Ten Customers Before Anything Else

Why the Website Can Wait

Fourteen versions of a logo. That is what I had to show for my first six weeks of working for myself in 2013, along with a five-page website, a services menu nobody had asked for and a contact form that, as I discovered in October, had been sending every enquiry to an email address I had mistyped. It did not matter much. There were no enquiries.

I spent the first six months of my consultancy building the shop before I had found anyone who wanted to come in. I paid a designer in Kothrud ₹42,000 for the logo and the site. I bought a theme, a booking plugin, two years of hosting and a stack of printed business cards on heavy cream stock, and by the end of that half-year the total came to roughly ₹1,10,000, a little over £1,100 at the rate then. The money hurt less than the time. My diary from those months, kept in the same chai-stained style as the one I described in the last chapter, shows about 310 hours spent on things a customer would never see: fonts, wording, a pricing page I rewrote nine times.

The reason is not flattering. Building is a way of hiding from rejection. A website cannot tell you your idea is weak, and a logo will not ignore your email. Every hour I spent adjusting the colour of a button was an hour I did not have to ring a stranger and hear "No, thank you" in a polite British voice. It felt like work. It had all the texture of progress: late nights, decisions, files saved with names like FINAL_v3. What it lacked was anyone paying for it.

The arithmetic, when I finally did it, was ugly. Across those six months I logged around 700 hours on the business in total and earned £2,400, all of it from a single client in the final month. That is £2,400 divided by 700, or about £3.43 per hour of attention, less than I had earned at nineteen packing samples in the export office.

The client came from a phone call to a former colleague in Leeds. He asked me three questions, agreed a price, and requested my bank details before he rang off. He never visited the website. When I checked the analytics later, it had received eleven visitors in its first six months, and seven of them were me.

One Offer, One Sentence

An offer is a single sentence that tells a stranger who you help, what is going wrong for them and what will be different when you have finished. Customer, problem, result. Leave any of the three out and the reader fills the gap with indifference.

Here is the first offer I wrote, in the spring of 2014, and sent to about thirty people: "I provide strategic operations consulting to growing businesses." Count the facts in it. There are none. "Growing businesses" covers a corner bakery and Rolls-Royce. "Strategic operations" could mean payroll or warehouse shelving, and the result is not mentioned at all. Two people replied. Both asked what I actually did.

The second draft named a customer: "I help small British export firms improve their operations." Better. A managing director in Sheffield who shipped valves to Germany could now recognise himself. But "improve" is a promise with no edges, and nobody pays for edgeless promises.

The third draft named the problem in the words my clients used on the phone, not the words I had picked up on a course: "I help small British firms that export to India stop losing weeks to customs paperwork and late payments." Forty messages, eleven replies. The fourth added a result someone could check: "…and get paid a month sooner, usually within one quarter." That version won me four of my first ten clients.

Daniel's drafts followed the same path, more quickly, because I made him read mine first. He started with "Brand identity for ambitious businesses," which sounds like the strapline of every design studio in Ancoats. He narrowed it to "Brand design for independent restaurants in Greater Manchester." Then he spent an evening listening to two restaurant owners he knew complain, wrote down their exact phrases, and produced this:

"I redesign menus, shopfront signs and Instagram templates for independent restaurants in Greater Manchester, so the place looks as good as the food, in three weeks for a fixed price."

It is not elegant. It does not need to be. Three checks will tell you whether yours works:

• Could a stranger say, from the sentence alone, whether they are the customer?
• Is the problem described in words a customer has actually said aloud?
• Could the customer tell, a month later, whether you delivered?

Daniel printed his sentence on a strip of paper and taped it to the bottom of his monitor. One of the restaurant owners, reading it over his shoulder, said, "That's literally what I told you." Daniel took that as approval, which it was.

The List of Fifty

A sentence is useless until it lands in front of someone. The next job is a list of fifty named people who already have the problem your offer describes: not "restaurants" or "SaaS founders", but Priya at the Gurkha kitchen on Wilmslow Road, with an email address beside her name. Fifty is enough to teach you something and few enough to write to each person properly.

My own list in 2014 started with the people I already knew. Eleven of the forty names came from my years at the export office: former buyers, a freight agent in Felixstowe, the finance manager who used to ring at 6 a.m. Pune time about missing invoices. The rest came from a trade directory of British firms exporting to South Asia, which cost me £85 and paid for itself many times over.

Daniel built his list over two evenings, from three sources:

• Past contacts. Nine restaurant owners he had met through freelance jobs, friends of friends and one cousin's wedding caterer.
• A niche forum. A private Facebook group for Greater Manchester hospitality owners, where people complained openly about printers, menus and signwriters. He read six months of posts and noted fourteen owners who had raised exactly his problem.
• Directories. Twenty-seven independents taken from local food guides and the council's hygiene-rating listings, filtered by hand to places with tired shopfronts and good reviews.

Then he wrote to all fifty, one at a time, across the first four weeks of March. The numbers, which he kept in a spreadsheet he was rather proud of, ran like this. Of the nine past contacts, seven replied. Of the fourteen forum names, six replied. Of the twenty-seven from directories, six replied. That makes nineteen replies from fifty messages, a rate of 38 per cent, with warm contacts replying at 78 per cent and cold directory names at 22 per cent.

Nineteen replies became eight phone calls or visits. Eight conversations became three paying customers: two of the past contacts and one owner from the forum. None came from the directory, which surprised him. It did not surprise me. Cold lists warm up slowly, and two of those directory owners did buy from him in the summer.

He spent thirty-one hours on the whole exercise. On the wall above his desk, the spreadsheet printout now has three rows highlighted in yellow, and a coffee ring over the word "Rusholme".

Charging Properly the First Time

A low opening price feels like modesty. In practice it works as a filter, and it lets through the wrong people. A client who chose you because you were cheap will leave the day someone is cheaper, and until then that client usually asks for the most. The florist who filled nine pages of Meera's diary was paying her £35 an hour. He was also ringing her on Sunday evenings about receipts.

Meera doubled her rate by accident. In April she was on the phone to the practice manager of a dental surgery in Oadby, a business with eleven staff, a payroll and VAT returns that had been filed late twice. Asked for her rate, Meera said £35 an hour. There was a pause.

"Our last bookkeeper charged sixty and we still let her go," the manager said. "Are you sure you've done a practice this size?"

Meera, flustered, heard herself say, "For a practice with payroll, it's seventy."

"Fine," the manager said. "Can you start on the first?"

She rang me that evening, half thrilled and half convinced she had committed fraud. She hadn't. Her original price had told a serious buyer that she was not serious, and the doubled price told the truth about the work. The arithmetic was plain enough. In Chapter 1 her real rate came out at £24.06 against a quoted £35, because about 31 per cent of her time went unbilled. Keep that same unbilled share and quote £70, and her real rate becomes roughly £48.12 an hour. She could lose half her clients and earn the same money. She went on to lose three, the florist among them, and did not miss him.

My rule now is simple. Quote the price that makes you slightly uncomfortable to say aloud, then stop talking. Silence after a price is the customer thinking. It is not a rejection.

This Week

Write your offer as one sentence and test it against the three checks. Start your list of fifty and fill in at least twenty names with a real contact detail beside each, beginning with people you already know. Send ten individual messages, each one written for the person who will read it. Before anyone asks, decide your price, set it above what feels safe, and write it on the same strip of paper as your offer, so you cannot quietly discount it on the phone.

The practice manager's first email arrived at 7.40 the next morning: seventeen things she needed by Friday. Meera had no idea how long any of them would take.