The Clients Who Were Never Going To Find You

So a couple of years ago on a Thursday morning, a woman I've been working with sent me a screenshot.

She runs a small web design studio, two people, maybe three, depending on the month.

She produces really good work.

She's got lovely clients and absolutely no idea where the next project was going to come from at any given time.

The screenshot was a LinkedIn message from somebody she'd never spoken to.

Not a mutual connection, not a referral, not somebody who'd read her newsletter, just a complete stranger who'd found his way into her inbox and was asking if she had capacity, whether they could have a chemistry call.

By the Friday of the following week, that project was signed and it was £30,000.

And the part I want you to sit with is she hadn't posted anything.

She hadn't been on a podcast.

She hadn't done a thing that week except answer her messages.

The system had been running for 14 days and that's what I want to talk about today.

So here is what I see over and over again in service businesses.

You're good at what you do.

That's not the issue.

The issue is that the work arrives in lumps.

You might have a brilliant quarter and you're at capacity.

You're turning things down and you think, right, this is it.

We've cracked it.

And then you look up in eight weeks and the pipeline is empty.

You have absolutely no idea how you're going to pay everybody, keep the lights on and, you know, how you basically got here again.

So you do the thing that everybody tells you to do is be more visible and you post more.

And you get out there and you network in person and you put up a few Instagram reels, perhaps, or you enter an award if you're a design agency.

You write those LinkedIn posts, you start the newsletter, and maybe you get talked into a short form video and you hate every second of it.

And you do that for three months.

And what you get is a handful of likes from other people who do what you do.