Client Magnets Official Blog

Archive for November, 2009

Building a strong list of clients and prospects is an absolutely critical step in developing your business. It takes time and effort to refine your list, but every entrepreneur starts somewhere. Let’s discuss the three types of client lists used in direct marketing, where they originate and the value they have for your business.

Compiled Client Lists

When you rent or buy a compiled list from a list broker, they’ve pulled the names together by key attributes. For example, all the people on the list might be IT professionals. Another common way to compile lists might be firms in a geographic location with a certain number of employees.

Whatever the attributes the people on your compiled list share, the point of these lists is to narrow down the reach of your marketing to people more likely to buy your products. So that means you’ll need to focus in on what common characteristics someone who needs your product would have. Once you know that, you can order your list more accurately.

But having said that, it must also be said that compiled lists normally provide the worst response. Unless you find a particularly adept list broker, and a group of people who will absolutely be helped by your product, the return may be disappointing. You’ll have to decide if you’re willing to invest money in such a list, knowing the possible outcome.

Response List

There’s another kind of list you can invest some money renting in order to boost your marketing. That’s the response list, and that simply means it’s a group of people who have responded favorably to your type of product in the past.

They might be managers who have attended certain seminars or workshops that fill a need similar to what your product meets. Or, they could be a group that has bought a product related to yours. Another way response lists are focused is by the types of trade magazines they subscribe to.

No matter why they end up on the response list you lease, they’re more likely to respond to your marketing because they’ve shown an interest in similar products. In the past, they’ve taken action in response to someone’s marketing in a field similar to yours.

That kind of qualification can make all the difference in how successful your marketing is. Rather than simply sharing a characteristic, they’ve actually reacted favorably to products related to yours. They understand the value of what you have to offer, and it’s filled a need they have. That’s a stronger foundation for your marketing efforts.

House List

While both the compiled list and the response list can result in sales, one list you should be building from day one in your business is the house list. These are the people who have raised their hands and said “I’m interested in your product.”

They may have responded to one of your marketing campaigns. They could also be previous clients. No matter how your house list is built, it’s going to yield a much higher rate of conversion than purchased lists.

This is true because the people on your house list are already somewhat invested. They’ve already moved toward you by responding to your marketing. This is the group of people on which a successful business is built.

How many do you need on your house list to become a success? That depends on how focused you are in learning what they need. If you have a small list of people who request information every time you announce a product, your conversion rate will be increasingly higher as you fine tune your products and marketing. For a house list, it’s not the size, it’s the quality that builds business.

Once you’ve spent the time and effort to build a decent house list, you’ll learn how it feels to sell out a seminar. You’ll know what it’s like to have tremendous response from little marketing effort. That’s when the tide turns to real success for your business.

Sometimes getting started in business requires renting or purchasing client lists. If you know up front that the conversion rate won’t be as high as from your house list, you can decide how much to invest in them. As your business begins to grow as a result, definitely compile your own house list. Focus specific marketing to them in ways that have worked before. In this way, you’ll build a group of loyal clients who can put your firm’s success on autopilot.

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Do you want to change your business model?

Do you want to go from trading time for money to creating an information empire?

If you’re serious about it, you will need to look at every aspect of your business to find the areas where you can make changes that will grow your business.

As always, I remind you that you might not immediately see how something applies to your business. Keep an open mind.  You never know where an idea might apply later on.

Maybe the following example will inspire you to make changes in your own business.

Imagine you are a management development consultant selling your time to businesses. Last year you had 80 billable days at £1,000 a day. So altogether you earned £80,000 of revenue.

The remaining 200 working days were spent identifying potential clients, selling to clients, writing proposals and following up.

The only way you can see to generate more income is to sell more billable days – because you’re caught in this trading time for money model.

You’re thinking, “How do I sell and land clients more effectively? How do I reduce the sales cycle? How do I convert interest into paying business?”

As long as you’re caught in this old manual labor way of thinking, you are trapped in the idea that you can only generate income by trading time for money.

What if there’s another way?

In reality, companies aren’t hiring you because they want to buy time from you. They hire you for what you can do for them. They recognize you as a problem solver with expertise that helps them to achieve their goals.

So, how do you switch your business model to an information empire?  You need to restructure you business offering so you can deliver more value to more people – while working less.

Identify the essence of what clients really want.

Sometimes we just put ourselves in a box and give ourselves a label – sales trainer, therapist, coach. We define ourselves by the activity that we do or the one way that we deliver service to clients.

