1^st Mistake is no sales process… “just put me in front of people and I’ll be fine” is not a strategy! Think about it, your would-be client is doing the best they can and you think you can do a better job because of your background… what would your reaction be if someone implied they could do a much better job than you… at worst you’d think they were arrogant at best you’d be at least a little bit defensive. That’s not helpful if you’re trying to sell your services! But it’s a common mistake and that’s why new advisors get a 1 in 20 conversion-rates. We’ve spent the last decade refining our sales process for getting new clients so our conversion rates are 1:2. Think how much time this saves when you’re signing every second client rather than every 20^th… that’s a lot of burnt leads you’re saving!

2^nd Mistake is wrong pricing… many new advisors will try things like hourly rates or project rates and if they’re desperate for more clients they’ll settle for a few hundred dollars a month. Your pricing needs to be around the $2K a month mark and for that you need to be able to present a business case that quantifies what they should be making with your help. Don’t do hourly rates and don’t do project rates… you’ll just end up limiting what you can earn. You’ll earn 4-5 X as much when you get your pricing right with long-term business development programs which brings me to the next mistake…

3^rd Mistake is not having a structured program… many new advisors see themselves as being able to fix anything so they’ll find a problem with a potential client and then pitch a price to solve it. Sounds logical, but that’s why most new advisors can’t keep their clients longer than 90 days. The client hasn’t been positioned for a long-term program because they think one project is all they need and they’re not prepared to pay for any more. With a structured program, the average time with a client extends to 18 months… that’s 6 X longer than new advisors who are constantly having to replace clients who drop off at the 3-month mark…

4^th Mistake is building your own content… I spoke to a new advisor just this week who told me they were working 6 days a week with just 4 clients because they had to build content for what their clients needed. The advisor had all the knowledge but not in a format that the client could use… they were all talk, but no tools. The reason they joined us was because they didn’t want to re-invent the wheel. Sure, they had lots of experience, but they told me it’d take a couple of years to convert it into client-facing professional content. You should just be focused on getting more clients because there’s more money in new clients than there is in building new content. The world doesn’t need more content, it needs more clients paying you for help…

So that’s it… all these mistakes are obvious once you start but not so obvious before you get into it… it’s like all businesses. You have the expertise, but you need a business model to make sure you can turn your expertise into client revenue so you can build a professional services business… no different to a builder that knows how to build, but the business of being a builder is different than building… make sense?