Position Yourself for Higher Pay

_{Mike Bank is an early-stage startup founder, former investment banker, and a visiting lecturer and career coach at some of Europe’s leading business schools.}

_{At Citigroup, he was one of the bank’s youngest team staffers, assisted with graduate and MBA assessment centres in the London office, and ran numerous lateral hire processes.}

_{Over the past ten years, he has built and led teams at his own ventures as well as consulting with VC-backed startups on talent acquisition.}

Becoming a Focused Expert

How would you like to increase your day rates and win more work?

Focused Experts are among the most highly paid flexers. They also benefit from positioning themselves as the expert in their chosen field. This means they can not only command higher rates but they also win more work seamlessly, often via inbound leads (more ‘inbound leads’ in a future article)

Picking your Niche

First, you need to identify the right confluence of experience in:

• a functional skillset; and

• a specific or emerging industry vertical.

For example, let’s say your experience is in compliance. If you are blindly applying for general compliance roles, it can be hard to differentiate yourself.

Instead, could you position yourself as the regulatory compliance expert for fast-growth e-commerce companies in the supplements space? For the right prospect, this is highly compelling.

The key is to be specific enough to enable you to position yourself as world class in your field. But not so niche that you are pigeon-holed to the extent that there are only a small number of clients in your prospect pool.

Identifying your Ideal Client

When picking your target client, you should also be mindful of both their:

• propensity to pay for your specific services (i.e. is there a market need?)

• ability to pay your rates (i.e. are they cash rich?)

As an example, choosing early-stage startups as prospective clients can make life harder for you - typically they do not have the cash-in-bank to be able to afford the best flexers.

Equally, choosing multinational corporations as your clients can also be tough - they may already have the talent in-house that render your services surplus to requirements. Or else they may have a preferred suppliers list that is, for now, insurmountably hard for you to get on to.

A halfway house may be a fast-growth, VC-funded startup. Or a mid-market firm in your field that does not have the resources to pay for a full time professional but has a desperate need for your services on a fractional basis.

Riding the Trend Wave

You should also consider picking your industry vertical in a forward-looking fashion.

Are there any emerging trends (e.g. generative AI) that you could position yourself to work in? We are not suggesting regularly jumping between the latest bandwagons, but you must be mindful to follow the work where it exists.

It is also doubly helpful to pick an emerging trend, as very few flexers in the market are likely to have deep experience in the field. This means you can fast-track your road to becoming the subject matter expert.

A word of caution. Worst of all is picking a declining market to position yourself in.

Whilst you may find that you are able to secure an initial run of clients in this unattractive field, as demand contracts over time and slow-moving professionals fail to reposition themselves, your rates will get squeezed and the work will dry up.

Geographic Focus

Establishing yourself as a world class expert can be daunting. One way of overcoming this is to niche down geographically in the first instance. As an example, could you become the regional go-to expert for a particular crossover niche?

Once you have won work and built up a track record in that specific geography, you can then begin expanding your target markets by pointing to the track record you have already built up.

Become Outcome Led

It can be tempting, particularly when first starting out as a flexer, to measure yourself in terms of a day rate.

While this is still very much the way in which many companies advertise their flex roles, by scratching below the surface you will often find that the hiring manager is more interested in a specific outcome for their business or division than simply hiring a fractional bum in a seat.

If you can change the narrative and work to focus the company on desired results rather than time served, this can have a two-fold benefit:

• you get paid fairly based on the value and outcomes you achieve, even if you are able to complete the project quickly;

  and

• by avoiding the trap of time for money, you are able to take on more projects in a given period, and further boost your earnings via volume of work.

There is also the added bonus of a happier client for whom you have achieved a desired outcome in a shorter time period than they were initially expecting. This can lead to more work from that client in the future, or at the very least a case study for use in winning work elsewhere.

The reality is that you are likely to face resistance from hiring managers, at least initially. But once you are able to point to actualised results and to the benefits of working in this way for all parties, this can be a true game changer in your career as a flexer.

The Downsides of Being a Focused Expert

Positioning yourself as a focused expert is not for everyone. Expert Generalists, for instance, have the upside of being able to apply their varied skillsets across multiple industries and functions.

However, for many of you, becoming a Focused Expert is the path of least resistance to establishing yourself as a flexer and will enable you to win your very first clients.

Learn More

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