But you are a lot more than that label.

When you’re working with a client, you bring more than just one methodology to the table. Coaching is one of the tools in your toolbox. Training may be another. But they are both just ways that you help people achieve the end result. After all, a plumber doesn’t describe himself as a wrench.

Look at what you are bringing to the table. Identify that quality that draws clients to you.

Find a way to package the solution.

Turn what you normally deliver in person into a standalone kit that can be sold off the shelf. For example, you might record a training session and sell that as a product.

Will someone who buys that have the same experience as being in a room with you? No. But they will still get a good portion of the information. And many people prefer this to attending events or workshops.

Create two variations of the new product.

There is a very good reason for this. Imagine a basic version that will cost buyers £249, and a deluxe version that sells for £349. A percentage of buyers will automatically upgrade to the deluxe version. These premium buyers want more and are willing to pay more. Give them the opportunity to spend more, and they will gladly take it.

Devise a plan for using existing resources and opportunities to develop products quickly.

You can’t spend months or even weeks creating products. You haven’t got that kind of time. Use what you have efficiently and effectively to develop the products you want to market.

Spend the bulk of your time promoting and marketing the products, identifying additional needs of your clients and customers, and creating more products to meet those needs.

Find the shortcuts to market your products.

You don’t have to have to write proposals for every single sale you make.

Use direct response marketing, the Internet or maybe direct mail or e-mail. The market you are selling to will determine which venue is best. But the point is that you can sell products automatically.

Launch the products.

Let’s say that you average two orders a day and 35% of the customers take the upgrade (which is a fairly typical percentage). Over the course of 12 months you will sell 325 of the basic version and 175 of the deluxe version. That will bring in £142,000 in income.

Remember that you were originally making £80,000. So you will have already doubled your revenue by switching to this model.

Switching to an information empire really will dramatically increase your income. Keeping an open mind while, examining your entire business will reveal opportunities for changes that will double or even triple your revenue.

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Chances are that there are lots of things you’re attempting to do yourself right now in your business that could easily be done by someone else.

It could be formatting your newsletter, or trying to send things out from your shopping cart or your broadcast system. Maybe your website needs updating, so you purchase a copy of Dreamweaver and plan to do it yourself. Or it could be that you’re handling a lot of the administrative tasks.

Although you could do all of these things yourself, you are not the best person to do them. How can I possibly say that you are not the best person to work on your business? Because these tasks are not what your business is all about.
These tasks aren’t your core strengths and they are not the best use of your time.

It makes more sense to hire a shopping cart wiz or an HTML wiz or an admin wiz to do them.

There are plenty of excuses and traps that prevent you from outsourcing these jobs. The big ones that stop most from people outsourcing are these misconceived ideas:

1. “I’ll save money by doing it myself.”
2. “It’s quicker for me to do it myself than to explain it to someone else.”
3. “I’m going to wait until I get to point X and then I’ll hire someone.”

If you buy into all of these pretexts, you are limiting your own success.

I used to format my own newsletter; create it in HTML and then I would upload and broadcast it.  Doing that took me an hour each week. And that was assuming that there were no little glitches or hitches.

I now outsource that newsletter. And for me, the advantage of someone else doing it isn’t the hour I save. It’s the fact that it’s handled. It’s one less thing I have to think about. And therefore, it’s more time and energy that I have to focus on the more important projects.

There’s a property show in the UK called Property Ladder. The host, Sarah Beeny, helps people develop a property. On almost every show, she hears basically the same conversation from the people that are developing properties.

“We’ve decided we’re going to save money by doing it ourselves. We’re not going to hire project managers or laborers.”

And then, halfway or three-quarters of the way into the project, they realize that they’ve taken on far too much. If they had just paid someone who knew what they were doing to do the job in the first place, they would have saved valuable time, energy, and even money.

Money isn’t the only thing holding you back on outsourcing, though. You may have set up your own parameters where you’ve said, “I need my turnover to be x or I need to have a certain number of clients, and then I’m going to hire
someone to help.”

I want to underline to you right now what a big fat lie that is. If you wait to hire someone, you will never get to that point. Here’s why:

You will either remain stuck at the number and level of clients that you can handle right now, or if you do get lucky and get a surge of clients, you’ll be too overwhelmed to train someone to help you. You’ll end up trying to train someone to help you at the very moment you have the least time to do it.

