Make new customers consistent — advertise

1. The stage at a glance

Item	At this stage
Stage	Advertise, stage two (also called level two)
Headcount	One. You are still building the business by yourself
Your role	Doer
Leadership structure	You are the leader, and you lead freelancers. You have no full-time employees, or at least most businesses at this stage do not
How many companies are here	30 million, because there is no statistical differentiation in the census figures. The imagined picture: fewer use contractors and vendors than work solo, but no good data source was found; less than 30 million, but more than the next stage

The mistake named for the role, at this phase and in starting a business in general: seeing established, well-known founders and copying what they do now. Be in the weeds, getting your hands dirty.

2. The functions: what holds you back, and what graduates you

Function	Meaning	Constraint at this stage	The way past it
Product	Your goods, services and the results you get people	Paying customers have higher expectations; the product is unreliable, not good enough, or both	Fix it until it is good enough for now, in an unscalable way
Marketing	How you get the word out about what you sell	Lead flow is inconsistent, often because you stop and start	Do a hundred actions a day and prioritize advertising daily
Sales	How people exchange money for your stuff	Sales conversions are inconsistent	Nail a script and a process for setting and closing
Customer service	How you get customers to refer, retain, review and resell	Paid customers have higher standards and complain more than the free ones did	Nail a script for upset customers, and get testimonials from happy ones
IT	How you store, analyze and display information	You have no money to afford tech	Use free tech and free trial credits for the starter software you picked before; set up a basic site to collect leads and a starter CRM
Recruiting	How you find and hire people to work for your company	You have too much work for part-timers and freelancers	Convert part-timers into full-time employees, and make public posts or run job-board ads for full-timers
Human resources	How you lower the chance that employees or regulators sue you	You treat contractors like full-time employees	Set employees up as W-2s
Finance	How you report and manage your money	You do not keep track of your money or have a way to pay taxes	Bookkeeping software or an equivalent, saving for taxes, and checking your bank account daily

3. Product: valuable over scalable

Work more so customers actually get the result, then try to build a better version that delivers the same result and scales. Optimize first for experience and result; worry later about the unscalable parts (driving to pick someone up, the airport run). Some might call that crazy, but every service benefit has a cost: if they will pay for it and you will deliver it, that is just free exchange. A big error of new entrepreneurs is working so hard to make the offer scalable that they forget to make it valuable. Much of the fixing was more or less done earlier; the focus here is a product that is actually good, with no worry at all about scalability.

4. Marketing: a hundred actions a day

When you create the leads yourself, often you are inconsistent. A hundred actions a day means consistent inputs: 100 dials, 100 outreaches, 100 texts, 100 emails, every single day; not every other day, not sometimes, not only when you need it. Consistency matters most. The common error is to stop advertising once you have enough customers; soon you will not, and will wish you had kept on. Excess leads are a good problem for later; when you open capacity, people are already interested.

The rule applies across the four lead channels, the ways to reach people (SOP 12):

• Warm outreach, the most common.
• Cold outreach, to people who do not know you. It could be people found with a filter on LinkedIn, people who follow your friends on Instagram, friends of friends on Facebook, or a list you buy. These one-to-one ways are private: text, email, knocking on doors.
• Content, one to many: posting to people who know you. The rule here is about 100 minutes a day on content, covering two things: making the post, and outreach to the people who liked or commented on it. Spend the rest of the time on 50 or so, or even 100, comments on other people's posts that advertise to your audience, aiming to write the best comment on each thread. You compete only with a thread's other commenters, so an extra minute makes winning much easier; people who like your comment can then be messaged. All of it creates engagement, so conversations start.
• Paid ads, the most leveraged way for one person. If you are starting out, spend $10, $50 or $100 a day. The hundred here is about the time you give the ads, since money takes no time to spend: finding new hooks, researching, making new creative, writing and posting it.

SOP 52, section 1, gives the rule differently: a hundred dollars a day on paid ads (adjustable down), and a hundred minutes of making content. Read as time, the spend can stay small while the minutes go in daily; read as dollars, the spend is set and the time is not. This page does not settle which reading is right.

