I was recently asked by a business associate (my financial advisor) for advice on how to get more business. Thought you might be interested in my answer.
"Leverage your value to others!"
Today as in years past people are more comfortable with word of mouth referrals than in doing the hard work of interviewing and comparing competing product or service offerings.
So what would make me more likely to bring up your name to friends and acquaintances when the opportunity arises?
I know you do a lot better job of keeping up with the market and investment options than any of us .... After all it is your full time job. How can you leverage your value to provide more service to each of us?
I suggest putting more effort into leveraging your value. You can do this by producing a written opinion/fact piece that you can distribute to those who have email addresses or internet access. I can either choose to read or ignore a distributed distillation of your knowledge when I have time without making an appointment. With this one effort you can have an efficient meeting with many minds at once and I would feel like I am getting more benefit from your hard work without taking much more of my time in meetings. You demonstrate your knowledge well when talking to any of your clients during an appointment, but each appointment takes up a major portion of your day and you cannot possible talk to each of us in a meaningful way more than once per month if your client base is large or if we are too busy. But if you were to produce an email summary of your current opinions on a weekly/biweekly or at least monthly basis...we could read and digest at our leisure.
Of course there are potential legal liabilities of putting things in print, but if you are digesting information from other sources with proper permission and attribution you may be able to limit your liability and we will appreciate your filtering - so we don't have to do so much reading and filtering on our own.
How will the above get you more referals? Your apparent value to each client would be more visible to each and it would be easy to forward such an email or web link to a friend in support of my opinion of how great a job you are doing.
I am experimenting with ways that I can add particular clients to leverage my own capabilities to provide greater service to humanity. I have not yet taken this much beyond the idea phase, but I am on the lookout for clients with grand ideas that have the chance of improving vast numbers of lives etc. I think I can vastly improve the capabilities of the right client. I can help them to leverage the skills of a few to service the multitudes using a networked database like FileMaker Pro. This perhaps is a bit arrogant of me, but I think it is a good direction to take. When I get some time to follow my own advice and put some more of my thoughts in print I may see some progress in this direction.
You can set up a weblog similar to this for yourself for free in about 10 minutes. You do not need to know html or any technology, you just have to have access to the web and some great ideas to publish.
If you forward this article to a friend, please include my link....Saving The World With FileMaker