The time to hire someone is now. You can hire a virtual assistant for as little as 10 hours a month to start to take some of the draught off your shoulders. And good people will actually be free to you because they will save you a lot more than they will cost you.

The time and energy that you’ve freed up and placed into other projects will give you a better return for your investment much of the time.

You need to be planning in advance. You need to hire in advance. Hire in alignment with what your business is growing into and becoming.

Heed the words of this Chinese proverb: “The wise man digs the well before he gets thirsty.”

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Do you recall the film Jaws? A nice safe seaside town, where everything is apparently normal, is suddenly turned upside down by the arrival of a monster shark. How about the movie Beuwulf, where the hero slays the monster with a magical sword?

It’s no coincidence that these stories end up becoming bestselling movies. It’s because these stories are ingrained so deep in our unconscious that we can’t fail to be moved by them. We can’t fail to respond to them.

As a business person, you may sometimes find yourself facing any variety of monsters. Monsters that cause delays and frustrations. Monsters that must be slain.

Like you, most business owners face their share of monsters. Bureaucracy, taxes, extra paperwork – the list can go on and on. But the point is, each bares its teeth, breathing fire, and keeps coming back until you get rid of it, once and for all.

The thing is, you can use these monsters to your benefit. How?  When we’re talking about marketing your business – marketing is both logical and emotional.

Once you’ve found a way to kill your monster, you can share your experience with your audience. Use it in your marketing to engage those clients who are facing similar struggles.  By using the monster theme you will connect with your audience at an emotional level.

Suppose that you were swamped by too much paperwork, and you have developed a method or a program that streamlines your business and eliminates all that extra paperwork. A burden has been lifted, and you can now focus your attention on more important matters.

So, by figuring out a solution, you have managed to slay the paperwork monster.  You found a way to get rid of it for good, and now you can help other business owners to do the same.

Can you see how the message has become a lot more dramatic and compelling by pulling on the monster theme? You’ve done more than just cut out the paperwork – you’re the hero who has slain the monster.

So don’t be afraid to look under the bed or in the dark closets. What monsters are you facing in your business?  Confront any monsters you may find.  What monsters have you overcome?

Figure out what the magical sword is that will, or has already overcome those monsters.

Then tell the world how you did it!

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There’s a saying that you have to spend money to make money. I have to say I couldn’t agree more with this. I know many trainers are hesitant to spend money when their cash flow may be low, but spending money to market your services is just one more step to attracting clients. But there is certainly a right answer and wrong answer to the marketing equation.

When you get to the point where you have clients calling you asking for your services, you’ve taken a step in the right direction. I’m certainly not saying to go out and spend money on advertising just for the sake of marketing because it’s necessary. Your goal is to find those marketing techniques that give you the best return on your marketing investment. It’s basic math and it’s as simple as 1+1=2!

For example, say you place an advertisement offering a free report for callers. It’s a worthwhile technique to use. It gives the caller something tangible to ask for and it produces more results than just offering a phone number to call for enquiries. Let’s say you spend £250 for this advertisement in a trade publication. That can be a fairly significant cash outlay if you’re just starting out.

But, if that £250 investment results in picking up £10,000 of business, you’ve created a 40 to 1 return on your investment. You should be asking yourself “where can I spend another pound?”!

Now, how about the investment of your time? That’s also a simple math calculation. If you’re making cold calls how many prospects are you going to get within one hour’s time? One or two perhaps, if you’re able to make it past the gatekeeper. What if you could take that one hour and multiply those results infinitely?

It seems an easy to decision to make, reaching more people in the same amount of time. But it’s a concept that many have yet to grasp. It’s a matter of taking your one-to-one marketing techniques and changing them to one-to-many techniques.

I can’t stress this enough – the one-to-one selling techniques that are used in the larger companies don’t work for those of us flying solo!

The quickest change you can make to take your marketing techniques to the next level is to engage either in direct mailing or advertising. Once you’ve fine tuned your message, this limited investment of your time has the ability to produce infinite results.
So, now that you have some ideas on how your money and time are going to produce the best benefit to your business, you can roll this together to take another step towards becoming a Client Magnet.

Attracting clients, having them call you is at the heart of this simple equation. Using these advertising methods, along with other steps outlined and detailed in my Attracting Clients system is going to put you in the position of having clients contact you to meet their specific needs and the return on your investment will transform your business.

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You started your business in order to use your talent, knowledge and expertise to help people – and to earn a good income, of course.

