How I Find Clients: Then and Now

On today's show, I wanna talk about the difference between how I found clients in the beginning of my business and how I find clients now. 

A lot has changed for me in my three and a half years in business. I started out providing one-on-one services 

so I can spend a lot more time cultivating my client base and working through the sales process with them. 

Now that I have a membership model, I really need to be a lot more efficient with my time, and I can't afford to sell every person in the same high-touch way that I used to. To,

I'm gonna walk you through the techniques I used in the beginning of my business, some of the things I've tried along the way, and what's working now as I sell my Growth Trackers membership.

I'm Lex Roman, and this is The Low Energy Leads Show.

Let me set the stage for you here. When I launched in 2019, my focus was on something called growth design, which I had popularized in Silicon Valley. I had done growth design in-house and at agencies. My last full-time job was at the Black Tucks, and I booked a client. Working in a really similar capacity for a different company, but instead of going full-time there, I went on contract.

The way that I booked that first client was by looking through job boards for the kind of contract that I wanted. So I looked at, this is not the role that I took, but I looked at job postings just like this one, and I looked for things that were exactly the kind of contract and relationship I wanted with my clients.

And then, I reached out through LinkedIn to someone I knew at that company, and I asked for an introduction to the hiring manager, and thus began the process of booking a contract with them. That made it really easy for me to start my company because I had the confidence that I would have enough revenue coming in to both quit my full-time job, but also start a corporation and begin thinking of this more like a business and less like maybe a contract I would do in between jobs.

I had freelanced for years before this. In fact, I started my career in the film industry, so I was used to freelancing, and I was used to networking and having to constantly find the next job. But in tech, it's really common to just take a contract in between full-time jobs and then go back to a full-time gig.

But in 2019, I decided I didn't really wanna do that anymore. I wanted to be full-time working for myself. The mechanisms that I would use to find clients looked quite different from how they look now, the job boards, as I already mentioned, was really a successful strategy for me and is a great way to get your feet wet with freelancing and to think about whether or not you enjoy the process of selling yourself.

It's so different from doing an interview process and for people who are striking out with full-time interviews. I recommend all the time this approach of pitching yourself on contract, because usually the interview process. Is much lighter weight. When I did that first contract, I did probably two phone interviews and then I went on site in San Francisco.

I was living in LA at that time. I went on site in San Francisco for two hours of interviews. I didn't have to do a portfolio review, at least I do not remember having to do a portfolio review, but I spoke with the team that I'd be working with and it was much more a conversation about how we might work together and much less sort of a rigorous vetting process.

I enjoyed it much more, and I always have. And so it was just, you know, further affirmation for me that I was on the right path in addition to job boards when it came to expanding that circle of clients, past colleagues who had worked with me full-time. Inside companies were a great way to get introduced to other companies that needed growth, design, support, Twitter.

So my Twitter presence now is pretty non-existent, but at that time I had around 10,000 followers, many of whom were in the tech industry and in the growth space specifically. So Twitter was a great way for me to connect with people, particularly when I launched my course and my membership in the growth design space in 2020.

Conference talks have been a great channel for me. And we're a great channel in the tech space. I gave a lot of talks on the topic of growth design and on the topic of UX and data, particularly how to leverage data in your business. I gave a talk repeatedly called the UX of data that was really popular in the conference circuit and led to organizations that had the problem that I was speaking about in that talk, reaching out to work with me one-on-one.

And I took a couple gigs based on that and I ended up working with, um, a couple analytics providers. And that was a successful strategy. Going to the conferences, speaking about the thing I was passionate about and attracting inbound leads that way. In 2021, I shifted my whole model, so I no longer worked with tech companies, and I actually reduced my cost of services substantially.

So back in 2019, I was charging 10 to 20 k to work with me. You could work with me on a half-time basis or a full-time basis. In 2021, I shifted my audience to small business owners, and so I changed my pricing and my services to reflect this. I bundled web design, SEO, and digital marketing services together and was charging in the low thousands for that.

Now, many business owners launched their business off of word of mouth, and I've actually never done that, and I found that when I switched to small business owners, I had a really hard time even leveraging my existing network to reach them. Most of my friends were unwilling to make introductions to their networks and their professional groups and things like that, and my past network in tech wasn't as relevant because they were only gonna lead me to more tech clients.

So I really struggled to connect with my audience. Which made me turn to something like Upwork, which honestly I really despise Upwork and Fiverr and all those platforms for a variety of reasons, mostly because I, I think they exploit labor, but it was a channel at that time that I felt like I needed to leverage.

And listing myself on Upwork was a real humbling moment because after many years of being recruited in Silicon Valley by Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Uber, you name it. I was recruited by them to go on Upwork with people who have just started learning web design yesterday. It was a real wake up call, right?

It was. I was no longer differentiated in the small business space where tech companies could see. My specialization and my expertise, a small business owner really couldn't, and so I listed myself on Upwork and I coaxed someone off of Upwork into working with me one-on-one, and that client was amazing.

I'm so grateful for them. They were my first client for super easy, and I remember being on the phone with him in like June or July of 2021. And him saying to me, Lex, the next time I talk to you, you're gonna be too busy to talk to me. And I'm just so grateful for clients like that. And I'm lucky that even though it's been hard for me to get clients in the small business space, the clients that I have connected with have been incredible to work with and wonderful people all around.

The next big channel that surfaced for me was the Squarespace expert marketplace. Squarespace created this directory of. Squarespace designers, marketing experts, and SEO experts where you can connect with a specific company and they will also match you with a company. Now the downside to this was, at the time I was involved with this, they were connected to 99 Designs.

