risk and delivering a strategic benefit that extend far beyond that IT operations. This makes them highly valuable for the right kind of businesses. Making sure your service remain price down, making sure your service remain affordable to the clients. It is important to take a step back sometimes and remember that nearly half of the small businesses in the United States will spend less than thousand 500 each month on cybersecurity solutions, and 30% of the small businesses are not at all concerned with the cyber attacks. If you are just starting up, this will likely be your reality. You may find that the clients are not necessarily willing to pay for the premium service and the one that may be out of the reach. That's when the economic pricing comes in. The best to think of this model is a cost plus pricing a model where you tally all the costs to provide your service and set a viable price that service that will still allow you to make profit. You'll find you have slim margin because the lower end of the market is almost always much more competitive than the other part of the market. But you will probably still be able to make it work if you decide to outsource the work to the other cyber executive professionals while taking on the supervisor role and ensuring all the work meets the clients need. This pricing strategy allows for a rapid expansion thanks to wider customer base. Economic services you want to offer client include basic Farwell setup for small businesses, entry Loop west package with malware scan and SSL implementation. These services are idle for small businesses looking for cheap solutions. I feel that if the customers switching your services just because you're giving them a better deal than everybody else, they will probably come to expect a similar bargain from you in the future, right? And if they don't, they will probably look for switching to another service provider, tapping you in the penetration pricing cycles. That said that the pricing strategy does have its own place. You might want to create a WordPress security plug in, for example, only to then offer that plug in to the customer under a penetration pricing strategy model with a goal that that subset of those users will then seek for your consulting services for a more a customized solution. You can then charge scheming or premium pricing to those clients. In that way, your penetration pricing services become more of a lead magnet of your other high end services. Some examples of the lead magnets that I offered my own clients in the plus, including downloadable evod that contain some of the most important common cybersecurity mistakes startup makes, as well as how to avoid them. This eBook was written for the CEOs and the founders, those startups as they are the ones, cybersecurity agency to learn more about lead magnets and how to use them. I wanted to read my eBook and capture as lead of my cybersecurity agency to learn more about I as you only just starting out, don't be afraid to mix and match and try out different things. Whatever you do, you start always think about the value of your service, the competitions, and how much they are charging for the similar services, the frequency of the use or how often client engage with your services. Those three factors will come together and determine how much you should charge your client whether it is appreciate to charge your clients on a long time um, fee or subscriptions or retainer, which reminds me I created this handy flashcard, you will see here to determine the key difference between a cybersecurity agency that rely on one time sales or alternative revenue stream to subsidize the business, reoccurring revenue or premium service. 5. Creating Your Service Package: Regardless of how much you choose to charge, you will need to figure out what services or features you want to include as part of your core product offering. And unfortunately, I think that is why a lot of cybersecurity consultant end up messing up. Generally speaking, the best way to do things is not spread yourself too thin. In other words, don't try and make first cybersecurity package that you offered your first set of clients to a feature reach. I know this may sound like counterintuitive, but just think about Facebook or Amazon early days. Both Facebook Amazon don't start with trying to do everything, and they are currently doing all at once. What they did was focus on doing one thing really well. And only then did those takes giants expand their offering. Similarly, you should avoid spreading yourself too thin, focus on instead of core services that you really great at and can set you apart from the target clients? That's how you start your making a name for yourself. Your first product offering should be a carefully designed package that only boast a small set of core services or features. Ideally, those services should be most critical or requested features by your target clients. Once you perfected these core packages, only then you should start considering expanding it by adding more services and features. At the beginning, however, you should start by thinking small. Not only will thinking small, make your life easier, always, also allow you to perfect your product offering, ensuring that you keep providing your clients high quality services. It will also make actual marketing of your cybersecurity package much easier. Having a few package means your marketing message will be much cleaner and much more focus of those features, which should help you to stand out in the competitive landscape. You should also be aware of the buyer motivations. There are emotional needs that your client's hoping your product or services end up fulfilling. Generally speaking, there are eight buyer motivations which are need, acceptance, fair, health, impulse, pleasure, financial gain, and aspirations. Needless to say you are selling a cybersecurity product, the buyer motivation you will most frequently encounter that will be fair or failing victim to a cyber attack. So above and all, that will be what motivates your clients. So whenever you interact with your client, just remember that the reason they're hiring you is seeking your service out of fear. If you can address this fair in every interaction you have with them, from