But chances are that you’re not earning as much income as you could be – steady, predictable income in significant amounts.

Why is this?

There are three invisible barriers that can get in the way of  you reaching your earning potential. They keep you stuck working longer and harder. And if you don’t address them, no amount of hard work or lucky breaks will help you to increase your revenue.

It’s important to recognize these three barriers and break through them to increase your income.

1. Undervaluing your assets.
In business, modesty is not always a virtue. In business, unlike other aspects of life, it’s good to sing your own praises and promote your natural talents – that’s how clients learn about you.

But many people undervalue their assets, effectively putting a lid on their income.

Your assets are your knowledge, experience and expertise.  Everything you learned in order to start your business is an asset. But you might not see it that way. You may think  that you have to work really hard at something in order for it to be an asset.

That’s not the case at all

If you undervalue what you know, you’ll be blind to the people who badly need your help.

So find the market niche that desperately wants what comes easily to you. They’re praying for what you have to offer –  and they’re willing to pay for it.

2. The wrong business model.
Working as a solo professional generally means selling your time. Unfortunately, that means you’re basically manual labor, because you’ve only got so many hours in a day.

This makes you vulnerable. It requires you to be constantly working to meet your target. And that’s not good for you or your clients.

If you’re constantly working in the trading time for money model, you are going to get tired and uninspired. Your clients will lose out because your passion goes – and you will lose out because your clients go.

You need to switch to an information empire business model. You’ll get paid for your expertise rather than your  time by helping people without having to physically be  present to do the work with them.

Look at your entire business to see where you can create products and programs that will boost your income. You’ll need more than just one product to exceed how much you earned per day by selling your time.

Think about a whole suite of products and programs, logically priced at different levels, that will work together to  bring you an income that you desire. When done in the right way, this can triple your income while you work fewer hours.

3. Too much manual labor in your sales process.
Is it easy for someone to become your client? Or are there several steps that they must follow? If they have to do much more than visit your website and make a purchase, you’re doing too much manual labor in your sales process.

Are you personally involved in every step of the process? If  too much of the process depends on you, it creates a bottleneck that prevents additional sales from flowing in smoothly.

The greater the dependency is on you, the weaker your business is.

Too much personal involvement also weakens your negotiating position. If a potential client balks at your price after you’ve already invested hours of time, you’re more likely to give in.

As your business grows, you’ll have less time to devote to established clients because you’re too busy trying to land new ones. This can also have a negative effect on client relationships.

You need to develop one-to-many marketing techniques that free you from the manual labor of the sales process. Look into Internet marketing or direct mail. There are options available to you once you decide to let go of your  involvement.

Now that you’re aware of the three invisible barriers that keep you stuck, look at how they may be affecting your business. Value what you know, switch to an information empire business model, and limit your involvement in the sales process.

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How many of us can’t wait to make cold calls?  Anyone?  What if I told you to stop making them?  They’re not worth your time.  Cold calls may have worked when you were drawing a salary, but now that you’re out on your own, you need to remember that your time is valuable and your time is limited.

So, stop the cold calling.  Why?  Cold calling is a one-to-one marketing technique.  When you’re a small business or flying solo, using one-to-one marketing techniques is like fishing with a hook instead of fishing with a big net.  You’re going to catch a heck of a lot more fish with a big net, and in a shorter amount of time.

If you’re skeptical about eliminating your cold calls and wonder how you’re going to bring in the prospects, do a simple cost-benefit analysis.  How many people can you reach within one full day of cold calls?  How many actual one-to-one conversations will you have with the person within the company responsible for hiring trainers?  Chances are that number is in the single digits.

So, say you’re reaching eight people on a good day of eight hours of cold calls.  One per hour – not too bad, but not nearly the number you need to create a full calendar.

Now what if I told you that you could multiply those contacts in half the time?  You need to do just one thing – change your one-to-one marketing to one-to-many marketing.  The quickest way to do this is to use direct response marketing methods such as direct mail and advertising in place of the cold calls.

I’m not saying that you can send a mailing or place an advertisement and expect instant results.  Rome wasn’t built in a day.  It’s likely that you’re not going to get prospects ringing your phone off the hook with your first ad.  There’s a learning curve.  You’ll need to test the mailings and advertisements that you use and there will be some fine tuning along the way.  But you’re going to get to the place where your mailings and ads will produce consistent results.  You’ll be able to rely on them to bring in a number of inquiries each month.

