How to start from zero in BOTH the corporate and consumer market – Without the BS.

Last night, someone asked the below question:

“Pete, I don’t have a database or any strong presence online, how do I get started?”

My answer was likely different to what she had heard before (at least, that’s my assumption.)

However, before I share the step by step process I shared yesterday, let’s first think about a lot of the advice thrown around online.

If you’re starting out, you need to grow an audience… FALSE

In fact, your efforts to continually try and grow an audience could be taking you away from actually building a business and you’ll likely to end up a neurotic ‘I’m an entrepreneur, entrepreneur’ where you spend more time trying to convince your parents of what you do, than actually doing it.

Believe me, I’ve been there and it isn’t fun.

You need to show up with content online consistently, day in and day out… FALSE

Sure, consistency is key, but I’ll take depth over consistency any day of the week. If you were starting out in 2009, consistency would have taken you to Britney Spears stardom, but we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Markets have matured and especially if you’re a coach, marketer, consultant or in the service based industry….

Your audience are sick and tired of someone who simply shows up daily.

TOP SIDE TIP: It’s 2019, your market are SMARTER than you likely give credit for and they’re now looking for DEPTH, not generic ‘what everybody else shares’ advice.

You need to be on social media… MORE FALSE THAN ALL THE ABOVE PUT TOGETHER

Social media is one of the most powerful networking tool on planet Earth, that’s fact.

However, what people fail to realise is that social media is not a strategy, it’s not a business plan and it definitely isn’t the answer if you’re struggling to get out of the gate with your business.

Social media is a channel, it’s not the ecosystem.

The problem with social media, is that we’re led to believe it’s the answer to all our problems (if we can just get our message to land with our perfect audience right?) Wrong.

I’m biased, but in my observation over the years, if you’re showing up on social media but still struggling to get a single client, chances are you haven’t actually figured out how to connect with PEOPLE yet (and I mean that with kindness.)

People, will always be more important than social media.

BONUS TIP: If your social media isn’t landing, you’ve probably been hiding behind your laptop so long, you didn’t even realise in your dark room that you’ve lost the most important edge of all – Your ability to interact and connect with people in real life.

This is why, what I’m about to share with you, is my personal advice on what I would do if I needed to get off zero in both the consumer and corporate market.

So you’re on your 4955,949th post on Facebook, you’ve posted 10X value and you know you have the secret answer to eternal success for your marketplace, but damn….

You haven’t had a client in months and even your cat is going hungry.

This is my exact reason why, I never had my own cat back in the day.

Anyway, your problem isn’t that you need £100,000 per month, or that you need your first 100 clients, let’s just get you one client!

My advice to the lady who asked me yesterday what I would do, was pretty simple.

“I would totally obsess over helping just ONE person.”

• I would make them my most important project of my life
• I would ensure they show up and are accountable, because they need to be all in
• I would harass them daily and triple check, that they’re taking the steps I recommended for them- I would work with them on such a level that the only option will be to succeed
• I would document that entire transformation

This obsession over just 1 person, I personally feel is far more powerful than 10,000 generic Facebook tips or advice.

This obsession over transforming 1 individuals life, will serve you far more than launching yet another generic online course to 500 people who don’t care.

You don’t need to take my advice as gold, but I would personally obsess over transforming one persons life, before I try and show up and be someone I’m not.

Start with one person, not with 5000 friends.

If we know each other already, you’ll likely know that over the years I’ve been helping companies grow in the corporate space. I’ve been fortunate enough to deliver over 1000 consulting days and worked with the upper side of 400 companies.

But it didn’t start that way. It started with x 2 strategies, but for the sake of this post, I’ll just share one.

Feel free to rinse and repeat it if you want to serve the corporate market.

When I was broke for the 727th time and kicked out of my 7th flat in London because I couldn’t pay rent, I knew something had to change. That something was me and my approach.

So, rather than trying to get companies to ‘buy my stuff.’ Instead I decided to walk into 100s of companies in London in a specific industry and I offered to help them, for FREE.

I basically said that I knew I could help them double, if not x 7 their sales results, but all I needed was access to train and coach their team.

Finally – I had 11 companies say “yes” and this happened in less than 30 days. Imagine going from ZERO clients to 11, now you have a new kind of problem.

I worked my ass off to help all 11 companies and had an agreement in place that if they had a significant improvement, they would pay £1000.

They had to make this improvement within 90 days of me working with them.

The result?

10 out of 11 companies paid me within 3 weeks, not 90 days.

This helped me resolve a massive ongoing cashflow problem but, more importantly it gave me validation that I wasn’t just another idiot pretending I could help people.

I had proof of concept.

And x 10 clients who were happy for me to put their logos on my website and do a raving testimonial.

By the way, if you’re wondering what happened to the 11th company, they actually had the BEST results! But the business was owned by a witch from The Never Ending Story who had never ending reasons why she couldn’t pay, despite me receiving reports from her team daily saying how they went from £50 sales to £2000.

Anyway.

These two above examples require:

• No social media presence
• No sales funnel
• No influencer status
• No website
• No branding other than your own tenacity
• No clever marketing techniques
• No fancy tricks or secrets to success

All it requires is an obsession to help people and a willingness to do whatever it takes to prove your concept.

The problem with today, is that we want to be paid so quickly for our work, that we end up chasing crumbs instead of getting to eat the whole cake!

We wind up doing exactly what all of our competitors do, even though deep down we know this makes us feel sick to our stomach and like we’re selling out on our ultimate potential.

Eventually, we even sell out on our values because our values aren’t paying right now and maybe this network marketing opportunity will!

It’s true, you can be whatever you want in this world and you can attain insane levels of success (whatever success is for you.)

But 99.9% of the time we don’t fail on an advanced hack or formula, we fail on the basics.

Yet we blame the advanced while completely ignoring the deep foundations that were never placed.

Showing up, helping x 1 person and obsessing over that (and documenting the transformation,) might not be sexy, it might not be a ‘weird secret trick’ to getting 49k Instagram followers,) but it will serve your audience more than you can say ‘hungry cat’ and it will eventually feed a whole bunch of cats. If you like cats.

Anyway.

This isn’t about cats, it’s about you going from zero (if you’re there now,) to making things happen.

Obsess. Over. 1. Or. 10. People. Start there, start with x 1, not x 1000.