the moment you submit your proposal to when you have your weekly briefing with them, you will find that you are essentially 80 person that way establish a healthy relationship with them. At the end of the day, marketing to your client is really all about messaging. Tailoring your message to your clients world view. It is essentially that you understand what your clients priorities are so that can engineer your service with those needs in mind. While fair is a huge driving factor behind your client's motivation, you shouldn't get complacent. I recommend that you use this client's profile in template that I have prepared properly studying and profile your crime so that you are completely out of those needs, maximizing your conversion rate and improving certification and your retention. While this may seem counterintuitive, but it is actually easier to sell a product or service that has a clear competitors than to sell something that completely innovative and lacks any real competition in the same market. A service that have a real competition in the market can be challenging to sell to prospective points don't really have a benchmark to compare your service to. The problem with that is if a client can compare the services you're offering, they're much less likely to see and appreciate the thing that's set apart. Fortunately, there is no shortage of competition in cybersecurity, but that doesn't mean we need to under we need to understand that how to positions ourselves against your competitors. One of those most important things I think a cybersecurity entrepreneur can do is to think of their product, the service they're offering their client as like an onion. We call this onion whole product model. In the onion core, you have a generic service you providing to your client. This is everything that you promise you'll deliver to your clients. This is what your contract stipulated to your clients should be at a minimum. From you. And next layer is the expected services, which is what client expect from you. This is different from the generic services because something there will be miscommunication between you and your client. Sometimes clients will have unrealistic expectations due to their prevailing market trend causing a client's attitude and need to shift. The fact is the gap is often exist, and you need to acknowledge it and work with minimize it if you're interested in, fostering value and long term relationship with your client. The next layer is augmented service, which is where you'll go on to provide a service that goes beyond the clients need and the expectation and delivers a truly unique experience. This is important to understand. However, it is likely that client will appreciate an augmented cybersecurity services unless they have the background and the knowledge to do so. It might fall to you as to educate them first before your work is truly valuable by them. Finally, we have the last layer. Which is the potential service. These represent whatever the room your service has to grow through customer specific modification modifications, enhance that end up delivering a truly holistic customer experience. And the reason this matter is to you at this stage is because you really need to start thinking of cybersecurity services that you're offering in terms their full lifetime. In other words, think about services you're offering today, how the services can transform to better serve the needs of those intended users and your clients. Essentially, start thinking about how you can turn your generic service into expected service. Once you have got your expected service, consider what would take to turn that into a augmented service and what needs to be done to turn that into a potential service. This is arguably the easiest way to win over new clients. Without going through the travel of changing the core service that you're providing is one example just off on the top of my head is Google Chrome. Why Chrome is most popular browser out there? It is because it's made. It is not because it's made by the Google or because it is a base browser. In reality, Chrome is a most common browser because it's a different things to different people. A discourse is just a browser that can be used to access Internet. But through an extensive library of plug ins and extension, Chrome can be tailored to every customer's specific needs, right? These plug ins and extensions customize to the user experience and ensure that Chrome remains more popular than the other browser, like Sapuri, like Age Think about your service is the same way. If you're designing a package of service for your clients, designing them so that you have different levels that upheld to the different segments of the market and the charge accordingly. Let's look at as a case study to explore this further. And IT consulting initially offered basic antivirus software as an one time cell. So as long as those basic antivirus does what it was built to do so, detect threads and analog client those threads, it is a generic service. Over time, this service may into a subscription based model that offer centralized antivirus management, weekly reports, proactive thread, mitigations for small businesses. If those services and features were things that the client expected from the antivirus software, then the service can be said to have a transform from a generic to expected services. These transitions would have no doubt the customer retention due to the expanded functionality. To trans to transition to augmented service category. Consider integrating predictive and the AI driven analytics on demand expert consulting and training, business intelligent integration to push the antivirus further into the potential service category. You may need to offer the futuristic threat modeling and the simulations and adaptive security architecture with a self improving AI. Though, I suppose at this stage, it will be hard to describe what you'll be offering as a simple antivirus software. It will be have become as much more. Once you fully understand the service that you're offering from the generic service all the way to potential service, it will be time to frame and position yourself against the computations. To do this will use something called competitive positioning