How to start, promote a business and find new clients

The article was inspired by a recurring question on Facebook: What should I do, what business should I pursue?

I believe this is the most important article I've ever written in my life. I look forward to your feedback.

In asking such a question, in my humble opinion, a person does not fully understand WHAT they are asking.

If you seriously consider starting your own business, you will spend more, sometimes much more, time on it than with your spouse and children combined. You must love it, nurture it, think and talk about it constantly, and bring all your acquaintances, friends, and clients into it. And you're going to find an answer to this in Facebook? If you're just looking for something where you can earn a lot of money, waste collectors earn a lot. It doesn’t require special education or business skills.

I should note that I am not disregarding or belittling waste collectors, they are necessary, and without them, our lives would be unbearable. But we need to understand that money is not the main factor when choosing a profession, and even more so, a lifelong business.

The first thing you need to determine is what you enjoy doing and what you can become a true professional in. No one on Facebook will answer this for you. Even if you like singing, cross-stitching, or something else that you might not consider a business idea, it can still become a business because there will be others who want to learn to sing, or want a scarf made by cross-stitching, in which you could be the absolute leader among professionals.

So, what is this article about?

It's about how to create a business that will be interesting and profitable to live with for your entire life. It's about how to find clients and how to market yourself. I am not imposing any opinion on what business to start, but the principles outlined here practically guarantee the success of your business intentions.

How do I know this? All the strategies described here, I apply in my own business and have helped others promote their businesses many times. The strategies and ideas are simple, require a lot of effort and time, but relatively little financial investment.

Once you've chosen what business to pursue, let's start with the first thing:

1. Become a professional. This might sound trivial, but nevertheless, millions of businesses close their doors because people don't know how to do what they started the business for. If you want to run your own business, study everything related to it. Read all the books, listen to well-known podcasts, watch videos on YouTube, attend seminars, and talk to the best people in the field. Very few people do this! Yes, it will take a lot of time to become a professional, as reading books, listening to podcasts, and attending seminars will consume your time, but if you don’t do it and don’t become a professional, even in theory, clients will leave, and you will be mediocre. Don’t look for excuses for why you don’t have time. If you don’t have time to learn and become the best at what you do, then you shouldn’t open a business at all. If you make mediocre coffee or tighten bolts poorly, you’ll face fierce competition because everyone can do it poorly. But if you do it better than anyone else, all the clients you don’t even look for will come to you. No one wants a haircut with blunt scissors.

We all want to deal with experts in any field, but many people who open businesses never become experts. Don’t be one of them.

The second important thing, which partly follows from the first, is:

2. Your reputation. This is one of the most important things in general and especially in business. Without a good reputation, you won't have deals or bread on the table.

When you're assigned a task, whether in business or as an employee, you're paid for your reputation, no matter how strange that sounds. People aren’t always interested in your diplomas, in most cases, they care about whether you can do what you’re paid to do. From janitors to surgeons and astronauts.

Brian Tracy has written many books on personal development. In one of his books, he gave a definition I really liked. Why do you get paid X dollars per hour? Because it costs X dollars to replace you. The more of an expert you are in a particular field, the more expensive it will be to replace you, and the higher your income will be.

Being a professional means knowing what exactly you can do well, within what timeframes, and what guarantees you provide. I know many people in the same field, but one of them has a queue, while the other has no clients or, even worse, is avoided. Lack of clients isn’t always about lacking skills; it can be about not knowing how to position yourself and find clients. If this is the issue, it can be solved, and we’ll talk more about that below.

How true are you to your word? If you promise something, do you always keep your word and within the deadlines you promised? And at the price you agreed on? Just keeping your word alone will set you apart from the crowd.

Reputation is the most important thing that exists in both life and business. It can't be bought, and it comes with hard work, but it can be easily lost. As they say, you work for years to build it, and it works for you for decades.

Another valuable lesson I learned in my youth was from a person I met when I was looking for work. They told me something that changed my approach to work: “You’re paid for the responsibility you bear.” If you act irresponsibly in your business, your clients will act irresponsibly towards you as well. When you're an employee, you can hide behind the actions of others, but when you own a business, you are the one who is responsible for what you do. And if you're not responsible, you’ll become part of the 90% (or however many) of failed businesses without a solid reputation.

If you’re starting a business, do it with the mindset that it will be the best; otherwise, just send out your resume.

3. Where to find clients?

This is, essentially, the reason I wrote this article.

