AKA How To Get Your Clients Coming To You
Don’t dream it, be it
Rocky Horror Picture Show
I was sitting in my living room having been held captive there by my ruptured achilles tendon, stewing about going back to work.
I had been there for a few weeks, having snapped my achilles whilst playing badminton at Center Parcs with a friend.
To say I was bored would be an understatement.
I have never been good at sitting around, but enforced sitting around with a moon boot on while my ‘repaired by stitches’ achilles started to glue itself back together was irksome to say the least.
Most importantly, it gave me one heck of a lot of time to think, and one thing and one thing only was occupying my mind most of the time.
Don’t dream it, be it…
My wife had had that printed on her wall the first time I met her, when she was in her late teens, and it had always resonated with me.
But now it was going round and round in my bored mind, along with “If not now, when…..”
At the time I was still a solicitor, although I had stopped undertaking any case work. I was in a full time marketing and business development role for a small law firm, but the thought of going back to the job terrified me as I sat there with my leg up.
I had an unholy itch that I just had to scratch, and I am not talking about the one in my boot for which I had to use a knitting needle to get to, but the one of starting my own consultancy business.
I had known for years that I wanted to start my own business growth consultancy, but I just didn’t know when.
I remember being at Guildford in the College Of Law, completing the final two year part time course of my eight years of study to finally qualify to become a solicitor, talking to a friend about my future plans, whilst he told me he was going to set up his own software company one day.
There we both were, eight years into working in the legal profession both expressing our excitement at getting out of it at the same time as completing our qualifications to become solicitors.
However, saying it and doing it are two very different things, but sitting at home for that prolonged period told me it was time to stop dreaming definitely time to start doing it.
Decision made, resignation penned (does anyone write a resignation letter any more or does everyone just whatsapp their employer these days?), it was time to dive in.
The only trouble was that whilst I knew I had a natural knack for marketing and business growth, I had never before run a business.
I had all these questions running around my mind and I didn’t know whether I would ever be able to answer them:
- What does it look like to run a business?
- How do I do it?
- Where do I work from?
- What does my working day look like.
- How do I actually get my first client?
All of that before the very fundamental questions of tax, VAT, finances, invoices, and everything else that is involved in running a business.
I didn’t have a clue about any of it, but I simply knew I had to escape from the employment world.
I decided that a sensible step would be to buy a franchise, where someone would tell me what to do, how to do it and provide support for each task that I had to undertake – just like when you learn to ride a bike you have stabilisers on, this seemed like the ‘starting a business’ equivalent to me.
I didn’t see the franchise as my ultimate aim, but a stepping stone on the way to my dream consultancy business that I have now run since 2003.
Knowing what I know now, I would have skipped the franchise part.
It cost me a lot of money to buy, took up two years of my life which would have been better spent growing my own thing and led to me amassing thousands in debt which the franchise could never repay because the profits were pitiful.
All of this whilst having a wife and two very young children to support.
Hindsight is a dream I know, but I would have been far better off spending the money from the franchise on specialist training to get my dream business up and running.
Lessons learned, scars earned, move on!
I think in life though there are some painful experiences that we have to go through to make us who we are and what we believe.
This was definitely one of mine.
I often say to myself when I or a client is going through a difficult time: If it was easy, they would all be doing it.
What I did learn in the process though, which has since become the bedrock of my business growth consultancy, was that there are a lot of ways of getting new clients that I absolutely detested.
Top of that list was cold calling, but there were many others which I will mention, and I will mention them now so that you understand the crux of this book; the main message that I want to get across, which is this:
Yes, you can grow a business using methods that require a lot of effort, masses of hard work, selling to lots of people who would never in a month of Sundays want to buy your services, but you absolutely don’t have to.
You can instead create a business where your ideal clients keep on finding you, day after day, month after month and year after year.
You can use all of the inbound marketing methods that I have used since 2003 to build a business that grows solidly year on year, using only a handful of marketing methods, which, when done consistently, will lead to growth for any specialist business when applied consistently.
I will show you how in detail in this book, but first let’s look at all of the marketing methods that I undertook when running the franchise, most of them falling into what I call the ‘sleazy’ sales methods.
Cold calling
How do most people feel when someone cold calls them?
