If you haven't already done so, take a quick moment to read the previous page on the topic of Your Vision. This page will then make a lot more sense.
I wouldn't ask anyone to do this exercise of imagining their future if I hadn't done it myself. I have done this – many times. However, I wasn't doing it from day one and for the first few weeks my story, website and even attitude reflected that.
While a story like this is a fairly personal thing, here is mine in all its glory. The act of writing something like this for others to see is a very powerful force. Human nature makes us work much harder to keep a promise or commitment that we've made in front of other people than one we've made privately to ourselves. So by publishing this story here, I believe it will make we work even harder to make it happen.
(My apologies if this story makes me sound a bit arrogant. The idea is to imagine what I would love my clients to be saying in the near future, and that obviously involves telling a very positive story about myself. I hope you'll understand the spirit in which this is meant.)
So here goes. It is 2010. On of my clients is at a dinner party and changes the topic of conversation…
“Hey, I have to tell you all about this new guy that's been helping me with the business. His name is Marc. A friend introduced us a few months ago and after a couple of meetings we started working together a couple of days a month.
He used to be a partner at Goldman Sachs, and was in charge of a team that managed billions of dollars. He's probably glad he's out of it given what's going on in the market, but he seems to like trying to help explain to me what's going on so maybe he misses it a bit. But I'm guessing he was pretty good at what he did. Something he said to me made a lot of sense. He told me about how he used to get a rush out of investing in a stock that doubled in price… who wouldn't… but he said that was nothing compared to working with a client and seeing his ideas help double the value of that company. If you've got the ability to do that it must be very rewarding.
So, you all know I was getting a bit down with things? Kelly knows – she has to live with me! I thought I'd tried everything, but I just couldn't change the business. Staff didn't seem overly happy or motivated, I was alone in the office every night at 5:30, and clients were getting a bit frustrated. You know, it doesn't seem like it but I left my job four years ago to start this business. I thought small business would set me free. I had all these dreams of earning a living based on the quality of my work, not on an hourly wage. Now I'm now working harder than ever, earning less, stressing more, and wondering what happened. At least I was until a few months ago when Marc came along.
The first thing that hit me was his enthusiasm. He seemed to love my business more than I did. He started asking questions. Lots of them. Some I could answer, but some I couldn't. They weren't difficult questions and it didn't take a rocket scientist to come up with them. Yet no one had asked me them before… and I certainly hadn't asked myself. Pretty soon he'd come up with a few things that I knew immediately were keys to moving the business forward. Some I think I already knew, but for whatever reason I wasn't admitting them to myself. Others I don't think I would have come up with if given twenty years… but again, they just made sense. He started work on a spreadsheet building a model of the business and that helped show me where we could make the easiest gains, while I started putting in place a few ideas we had for the office and working on our new marketing plan.
But it is not only Marc that's helping me come up with new ideas for the business. He runs these nights he calls “personal MBA” nights for all his clients. He picks a book off some website and we all read it then get together for dinner at this cool little place in Richmond. Sometimes a couple of us bring someone else from the office, or sometimes even a client of ours. We then pick two or three of our businesses and brainstorm (with the help of some red wine, of course) on how to apply the ideas from the book in our businesses. I've learned a lot just from talking about other people's businesses, and I think they've liked a few of my ideas. It's fun coming up with ideas for someone else's business instead of just thinking about mine 24/7! They're all really good people, and they've also come up with some ideas for me. It's amazing – I read the book and get 10 or 20 ideas and I think “wow, 20 ideas for $30 – awesome!”. Then all the others come up with another 30 ideas between them! I never imagined how different people could read the same book and get so many different things out of it. It shows me that trying to save money by doing everything myself for so long has been the absolutely the wrong thing to do. Just as I can find stuff in other people's businesses that they've never seen or thought about, they can do it for me. It's great!
So back to Marc. I'm so glad my mate decided to introduce us, especially now because he's put a cap on the number of clients he'll take on and he's full up. I think it's eight he has now. Maybe nine. I can see why he likes working this way. He has all these ideas, and he gets to choose which ones he uses for each client, and sometimes probably uses the same idea for all of us. It makes so much more sense, given what he does, than working for one firm and only having one place to use all those ideas. He said to me something that I've thought about many times since – most businesses don't work for just one client because they can earn greater profits by doing what they're good at for a number of clients. It also makes sense to do this because it spreads their risk. Why shouldn't the same apply for employees? If someone has a skill that a number of businesses can use, why not work for several of them? I guess this is what consultants do fairly well, and why small business people start their own businesses, but it makes you wonder about all those people in their corporate jobs. They've got their own reasons I guess.
But Marc should really charge me more. At first I wasn't sure that I could afford the additional cost, but I think he probably paid for a years work with me in about three months without even counting the potential new client he's set me up with. I'm sure one day he'll be coming to me to tell me he's put up his rates. That's fine… to be honest if he keeps adding this much value I'll probably go to him and offer more money, or maybe a share of the profits or something like that. But for now he seems to just love what he does so much that I really don't think he's thinking a lot about the money. I know I'm not!
Oh, and just in case you're wondering, I don't think he's taking on any new clients. I know he meets people regularly and agreed to take me on earlier in the year, but I think he was pretty much full up as long ago as the middle of '09. Still, he likes me – I'm sure he'd find time for a chat with you if I asked. After all, he only has eight clients… how busy can he be? If nothing else you can pick his brain for a couple of hours and see what you can get out of him. You won't regret it.”
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So, back to today. If you made it through the whole story I hope you enjoyed it. Even though I wrote the story, every time I read it again it motivates me to make it happen.
My next twelve months will now be dedicated to finding the right clients and providing a service that leads to all of them having conversations like this. Every decision I make about my business will be based on one key question “will doing this make it more or less likely that I have a list of clients that will speak about me this way?”, and any actions that aren't moving me closer to this goal will need to be seriously reconsidered.
Now that I've put all of this in writing I'd better make it happen!