It took me several years, working in multiple businesses, to understand the meaning of what you're about to read. For many, this may seem trivial when you read it, but therein lies the reason why many businesses succeed while others don’t. Also, note that just because a business is successful doesn’t necessarily mean it follows this strategy. However, if you do follow it, success is practically guaranteed.

So... Don’t search for individual clients; create a community that will find clients for you. If you figure out how to create a community of clients, competitors, colleagues, and people interested in what you do, you can’t help but succeed.

Selling insurance is one of the toughest professions; not many people want to think about losing a limb or leaving this life. So, if my insurance business has succeeded, yours can too.

What does it mean to create a community instead of looking for clients?

I'll give an example from my industry. Most people starting in insurance search for clients by calling people, meeting at parties, and attending events. This strategy works, but it’s incredibly slow, and it can take 4-5 years for everyone who’s heard of you to remember you. This strategy gets one client per acquaintance because you can only talk to one person at a time.

Instead of searching for clients, focus on creating a group of people who want to know more about what you know. I'm not talking about sales, just sharing knowledge. If you can share knowledge, do it, but don’t tell just one person what you know—tell everyone who joins your community. This could be a physical community (like gathering people in a church on Mondays) or a virtual one, from LinkedIn and Facebook to YouTube. The more people know you and ask you specific professional questions (remember, you must be a professional in what you do, or no one will want to ask you anything), the more people will join your community. You can hit all available social media channels at once, or choose the one that works best for you.

The next rule of the community is to introduce people to each other. Make it a rule to ask each person you talk to what they do, and when an opportunity arises to connect someone with someone who could benefit, do it. Not always will it work, and sometimes things won’t go as planned, but those who don’t do anything will never get results. Furthermore, if your acquaintance has their own business, you should know their contacts and what they do. Don’t think about what people can do for you—think about how you can help others with the information you have and your contacts.

The next thing many people do is offer their services to everyone. Don’t look for clients who aren’t looking for you. You need to focus your efforts only on those who are looking for a specialist like you and who need your services. This doesn’t mean that the whole city or country shouldn’t know about you, but it also means that you shouldn’t force your services onto others. As soon as you start to push too hard and see every person as a wallet, you’ve lost. People will avoid you like a nightmare. The more people know about you and the less you push your business, services, or products, the more people will want to work with you. Even if you know you can help and your service or product is better than what they currently have, don’t push yourself onto them! Some of your acquaintances might take 2-3 years to ask you their first question.

Continuing from the previous point: you don’t need to sell; you need to help people buy. Amateurs try to push their products to everyone and prove their necessity, while professionals look for those who are already convinced they need what you offer. They just don’t know where to find it or how it works. In my opinion, marketing differs from advertising in that marketing explains what you do and how you can help, while advertising is about pushing yourself onto others. Forget about advertising and focus on marketing.

Brian Tracy once wrote in one of his books: Want to double your success? Double the number of failures. There is no successful business where people don’t make mistakes. Make mistakes as often as you can, because it will mean your business is alive and thriving. If you follow just one path, your business won’t grow.

How many people don’t like you? Triple that number. If you want your business to grow, you need to increase the number of people who know about you. The more people love you, the more people will dislike you. So if you have three times as many "haters," you’ll have three times as many people who love you!

This advice doesn’t mean you should provide poor service or deceive people. On the contrary, your competitors and lazy people who lack work ethics will hate you, and their clients will become yours.

I believe it goes without saying that no business today can exist without a website. The site should be simple, well-designed, and easy to navigate so that people can easily find how to contact you. There's nothing worse than when you're ready to place an order, buy, or sign up, but you simply can’t figure out how to do it.

Many people starting a business don’t realize how much work the business owner has to do. The main reason why good businesses stay in the "good" category while others become outstanding is because of procedures and consistently followed actions. It's difficult to find employees who will stay at the same job forever, so try to structure everything you do and what you delegate to others. Every task should be done like it’s on an assembly line, everything should be sequential, so that neither you nor your employees have to think about many things. For example, if you send clients a card after a purchase, there should be a process for entering addresses, printing labels, determining the size of the card, and knowing where the stamps are, etc. If you have a process flow, many workers can be replaced without losing service quality and without losing clients.

Where possible, write down all procedures so that when an employee leaves, the new one can read about the process and understand what follows from what. Just having these written procedures will make your company stand out from others where everyone does whatever comes to mind, and clients’ expectations don’t match the company’s results.

