Things with this new client have been going along great. You had an excellent strategy session and laid out a whole marketing plan for them. They were bought in – now you are into implementation. The work you’re doing for them looks terrific, right on track. Then the phone rings. The client wants to go…
I started life as an engineer, designing aerospace control systems. When we would start to design a new system, the first question we’d ask is, “If this project fails, what happened?” We’d look for the riskiest, most uncertain part of the problem and try to solve that part first. If we could solve the hardest…
One of the key roles of a successful agency owner is to build a network outside of your agency. You are your agency’s eyes and ears. You are scanning the horizon to find the “next thing” that clients are going to need, the problems that they are going to run into so that you can…
Thanks for your replies to Tuesday’s email about making business development easy. If I could summarize the replies, they’d (collectively) say, Once I’m “in the room” with a buyer, I’m golden – but how do I get “in the room”? How do I find more people who could hire me? 1. Who are the “people…
For the last few days, I’ve been comparing the process of bringing new money into your business to the process of gathering firewood. The most common reply I’ve gotten is some form of, “Sure Brad, but gathering firewood is easy, finding clients is hard! If I could just find clients lying on the ground that…
I imagine that you’re in a cabin in the woods. You’ve been gathering firewood every day for months. Firewood is piled all the way around your cabin, and yet, you feel compelled to collect more. You have to go farther and farther to get firewood; the once beautiful forest has been stripped of anything that…
I imagine that you’re in a cabin in the woods. You notice late one afternoon that you’re almost out of firewood. How do you respond? Do you panic? Do you worry or run around decrying how unfair this is? Do you count your sticks of firewood and develop a plan to ration them out? “How…
You’ve been cultivating this lead for a while, truthfully, for years. They finally have a project that would be perfect for you, and as luck would have it, you reached out just as they were thinking about how to get it done. You’re in the door – and there’s an actual project on the table….
On Saturday, I gave you the assignment to think about, “What would I do if I didn’t need the money?” Did you do that? What did you come up with? Now that you have some goals that hopefully don’t involve starting another business, let’s think about how we could include some of those goals in…
What if, at some time in the future, your dreams of business success come true? Imagine you’ve got a successful business that brings in good money. What more do you want out of life? What goals do you have, or would you have, if your money needs were taken care of? Because there’s got to…