Apr 5 in Strategy
How to Find Clients
The difficult thing about business is that it runs on hope. Especially in service based businesses where we are working on an as-needed basis, our workload is never the same month to month. So to grow, what do we do?
I am a big fan of input/output equations. If I do x it equals y.
There are only 8 ways to get business in any industry and can be found in books, webinars, TED talks, and everywhere in between. The thing is, there are only 4 you can actively control the results on and really only 3 I focus on.
You control:
-Warm Outreach
-Cold Outreach
-Content Creation
-Ad Spend
Others are:
-Employees
-Affiliates
-Agencies
-Referrals
Out of the 4 you control, the one method I generally don’t touch is Ad Spend. Social Media companies are businesses and they want your money. So when you spend money to boost a post and you don’t have a large enough engagement base on your content for them to make ad money off of you, then the more practical business model is to no longer boost your posts organically. I mean, why would they?
So unless you plan to spend $100 a day to hop into the ring of the millions of other companies fighting for limited attention spaces, I personally choose never to go that route.
So lets talk about the 3 I do focus on.
Warm Outreach:
This is reaching out to people already familiar with your brand. Maybe they worked with you before. Maybe they have seen your content. Maybe you met them in person at a networking event. They already have a feeling what it’ll be like to work with you and thus, this is probably the easiest target.
Cold Outreach:
This is contacting someone who has never heard of you. A lot of minds limit this to cold calls and email marketing but it’s not limited to that. Proposals sent via government platforms, freelancer sites, craigslist searches, auditions, messaging companies on social media, or really anything that puts you in front of someone new to make a first impression.
Content Creation:
This is pretty self explanatory. Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Alignable and a bajillion others. Don’t forget. Video converts better, but static images count.
So while input/output equations do not convert in the short sprint, “The Law of Averages” is that special sauce that lends you the catalyst to making your own luck!
This is why goal sheets are so important.
Are they tedious when you would rather be actually trying to do the thing? Yeah. But they are necessary because if you cannot track what equals growth, then how do you know you are growing?
So if your marketing method is to send 10 emails a day, do 10 cold calls a day, submit 10 proposals a day, etc, then how do you 10X your client list?
By sending 100 a day!
Doesn’t need to be 100 of 1 thing, but it needs to be getting in front of the number of people that will inevitably result in creating the success in your business you keep hoping falls into your lap.
Waiting to be motivated won’t fix that. Discipline will always trump motivation.
And discipline is doing the thing you don’t want to do but is necessary to keep momentum.
Fun fact: Discipline is a muscle!
The more you use it, the more it will grow.
And not a figurative muscle either.
According to Dr. Andrew Huberman, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) is the part of the brain that is activated when you do things you don't want to do.
Growing the mACC may involve doing challenging tasks that you don't want to do, which could potentially extend your longevity.
So focusing on the tasks you know are necessary can lead to longer lifespans. Throw that in your motivational coffee cup!
Now this is a lot of aggressive growth and sometimes it can mess with your mind a bit. Sometimes you will find yourself anxious in your business and sometimes you might feel depressed.
How do we correlate those to actionable things?
Depression is a feeling of hopelessness. It is a lack of tangible choices. So how do we fix it. By making a choice. If the only ways your business grows is cold outreach, warm outreach, and content creation.
Anxiety is generally rooted in having too many options and not knowing what to do. My exercise for this is to write out the main things I do during the day (usually 10). I look through my business and I see what that action netted me last month. I divide it by 20 (5 days a week, 4 weeks a month) and that is the daily value of my task.
The more valuable the task, the more obvious it is that it needs to be my focus.
So write a goal sheet of all the ways you market. What are you doing to find new people, reach out to people who know you, or show up organically in their day?
See what you do every month, give it a monetary value, and now you know where your quickest growth lies.
It may feel uncomfortable. I love discomfort. Because it means I’m growing partially but also because it means someone else in my same space got uncomfortable with things getting hard and gave up.
I don’t blame them. Biologically, human beings are built to conserve energy for survival. Call it a predisposition to laziness. And that’s fine.
But tenacity will be your leverage.
Stepping out of your comfort zone grows it.
A ship is the safest in the harbor, but we all know that is not where ships are meant to be.
-Andrew Morrison
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How to Find Clients
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The Service Based Marketing Collective
Most service based businesses quit. Except you. Not this time.
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