compass. Basically, you need to understand that there are two way of appealing to clients. You have the product centric approach. And you also have the market centric approach. Product centric approach, focus on the service you provide and the different things and the features you will be able to create and deliver the terms of cybersecurity functionality. Market centric buyers, on the other hand, cares more about the user experience, reliability, tangible usefulness, and the compatibility of your features with those of others provider. You need to know who your client is and understand their needs before you choose what approaches to take. That is because it is generally best to take product centric approach when the clients you're appealing is adventure or a visionary. When you are dealing with a pragmatics or a conservative leaning clients, you take a market centric approach. The reason I'm telling you all this is because there's really smart cybersecurity entrepreneurs will position themselves by finding a competitors that is two market centric and finding other competitors that's a two product centric. The market centric competitors who will be competitors who are industry leaders, the natural choice for conservative buyers. Meanwhile, the product centric competitors will be agency that is an early earlier stage to that, like the one you are at right now. You should position yourself that you lie precisely in the middle between those competitors. You can win a lot of clients, even as a upstart cybersecurity agency by positioning yourself so that you are the alternative to the market centi company and the market centic alternative to the product syntic company. It is kind of the base of the both worlds. When you think about your agency will be the one that provides client centric focus service and one that offers innovative features, just like your product sty competitors. But your services are also compatible with the other services and the tool use in the broader mainstream market. This way pragmatic and the conservative plan will start see you as a realistic alternative to establish market centre businesses that they have been buying for years. 6. Crafting Your Elevator Pitch: Once you have figured out those bits and pieces out, it will be the time for you to come up with your elevator speech, which is a brief introductory introduction to your product and services. As the name suggests, your elevator speech is about as long as average elevator write. So this is actually where a lot of entrepreneur messed up. The wrongly think about an elevator speech should be about trying to sell your services to prospective client. It is not the elevator speech is meant to ease your client into making their purchase by helping them understand what you're able to do for them. With this in mind, your priority in your elevator speech should be focused on clarity, above all else. Your elevator speech must be addressed any questions or concerns that prospective client have about hiring you in 60 seconds. Start you start your elevator speech by telling the client what your services is, what is does, what they need it, why they need it. And you should also describe one or two key features of your services and briefly describe why and how your service is different from the other offers elsewhere. As an example, here my own personal elevator speech. See if you can spot how I use my elevator speech to differentiate myself and agency. My agency specialize in providing end to end cybersecurity solution tailored to small and medium businesses from implementing robust defense like multifactor authentication to conducting compliance audits. We ensure our clients stay protected and aligned with the industry standard. What set us apart our client centric approach, we provide long term relationship and the customized strategies that delivers measurable results. Either way, it is crucial that your elevator speech remain specific to its intended audience. Not everyone will respond to specific elevator speech because different clients have a different priorities. That is why it is important that you identify what those priorities are. Before you go on fine tune your elevator speech, maximize those its impact with every clients. For example, my cybersecurity agency will have a different package depending on those needs of the clients of their business. A small business owner who only looking for a basic solution like antivirus installations and training, it's not going to be interested in hearing about advanced encryption services or SIM you are able to offer. In fact, you would probably end up confusing them, if anything, your masses need to be tailored to the clin, your positioning. 7. The Difference Between Marketing & Selling: Wonder what is different between marketing and selling is. People use this term interchangeably, but you better than that. So it is important that you know different between those two. Marketing is all about creating an audience for your services, demonstrating the value of those services, making those buyer experience effortless as possible, and generating leads for your business. Sales, on the other hand, rely on distribution channel. This is how you reach out to your clients. It is important you know that these distribution channels you end up using will almost always depends on your unit economics and how much you charge. And on end of the spectrum, these are contracts, um, that worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of the contracts even be worth, like, you know, 2.9 billion contracts, like 2.9 billion contracts with SpaceX signed up with NASA to take NASA Astronaut the moon. I don't think so. Elon secured this contract just sending NASA sales Bridge via email, right? This is really is that those contracts are secured via close personal relationship and involve high stake, making them incredibly complex to negotiate. But I would expect to speak and negotiate with the company CO when the contract is owed tens of hundreds millions of dollars. On the other extreme products and the services where the customer lifetime value is very those type of products is the best solid using the viral marketing campaign on the social media. Vral marketing allows you to spread the word about your