The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 65 Degrees
I like simple. Simple is clear, simple is straightforward, simple is effective.
It was pretty simple the day I decided to get on the phone with prospects and clients only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I setup the self-service schedule with TimeTrade.com and I was done.
No more phone tag, no more chasing, no more wasted time.
It was simple when I decided that every working hour should be worth $X to me. (The actual money amount doesn’t matter. That’s my amount. Only YOUR amount matters.) After I did that, I could easily see the projects and work I shouldn’t get involved with if I didn’t want to slow my progress.
It was simple when I realized the power of asking questions of prospects rather than talking about myself. One day, I just stopped blabbing about me and started actually talking about something my prospect was interested in: himself, his problems and his goals.
All of these things are simple.
But when you string a bunch of them together, all of a sudden, a rather complex picture of your business emerges. It doesn’t feel complex, but that’s how it looks from the outside should someone try to copy you.
You have processes for X, you have processes for Y. New processes that take what WAS annoying for you and make it less annoying, or not annoying at all.
As time goes by, the complexity of what it means to work with YOU increases. You have YOUR proprietary way of taking a prospect into your world. You have YOUR proprietary way of working with clients.
This “complexity” ends up setting you apart from the crowd in ways you can’t imagine at the beginning. Not only that, it also makes your decisions easier, quicker, more sure, with less deliberation.
And it all starts with SIMPLE. Simple solutions to simple problems.
Do you hate it when your clients pressure you to change the scope of a project? Why not take that energy you’re wasting on that emotion and use it to create a process that DEALS with that issue and takes it off the table as a possibility?
No attitude is required. This isn’t about “being in charge” and acting like royalty. This is simply about building the business you want.
It’s really not hard to do this. You just have to start with a single process, then another, then another.
You will be amazed at what happens when you invest a little bit of energy in your client management system.