So, let’s do the math – you spend three hours crafting an ad or mailing, fine tuning it and analyzing the results.  The end result will be three hours of work for an advertisement that can work for an infinite amount of time and on an infinite number of prospects going forward.  Compare that to the cold calling which may generate one good prospect per hour if you’re lucky.

Now, if you happen to generate a sale from a cold call, you’ve already put yourself in the weak spot in the transaction.  You’ve put yourself in the position of you needing them more than they need you.  That weakness will follow you through the entire deal, from negotiating fees to closing the sale.

If you’re using an advertisement, they’re calling you.  You’re in the ‘power’ position.  Obviously, their resistance to your product is low as well, or they wouldn’t be calling.

So, drop the one-to-one marketing cold calls, upgrade to the one-to-many marketing techniques.  You’ll find that when you ditch the time-consuming manual prospecting and selling methods, you’re setting yourself up for not only an infinite number of prospects, but for a completely different, and more successful, dynamic in your business relationships as well.

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You’ve heard the expression, “If you want something done right, do it yourself.”

Think about it.

Does that expression reflect your beliefs and attitudes? Do you think that you are the only one who can adequately accomplish a task – whatever it may be?

If you’re running your own business, chances are that you’re a seriously independent individual who likes things done your own way. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being independent and wanting things done right.

But, it really can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, your strong sense of independence has given you the vision, courage and bravery to go out and strike it big on your own. Especially if you’ve come from a typical working environment where you became disillusioned with the system and made the decision to go it on your own.

If you think that you are the only one who can do the job right – or do it better than someone else – there is a downside.  And that downside is that you can end up being a bit of a lone ranger, trying to do everything yourself. You will end up getting really overwhelmed because you believe that you have to do everything yourself.

This is where it’s so important for you to learn to let go and trust others.

That’s actually a really key part of outsourcing that no one ever talks about.  Before you rush out to find people to help you with the things you want to outsource in your business, examine your beliefs. While you’ll need to accept that there are things you don’t excel at – or don’t care about – you will also need to accept that you have to delegate those things to someone else.  To do that, you have to acknowledge the qualities and skills that others possess to do those things.

In her book, Trust Your Vibes at Work (and Let Them Work for You), Sonia Choquette talks about how business, at its core, is the art of good relationships. And so, your beliefs about relationships and your attitudes towards relationships and towards other people are going to play a big role in your hiring people and working with people and partners. Don’t limit yourself or your business by thinking you will never find anyone who can possibly do the job as well as you.

Some of the myths and limiting beliefs I have observed over the years have come from my own experiences. I grew up in a family business. I watched my dad struggle constantly with hiring reliable staff. I remember hearing him say several times, “If it’s going to be done right, I’ll have to do it myself.”

He would get very impatient with people who couldn’t straight away do a task the way he did it.  This really limited him. And it limited his business.

Although he was a fairly successful businessman, I sometimes wonder what more could have happened for him in his business had he been willing to place his trust in other people. That was a shame.

So, by all means, having faith in yourself and your abilities is essential to opening your own business. But, don’t be limited in your beliefs or you will end up limited in your business. Having faith in other people will help both you and your business to thrive and grow.

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Have you ever heard of the Pareto Principle? It’s based on the idea that 20% of all our activities are actually responsible for 80% of our results.

If you apply that to your work situation, 80% of what you’re spending time on is irrelevant, unnecessary, or could easily be handled by someone else.

Don’t get discouraged by that. There’s still that 20% left. And for you, the 20% is where you really shine. Your 20% is your unique ability. It’s where you’re immersed in your distinctive activity; time just passes so quickly because you’re so caught up in what you’re doing. You’re in a flow when you do it. It’s enjoyable, easy and effortless.

You probably have a good idea of what that activity is, but I encourage you to do what I call a time inventory. This will really help to bring it into focus, and also highlight the things that are stopping you from spending more time on that 20%.

You can apply this to your whole day, not just your working hours, if you like. That’s up to you.

Here’s the exercise I want you to do: Break up your day into 15-minute blocks. Keep a note of what you’re spending your time on. This on its own will be a very illuminating exercise. I can promise that when you start to realize where your time goes, you’ll be both horrified and amazed.

As a result of doing this exercise, you will be more time efficient. But that’s not the primary reason why I want you to do it. The reason is to find out how the 80-20 rule applies to YOU.

I recommend that you do this exercise for 3 days. At the end, sit down and review your 3 days of activities.