So, so Squarespace and 99 Designs was taking a large cut of what was already a really low price service, and there was an expectation about what those prices could be. So you couldn't really set your own prices. You were sort of locked into a pretty low rate. So that was very frustrating, but I did get a lot of leads.

From that space and was able to upsell some of them or continue to work with them in other capacities Beyond that initial engagement, I've always been a big blogger and while I was in the growth design space, my blog post really stood out and had no problem getting ranked on Google. When I moved into small business marketing, there was a lot more noise in that space and it was really hard for me to get seen above some of the platforms like Thumbtack, Yelp. HubSpot.

What I ended up doing was pitching guest blog posts to publications that had better SEO than I did so that those could actually get seen. And that led to some leads. Professional groups is one of my favorite strategies that I still use to this day, and one of the first groups I reached out to in 2021 was HECA.

Which is the Higher Education Consultants Association. My mom was an independent college counselor, which is how I knew about this organization, and I knew about this industry as a whole. And they actually have a business partner program that already exists. So you pay a small fee and you're able to send a dedicated offer to their entire mailing list of members.

So I sent out a webinar invitation and I actually didn't get anyone to come to the webinar, but it led to several people reaching out about me doing their websites and working with them on their digital marketing. That was a really successful strategy that paid itself back, um, multiple times over, and some of those clients I'm still working with.

Today and then later on in the journey of super easy, I would say towards the end of 2021, beginning of 2022, I started seeing friends and longtime contacts. So I make a distinction here between past colleagues, which are work related and people who are really more in my social network. Those folks starting to realize what I was doing, become more aware of it, and started recommending me to people that they knew.

So I finally started to get a little bit of a word of mouth engine towards the end of 2021. In the middle of 2022, I launched my membership program, which is called Growth Trackers. Since then, I've really been trying to shift away from one-on-one services, and I want to work with people more inside growth trackers, and that's really shaped how I get leads and how I spend my time marketing my business.

I've invested in my affiliate program, which is called Friends of Super Easy, and that is now my biggest channel for finding members of growth trackers and even one-on-one clients. Clients become friends of super easy, but I also split them out in terms of how I track referrals from clients, so existing clients or members referring work My way has become a bigger channel.

Obviously, in the beginning of my business, I didn't have clients to refer other clients to me, but now I do, and so that's becoming more of a prominent channel for me. LinkedIn has. Sadly become an important [00:10:00] channel for me in two ways. One, it's helped me stay in touch with my past network and made them more aware of what I'm doing, and so I've gotten more inquiries there as time has gone on, as I've shared more about my work.

And then I also tried something last summer called copilot ai, which did bring in a lot of leads. Now it had other downsides, which is that it brought in a lot of low quality leads, along with the higher quality leads, which wasted a lot of my time. So I did decide to stop using it. But it really taught me the power of the LinkedIn DM strategy where you connect with people in your second degree network and build mutual relationships, particularly that's strong for partnership relationships.

So working with adjacent business owners. Local event networking has joyfully become a big channel for me. I help run a meetup here called the Atlanta Solo Printers Club, and I also participate in a lot of local event networking through groups like Atlanta's Rising Women and Toast and Jam Up in Buford, Georgia.

That's been tremendous. I looked at my leads earlier this year and several of them were coming from these events. So that makes me happy because I really enjoy participating in those. I enjoy organizing those. I spend so much time online that I love being in the community, and so I'm glad to see that that's paying off.

And one of my last channels here is online networking. So I participate in groups like, Like Minded Collective Forward Female, and I spend a lot of time connecting with other business owners online too. That has paid off quite a bit. One in just the support they provide me to keep my head in the game week after week.

And two, in terms of the connections and the introductions that I get through those groups. That's been really powerful. And the collaborations that have happened there have led to lots of introductions and have led to new clients and members. I wanna show you this data in HoneyBook because I started using HoneyBook in 2021 to track my lead sources, and that's how I was able to put together this list for you, because if you had asked me about this, I probably would've given you wrong information, which is why I've gotten so passionate about tracking your leads.

Back in 2019, I was using something called Harvest, and I wasn't tracking leads as closely because I was doing more low volume, high ticket business. Now I'm doing more high volume, low ticket business, so the lead tracking becomes more important and more frequent. I started super easy in May of 2021, so we're going sort of mid-year to mid-year here, but you can see.

The Squarespace leads in here. Longtime Contact, HECA, the professional group I mentioned, and industry referrals, which is Friends of Super Easy, my affiliate program. And then you can see there's a long tail of some other things in here, guest blog posts, cold outreach starting to pop up when it comes to 2022 into 2023.

You can see industry referrals has taken the lead, followed by co-pilot and LinkedIn. As I mentioned, Squarespace is only still here because of repeat clients. And then we have friends, longtime contacts, local networking, client referrals, et cetera. So I'm excited to see more of the relationship side coming forward.

And as I always coach my clients on, I like to break down word of mouth in more depth, right? So industry referral, longtime contacts, local event networking, client referrals. For me, those are all different categories and they're all different ways that I maintain relationships.

I would love to hear how you're tracking your leads, how you think about lead sources, what feels like an easy channel, and what feels like a lot more work. 

Get in touch with me at lowenergyleads.com.

Connect with me on Instagram @supereasydoesit

If you're interested in finding your buyers or getting better at tracking your leads, I host free and low-cost trainings every month. You can find those on my website supereasydigital.com/events