Now that I’ve had my first year in business, I’ve realized a few things. One of which is that many of the qualities that you need to be successful in life can also be helpful in business. We learn early on that if we fall, we need to get right back up. If you’re an equestrian, you might be familiar with falling off a horse and getting back on (barring any injuries). Yet, as we get older, it somehow becomes more acceptable to throw in the towel when things don’t work out.
I started working with my business coach, Diana Davis, last year because I wanted to explore what I didn’t know, learn from someone else’s mistakes, and hopefully, collapse my timeline when it came to running a successful business. One of the things we discussed in Camp Clarity was networking (or what Diana calls, Dating in the DM’s). When it comes to landing clients, you have to not only be out there, but people need to know how they can work with you. Diana suggested looking at our existing connections on social media and seeing if any could be helpful to make an introduction or potentially become clients themselves. So, I took Diana’s advice, and I scrolled through some different communities I was a part of on Facebook and LinkedIn. I wrote a heartfelt post about going out on my own and looking for clients to work with. I was sure that by the end of the day, I would have a few comments, connections, or maybe even leads. I dropped my email and my Calendly link in the post to make it easy for people to connect with me. And…crickets. I felt so discouraged that I didn’t even have one response to sink my teeth into.
Fast forward half a year, and I had all but forgotten that ambitious moment until Diana once again brought up the importance of being in those networking groups and reminding people what it is you do. I thought back to when I had made the first post, and what I realized was that after it didn’t work in my favor, I gave up. I decided that posting in groups wasn’t for me and that it wasn’t a good strategy.
But it wasn’t the strategy that was wrong. It was my lack of perseverance and consistency in telling people what it was I did. So, last week, I wrote a new post with a clear mission and a call to action and talked to a specific niche. I left my email address and asked people to contact me if I could help them with their social media, public relations, or content creation needs. And do you know what happened? I was…INUNDATED with responses. Suddenly, my calendar was booked with discovery calls and people who wanted to see how we could work together.
The moral of the story is that it pays to be persistent…and that it’s good to re-evaluate your strategy.
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