5. Sales: a script and a process for setting and closing

This assumes you sell one on one, which is said to be 78% of businesses. With a checkout page it differs: the work is optimizing that page for conversions.

The call, step by step, in this order:

• Clarify why they took action and showed up.
• Label them with a problem, or a plan you want to solve.
• Overview their past pains and experiences.
• Sell them the vacation, not the plane flight.
• Explain away their concerns, once you have made the offer.
• Reinforce the decision.

The mental picture: where are you now, where do you want to be, what is stopping you, and how I can help you past it.

The three-pillar pitch, a habit in one practice here, for the selling step. Boil everything into the three things someone needs to be successful, give a one-line statement, then an analogy or metaphor. The classic fitness example: fitness, nutrition and accountability are the three legs of a stool, and with two it falls over (without accountability you will not do it; eating badly, you lose no weight; without training, you lose muscle too and gain it all back). Then explain each pillar with an analogy: for accountability, parents made you brush your teeth until the habit was yours. The pitch does not usually take more than two or three minutes; salespeople often take 20 minutes. People care more about themselves, so spend most of the call on where they are, where they want to go, and what they have tried.

The pain cycle. Ask what else they have tried, how it worked, what they liked and did not, and keep going until everything is exhausted. Selling motivates action, and you motivate by raising deprivation: a hungry person wants to eat, so remind them how hungry they are (maybe they are in the mood for a steak right now). It could be: when did you last have regular lead flow, and what would that be like?

The questions, in order: what made you opt in, engage, open the email or reply to the comment; so it sounds like you would like to be here, is that right; what has got in the way; what else have you tried and how did that work; the pitch; then their concerns.

Concerns are typically these: time (I am busy); stall (give me a couple of days); money (too expensive); preferences (I would rather get results my way); and the last, where they hand the decision to someone else, called decision maker, or authority. You overcome these to get a decision today. Then reinforce: sell them on having made a great decision, with a good offboarding from the call, or onboarding into customer service's next step.

A two-step sale. If you set appointments for a closer, the setter runs only the first three steps (clarify, label, overview) and does not sell: what is your problem, where do you want to go, label the gap and what they have tried, and overview their pains. When they are starving for the answer: "I think you'd be a good fit for this," then set them up with the closer. Get them hungry without giving the solution, so they are more likely to show up.

Between questions, the habit described is to loop these moves so the script never sounds robotic: restate what you heard and check it ("so I'm hearing X, Y and Z, is that right?"); tell them that makes them like some of your best customers; then ask the next question.

6. Customer service: upset customers and happy ones

Upset customers: get in the angry boat. Only one person fits in the angry boat, whoever is most upset; the idea is also on SOP 76, section 3, and SOP 132, section 3. Get more upset than the customer and they will almost backpedal ("it's not that big of a deal"). The most frustrating thing a customer hears is "I don't know if we can do anything about that." The example given: a customer booked the only date offered for an event, it does not work, and the next they can attend is 6 months away. The procedure, in order:

• Hear them out. Let them vent; stay quiet; engage with body language and short responses.
• Acknowledge how awful the experience was, agree with their thoughts and feelings, and escalate beyond their upset: "I cannot believe that you've had to deal with it … do I need to fire somebody?"
• Apologize for the issue. It does not fix anything, but taking accountability for the impact and the inconvenience helps them.
• Resolve it with them, not around them, so they like the solution. The example offers three options: a refund, while saying you would rather not because you know they want this; getting them into a later date that works, going to a manager if needed; or, since it is your fault, putting them into your higher-level event at your own cost. Then ask which sounds best, or whether something better was missed.

Do not back down from an upset customer, and do not cower; always confront it at this stage. Often people avoid this because they lack the skill of hard conversations; the same skill works with a spouse or a friend.