product quickly and also cheaply and leading to the chain of reactions, exponential sales growth. Neither of those extreme applies to us in the cybersecurity consulting space, though? We are actually somewhere in the middle between the complex sales and the viral marketing. Well, N, it is actually the hardest place to be. It's sometimes described as dead zone. Your distribution channel will need to rely on personal sales. As your service will be typically cost between 1,000 200,000, your client will typically expect to speak someone before they agree to sign those contract with you. This is relatively easy if you are the only the one doing to do the work. If that's the case, your client can speak with you if, however, your operator start to expand, you begin building the full fledged agency, you probably need to hire a sales team that can sell you agency services for you. Or at the very least help you to wait client filtering out those who may not be able to completely serious. In both cases, you need to spend a significant portion of your time selling, which can be difficult when you're trying to navigate the other parts of your business and fulfilling the obligations you have with your other clients. This is why it is absolutely crucial that you create a sales process, a blueprint to streamline your sales operations. We call this sales fan. And it will take the form of the funnel you will sing on the screen to probably understand how the cells funnel work, however, you need to first understand the difference between demand generation and lead generation. It is and it is the simplest term demand generation, it is all about what happened at the top of your cell funnel. It is about the rising awareness or interest of your service that you're offering, casting a wider net and reaching out to a broad audience. Some who may not be able to ready to purchase from you, it is establish a relationship between you and prospective client. It is all about laying the groundwork and preparing for the sale. Once you have ignited interest through the demand generation, the next step is capturing that interest, turning into sales. That is where lead generation comes in. You look for a potential customer who have expressed the interest in your service and determine which one is the most likely to buy your product right now. Find out how to base target them, taking on a much more focused marketing approach to convert those interest buyer into a paying customer. So when you demand generations cast on a wide net with the aim to inform, and lead generation takes on a much more focus driven approach that capitalize on the success of your demand generation effort. If you are just starting out, you don't need to you don't have any customers and wish to find out new leads. Um, you need to you don't need to worry. There's plenty of other tools out there which can help you to compile a list of potential customers. That include using a web scrapping application like a blue Width, mix, bang, combined with the tools like Zoom in for Apolo, to find those phone numbers or the email of the decision makers you interest approaching. Remember, don't spam, always make any always make any cod emails. You're sending personalized to a business you are sending 8. Earn Your Expert Status: I want to end this master class with a short conversation on what it's meant to be an expert. If you are planning to become a cybersecurity consultant, by definition, you plan to be become an expert. Unfortunately, I don't think so most of the people spend enough time, nearly enough time to understand what it means to be expert, which causes a lot of issues down the line. As an expert, a person with extensive knowledge or ability, which means expert is a person that others can trust in specific area. There's plenty of cybersecurity experts out there, but most of them don't have expert status because people are unaware of their expertise. In other words, if your expertise is only valuable if the people are aware of it. If you are good at what you do and put in an effort to complete the project on time, you will naturally build expertise. But unless you acquire expert status, you will probably find yourself flying under the radar, winning the new work through a referral or other subcontracting arrangement. This is the hard way to achieve long term success. Expert status what you are looking to get. Expert status when a prospective client has already heard of you, is in some way already out of the work you do and can Google find you a lengthy track record of amazing work that you have done. Expert status will make your life infinity easier. This idea of marketing gravity comes in. Marketing gravity is a concept that developed by Alan Weiss, it is essentially that the cumulative effort of everything that you do to rise your online profile and presenting yourself an expert to draw your client in. Sometimes a client will come to you because they watched your YouTube video that you made where you given a clear and conscious answer to cybersecurity concern they have had. They may have read an article you written for your substract plot. Sometimes it is unclear what a prospective client decided to approach you but which is usually good sign because it is such at that they have came across your name several times while they're browsing the Internet on a lookout for a cybersecurity expert for their business. I strongly recommend that you start by googling yourself to see what turns up. If you have a fairly common name, that can be a problem. But this is not an impossible one to overcome. Right? If you're branding yourself professional business identity, your name could be as common as John Smith. But this is not a problem. As long as you brand your professional business identity around something along that line of John Cyber solution, that can become who you are, at least professionally. Once you have figured out that part, make sure you turn up your Google search result and make sure that coverage about you positively and encourage the prospective buyers. This is actually a good news because, like, we actually control the things that appears about us on Google search result by maintaining active YouTube channel, regularly posting new article 0N substract and of course, keeping