A large portion of the work can be outsourced. One of the things you can do if you have a very limited budget is to find specialists from the former Soviet Union. There are many websites (like Fiverr, Elance, Freelancer, etc.) where you can find specialists for a relatively low price compared to Canadian rates. These specialists can help with translation, website creation, graphics, brochures, marketing, and so on. You can also find virtual assistants — people who work remotely (usually from other countries) and can provide various services, such as responding to client emails, conducting research, marketing, and handling administrative work. It's especially useful to hire people in different time zones because if it’s night time for you and clients are emailing, they can respond. There’s nothing people appreciate more than receiving a reply to their email from a real person within a short period of time, no matter the time of day. That’s service!

If you plan to open or buy a business, consider whether it can be made global, not just local. If you open a pizzeria, it’s very difficult to promote it on social media through community building. Also, people won’t drive 50 km just to order from you, meaning your business will be limited to local consumers.

However, if you produce and sell furniture, for example, even though your business is local, you can still build a community because you can teach people how to make furniture from scratch, how to fix it, how to apply varnish. You can even make unique items (like restoring expensive antiques), and you can sell specific furniture online. Not only that, but you could sell varnish, tools, books, and more if you have a large community of active people who live an engaging life. Even though it might be hard, people might travel 100 km for good furniture. Therefore, the more global your business, the more people will promote it for you when they see the value in joining your community.

Send clients to your competitors if they offer better terms. Don’t sell low-quality products or services if you can’t provide better service and quality. This is an interesting business principle, but it will pay off well because your competitors will appreciate you, and clients will respect you.

I should clarify that I’m not talking about offering better rates than your competitors, but about the quality of the product and service they offer.

If you are just starting out and are unsure of your abilities, find the best specialist in your field and help them.

One of the main problems in any industry is that it’s difficult to find people you can rely on. This doesn’t only apply to business, but it’s especially important there. We don’t work in a vacuum; we are surrounded by people, and we need to rely on someone. The better your surrounding people are, the better the business you can create.

Personal assistants for high-level people are extremely valuable, not just in terms of money. Everyone wants to poach them. This is precisely because such people are hard to find (remember the rule that you get paid exactly as much as it costs to replace you). A person who can be trusted to do something and will take responsibility without asking unnecessary questions is invaluable. Become that person for a specialist in the field you want to work in! Don’t try to create your own business from scratch, searching for clients, meeting people, and wasting time looking for optimal solutions — chances are, the business you want to be in already exists. Find the founder and follow them like a puppy on a leash.

If you think it’s hard to break into such a specialist’s circle, you’re mistaken. Most people, especially those new to a business, ask, "What can you give me?" Ask a person a question that will completely throw them off: "How can I help you?" Not long ago, I met someone who’s been in the insurance business (what I do) for over 40 years. I specifically went to his office and asked him one question — what do I need to do to learn from him? The person literally sat back in his chair. After a minute’s pause, as I expected, he told me that in all his years, no one had ever asked him such a question. Usually, people want money, clients, or something else, but no one asks, "What can I do for you?" Ask it — you’ll be amazed at the results, provided, of course, that you are willing to actually do something for them. Even if it's something as simple as bringing them pencils. And since the law of feedback exists in nature, when we give something to someone, someone else will give something to us. Try it — you’ll be surprised by the outcome. Don’t look for a job for the money, look for it for the experience, contacts, skills, and expertise.

One of the things that will always be useful and will certainly increase your client flow comes from the previous note, and I’ve already mentioned it above, but I’ll repeat it because it’s very important. If you want people to talk about you, talk about others. From now on, write down every person you know and what they are looking for. Someone is looking for insurance for their cat, someone for a car, someone for a nearby funeral home. If you start connecting people and act like a directory, knowing what everyone is looking for and what they can offer to others, there’s simply no way that when you open up to the world, people won’t talk about you. If you tag someone on Facebook when someone asks where to go or send a message about a job someone was looking for three months ago, you will stand out from the crowd. Very few people care about others' problems, and few help others, but if you dedicate your free time not to watching TV but to learning about what people are searching for, it will pay off in spades.

And finally, the last thing I want to add — show the persistence of a rhinoceros. Rarely does a businessperson, shortly after starting their business, say “I’m on a roll.” Everything takes time, patience, and an immense, relentless desire to move forward like a locomotive. Remember, "Patience and hard work will grind through anything," but they should not grind your faith in yourself. Don't chase after money; do for your clients what you would do for yourself, and let the whole world know what and how you do it — success will come to you!

I hope this article will be useful for you in starting and growing your business. If you have any questions, comments, or would like to discuss your business — I’ll be happy to answer!

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