When Barbara and I started Revealed Resources 25 years ago, we had no clients. No marketing system. No clear idea how we were going to get work consistently.
There was a period where we went cleaning houses to keep money coming in. Not because we wanted to. Trust me – we didn’t. But because we had to.
I was a mechanical engineer who’d spent 20 years in IT. I knew a lot about a lot of things. I knew I could sell if in front of the right person. But “marketing”? Nah – not a real clue.
Purely by chance I cleaned the house of a managing director of a mid-sized company. Got talking – as you do 😊
A year went by and out of the blue I got a call. He’d been reading my weekly newsletters and decided he needed help building the business.
We worked together, sorted out systems, and hired and coached salespeople people and helped grow a business from $3 million to $11.5 million.
Now, well, that’s a pretty good result in anybody’s language, that’s not the point of the story.
We got our first major client through a chance conversation during a domestic cleaning job. That’s not a strategy. That’s not repeatable. You can’t build a practice on luck and good conversations that happen by accident.
And over the last 25 years I’ve seen something similar play out time and time again.
Most professional services firms are run by technically brilliant people.
Engineers. IT specialists. Financial advisors. Management consultants. Genuinely expert at what they do.
But expertise in your field and expertise in getting clients are two completely different skills.
So what happens? You get good clients through your network. A few referrals come in. Things go reasonably well. Then someone retires, a key contact moves on, or a major client gets acquired. Suddenly the pipeline is thin.
You scramble. You go to more events. You post more on LinkedIn. Maybe you hire a salesperson. None of it works reliably.
Because you’re not operating from a system. You’re operating from activity. And hoping.
Looking back all those years ago, three things stood us in good stead.
First, we understood their problem deeply. Not the surface pain. The real underlying issue and the cost of not fixing it.
Second, we stayed in contact consistently. Not aggressively. But we were present and useful when decisions got made.
Third, we delivered results that were visible and measurable. Real numbers. Real movement.
Those three things became the foundation of everything we’ve built since. It’s not complicated. But doing it systematically, reliably, with every client and every prospect? That takes structure.
Ask yourself – If a major client disappeared tomorrow, do you have a system that would generate the next one? Not an idea. Not a plan to do some networking. A system.
Because random results aren’t a business. They’re a livelihood that depends on luck.
And luck is not a strategy.
If you’re curious whether there’s a more predictable way to grow, give me a call on 0414 913 334.