the active LinkedIn profile website. Eventually, you want to get some features and the gaze block by about your high authority on the website. The key things here to focus providing prospective clients with what they're looking to see. Which will be example of recent project that you are completed with demonstrating your experience and expertise, testimonial from some of your previous clients, articles and the videos that you have created and published publicly. All of this incredibly valuable. You also need to work to maintain your expert status with your client once you achieved it. Which often means that you need to keep encouraging your clients. In fact, as a general rule, consultants should aim to spend 20% of their time on marketing to new and existing client. But we define marketing in this case, as any or all activities that help positioning you as someone with expert status in cybersecurity. This is the time you spend create YouTube videos to reach out to the new clients, write up articles about your blog, block to position yourself as an expert, networking and growing your band. It is also the time you spend engaging and re engaging your client. Email is one of the most underrated tool out there. Everyone on focus on the social media when email is a very opten when the magic lies. You can guess where this is going, right? You need a mailing list and the newsletter to communicate with your client on a regular basis. Fortunately, we are in the service scot space, and it is not going to be strange or weird for you to set up a newsletter where you provide regular updates to your clients, along with the interested readers on the latest in the cybersecurity, including the latest security threats or latest development. If you are positioning yourself as their source of news for all the things in the cybersecurity, you'll be the golden and set for your life. If you are wondering what content to publish, you always check out what other cybersecurity professional are publishing their newsletters and get inspiration from them. One of my personal favorites Ross Hackle ventures in the cybersecurity newsletter. The important thing is that you don't need a large email list to start with. You can start just 100 to 200 people on your list, and to grow your list, you can just sometime consider offering an ethical drive, perhaps or lead magnet or something like essentially a freebie, to be honest. And that incentivize people to subscribe to your mailing list. Eventually, once your list grow up to a certain size, it will keep on growing organically. As people forward your email to others in their network, obviously, this depends on the information you sent out actually being useful for readers and make sure your email options to subscribe and unsubscribe. I think it's a base bit of advice I can give it to you at the stages. When you sending it out an email to your email list or writing it article 0R recording a YouTube video, don't address the people you are speaking as they're like your client, even though they might very well be your client, but it's important that you address them as your audience. Try to humanize the way that you communicate with them. 9. Course Outro: A or touch upon in this hour long learning video, don't sew it on it, though, because I built an entire platform for you where I have created a tons of great resources, including guides, articles to exercise and worksheets. I have even curated a fairly long list of links to additional reading for when you are ready. All of these resources are completely free to access, and I'm confident that they should help you thrive on your journey as become a cybersecurity independent. I have a lot of good, great videos, resources and tools planned out for you. So make sure you visit the website and join my mailing list to receive updates. When they are made available. And on that note, I believe we come to the end of the cybersecurity de parent master class. Thank you for taking time to watch this masterclass. And I hope you found that theme that we have covered useful. I wish you a best of luck on your journey. My name is Nandi S soon. 10. Class Project Video: Resonate with your target client. I choose this project because every successful cybersecurity business start with a solid plant. This blueprint will act as your roadmap as you build and grow your agency. By the end of this project, you'll have a comprehensive cybersecurity agency blueprint in a digital and written format. It will include your agency a product market feed analysis, a breakdown of your core service offering, a pricing strategy matrix, and your elevator speech tailored to your target clients. Make sure you provide thoughtful reasoning behind your decisions and take a client centric approach in all of your decisions you make. Remember, you can watch any of those lessons in your master class if you needed to. Here how you complete the project. First, you start with your target market, research your idle clients, what industry are they in? What cybersecurity problems do they face? How can you provide solution for those problems? What will the cost of those solutions be? And can your idle client afford those solutions that you plan to offer them? Use this research to define your product market fit next outline your core service. Focus on a small manageable offering that solve your client's most pressing problems. Remember, start small and scale litter. Once you're done with that, use our pricing strategy metrics to develop your pricing strategy. Decide whether your service will use scheming, premium, economic, or penetration pricing. Be clear about why this strategy makes sense to your market. Finally, craft your elevator speech. This should be conscious, engaging, highlighting your unique value, and why clients should choose your over the competitors in the market. All you need to do to start is download the project blueprint template from the class resources, and you will be ready to go. Once you have done, upload in the project gallery, so I can offer you some feedback. Remember, everyone overlooks things sometimes. So it is always handy to have a second pair of eyes, look over those grand plans. Good luck with your project. I wish the course turn out to everything you need to be.