Now, ask yourself a few questions:
1. Which were the income generating activities? Put a little pound or dollar sign next to each of them. Do this with a highlighter pen so you can really see them on the page.
What were the things that made you money? Don’t be at all surprised to find that less than 20% of what you’re spending your time on is actually making you any money. That’s typical. But, obviously you want to increase the amount of time you’re spending on income generating activities.

2. “Of all the things that are on this list, what can only be done by me?” What are the things that only I can do, only I can deliver? What things, if not done by me, would cause a lot of problems or not be done as well as they could be?

3. Which activities give you that “yucky” feeling when you think about them? You know, the things you’d really rather not think about at all. These are the real energy drainers. They sap your energy, not because of the time that they take, but because of the blah feeling that you have when you think about them. Pay close attention to which activities are draining you.

4. “What are the things that I could outsource first?” Pick what you most want to outsource. What would be easy for you to outsource? As a rule of thumb, you should start outsourcing the things that already make you money, or time-consuming things that free you up to make more money. You really want to look at leverage.

5. What could be eliminated entirely? In his excellent book, The 4 Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss says, “Eliminate before you delegate.” I highly recommend this book to you. It’s full of useful information about outsourcing, setting up your life so that you are doing what you most enjoy, living life on your own terms, and really constructing a business that frees you up entirely. But, before you hire any help, there’s a good chance that there’s a lot of stuff that could just be eliminated.

There are so many things that are on your “to-do” list simply out of habit – and they are taking time from your working day.

One of the good things about this time inventory is that it really gets you to look at and identify what those things are. You’ll realize which activities you won’t even bother paying someone else to do, because they are just a waste of your time.

When you review your activities, you’ll discover which generate income and which can only be done by you. These are the activities that you either want to keep doing yourself or outsource in order to free yourself to generate other income. Either way, these are your priority activities.

The ones that drain you are the things that you’re going to want to outsource.

The ones that you realize are a waste of time won’t be an issue anymore.

Do this exercise more than once. Make it a regular practice – maybe every 3 months. You’ll find that as your business grows and evolves, and as you grow and evolve, your time inventory will change.

Personally, there are things that I now outsource that I wouldn’t have dreamed of outsourcing 18 months ago. And there are probably things I’m doing today that in 6 months time, I won’t be doing at all.

It’s just a case of constantly reviewing your time inventory.

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There’s a basic problem with being in business for yourself and that is if you’re not working, you’re not getting paid.  It’s one of the pitfalls of being self-employed; we’re human, we do need to have a weekend off or sick time.  So many of us have this basic dilemma, we have to be active to generate cash flow for the business and there’s only so many days in the week and weeks in the year to do so.

What we need to have is something that is working for us when we’re not.  Now, many people call the solution to this conundrum creating a passive income stream, but I’d like to emphasize that when I started, it wasn’t about generating a passive income, it was about generating an active income.  I needed to generate some cash.

What I did was create what I’ve called off-the-shelf solutions, which includes books, tapes, seminars, videos, etc.  They will help your cash flow significantly.  Not only will they generate income, but they can be lead generators that open doors for higher priced, more customized services.

Think about it … that product can create so many additional opportunities that it’s an advertisement in and of itself.  But there’s another advantage to creating off-the-shelf products – they give you an alternative.  That alternative is what makes it easier to walk away if a client can’t meet your price, and that in turn can give us an advantage in negotiations.  It’s so much easier to say no if we have to when we have another opportunity waiting in the wings.

When you ventured out on your own, one of your reasons for doing so was probably for the same reason as many of us have, to take control of our own destiny.  But now, reality has hit and if you’re depending on the decisions of people working for organizations, you haven’t gone very far, have you?  But these off-the-shelf solutions can give you more control over your well-being, your income and your business.  They’re going to give you the control for which you were searching.

This is not going to be an overnight cash generator for your business – there is lead time and production time, but there is a short-term solution that you can use in the interim, and that solution is to hold an open workshop.  In fact, my first product came from a tape that was made of one of my workshops.

I’ve also said time and time again that our goal in attracting clients is to get us to the point where the client is making the initial contact.  When your client notices your name on a product setting on their book shelf, you’ve already gotten one step closer to making this happen.  In fact, you’ve also increased your visibility in your field of expertise.

Consider using off-the-shelf products to complement your training services. They’re definitely a win-win solution that will give you control, visibility, alternatives and a steady cash flow.

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