Get more clients now.

Right now, you don’t know where to begin with client work.

• Where do I find clients?
• What should my unique selling proposition be?
• Should I use a contract?
• How do I get clients to pay me?
• What business structure should I use?

You have skills, and you know you can provide a valuable service, but you feel bogged down by the logistics.

This is where everyone starts. Everyone feels like they don’t know what they’re doing at the beginning.

You have two paths forward:

1. Figure it out as you go (this involves making mistakes, learning things the hard way, wasting years of time, and leaving money on the table).
2. Learn from someone who’s done it successfully (I recommend the second approach).

I chose Path #1 when I started in client services well over a decade ago. I didn’t have a mentor, and online courses weren’t a thing yet.

I had to learn things the slow way by making mistakes—and boy, did I make a LOT of mistakes.

The mistakes I made caused a lot of problems (maybe you recognize some of them):

• Feast and famine.
  • I didn’t know how to get clients. I only knew how to get lucky. When I got a random client by chance, I made some money. When clients didn’t knock on my door, I ate ramen noodles.
• Working with bad clients.
  • The clients I worked with in the early days were bad enough to almost make me want to quit. They pushed me around, told me what to do, and made me make changes until they were happy.
• Getting underpaid.
  • When I first started out, I didn’t make much money. That’s understandable, because I was new. But even years into honing my craft, I wasn’t able to make much money and still struggled. I didn’t know how to price.
• Not getting paid at all.
  • In some of the worst cases, the clients wouldn’t pay at all. I’d send the invoice and wait. Then I’d wait some more. Waiting turned to hoping. Hoping turned to desperation. Desperation gave way to despair.
• Having no consistent process.
  • Sometimes things went well, but I had no solid process to follow. That meant I couldn’t repeat the successes I had. Worse, it meant I was doomed to repeat the failures.

If you don’t recognize any of the above problems, that’s good news because you must have just started! That means I can help you avoid these problems before they happen. This doesn’t have to be a picture of your future.

Find your professional focus.

I felt like I was floundering about in those early days. I was trying to do everything. Any job that came along, I would just say “Yes!” I was desperate, and I needed the money.

The problem was: I wasn’t able to find my focus. I didn’t understand fortune was in the focus (or the “riches were in the niches”).

Right now, you’re a generalist, but people want to hire specialists.

But here’s the trouble: what should you focus on? How specific should you go? How do you know when you’ve niched down too far?

These thoughts paralyzed me, so I continued to take on whatever jobs I could get as a generalist. I felt aimless. I wasn’t able to make a lot of money until much later when I understood the power of finding my focus.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned about the business basics needed to understand how to get the kind of clients that pay well. Had I known these business basics, I wouldn’t have wasted so many years spinning my wheels.

Land the job and close the deal.

Sure, I was able to take on the cheap jobs pretty easily. There wasn’t much of a problem getting work that I wasn’t too thrilled about.

But years later, a prospective client approached with a killer project. It was MASSIVE would be incredibly lucrative. It took everything I could to contain my excitement.

I wanted this job. It was going to pay thousands. No, tens of thousands.

Coming from my humble beginnings of charging $35/hr (when I could get it), this was incredible. I’d worked my way up over many years to charging hundreds, and even thousands of dollars in some cases, but TENS of thousands? My eyes were dollar signs like in the cartoons.

You’re not going to believe what happened next.

The client was actually really impressed with the proposal and the quality of work, but they chose someone else who charged more.

What?!

I couldn’t believe it.

The job slipped through my fingers. Here I was thinking this was a HUGE job that was going to be amazing, and this way of thinking was the very thing that kept me from landing it. I thought tens of thousands was really big, but it was actually so small to the client, they didn’t take it seriously. They went with someone else who charged more because they assumed they knew what they were doing.

I was devastated.

I didn’t know how to land the job and close the deal.

I learned a lot, but it had taken me so long to get to this point. Every lesson I learned was hard-fought. I had to learn the hard way by making mistakes (which meant learning the slow way).

What I should have done is tried to learn from other people’s mistakes—people who had been there, done that.

Get paid on time every time.

I wince to think of how much money I lost because I didn’t know the Simple 4-Step Method for Getting Paid on Time Every Time.

I didn’t know how to do business properly. I was taken advantage of at every turn because I was uneducated. I was simply never taught.

I thought the way it worked was you say “yes” to any job you can get (because you’re desperate), do the work, send the invoice, and then pray the client pays you. If they don’t, you follow up… and follow up… and follow up…

…and then eventually cry because the client never pays you.

Isn’t that how it goes? And then you go on Twitter and complain about your client and get likes on your tweet and you at least feel a little bit better, right? Right?!

It took me years to learn how to get paid consistently, every single time.

I wasted years not getting paid for work I did.

Shouldn’t it be illegal for clients to not pay you for work you did? Probably, but you can be sure they’re not going to do anything about it.

Only you can protect yourself and guarantee you get paid 100% of the time. You have to look out for yourself and implement the Simple 4-Step Method for Getting Paid on Time Every Time.

Follow a bulletproof process.

I can’t tell you how much I would have paid to look over the shoulder of someone who had worked successfully with clients just to see how they did it.

• Where do they find clients?
• How do they get clients on board with their decisions?
• How do they avoid getting micromanaged?
• What does their process look like?
• How do they make sure they actually get paid?

It would have saved me so much pain.

I could have enjoyed my work for all of those years had I followed a bulletproof process.

You don’t have a process unless it’s written down.

I sure didn’t have any written process. I had no idea what I was doing. I played it all by ear and guessed at every step. If things went bad, I didn’t know why. If I was lucky enough for things to go well, I had no idea how to repeat success.

I couldn’t avoid the nightmare situations. I kept experiencing the same problems over and over. I was doomed to repeat my failures.

That’s enough to discourage anyone from working in client services for good!

It’s no wonder you might be scared, confused, or worried.

They don’t teach you how to work with clients in school.

If they do, it’s none of the practical stuff you actually need to survive.

You need to understand things like:

• Your client attraction pipeline.
• An understanding of business basics.
• How to communicate with clients.
• How to price your services.
• How to write a process.
• Contract terms.

Speaking of contract terms…

Download time-tested contract templates.

Inside the Client Work Essentials class, I give you actual downloads of my contract templates.

These are time-tested, lawyer-vetted contract templates.

You’d have to pay a lawyer hundreds of dollars per hour to make you something like this. Instead, you get instant access to not only a downloadable template but also a video guide that walks you through each step of how to customize the template for your use.

I take you through section by section of the contract and explain the terms in plain English so you actually understand your own contract. Since you’ll understand the contract terms, you can also explain things to your client if they ask questions.

I started doing client work over a decade ago. You can bet I made a lot of mistakes in the early days, but I never made the same mistake twice. My goal now is to make sure you never make the mistakes even once.

Every time I encountered a problem, I patched the holes in these contracts and processes.

These contracts work and they’ll protect you so you can focus on doing great work.

Talk to clients with confidence.

Know the right things to say when talking with a client. Have confidence you can deliver what your client needs and communicate effectively.

You’ll learn:

• What to say when a client first approaches you.
• How to ask the right questions to find great clients.
• When to move on to the next stage of your process.
• How to get powerful testimonials from your clients.

Avoid saying the wrong things and backing yourself into a corner.

When you know what to say, and when to say it, you’ll be able to speak to clients with confidence and communicate clearly.

You will feel total confidence.