What to Do After You Get Your First Clients

Congratulations!

You've figured out who you're going to serve, you've figured out how you serve them, you've attracted clients, and you've "landed" your first clients.

So what do you do next?

Well, the answer may surprise you.

Hi, I'm Don Downs of RV Business Coach, and today were going to talk about what do you do after you land your first clients.

Now, the first thing we might want to do is something that we often overlook:

We want to celebrate. Congratulations!

You actually got clients!

Sometimes the path of an entrepreneur feels like we're walking towards the horizon. No matter how far you go, there's always further you can go. So you get your first client, 2 clients, 10 clients, 20 clients… You can always see things you can do to get more clients. And so it's always sometimes this feeling of inadequacy that because there's so much more we could be doing and so many more places we want to go,

But we really have to stop and celebrate the successes along the way. So once you find those first clients, be sure to take time to just live in that moment and enjoy it and be excited that you've done something a lot of startups actually don't do:

You've made those first sales.

You've got those first clients.

And then we really need to look at those clients and we need to deliver and serve those clients.

If you can—no, not even "if you can,"  DO— over deliver to those clients.

This is really important to get things started out the right way. You're setting up the future reputation of your company. You're working with these clients. They're going to be your first success stories, your first referrals. So make sure that you serve them in a great way. Over deliver to them, help them achieve the thing you said you were going to do for them.

And the other reason this is really important is what you're going to find out is things are probably going to implement different than you thought. The things that you thought were going to work may not work. And you'll get new ideas that you never thought of before that will be the things that actually put your clients over the top.

So being very involved with those first clients, and over delivering, just helps you design your program that much better and make it that much more resilient.

So make sure once you get those clients, you serve them in the best possible way.

And of course, the other thing you want to do is continue to get more clients. To a degree, you just need to keep doing what you already did to get those first clients. Now, it's possible you may want to make some tweaks in order to sign more clients faster, depending on how long it took, whatever.

But generally at this point, we just need more clients.

Now, when I work with clients on my Five-Step program, I call it the Blueprint for their lifestyle, in Phase 1, we set what I call the the Validation Income™. How much money am I going to have to make in order to prove that this business is viable, and that it's going to be a success? And so once you get the first client, you want to continue to build clients until you've got that Validation Income. That's kind of the breakpoint where you say, OK, now what I need to do is kind of open up the faucet, get more clients, make more money, and that it's a very safe place where you can start thinking about leaving your corporate job if you haven't already.

So the question that comes up a lot of times is what about scaling?

Right. We always hear about we want to scale the business.

In fact, I talk a lot about the three keys to generating consistent income:

You need to solve a problem, solve a big problem. The bigger the problem you solve, the more demand there's going to be for it.

You need to stand out from the pack, give people a reason to hire you instead of other people.

3. Use scalable delivery.

But you know what? We've got a hold up on step three.

Paul Graham famously said startups need to do things that don't scale. And he's absolutely right. The things that get you those first clients, the things that bring success to the first clients, those often happen because you're very involved and they're not scalable.

So we want to do those up front, get things working up front, and then we can take a look at scaling. And there's so many ways we can scale.

We don't have to, like, go from very involved, to everything's automated overnight. We’ll, bring it in step by step by step.

Like everything else in your business, you have to do it at the right time. So, yes, we're going to scale, but we don't have to jump in and say “Hey, I got one client now I can scale.” We can continue to move this thing step by step in a logical progression.