Speaker 1: As a consulting business owner, there's really only three key areas that you need to focus on when it comes to business development and getting clients. People these days, unfortunately, are over-complicating business development. And it's understandable. I completely know that feeling because we're surrounded by so many options when it comes to different tools, different technologies, different tactics. There's more information, right? Just everywhere out there, Kindles and books and YouTube videos and all this kind of stuff. Even what you're watching right now, right? There's information everywhere. So it's easy to get distracted, to be potentially confused or to be pulled in many different directions. But when it comes to business development and marketing and getting clients for your consulting business, there's really only three things that you should be paying attention to. The first is outreach, right? So getting clear on who your ideal client is. And then getting in front of them. The second is follow-up. Once you've identified who your ideal client is and you reach out to them, well, you're going to need to follow up with them. And that follow-up is not just going to be about getting in front of them two, three, four, even five times. You might need to get in front of somebody 10, 15, 20 times or more over the long-term, but that's okay because that's where the real benefits come from. And if you set up the right system, the right structure, the right process, it won't actually take you very much time to do that at all. And then the third is content, right? So it's developing your intellectual property, your thought leadership, creating new, it could be videos, it could be audios like a podcast, could be short form articles or long form content, speaking webinars, whatever. But the idea is that content is also critical for this pyramid or triangle. Why? Because your content and your intellectual property will demonstrate your authority. It will really... It will really position you as an expert. It's one thing to tell people that you're great at something, but it's much better to actually demonstrate and show them. They can consume your content and by doing so they go, yeah, this person knows what they're talking about. This person understands the situation that I'm in right now. I resonate. I feel this person really knows me and they're an expert in this area and therefore, right, they'll turn to you. Now, the other reason why these three things work together is because as you create more content, you can now start to embed that content. You can now start to embed that content. You can now start to embed that content into your outreach and into your followup, right? So you're doing outreach, you're getting in front of your ideal clients, then you're following up with them, right? You're going to then get in front of new ideal clients. You're going to follow up with them, but your followup and even your outreach in some cases, depending on the kind of the strategy and system that you're using for your specific kind of business can include content, right? So rather than reaching out to someone right off the bat and saying, Hey, you know, my name is Michael. Do you want to buy what I have to offer? No one likes that. But if you said, Hey, my name is Michael. You know, here's what we do. And we have a case study, a report, a study that we just published. It's on this topic thought you might find it of interest. That's a great way to start, right? A relationship. Why? Because you're providing value and there's a law of reciprocity, which says that, you know, if you receive something from somebody, you, you feel like you want to give back to that person, right? Even if you didn't ask to receive something from that person, just the fact that you received from them makes you feel like you should give back at some point. Now that's not the intention, right? You're not giving to somebody just because you're hoping that you get something back. Right away. If you're being genuine and true, then the focus should just be on providing value. You should understand and know that most people, people that you reach out to will not become clients of yours right away. And that's okay, right? Because there's more than enough opportunities out there. There's more business than you could ever possibly handle. And so the three things that you need to be focused on are outreach, doing followup consistently, creating content and outreach and followup, right? Very easy to get those things going. If you have the right system in place and then content as well. You don't need to create tons of content, but having some content that you can start to mix in as you do followup will really help you to provide value, to build a relationship and to demonstrate your authority and expertise. So if you're like some of the consultants that we speak to who are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, there's a lot going on, there's a lot of options, a lot of different tools and technologies, different books and courses and all this kind of stuff where people are talking about all these different things that you could be doing. Okay. So I encourage you to just to boil it down to these three as your strategy as a starting point. And then as you get these moving, then you can look at what else to add on or what to improve or what to optimize. But your business development, your focus on getting clients doesn't and should not be more complicated, should not include more as a starting point than these three things. So outreach, followup and content. 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