Happy customers: capture testimonials. You still do not have many testimonials, and you cannot keep growing unless you capture social proof. The script walks the internal and external journey, with the same beats in the same order as SOP 125, section 2: internal struggle (rock bottom, what they hated, what they could not do); external struggle (objective metrics, such as 250 pounds, 3,000 calories a day, a size 45 waist); skepticism (their main concerns before joining); what made them do it anyway; external victory (their measures now); internal victory (best moment, biggest win, what they can do now). Not on that page: on skepticism, prospects relate to the pain more than to the solution, which they do not have yet. On the fourth beat, ask why us, and why now or then, to surface your differentiator and why the timing mattered.

Customer service always has an element of selling. An upset-customer talk resells them on you; a testimonial interview re-excites them about the product. Selling into the product, to keep using it, or not to leave: it is all selling.

7. IT: free tech and a starter CRM

You start using the software you picked at the last stage. What you need: a place for customers to submit contact details, and a way to track prospects and customers (a sales pipeline). Google's suite and a CRM are the examples. Automation saves a lot of time early, because time is short: an automatic response, text reminders for booked appointments. In one practice here this was once all done by hand; the tools have advanced, but this is what has to happen.

8. Recruiting: part-timers to full-time

Friends and family cannot keep helping while holding their own jobs. Freelancers become a constraint as you become most of their work: they have other clients and cannot keep your pace. Your demands exceed what a contractor can deliver. Decide two things: which work now needs someone full-time because of volume, and which contractors you need to replace with a full-time hire.

Convert part-timers. You will probably go to people working part-time for you who hold a full-time job they dislike and make them an offer: come work for me. Some of them will refuse, saying you can never pay them enough; some of them will say yes, wanting a shot at something that maybe becomes big.

Recruit the rest. Start with basic platforms such as Indeed or LinkedIn, which both have internal candidate pipelines, and post on your social media. One post shape used: I am looking for [role], here is what our current scores look like, if you know somebody apply here, copy this post and share it. A post on your personal social media can find a full-time hire even with a small following. Indeed is called so easy it needs no explanation: it walks you through each step and even sends automated reminders and outreach.

9. Human resources: employees on the books

Treating contractors like full-time employees is called illegal. Set employees up as W-2s; that is how it is in the US at least, other countries differ, and there is probably some full-time employee status you must set up properly. Employees mean withholding taxes and paying payroll tax, Medicare and "all that kind of stuff", on top of pay, so it costs more. Running a business costs more, especially legitimately.

It is about risk. Some of you might have had a mentor say not to worry; ask how big that mentor's business is. You can run a completely illegal business, but you run risk; the question is how much. The recommendation is to go by the book. One step further out (said expecting to probably be sued for it): if the extra payroll cost would put you out of business, that is the greater risk, and sometimes it is a question of which risk is larger. The most compliant way to advertise is to tell nobody you exist, which guarantees failure. Everything in business is managing risk, in levels, never risk-free or 100% guaranteed. Go by the book as long as you can afford it.

The actual risk: being sued for back taxes, with penalties and interest. Everyone likes you now, but maybe in a year a worker paid as a contractor leaves, meets a tax bill, and says they were an employee. If they win, the IRS comes after you for the taxes with interest and penalties. Across, call it, 10 people for two years, that is two years of back taxes, penalties and interest, and once one is found they pull the thread to see what else is wrong. The bigger you are, the longer you let it go, and the higher your turnover, the larger the liability and the risk. Withholding also lowers a contractor's gross pay and costs you more; that is what going legitimate means. The summary given: relax, do not be a jerk, and you will be okay as you move everyone to full-time W-2 status or replace those who will not move.

Employment and tax law are not covered on this page; the statements above are carried as stated.

10. Finance

Bookkeeping, tax savings and the daily balance check are on SOP 150 — Set up the finances stage by stage.

11. The bottom line

The constraint is that new customers are inconsistent. To graduate, let more people know about your stuff. This is the last stage with no employees; the next brings the first four employees, the first full-time team.

12. What this page does not decide for you

• When the pain cycle stops. Here, once everything is exhausted (section 5); on SOP 240, section 2, after three rounds. Three rounds caps the call's length; exhausting everything does not. This page does not settle which reading is right.

13. What this page does not cover

Worker classification tests are not covered on this page.