Last week was a good week.
- Monday – workshop with new client. Seemed to go well – I enjoyed it, at least – and I got a pile of information about what their perfect client is that I’m now working up into a campaign.
- Tuesday – worked on the campaign. Met up with an old workmate who is now setting up a recycling plant. Totally fascinating to see what he’s doing. Made a proposal to build a website for his family’s investment business.
- Wednesday – more campaign work, Some more work on my blogs. I also went to the wake of an elderly friend, which gave some food for thought that I’ll talk about in my next blog.
One of my rules for this business is that I’m going to be very selective about who I do work for. Whether or not I continue to do payment by results in the long term, I want to make sure that every client that I take on is a success. I also want to focus on doing one thing well, and focus on doing this for a tightly defined group of clients.
I’m sure that this will develop, but currently my target clients will be:
- Small businesses, 5 to 50 people, with a capacity to grow by at least £100k per year.
- Professional service businesses. Not retail. Preferably B2B, but potentially B2C also.
- Preferably a recurring revenue business model.
- Established WordPress website that doesn’t need massive overhaul.
- Preferably local – Hampshire, London, Surrey, West Sussex, Dorset.
Initially, I’m prepared to break my rules as long as there is an identifiable benefit. An identifiable benefit at the moment is to actually get some customers under my belt! And if one walks through the door without me doing any work to find it, that’s probably not a bad reason. The one thing I don’t want to do is to have to spend ages learning skills that I won’t be using for my target clients.
My old workmate, who is building an amazing recycling plant that takes very low-grade glass waste and turns it into highly pure glass-sand, needs a small website building for his family’s investment company. It doesn’t need any great deal of SEO work. For me, it’s a perfect job to enable me to go through the process of building a site that the Search Engines will love from start to finish, for a site that won’t matter if I make any mistakes.
I was going to use my company website for this, when I get round to setting it up, but having a separate test-bed is perfect.
I also have a friend who is looking at setting up a solar panel business. Again, this doesn’t fit into the above criteria (not an established company, not enough staff, B2C, not recurring revenue), but setting up a site for him and getting his initial SEO and Google Ads up and running will also be a good exercise.
I guess the message here is that in the early days, you need to be a bit pragmatic in what you have to do to get things up and running. The big no-no though is ending up being tied into doing loads of ongoing work for clients that aren’t your target, and that don’t get you anywhere. In fact, they can be a busseness-killer in that they actively stop you from making progress. Fear is often the driver for this – being so worried about getting enough money in to pay the rent that you’ll take anything that comes your way. Yes, this is definitely a way to pay the rent, but if you’re really going to follow your dream and create the company that you have in your head, sticking to your guns is a massive skill to have.
Anyway, as well as my lovely HR client, I’ll be building a WordPress site so that I can work through an SEO process from start to finish, maybe doing this again for a solar panel company, and perhaps finding one other friendly client to work with. Once I’ve done that, and set up my own business site, I’ll by firing on all cylinders to go out and start adding new clients.
All good fun:)