Do they rejoice that someone has taken the time out of their busy day to hard sell to the, impressed by the fact that they do not listen to a word being said and just press on with their sales messsage, or do they feel slightly grubbier than they did before receiving the call?
Usually the latter, right?
That was me.
I had gone from being a solicitor/lawyer, someone of a professional standing, to someone calling anyone who I thought might be vaguely interested in buying one of my promotional merchandise items such as an umbrella or a pen with their logo on it.
The surprising thing to me was that despite the fact that I despised it with my entire heart, I wasn’t terrible at it.
I knew that I could make 70 calls a day to generate 10 conversations, and pretty consistently from those 10 conversations I would generate three interested prospects and from them, one sale.
If it hadn’t been the fact that a small piece of my soul died every time I spent a day cold calling it, maybe I would still be doing it now (definitely not!).
How had I gone from being a solicitor to a spammy, cold calling monster?
It still makes me sick just thinking about it.
Vile!
Networking
Be there at 7am, sell your soul to the devil in a one minute pitch, refer business to everyone else there even if they aren’t very good at what they do because you are ordered to or else.
Get lost!
I know some people claim to enjoy it, but when I show you in this book how to get new clients without it, would you still do it?
Most people I ask that question to say not!
Exhibitions
Oh good Lord please, no, just no.
“Are you interested in putting your business name on this pen?”
No, of course they are not, who would be?
What the heck are you doing with your life Jervis?
Spam emailing people
Some people love this way of getting new clients.
Buy a list with say 1000 business people on it.
Send them an email asking them if they want to put their business name on a pen.
Receive a few replies telling you where to stick your currently unbranded pen.
Receive some emails from people telling you in no uncertain terms to stop emailing them.
Receive one vague expression of interest in a pen with their business name on it and then after many rounds of toing and froing by email, increasing the font size of the logo on said pen, changing the colour of then pen and presenting a new artwork, changing the size of the logo back to the previous size, then being told that they will think about it, oh lordy loo loo!
You might not think so from my comments above, but I gave my all to each of these methods, I had no choice as I had a mortgage to pay and a family to feed.
It worked, to a certain extent, in that the six figure sum I turned over was more than anyone else had achieved in the promotional franchise world in the first eighteen months, but even with that it was clear with such tiny margins that it would never make enough money to provide the lifestyle I wanted, and not even as much as I had earned as a solicitor.
It was time to start my business growth consultancy, as always intended.
I now knew without doubt the ways of winning new clients that I didn’t want to go anywhere near, but which ones was I going to use to grow my new consultancy?
I share those with you later in the book.
The good news is that I have grown a mid six figure consultancy without any of the methods above, so if you are currently detesting any of them as much as I used to, I have a full system for you to follow to grow your consultancy in the pages ahead!
I love the freedom that I have in running my consultancy, particularly in avoiding all of the “Get lost Jervis” marketing methods mentioned, and I want you to have that same freedom and growth for your own consultancy, so you get my complete system.
I only hope that you implement it, as many other consultants have already done, so that you too can grow your business the easy way.
Before diving into the nitty gritty, let’s look in a bit more detail at what this book and who it is for and who it isn’t indended for:
- It is not a “Shall I become a consultant/expert/trainer/mentor” book. It is for those already in business, doing quite well but wanting to make their business more profitable, have more fun and take more time off.
- It is a book in which I share with you EVERYTHING I do to grow my business now, having tried, tested, used and hopefully perfected the growth model to create an expert led business that has been consistently growing for years.
- It will produce dramatic results for you if you are really good at what you do. Wherever your area of expertise lies that you sell, if you are good at what you do and the information and advice you provide to your clients, then following the systems and processes in this book will help you to grow.
- If you are frustrated at your lack of progress, are not really growing much or at all, and do not have methods in place to help you to grow, then this will show you those processes and methods to finally allow you to move the needle forward, consistently.
If the above resonates with you, then we can crack on.
First, I want to start by talking about “Business Gurus”, because there are so many of them out there vying for your time and I want you to be able to spot the good ones from the bad ones.
PREVIOUS: Watch This Book Grow As It Grows
NEXT: The Truth About Business Gurus
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You have just read a segment of my next book: The How To Get More Clients Book: The Proven Formula For Attracting A Steady Stream Of New Clients For Coaches, Consultants, Freelancers And All Specialist Business Owners.
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